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The Coburg Moor: How Europe Turned a Black Saint Into a Racial Caricature — And Called It Heritage

St. Maurice was a real historical figure — a Black African Roman soldier who was executed around 286 AD for refusing to massacre Christian civilians, making him one of the earliest documented acts of moral resistance in recorded history. He became a venerated Christian martyr, the patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire, and eventually the patron saint of the German city of Coburg. For centuries his image appeared on city coins, crests, and buildings as a symbol of faith and courage. But Europe could not leave that legacy alone. As scholar Jean Devise documented, Black figures in European heraldry began with genuine reverence in the 13th and 14th centuries — but from the early 15th century onward, as the transatlantic slave trade expanded and European maritime colonization accelerated, those same Black figures were progressively stripped of dignity and redrawn as exotic, fantastical, and savage.

The Coburg Moor followed that exact trajectory. By the 17th century St. Maurice had been transformed from an armored knight — a man of honor and military rank — into a "noble savage." Then in the 19th century, at the height of European colonialism and racial pseudoscience, a large gold earring was added to the imagery, conforming deliberately to colonial-era caricatures of Africans as primitive and uncivilized. Today that same image — gold earring and all — sits on the official coat of arms of Coburg, stamped on official buildings, storefronts, and sewer covers throughout the city. As one visitor put it upon seeing it for the first time: it is a shock to see a racial caricature plastered across an entire town.

What makes the Coburg Moor story particularly layered from a Black history perspective is what happened to it during the Nazi era — and what that reveals about Europe's relationship with anti-Blackness versus other forms of racism. When the Nazis rose to power in 1934, they removed St. Maurice from Coburg's coat of arms and replaced him with a sword and swastika.

After World War II the image was restored in 1945 as a symbol of liberation from Nazi ideology — the logic being that celebrating a Black saint was the opposite of Nazi white supremacy. But this framing conveniently ignored that the image being restored was itself a product of white supremacist colonial thinking, one that had been progressively degraded over centuries to reflect European contempt for African people. The 1953 redesign added a neck collar to the imagery — an adornment historically worn by enslaved Black servants in European courts — without apparently registering the grotesque symbolism. The image was last updated in 1974 and remains largely unchanged today. When activists Alisha Archie and Juliane Reuther launched a petition to redesign the symbol, residents launched a counter-petition to keep it, and Germany had its own miniature culture war over a caricature that has been evolving since the slave trade.

This is the broader lesson of the Coburg Moor — it is not an isolated quirk of one small German city. It is a window into how Europe systematically took Black figures of power, dignity, and moral courage and over centuries quietly remade them into caricatures that reflected the racial hierarchy Europe needed to justify what it was doing to African people. The saint's name was never changed. His crime was simply being Black in a Europe that had decided what Blackness was allowed to mean.