Modern Persians are cast as the medieval Black Saracen monster

Evidence

The Persians are also racial monsters. In an early scene, an African messenger from the Persian court, reminiscent of a cross between a giant and a Black Saracen or Black Turk, arrives at the Spartan court. Wearing a human garland of skulls, he is accompanied by other Persians wearing turbans and face veils. He has a vile hatred for women that is expressed in his behavior toward Queen Gorgo, played as an emancipated Western woman. King Leonidas refers to the Persians as “philosophers and boy lovers” (an ironic charge given the sexual history of Sparta) before the Black Persian and his companions are killed, pushed into a bottomless pit. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 676

The Black Saracen appears in future centuries in Gothic horror and in early US political culture in the form of the “monsters of Africa,” also known as Moors. As recently as 2006, the hyper-racist civilizational gore-fest film 300 features a “Black Persian,” a giant, grunting monster who wears a necklace of human skulls around his neck. These characters are discussed in following chapters. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 965

Categorization

• XREF: The African messenger as ‘a cross between a giant and a Black Saracen or Black Turk’ is exactly the reader’s analytical category — the monster figure carrying racial and sexual anxieties.
• SHARE: Worth sharing with anyone working on race in American cinema — the 300 Persian as a direct cinematic descendant of the medieval Black Saracen.
• SEED: An article angle: tracking the Black Saracen’s unbroken genealogy from medieval romance to 300’s Black Persian — the monster as civilizational shorthand.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 676; Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 965