Imperial Letters Patent of Ennoblement for the Moren Family, with Rare Heraldic Illustration Featuring Moorish Imagery.
Vienna, 6 May 1668. Certified copy dated, 4 April 1669. With a large, finely illuminated coat of arms in vivid colours and burnished gold, framed by green palm fronds and flanked by angels, incorporating distinctive Moor’s head motifs. Manuscript on vellum, folio (c. 240 × 300 mm). Sewn in contemporary limp vellum. [8] leaves. Final leaf with contemporary notarial certification, signature, stamp, and remnant of wax seal. Some wear and light soiling, but a well-preserved and striking copy.
Imperial ennoblement diploma featuring depictions of Black African figures—an unusual and well-documented example of African representation in early modern European aristocratic identity.
This lavishly illuminated imperial diploma, issued by Emperor Leopold I on 6 May 1668, confirms the noble status of Georg, Adam, Christoph, and Jakob Moren as members of the knightly nobility (rittermäßiger Reichs- und erbländischer Adel) of the Holy Roman Empire and its Hereditary Lands. It reaffirms earlier ennoblements of the family in 1514 and 1557 and grants the recipients revised arms and the right to use the territorial predicates von oder zu Sunnegg und Morberg, following the extinction of the line of their cousin Hieronymus Moren. The present manuscript is an authenticated official copy, certified on 4 April 1669.
Of particular interest is the large full-page coat of arms, likely painted by a professional court illuminator. Richly coloured and heightened with gold, the quartered shield includes two fields with black imperial eagles and two with bust-length portraits of dark-skinned men in three-quarter profile, adorned with gold earrings and chain necklaces. Above the shield rises a bare-chested, crowned Black man, holding a red orb in each hand and emerging from a coronet. The rendering is highly individualized and unambiguously emphasizes African phenotypic features. The composition is framed by a laurel cartouche flanked by angels and fruit.
The surname (Moren or Mor) and the heraldic iconography leave little doubt that the family was of Moorish origin—or at least claimed such ancestry as part of its noble identity. While Moor’s heads appear elsewhere in European heraldry, they are typically stylized emblems representing conquest, exoticism, or religious symbolism. The Moren arms are distinct: they include multiple, prominently placed depictions of Black African men—not as abstract symbols but as individualized and repeated figures in both crest and escutcheon. Their dignified and central presence—together with the family name—suggests an intentional genealogical claim, rather than a purely symbolic motif. The route by which the Moren ancestor entered Habsburg service is uncertain, but likely occurred via Spain or Italy in the late 15th or early 16th century.
The Moren family retained noble status over successive generations, with branches in Tyrol, Styria, Carinthia, and Upper Austria, and remained listed in official registers of the Austrian nobility into the 20th century. Among their later descendants was Therese von Mor zu Sunnegg und Morberg (1871–1945), a painter trained in Vienna, Munich, and Paris, and active in several artists’ associations. The family’s heraldic identity—with its explicit visual reference to African ancestry—remained remarkably consistent, making this diploma not only a legal instrument of nobility, but a rare and compelling record of Black lineage within the early modern European aristocracy.
Reference: Genealogisches Taschenbuch der adeligen Häuser Österreichs. (1907). Zweiter Jahrgang, 1906/07 (pp. 278–310). Wien: Otto Maass’ Söhne.
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Price: €35,000.00