For many people in Western countries, even those with a love for history, the years between the unwinding of the Roman Empire (beginning with the Migration Period in the fourth century) to the first twinklings of the Italian Renaissance nearly a millennium later are almost a blank. Many could probably give a few events or figures from that thousand years: Dante, perhaps, or St. Thomas Aquinas, or the Norman Conquest, or maybe El Cid or some of the Crusades. But “the West” during that millennium plays a vanishingly small role on the world historical stage.
But what if instead of trying to tell a through-put story of “the West” from ancient Greece to modern New York City, we saw at least the period of European diminishment as part of another history? In a splendid new book by scholar Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne, we get glimpses of “the West” not as a sui generis entity imposing its historical will on all comers, but as a heavily contextualized, loosely arranged, always-contingent, and difficult-to-define grouping, often forced to rely on wits more than on arms in its dealings with much, much greater powers on its peripheries. Or, to put it more accurately, with much greater powers to which it was but one of many peripheral political and religious arrangements. In The Emperor and the Elephant, Ottewill-Soulsby tells the story of a part of this contextualized “West,” namely a man whom many in the West regard as a conquering hero, Charlemagne, and his forebears and descendants. Stripping through post hoc mythmaking, Ottewill-Soulsby gives us a Charlemagne, and a brace of Carolingian kings, much less conquerors and much more diplomats, navigating the politically, religiously, and culturally very complicated world of what Westerners somewhat self-importantly call “the Middle Ages.” “The roles and interests of Muslim rulers have taken a back seat in earlier” scholarship, Ottewill-Soulsby writes. “Rather than engaging with the ‘Abbāsid caliphs or Umayyad emirs as historical actors operating within their own context,” he continues, “they have been treated [by many earlier writers] as an inert fixture in the landscape” (7). Ottewill-Soulsby rectifies this oversight in good measure, and much to the reader’s edification, in one of the most enjoyable history volumes I have read this year.
No small part of The Emperor and the Elephant’s charm comes from the hard archival work that went into it. Ottewill-Soulsby works in an impressive range of source materials–Arabic, German, French, Latin, Italian, and Spanish stand out–to recast the history of his subject, Charlamagne and his age, as being one of ongoing negotiation and recalibration among states and other powers in Europe and beyond. Ottewill-Soulsby is particularly interested in moving past the work of Francis W. Buckler, who, in his 1931 volume Harunu’l-Rashid and Charles the Great, “argued that Carolingian relations with the Islamic world could be understood as part of an alliance system between the four great powers of the Mediterranean at the time. In [Buckler’s] view, realising that they shared common enemies in the Byzantines and the Umayyads of al-Andalus, the Carolingians and the ‘Abbāsids allied with each other against these opponents. Córdoba and Constantinople responded by coming to their own mutual arrangement, thus forming an alliance system” (6). Ottewill-Soulsby, by contrast, argues that moving beyond Buckler’s “alliance system allows the consideration of other possible incentives for diplomatic relations beyond the geostrategic… mak[ing] it easier to understand Carolingian relations with the caliphate and Córdoba on their own terms [as well as] to consider the role of non-state actors [such as marcher lords on the frontier between Francia and al-Andalus]” (9). Ottewill-Soulsby’s scholarship break up of the Buckler-locked views imposed by earlier scholars opens up “a new vision of Carolingian relations with the Islamic world,” wherein “Frankish monarchs did not deal with all Muslim rulers as part of a grand system… each power [rather being] engaged with [other powers] on its own terms” (11). Domestic politics, and not grand global alliance strategy, was, Ottewill-Soulsby concludes, “the primary motivation for ‘Abbāsid-Carolingian… caliphs and kings” to send diplomats back and forth to their respective capitals (12).
In the opposite direction, Ottewill-Soulsby “aims to cross the Pyrenees by reintegrating the Carolingians and the Umayyads in each other’s history” (15). The Carolingians, “an expansionist power,” were confronted in their day by “a multipolar Islamic world” (20-21). By the end of the ninth century, however, the Carolingians were on the wane, as were the ‘Abbāsids, and so the “revived Umayyad state in al-Andalus under ‘Abd al-Rahmān III (r. 912-961) found itself with very little need to engage” with the Carolingians (22-23). The Umayyad Caliphate would meet its own end in 1031, after which new rulers in new polities in the Mediterranean world would have to confront new political realities, beyond the scope of this book but well within its larger argumentative thrust that kings, caliphs, and emirs live, always, in times of great complexity, forcing them to deploy subtle and skilled diplomacy in order to stay in power as long and as best as they can.
Ottewill-Soulsby’s marvelously well-written book (a real treat for those of us doomed by our day jobs to reading turgid, self-important academic prose) is divided into six chapters and a conclusion. In the first chapter, Ottewill-Soulsby provides important historical and historiographical context to his book and its subject, from which I have quoted above. In chapter two, “Perception and Practice in Carolingian Diplomacy with the Islamic World,” Ottewill-Soulsby “focus[es] on the… mechanics of… diplomatic activity,” the “human perspective” involving “the identities of the envoys [shuttling between Carolingian and Muslim lands], how they reached their destination, how they were received, and how they returned” (32). We also find here a treatment of “the way Franks and Muslims thought about each other, and the way they coped with peaceful diplomacy with people of other faiths” (32). Many people in Europe at the time had very little knowledge of Islam (34-38), and knowledge among Muslims of Europeans ran the gamut from detailed to non-existent (39-41).
Diplomacy among Carolingians and Muslims unfolded, furthermore, during “the beginnings of what would become the four madhāhib or schools of Islamic law… part of a process of codification… as the previously largely oral teaching of Muslim law was written down and regularized into a corpus” (42). Despite Franks’ technically falling into either the category of “dār al-harb (the House of War),” denoting non-Muslim lands with which the believer, according to the Qur’ān, must remain in a state of hostility, or the “dār al-sulh or dār al-’ahd (the House of Truce),” denoting, according to some scholars, lands which had entered into legalized relations with Muslims, “some scope for diplomacy was possible in the view of the jurists” (42-43). The reach of these teachings into the world of politics was varied, Ottewill-Soulsby writes. “In their dealings with the Carolingians most Muslim leaders seem to have been willing to play hard and fast with the strict rules” (45).
On the Europeans’ part, political actors faced religious constraints of their own, such as “Paul’s question in 2 Corinthians 6:15, ‘what concord hath Christ with Belial?’” (46). With scriptural hackles such as these in the background, “alliances with non-Christians could be politically damaging,” Ottewill-Soulsby argues (47). And yet, diplomacy, being a political necessity, went on while the religionists in all camps disputed. There was therefore a need for guides and interpreters and translators (52-57). Diplomats, however well provided for, though, faced the perils of travel along the way: pirates, bad weather, sickness, as well as the diplomatic high-wire acts of attending ceremonies and showing courtesy and proper form in utterly foreign environments (61-77). Ottewill-Soulsby, working deep in the sources, brings many long-lost moments of diplomatic history back to life.
In chapter three, “Carolingian Diplomacy with the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate,” Ottewill-Soulsby provides a backdrop to scholarship on Christian-Muslim diplomacy during the time period in question, as well as important historical context to Carolingian rule. From the perspective of Damascus, capital of the Umayyad Caliphate at the time of “the final fall of Carthage to Muslim forces in 698,” when “Umayyad power [was introduced] into the Western Mediterranean,” Frankish territories under Pippin II were probably of very minor interest, Ottewill-Soulsby writes (87-88). This context is important, because, in seeking to disrupt the “alliance system” advanced in the 1930s by Ottewill-Soulsby’s bugbear, Francis W. Buckler, Ottewill-Soulsby must show why that system does not reflect historical reality. The answer is that the alliances Buckler touted would have served, Ottewill-Soulsby argues, very little practical purpose. “The Umayyads… were in no position to threaten ‘Abbāsid power,” he writes (103). Moreover, “throughout the eighth and ninth centuries, even the most pugnacious ‘Abbāsid demonstrated little interest in conquering Byzantine territory” (104).
Charlemagne and other Carolingian rulers did have an interest in securing good relations with the Patriarchs of Jerusalem, however, and the Patriarchs, Ottewill-Soulsby writes, had interests of their own in the same (106-111). That the Carolingians were able to make “contact with the Patriarch of Jerusalem should… be seen as an unexpected by-product of diplomacy with the ‘Abbāsids,” though (111). After Charlemagne, Carolingian kings did not seek “Hārūn [al-Rashīd’s] permission to intervene in the Holy Land,” such as at the religious community at the Mount of Olives (112-113).
It was the same Hārūn al-Rashīd who, in 802, provided Charlemagne with an elephant, named Abū al-’Abbās, which for Ottewill-Soulsby represents some of the historiographical complexity of Carolingian-Muslim interaction as the story of Charlemagne changed in European writing about the past over time (3-4). The elephant is also symbolic of the “prestige diplomacy” that Ottewill-Soulsby believes motivated much of the diplomacy in Europe and the Muslim world at the time (114). “The political culture of both the Frankish world and the caliphate was one in which diplomacy with powerful, distant rulers was highly prestigious,” Ottewill-Soulsby writes (115).
“In part this reflected the shadows of empires gone. Charlemagne’s coronation as emperor in 800 is one of the clearest examples of the influence of the Roman past. Poets proclaimed Charlemagne to be the new Augustus and Constantine. Paintings of Augustus, Constantine, and Theodosius gazed down upon the revellers in Louis the Pious’s palace at Ingelheim. This reverence was paralleled in the Islamic world by an interest in Sasanian Iran, which served as an analogous model for imperial power.… Al-Jāhiz and al-Ya’qūbī wrote of al-Mansūr that he sought to imitate the Persian kings of old. In his Mirror for Princes, which was heavily dependent upon Sasanian material, al-Tha’alabī (d. 864) noted the importance of Persian precedent to ‘Abbāsid court life ‘for they were the first in that and we took from them the regulations on kingship and kingdom’”… Present among both these models was the idea of a ruler’s power being displayed by the reception of dignitaries from distant lands” (115).
The aggrandizement of political power and home by invoking the glories of empires buried both beneath one’s feet and under the sands of a faraway political imaginary seems to have been much more important a motivation for Carolingian and Muslim diplomacy than any system of alliances a previous generation of scholars advanced. To have an elephant in his court was worth much for Charlemagne politically, and much more important than any system of alliances restraining political forces at almost inconceivable distances beyond his domestic political horizon.
Chapter four, “Carolingian-Umayyad Diplomacy, Part 1: 751-820,” and chapter five, “Carolingian-Umayyad Diplomacy, Part 2: 820-864,” tell a story of the Franks and the Muslims not as part of a grand narrative imposed by later zealots, of the religious or nationalist variety, but from the perspective of diplomacy and exchange. It is fitting that Ottewill-Soulsby focuses on “the frontier,” then, especially given that “the region where the two polities [of al-Andalus and the Franks] met was a constantly shifting one, divided between the Carolingian Spanish March (Marca Hispanica) and the Umayyad Upper March (al-thaghr al-a’lā),” which “at their maximum extent… covered the territory between the Ebro river valley and the Pyrenees” (151). These “two marches were… multiethnic zones,” with “Goths and Basques” mixed with “settlers from the imperial core, including Franks, Arabs, and Berbers” (153). Much of chapter five is taken up with detailed histories of the attempts by Christians and Muslims to conquer, hold, and retake these borderlands, including the campaigns of Charlemagne (159-170). “Carolingian expansion in al-Andalus” was “highly contingent,” Ottewill-Soulsby writes, with “Carolingian campaigning in Spain” in the first decade or so of the ninth century “dependen[t] on conditions within al-Andalus, namely the distraction in Córdoba caused by the Umayyad civil war and the willingness of Muslim border warlords to enter into agreements with the Franks” (183, 185). A “useless peace” between the Carolingians and Abulaz al-Hakam lasted until 820, when fighting between the Franks and Muslims resumed. Chapter five continues the story of Frankish and Muslim fighting and diplomatic relations, such as Charles the Bald’s dealings with Umayyad Spain (230-255). Power waxed and waned in the frontier until “the Umayyad dynasty slipped into crisis after the death of Muhammad [I of Córdoba] in 886” (257). Umayyad power remained at ebb until “the accession of ‘Abd al-Rahmān in 912” (257). Whatever the momentary political and power mix, warfare and diplomacy, Ottewill-Soulsby concludes, “were fundamentally linked” (199).
In chapter six, “The Central Mediterranean: The Limits of Carolingian Diplomacy with the Islamic World,” Ottewill-Soulsby turns his attention to an “absence,” namely the lack of “regular diplomatic contact between the Franks and the Muslim powers” of “Ifrīqiya… part of the Maghrib, a crucial hub in the centre of the Mediterranean, connecting al-Andalus with Egypt” after Carthage fell to the Muslims in 698 (258). “Charlemagne,” Ottewill-Soulsby writes, “may have been looking to extend his political influence to North Africa” (264), and the region “was also a part of the Frankish Christian imagination” (266). Piracy in the Mediterranean also drew Charlemagne’s attention (270). But, if so, then why was Charlemagne not more engaged in North Africa? Ottewill-Soulsby here takes the crucial step of seeing things not only from Carolingian, but also from Muslim (and Sicilian and other) perspectives. Why did the Franks not succeed in developing diplomacy in North Africa as they had with the Muslims of Spain and the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate? Probably, and due in part to the complications posed by Byzantine Sicily, the Aghlabid rulers of Ifrīqiya were not interested (271). And then there is the position of the southern Italians, who–notwithstanding Pope Leo III’s letter to Charlemagne in 809 conveying “fears [over … an] infestation of pagans and our enemies” (referring to Muslims in North Africa) (272)–probably “saw little distinction between Saracens and Franks,” frequently making alliances with both (275). The fact that, in “the late eighth and ninth centuries… Muslim powers and the Carolingians, [despite being] in close proximity in the central Mediterranean… practised only very limited engagement with each other,” “highlights” for Ottewill-Soulsby “the contingent nature of Carolingian contact with the Umayyads and ‘Abbāsids. Proximity did not make diplomacy automatic” (281). It was always a question of what could be done given the constraints imposed by having to deal with other powers.
In the conclusion, “Death of an Elephant,” Ottewill-Soulsby returns to Abū al-’Abbās, the elephant which Hārūn al-Rashīd had sent as a gift to Charlemagne in 802. The year 810, Ottewill-Soulsby writes, when the animal died, was a tragic year for Charlemagne, marked by astronomical omens, a cattle plague, and the deaths of “Charlemagne’s son King Pippin of Italy and his daughter Rotrud” (282). But the elephant represents much more than just this bad year. For Carolingians, Ottewill-Soulsby argues, diplomacy with Muslim rulers “ultimately offered a means to legitimise domestic political change through prestige diplomacy,” with the elephant from Hārūn al-Rashīd and other “extraordinary presents that the caliph sent” allowing Frankish rulers “to bring a sense of wonder and scale” to their regimes, particularly at times of “ambitious… legislative, religious, moral, and cultural reform” (283). Abū al-’Abbās, the elephant in the Carolingian court, one might say, distracted from the elephant in the room of great changes and political shortcomings, making the pachyderm worth much more than his great weight in political capital. The same holds true, mutatis mutandis, for the Muslims, with “diplomacy between the Frankish and Islamic world matter[ing] for all parties” (288).
Sam Ottewill-Soulsby is to be congratulated and thanked for the labor that went into this work of scholarship. He is to be doubly thanked and lauded for making his book a delight to read. I encourage everyone to pick up this volume and see “the West” for what it was at the time of the Carolingian kings, namely an outlier, in large part, to the dynamics of Muslim conquest in Europe, North Africa, and beyond.
