New book sheds light on Harun Al Rashid’s elephant diplomacy

Historian Sam Ottewill-Soulsby investigates the complexities of Christian-Muslim relationships in the early Medieval era

An oil painting of Harun Al Rashid receiving Charlemagne’s envoys, painted by Julius Kockert. Photo: Maximilianeum Munich

Medieval historian Sam Ottewill-Soulsby has long been fascinated by animals. As a child he recalls frequently dragging his parents to the zoo and being obsessed with nature documentaries. “Long before I was interested in history, I was interested in animals,” he says.

So it comes as little surprise to find reference to a gigantic quadruped in the title for Ottewill-Soulsby’s debut book: The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne. The elephant in question, Abu Al Abbas, was an unusual gift made by Abbasid caliph Harun Al Rashid to the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne in Aachen in 802AD.

However, the book sheds light on a lot more than just a 9th-century tusked creature being presented as a diplomatic offering. Ottewill-Soulsby, a scholar of late antiquity and early middle ages based at the University of Oslo, Norway, says he wanted to respond to the idea that in the middle ages Christians and Muslims were inherently at war with each other.

“There is this vision of the past as nothing more than particularly the legacy of the Crusades. What I wanted to do was to get us to think about a period in Christian-Muslim relations several centuries before the Crusades,” he says.

Although he acknowledges that there certainly was a lot of warfare and religious-based conflict in the early medieval era, he says the truth is complex. “When we look at the world of Charlemagne, we see a whole complicated set of relationships, sometimes hostile, but often peaceful,” he says.

“Christian-Muslim rulers could do business with each other, they could engage in peaceful relations with each other when it suited them, and that much more complicated, much more pragmatic world is one I tried to bring out in my book.”

Untangling the Charlemagne myth

Several centuries after Charlemagne’s death at the time of the Crusades, he began to be portrayed as a great Crusader, fighting against a gravely misunderstood enemy. “You have all of these famous stories, like the La Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) which, for example, portrayed Charlemagne as the man who battled the Saracens,’” says Ottewill-Soulsby.

“When the third Crusades are going on – this is the one with Richard the Lionheart and Saladin – they sing songs about Charlemagne, because Charlemagne fights Muslims, we are going to go fight Muslims. There is very much this idea of Charlemagne the fighter of Muslims that gets into the cultural bloodstream,” says Ottewill-Soulsby.

Such misrepresentations have continued into the present era. Ottewill-Soulsby’s book begins with a quotation from a 2016 Washington Post article describing Charlemagne as “the Holy Roman Emperor who tried to drive Muslims out of Europe” after a “white nationalist radio host” compared the medieval emperor to then presidential candidate Donald Trump.

There are other popular myths about Charlemagne. “He has often been presented as the father of Europe, his empire seen as a sort of forebear for the European Union. The European Union issues a yearly prize, called the Charlemagne Prize, for people who have advanced the cause of Europe.”

Ottewill-Soulsby says this is also a misleading image of Charlemagne that presents him as a type of peaceful founder of Europe, when in fact he waged a lot of war. “He was a pragmatist, but a ruthless pragmatist. Trying to present him in too cuddly a form would be a mistake,” he says.

Elephant Diplomacy

The gift of the elephant from Harun Al Rashid should be seen in the wider context of a point in Charlemagne’s reign when he was styling himself as a Roman emperor, piecing back together a broken realm. “He is a new style ruler, or rather an old style ruler, and the elephant helps suggest that he is like a Roman emperor, he is something spectacular. And that everyone who sees it, knows that they are part of something spectacular and unusual,” Ottewill-Soulsby says.

Harun Al Rashid’s motivations behind giving the elephant, Ottewill-Soulsby says, was a statement of power and confidence. He gives the modern analogy of China’s panda diplomacy: “One way in which the Chinese government spreads soft power is by giving or loaning pandas to zoos around the world. It is a way of showing friendship, also communicating something about the specialness of China to the world, and I think there is something a little bit like that happening with the elephant.”

Ottewill-Soulsby says the elephant gifted to Charlemagne was almost certainly an Indian elephant, since African elephants were much harder to train and domesticate.

“One of the problems that Harun is experiencing at this point is that the bit of India that he does hold – which is Sindh in modern Pakistan – is in revolt, which among other things disrupts his supply of elephants. By sending Charlemagne his elephant, he is showing his confidence that this rebellion in Sindh will be crushed,” he says.

Filling the gaps

Curiously there are no Arabic sources that mention the gift of the elephant, which instead comes from European sources. “There is one Arabic source that refers to relations between Charlemagne and Harun Al Rashid. But it doesn’t talk about the elephant. It just says Harun Al Rashid received gifts from Charlemagne.”

Ottewill-Soulsby explains the primary sources for the Abbasid caliphate were intellectuals based in Baghdad, such as Al Tabari, who were mainly interested in events in Syria, particularly in Baghdad. “The caliphs are also doing business with Nubia, in Sudan, they are also doing business with the Turks and Indians, and most of the time you don’t know about them from Arabic sources. You only know about it from the Nubian sources, from the Turkish sources,” he says.

Ottewill-Soulsby studied Arabic sources alongside Latin ones. He says up until this point, most of the studies on the subject have been very western-focused and centred on Charlemagne. Looking at Arabic sources have helped him fill missing gaps.

“None of the Latin sources tell me that the elephant came from India. But, for example, if I read the writings of Al Jahiz in 9th century Baghdad, I notice that he writes about elephants. He tells me that the only elephants that can be trained come from India. They have to be raised in India. And from this I can deduce that the elephant that Harun Al Rashid sent must have originally come from India.”

Elephants are not the only four-legged creatures that have caught Ottewill-Soulsby’s scholarly eye. In another article, he scrutinises a gift of camels from Umayyad Emir of Cordoba, Muhammad I, to the king of West Franks and Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bald, in 865AD.

“That process of trying to work out what do camels mean in Muslim Spain, what do camels mean for the Franks, that was a whole journey that taught me a huge amount about politics at the time, the culture at the time, their religion, people and their relationship with the natural world.”

“From that starting point I became much more interested in thinking about the way in which people in the past related to these animals. The role they played in their lives. I think it is an unappreciated way that really gets you into the mindset of people who lived a very long time away,” he says.

The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne is out on Tuesday