Here at The Historian’s Sketchpad we like to make the odd stab at relevance every now and again. As Christmas looms, we face the joys and challenges of gift-giving, finding the right present that speaks to the interests of the people in our lives, while also getting a pleasant/disturbing insight into the way they perceive us. With this in mind, I thought for our translation this week we might take a look at a text that speaks directly both to those delights and anxieties.
Formulae Salzburgenses, ed. K. Zeumer, MGH Formulae (Hannover, 1886), no. 62, 453-454.
To the archbishop.
To the most blessed bishop N., who by divine will carries out the dignity of the priesthood honourably and with honour on the episcopal throne. I, N., though unworthy nonetheless called abbot by the will of divine grace, your faithful and wholeheartedly devoted servant. Through this series of our words, we hope for eternal salvation in God the Father, unfading and in a rosy fragrance.
Your nourishing prudence should know that ambassadors came to us from the region of N. province, directed by their king N., bringing us a tent, woven with wondrously beautiful workmanship, able to contain almost 30 men; and other great presents, imploring us forcefully to receive these gifts with a happy heart and so we did. Therefore, as if prostrated before your angelic sight and countenance, we beseech your blessedness and your generous clemency that you might deign to send us some of your great gifts, so that we may be able to pay back something so them, since they have so generously given to us. Send gold, if you are able, or cloth, for this seems to be very valuable in their provinces. We faithfully and completely desire to freely repay your service from the rest of our goods which our Redeemer and Maker has brought us, in every respect you enjoin us, as is worthy of such a beloved father and our faithful helper.
This short and anonymous letter comes from the Salzburg Formulary. A formulary is effectively a collection of templates used to guide people as they compose important messages (and love letters). This particular formulary is found in manuscript Clm 4650 in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, which was composed in the late ninth century, probably in Salzburg, and contains a number of other formularies familiar from elsewhere. These formularies are fascinating sources for medieval writing, but the original letters their templates are modelled on are often hard to reconstruct. The templates tend to remove details like names that would help us date and contextualise them.
Thankfully the Salzburg Formulary is a little unusual, and its contents tend to contain more information. Often these details suggest a link to Salzburg and its formidable archbishop Arn (r. 785-821), more on whom later. The particular letter we’re interested in gives us a rather specific clue that allows us to more clearly date it, which is that the author is writing on behalf of someone who has received a spectacular tent or papilio from a distant king. More precisely, I strongly suspect that this anonymous abbot was writing on behalf of Charlemagne. If this is the case, there would be a couple of potential occasions that could have prompted this letter. In 798 Charlemagne received ‘a most beautiful tent’ from King Alfonso II of Asturias (r.783, 791-842). Nine years later, the emperor was sent a tent ‘of unbelievable size and beauty,’ by Caliph Harun al-Rashid (r.786-809), a gift that was apparently impressive enough to compete with the elephant he had sent a few years earlier.
A hint as to which tent is being referred to here was unearthed by Bernhard ‘der heilige’ Bischoff in 1972. Going through the papers of Frobenius Forster, the Benedictine scholar and later Prince-Abbot of St. Emmeram’s in Regensburg (r.1762-1791), Bischoff discovered a transcription of an unknown medieval formulary (Regensburg, Staatliche Bibliothek, Rat. ep. 422). Although the original manuscript is lost, Forster’s precise copy allowed Bischoff to reconstruct the text. Many of the templates contained in the lost formulary were familiar from elsewhere, particularly the Salzburg Formulary, but with added details. Among these was the letter translated above, but with the crucial line noting that the envoys who brought the tent ‘came to us from the region of Jerusalem, sent by their king Amurmulo.’ That fairly clearly identifies the king as Harun al-Rashid, with Amurmulo being a rendering of the title amīr al-muʾminīn used by the caliphs (that is Commander of the Faithful, rather than Commander of the Moomins).
But why should we suppose that this letter was written on behalf of Charlemagne? After all, the emperor receives no direct mention in the missive. It seems reasonable to suspect that any ‘Abbasid embassy would give generously to senior figures at court as well as members of the royal family. It would make sense that a well-connected abbot would be given gifts that he might struggle to match.
There are a couple of clues that hint at Charlemagne’s involvement. The first is the phrasing, that the ambassadors ‘came to us…bringing us a tent,’ which has a royal air to it and implies that the main purpose of the embassy was the bearing of these gifts, which would be a ludicrous claim for an abbot to make, but not for Charlemagne. The logistics of an abbot based in Aachen writing a letter to a friend in Salzburg in order to get a present in time before the embassy left might also be tight, but less of a problem for an emperor whose presents came from the caliph and could therefore send gifts back with his next legation.
But perhaps the most compelling point here is the tent itself. The only other usage of the word papilio in Carolingian texts I can find are in the entry in the Royal Frankish Annals for 807, describing the tent given to Charlemagne by Harun al-Rashid’s second embassy and in the 865 entry of the Annals of St-Bertin listing the gifts sent by Emir Muhammad I of Córdoba to Charles the Bald (including camels!). Both of these are describing lavish, elaborate tents that were royal gifts. Of the tent of 807, the annalist says that it was ‘made of different colours and of wonderful size and beauty. They were all of the best linen, the curtains as well as the strings, and dyed in different colours.’ Interestingly, the tent is listed before any of the other gifts, which included ‘many precious silken robes, of perfumes, ointments, and balsam; also a brass clock,’ mirroring the abbot’s ordering, specifying the tent before mentioning the ‘other great presents.’
Tents obviously came in many different forms in the Caliphate, and the majority were presumably workaday practical items for travellers. But large decorated tents capable of holding thirty people would probably have been a luxury item. Harun himself was apparently not short of them. An inventory conducted by his son and successor al-Amin (r.809-813) upon his father’s death discovered 4,000 ceremonial tents and 150,000 camping tents in the treasury. Yet the evidence of other early medieval embassies suggests that tents were generally a singular centrepiece to a wider set of gifts.
For example, according to The Book of Gifts and Rarities, in 894 the Saffarid ruler of Iran, ‘Amr b. al-Layth (r.879-901), sent Caliph al-Mu’tadid (r.892-902):
‘a thousand pieces of cloth, twenty mann of musk, a hundred mann of aloes wood, a thousand mithqals of ambergris, a hundred workhorses, two saddles adorned with gold and seventeen saddles adorned with silver, a hundred and twenty camels with their saddle cloths and blinkers, two large two-humped camels for breeding, one great tent, and fifteen gyrfalcons.’
Given the extent of this menagerie, one hopes it was a truly great tent indeed. Not to be outdone, the following year, upon the marriage of the caliph to his daughter, the Tulunid ruler of Egypt and Syria, Abi al-Jaysh Khumarawayh (r.884-896), sent al-Mu’tadid forty golden trays and twenty silver trays, all loaded with precious spices and scents. In addition, his daughter, Qatr al-Nada, had an ebony dome complete with throne erected so that the caliph could watch coins being thrown to the thronging crowds. At the climax of this spectacle Qatr al-Nada presented al-Mu’tadid with ‘one Rashidi tent and one Tabaristani tent with gold [embroidery], and he liked both.’ The implication is that tents were a big deal and not handed out en masse to courtiers.
Further, elaborate tents like these had royal implications in the Islamic world. Harun al-Rashid held court under a ‘black pure silk tent’ even within the walls of a palace. Persian tradition held that the roof of a tent mirrored the sky, making the tent’s master a king of the world in miniature. This tent, in which he eventually died in 809, became legendary. It was listed among the marvels found in the collection Rashida, daughter of the Fatimid caliph al-Mu’izz, when she died in 1050/1. When his son, Caliph al-Ma’mun (r.813-833), travelled through Egypt in 833, his presence was advertised by the erection of his Tabaristani tent wherever he went.
In setting up a grand tent, one became master of the environment wherever you went. This was demonstrated by Sayf al-Dawla, the lord of Aleppo (r. 945-967), who showed his dominance over the Byzantines by forcing the emperor to allow him to set up his ‘brocade tent that accommodated five hundred persons.’ It probably didn’t help matters that, according to the poet al-Mutanabbi, the tent was decorated with images of Byzantine rulers performing obeisance to Sayf al-Dawla.
Handing out such a potent symbol of power and monarchical rule to an abbot would send a strange message. This is why I believe the abbot was writing for Charlemagne following the embassy of 807. With that in mind, the rest of the text falls into place. The unnamed archbishop receiving this letter has to be Arn of Salzburg. Arn was a trusted advisor of the emperor, spending time at court and acting as a signatory to his will. As we can see, in the letter Charlemagne tells Arn about the wondrous tent and other gifts from Harun, giving us a valuable demonstration as to how news about the presents sent to him by foreign rulers (and the respect and status that implied) could be spread across the empire. But he also reveals a problem, which is that he now needs to find something to send back.
This presented something of a difficulty. What do you give the man who has elephants? Harun was the wealthiest and most powerful individual west of China. Exactly what Charlemagne could possibly have dispatched to the Caliph has long been something of a mystery. The Arabic sources simply state that the ruler of the Franks sent presents. Notker the Stammerer claimed that Charlemagne sent fierce hunting dogs, but given that he uses them to set up a joke, I’m somewhat wary of taking this story too seriously. Luckily for us, we can see the lines on which Charlemagne’s mind was working, with gold and textiles being his chief idea. Less luckily for Arn, the Archbishop was expected to contribute to this act of imperial generosity (although presumably only Charlemagne’s name would be on the card). Charlemagne’s apparent need to cadge gold from his subjects is interesting given the vast wealth that had fallen into his hands in 795 and 796 following his conquest of the Avars. The wagon loads of treasure seem to have been divvied up fairly quickly if Charlemagne was already skint a decade later.
Gold and textiles were far from unknown as presents in the Carolingian world. Arn had form in giving people the latter, sending Alcuin a blanket and a canopy in 800. Among the gifts sent by Charlemagne to King Offa of Mercia (r.757-796) in 796 were silk cloths. Textiles and precious metals often went together. The chasuble of Saints Herlindis and Renula is embroidered with thread made from silk and gold. In the middle of the eighth century King Æthelbehrt II of Kent (r.725-762) sent St Boniface a silver cup lined with gold and two woollen cloaks (he asked for a pair of falcons in return.) When he anointed Louis the Pious as emperor in 816, Pope Stephen IV (r.816-817) gave the Frankish ruler gold and clothing. Ten years later Louis celebrated the baptism of Harald Klak by giving the Danish leader a cloak bordered with gold, a sword belt decorated with gold, a golden belt with gems and boots laced with gold in a look that gangster rappers would consider to be trying too hard. Empress Judith and King Lothar bedecked Harald’s wife and son with similar golden clothes.
Charlemagne was not wrong in thinking that the caliphate was interested in both textiles and gold. Al-Jahiz observed in the middle of the ninth century that Iraq imported gold, textiles and silk brocade from Byzantium. Nonetheless, I suspect that both of these gifts may have been a case of coals to Newcastle. The popularity of gold dinars in Western Europe, indicated by the number of copies made, such as that minted by Offa, suggests that the Caliphate did not need to look to the Franks for shiny metal. While beautiful examples of Frankish textiles do exist, they would struggle to compete with Byzantine silk or Egyptian linen, both of which, along with cloaks from Mercia, were imported by the Carolingians. Notker the Stammerer says that Charlemagne sent ‘white, grey, red, and blue Frisian cloths,’ which had a high reputation, although why Arn in particular might be in possession of such goods is a little unclear.
This is to say, gold and textiles would have been valuable and welcome in the ʿAbbasid court, but I suspect that Harun al-Rashid would not necessarily have been overawed by such an offering, and instead felt confirmed in his superiority. That did not make either party necessarily a loser. Both caliph and emperor benefitted from publicly receiving gifts from a distant and powerful ruler. But Charlemagne’s need to scramble to produce something suitable for Harun does perhaps tell us something about the relative disparity in resources. The letter also suggests that we need to be flexible in our interpretation of formularies. It seems very unlikely that anyone in Salzburg would need to scrounge up cloth to impress someone who sent them a really nice tent. This might hint that the letter was being preserved as a record of the importance of Arn. Whatever else it does, it certainly illustrates the importance of gifts.
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