Charlemagne's Elephant

On the 1,200th anniversary of Charlemagne's coronation in Rome, Richard Hodges reviews the evidence for long-distance trade in his empire

Relations between the Mediterranean and northern Europe in the age of Charlemagne have puzzled archaeologists and historians. At face value the two parts of Europe appear to have been completely separated, despite Charlemagne's famous coronation in Rome in December 800. Furthermore, relations between Latin Christendom, Byzantium and the Abbasid caliphate (based in Baghdad) appear to have been virtually non-existent. Only intrepid pilgrims bridged the ideological divides that separated these three great regions with their different religions in order to visit the Holy Land. What puzzles archaeologists, in particular, is that while the Christian regions of England, France and Germany apparently had little contact with the South and East, archaeological evidence has long revealed that the Viking-Age communities of the Baltic Sea enjoyed successful commercial partnerships reaching to Byzantium and the Orient. Moreover, ninth-century Frankish glass and decorated pottery have been found in excavations of Viking-period settlements as far north as the Lofoten Islands.

Ever since archaeologist Haljmar Stolpe began his exacavations in the barrow cemetery surrounding the central Swedish island port at Birka in 1870 (situated in Lake Malaren), it has been evident that the north-south divide in post-Classical Europe was more virtual than real. Stolpe found numerous ninth-century merchants' graves containing Arab silver dirhems, similar to the thousands found in hoards in western Russia and around the shores of the Baltic. Many of these coins were defaced with Scandinavian runes, as if to destroy their ideological power. Other oriental grave-goods include silks and collapsible balances. Notable discoveries included a finger-ring bearing the legend Allah in Arabic from grave 515, and a cylindrical glass vessel of likely Syrian manufacture decorated with bird and plant motifs from grave 542. Similar finds have been found at other trading sites around the Baltic. Hedeby, for example, the Danish-planned emporium situated at the base of Jutland, boasts not only Arabic objects, but also a lead seal dated c.840 belonging to a certain Theodosius, patrikos, imperial protospatharius and chartularius of the public vestiary, chief of the Byzantine emperor's personal security.

Did such objects occur in Latin Christendom in the age of Charlemagne? Only a handful of ninth-century Arabic dirhems have been discovered to date, and only one hoard of them buried in the bed of the river Reno near Bologna in Central Italy. Silks, Syrian glass and other exotica are similarly scarce. Archaeologists argue whether the dirhems were melted down to make Charlemagne's silver-rich coins, while as yet few places where silk might survive have been excavated. On the other hand, while the written sources rarely describe commerce, special gifts did attract the attention of monkish chroniclers. For example, the Emperor Charlemagne was sent a brass clock by the Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad. According to the Emperor's biographer, it was,

... a marvellous mechanical contraption, in which the course of the twelve hours moved according to a water clock, with as many brazen little balls, which fell down on the hour and through their fall made a cymbal ring underneath. On this clock there were also twelve horsemen who at the end of each hour stepped out of twelve windows, closing the previously open windows by their movements.

For Charlemagne, this extraordinary object must have represented learning and progress, much as a Model T Ford did in an isolated town in the early twentieth century. The clock, however, was modest by comparison with more Harun's fabled present to his Frankish peer.

Befitting Charlemagne's image of himself as a Roman emperor, Harun sent Charlemagne an elephant, called Abu l'-Abbas, which had originally been owned by an Indian raja before Harun's predecessor, Caliph Al-Mahdi, acquired it. The gift of the elephant did not come out of the blue. The embassy to the Frankish court was led by the governor of Egypt, Ibrahim Ibn al-Aghlab, in response to a mission despatched by Charlemagne to the caliph's court in 797 - the first of three embassies sent to the caliphate (the others set out in 802 and 807 respectively). Ibrahim crossed the Mediterranean and disembarked at Pisa. From there, in part following the old Via Cassia from Rome to Turin, the embassy journeyed over the Alps to Charlemagne's court in the Rhineland. Once in Germany, Charlemagne presumably built a house for Abu l'-Abbas, where the creature lived for the best part of a decade. We know only one further detail of this creature's colourful life. The Frankish annals record that when King Godfred of the Danes seized traders from a place called Reric - possibly old Lübeck - and installed them at a place that the annalist calls Sliastorp (probably Hedeby near Schleswig in north Germany), Charlemagne took the elephant with him on his march to quell the trouble. The two great casualties of the campaign were Godfred, who was assassinated during a revolt in the Danish camp, and Abu l'-Abbas. The elephant died at Lippeham on Luneburg heath.

The story of the elephant draws the thinnest of historical threads together, forging connections between the Arabs, Latin Christendom and the Vikings: between Muslims, Christians and Nordic pagans, setting in motion a cycle of entangled relations. But we should be cautious of taking the story at face value. Inevitably Harun's gift begs many questions: what kind of boat was used to carry the beast to Pisa? It could not have been accommodated on any of the known late Roman or high medieval wrecks so far discovered in Mediterranean waters. Are we to assume that the deep- draughted cargo vessel could be docked against a quay at Pisa? How did Ibrahim's embassy progress to Germany? Did Charlemagne build elephant houses at his palaces of Ingelheim, Aachen and Nijmegen? How did the elephant, a tangible commodity from another ideology, influence his attitudes to that people and, consequently, to the re-examinations of his own ideology? Was it old Roman imperial vanity that persuaded him to take the creature on the Danish campaign?

The clock and elephant cannot have failed to open Charlemagne's eyes to the expanding horizons of the ninth-century world. Like the Vikings, he must have been aware of the silver-rich mines of the caliphate and perhaps of the harbours in China now open since 792 to foreigners. Quite clearly, he must have known that the Abbasids were a source of silks and spices. Less conspicuous gifts such as these are regularly noted from the later eighth century onwards by the Liber Pontificalis (the book of the Pope) in the possession of Rome's churches. Similarly, a rare description of the rich treasury of the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino lists silks and exotica. Excavations of Monte Cassino's sister monastery at San Vincenzo al Volturno in Central Italy have produced shards of an Abbasid polychrome dish, glass-making following the Syrian tradition, and a sword chape made of nephrite jade derived from China. Yet aside from these objects, oriental culture is notably absent.

Why was this? The principal reason is that this was an agrarian society. The engines of production were royal estate centres and monasteries as towns had not survived beyond the seventh century in Latin Christendom. Rome, of course, never truly died as an urban centre. Recent archaeological excavations in the Forum of Nerva show that north European pilgrims and tourists (such as the retired eighth-century West Saxon king Ina and the young Alfred the Great) would have discovered town life squeezed between the constellation of monasteries that occupied the eternal city in post-Classical times. Yet Rome was not so much a town in the sense that it had been in the age of the Emperor Augustus with streets and public buildings and residences, as a collection of elite centres with thousands of inhabitants that necessitated a bare minimum of production and procurement services. Rome, without doubt, became a town again in the later eighth century when, with Carolingian political support, it entertained a new vigour, situated midway as it was between the centres of occidental power in the Rhineland and East Mediterranean. Many great churches in the city - basilicas such as SS Quattro Coronati, and Santa Prassede - remain a testament to this important revival of its post-Classical fortunes.

North of the Alps, town life was revived around AD 700 in a particular and almost quarantined sense in a few great places occupying the edges of the North Sea littoral: Rouen, Quentovic, Dorestad, Hamwic (Southampton), Lundenwic (London), Ipswich, Eoforwic (York), Medemblik, Hedeby and Ribe. These places went largely unnoticed by contemporary chroniclers, yet possessed the hallmarks of later medieval towns: customs, quays, warehouses, gridded streets regularly maintained, tenements and industrial zones.

These emporia (trade centres) are archaeology's special contribution to Dark Age history. Like modern shopping malls or airports, these were non-places, in the sense that they were overlooked by contemporary historians. Their rich material culture was first noted in the mid-nineteenth century. Then famished peasants plundered the bonefields of Dorestad (at the mouth of the Rhine), and at the same time Southampton's inquisitive citizens were digging up parts of Hamwic, the eighth-to ninth-century town on the low-lying brick earths in the Itchen-side suburb of St Marys. But only in the last fifty years, following excavation sponsored by the Gestapo at Hedeby on the eve of the Second World War, has the geography of these places become apparent. Hamwic, we now know, was shaped by a rectilinear street grid, not unlike ancient city, with groups of dwellings clustered in each insula. Initially, Hamwic was interpreted as a traders' town, an emporium humming with foreigners. But closer analysis of the rubbish pits shows that it was in fact a centre for regional craft production. Sunk deep into the brickearth, these pits are brimming with refuse as well as rubbish such as animal bones. The first, distinctive English coins known as sceattas also occur in striking numbers.

The same features have now been found at the other great centres of this age. Lundenwic, occupying the rising ground west of the deserted Roman walled city, was quite as rich in imported and local material culture as excavations beneath the Royal Opera House and even in the grounds of 10 Downing Street have shown. Ipswich, initially no more than a riverside nucleus, was furnished with a street grid rising well away from the river Gipping. In one sector the distinctive grey burnished pitchers known as Ipswich ware were made in huge quantities. South-east of York's Roman walled city, beside the river Foss, a similar tract of a Northumbrian emporium known as Eoforwic has been excavated. Again it is singularly rich in finds. The pattern is repeated at Quentovic, the great Frankish emporium, now a green field site near Montreuil-sur-Mer, and Dorestad, where in advance of a housing development in the 1960s, a great swathe of the Rhine-mouth emporium that served the interests of the Carolingian manufacturers in the Bonn-Cologne region was excavated. In common with the line of later eighth- to ninth-century craft workshops found in the central Italian Benedictine monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno, these places were awash with material culture much of which has been left for archaeologists to study.

What the emporia lacked distinguishes them as centres. The secular and ecclesiastical elite were absent. Traces of timber or stone palaces like those found at Northampton, for example, simply do not exist in these towns. Churches rarely occur. Hamwic boasts possible examples made of slender posts, as does Dorestad. However, minsters built of stone such as Brixworth (Northamptonshire) or small rural basilicas such as Escomb (Co. Durham) are missing. In a sense, the excavated dwellings, known to archaeologists from the holes vacated by their posts or earthfast beams, follow broadly vernacular forms and reveal only limited variation. Paradoxically, of course, the elite were present in spirit. No archaeologist seriously doubts that the emporia were created by powerful leaders to channel the exchange of prestige goods and to control regional production. Outside Hamwic lay the royal palace of Hamtun; Mercian kings maintained estates at Chelsea near Lundenwic; the Bishop of Utrecht held property in Dorestad. Understated though the ambitions of these places were, we should not underestimate the eagerness of kings and clerics to profit from them.

Hamwic covered more than forty hectares; Lundenwic covered perhaps sixty. As many as 5,000 people lived in these places at their zenith, a figure at least fifty times larger than a large village or royal estate. In each the gravelled streets were regularly repaired, just as the plank-made jetties stretching out into the river at Dorestad were lengthened and maintained as the Rhine bed shifted away from the town.

Did such places exist on the north shores of the Mediterranean? Many historians believe that Venice was possibly as ambitious a centre, replacing Marseilles as the conduit leading from the Mediterranean into central Europe. Thousands of traders lived on the islands, if we accept the accounts of Frankish chroniclers of Charlemagne's dogged attempts to conquer the archipelago. As yet, too few archaeological excavations have been possible but the glimpses of the ninth-century levels are intriguing. Several historians believe that Commachio further south, at the mouth of the river Po on the Adriatic, was another emporium.

In complete contrast to Rome, the emporia were without history or memory, ritual or monuments. As such these places could not be central to Charlemagne's vision of a renascent Christendom, with its architecture, art and cultural spirit rooted in the glory of ancient Rome. Convinced of the need to extend the market system beyond these monopolistic centres, Charlemagne promulgated laws intended to introduce regional markets. At the same time laws were issued to encourage the use of a common silver currency based on a closely monitored weight. After 793-94 money brokers, from Naples to Hedeby, minted silver deniers to the new euro-standard. It would be foolhardy to suggest that all Europe subscribed to the new economic order, any more than it subscribed to Charlemagne's cultural revolution. It did not. Nevertheless, there was an incremental increase in productivity and trade.

Certainly new towns were created in flourishing regions like Mercia, Wessex, Flanders and central Italy, while extra-mural markets grew up outside the walls of many monasteries. The archaeological remains of these incipient market towns are often fairly vestigial. In Mercian towns like Hereford and Tamworth, at Winchester in Wessex and Norwich in East Anglia, emergent urban nuclei clearly existed, presaging the planned towns of the late ninth or early tenth centuries. The same is true in places like Ghent or Huy, while further south in Italy new towns like Sicopolis, near Capua, and Centocelle near Civitavecchia were laid out rather in the image of the mid ninth-century Leonine city filling the zone between the Vatican and the river Tiber at Rome. These were secular versions of the vici, the extra-mural market settlements described by chroniclers outside the holy precincts of monasteries like Monte Cassino (Italy) and St Denys (France) and now identified as clusters of timber buildings in the extensive excavations at San Vincenzo al Volturno, little different from a sector of a north European emporium.

Known to King Alfred from his pilgrimage as a youth to Rome, these places must have been in his mind as he instructed the shift around 886 from Lundenwic to Lundenburg, within the old walls of the Roman city. A wall-painting in London's Royal Exchange, painted in 1912, depicts King Alfred on a piebald horse amid the ruins of the Roman city sagely approving an architect's plans for the new capital. The image may be a little farfetched, but excavations now reveal a block of 30 hectares laid out in a rectilinear grid mirroring, perhaps, the Middle Saxon field system that had existed here, and clearly resembling the earlier town-plan of Lundenwic to the west. Alfred, we may suppose, the quintessential proponent of Charlemagne's ideas on cultural values and government, was locating his premier city in a place that possessed the spirit of antiquity - a place with a memory, as opposed to a non-place. At the same time the Anglo-Scandinavian rulers of Eoforwic abandoned the Foss-side emporium for the security and traditions embedded within the Roman walled town of York; the same happened at Rouen, where its Frankish rulers undoubtedly made the same connection between safety and memory.

The rise of towns, of course, reflected rural productivity and a burgeoning demand for craft production at all levels of society. Excavations of villages from all parts of Carolingian Europe show a growing emphasis upon improved animal husbandry as well as crop management. Villages like Kootwyk, occupying marginal ground in the sparse sandy Veluwe region of the Netherlands, were remodelled, in this case as its iron ore extraction activities lent the community a new significance. Even beyond the bounds of Christendom, the effects of the new order were felt. Recent excavations of the Viking-Age village of Vörbasse (Jutland) brought to light traces of a horizontal-wheel water-mill, a technological device which historians once imagined only to exist in Denmark when it was an established Christian nation in the twelfth century. The archaeological evidence suggests that Carolingian-period Viking magnates were every bit as aware of the new technologies as their Christian contemporaries who possessed similar water-mills on their estates at, for example, Old Windsor in Wessex and Tamworth in Mercia. In a nutshell, ninth-century Scandinavians, it is now clear, were tied in not only to the trade in prestige goods emanating from the Abbasid caliphate but also in new technological information emanating from the heart of Latin Christendom. Nothing better illustrates the integration of Europe as Charlemagne, using new architecture, arts and literacy, promoted a new age of cultural politics.

But precisely who provided the bridge between Christendom and the Orient? As we have seen, much of the evidence is uncomfortably slight. Certainly, after c.800 references in the chronicles to pilgrimages to the Holy Land increase as significantly as the references in the Liber Pontificalis to gifts of silks to Rome's churches. Is it coincidental that this was the moment that Abbasid silver dirhems first occured in Swedish towns like Birka, when the clock arrived in Aachen and when the monks in San Vincenzo al Volturno's workshops made lamps using Arabic techniques? Surely not.

Whether Charlemagne and his contemporaries were influenced by the pilgrims who had been to Palestine and had seen the great Abbasid cities of the Levant (where townlife persisted uninterrupted in its Arabic reformulation of classical townscapes) is a matter of conjecture. Any contemporary mention of such admiration by a Christian chronicler was heresy. Yet, as the archaeology of the eighth and ninth centuries becomes a little more familiar, we must seriously envisage that, just as the Baltic Sea was regularly in contact with the Abbasid caliphate via the long riverine route passing through western Russia to the Black Sea, so the Carolingian, Byzantine and Arabic worlds were far more interconnected than the media of this Dark Age would have its readers believe. Such contact, as the celebrated Belgian historian Henri Pirenne long ago surmised, was the scaffolding on which the Middle Ages were constructed.

© History Today