Abd al-Rahman III Receiving the Ambassador at the Court of Cordoba, Dionisio Baixeras Verdaguer (note that the emir in this story is Abd al-Rahman II)
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Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World. This is also a bit of an experiment in terms of format. As you may have noticed from the title of the episode, this is the first in what I’m planning to be an intermittent series - I’ll tentatively call it Medieval Lives. What I want to do with these episodes is shorter stories - and shorter episodes - focusing on the biographies of medieval figures to which, for various reasons, I’m not going to be giving the 40 to a few hundred minutes I spend on an ibn Fadlan or Marco Polo. That might be because there’s a lack of source material or maybe it’s just, by its nature, a shorter story that I still want to share here.
These episodes aren’t going to be replacing the established format; the full length stuff isn’t going away. These are just something short that you’ll see pop up between and around the usual series. It won’t always be exactly travel related - I might use these to cast the topic net a little wider - but this one will be.
This story takes us to 9th century al-Andalus, Muslim Spain. To the city of Cordoba, at least to begin with. It is the story of Abū Zakariyyāʾ Yaḥyā ibn Ḥakam al-Bakrī al-Jayyānī, the story of a diplomat and a poet who is perhaps better known as simply al-Ghazāl, the Gazelle.
“The Gazelle” supposedly got his name for his good looks and his grace of figure and of speech. He was described as “distinguished and shrewd personality famous for his sociable nature, gaiety, smartness, adroitness, and quickness of wit.” He was described as a “confidant” of five of Cordoba’s Umayyad emirs. Doubtless, they enjoyed his presence for that pleasant wit and charisma, that skill at poetry, and they also trusted him to represent them diplomatically, to put that personable nature of his to work as an envoy. He is known to have done so first to Constantinople in 840, and then, though this second journey has sometimes been written off as mere legend, to some Vikings in 845. The story comes to us from the scholar ibn Dihya al-Kalby, born in 12th century Spain, dying in 13th century Egypt, its source supposedly Tammam ibn Alkama, vizier under three consecutive emirs who is said to have had the story directly from al-Ghazal.
In 844, a Viking fleet had come south, working its way along the French coast and rivers. They had taken Lisbon in late summer and Cadiz. They had come by the Guadalquivir River to Seville, then known as Išbīliya, and they had stormed and looted it. They had made to threaten Cordoba itself, but in that they were less successful. They are said to have suffered a significant loss to a combined Muslim force that used fire hurling catapults to great effect and soon had them fleeing for the coast and looking to make peaceable arrangements. Emir Abd al-Rahman II for his part likewise wanted peace and at least enough time to prepare a navy, so al-Ghazāl’s embassy had its mission.
Terrifying weather figures heavily in the crossing. It is so often the way with ocean travel. Al-Ghazāl is said to have improvised a poem on the spot, saying out loud, quote:
“Yahya said to me, as we passed between waves as high as mountains
And the winds overbore us from West and North,
When the two sails were rent and the cable-loops were cut
And the angel of death reached for us, without any escape,
And we saw death as the eye sees one state after another -
“The sailors have no capital in us, O my comrade!””
It’s not clear exactly where they were going. “Vikings,” after all, is pretty vague, and not helping matters is the word used to refer to them in the chronicle, al-majus, a word more generally meaning Zoroastrians. Their destination was an island, or perhaps a peninsula. An island among islands. They lingered on one, waiting for their ship to be repaired. Were greeted by with great interest when arrived and had fine lodgings made ready for them. Maybe they were there with letters and gifts to see the Norse chieftain Turgeis in Ireland, or maybe it was King Horik the Dane in Zealand. I’ve seen arguments for both possibilities.
Whichever ruler it was, the initial audience al-Ghazāl had with him is fascinating and opens with a kind of absurd game of wits, quite possibly fabricated later to demonstrate its protagonist’s strict religious adherence. The situation was that Al-Ghazāl had at first refused that opening invitation until it had been made clear that he would not be asked to kneel before this lord not his own. However, when he went to enter the royal court, he found the entrance had been lowered enough to force him to crawl, in effect to kneel. An awkward predicament. But in response, he sat flat on the ground, stuck his feet out in front of him, and scooted on in towards his host. “Peace be with you,” he greeted his host, when far enough in to be able to stand. “And with those whom your assembly hall contains”
The move was well received by all. That local king, that Viking ruler, applauded its cleverness through an interpreter. “We wished to humiliate him,” he said, “and he displayed his shoes in our face.” A peculiar anecdote and part of a broader theme in this cross-cultural encounter.
The picture that develops in the chronicle is that of a stage on which our protagonist wows his fellow actors and his audience with repeated displays of wit and wisdom, debating the scholars of this place, and proving himself again and again their better. But he also impresses in other ways. “The Gazelle” did not only draw attention for academic arguments.
The centrepiece of the story is in many ways al-Ghazāl’s romance with the Viking queen, a courtly romance conducted through an interpreter.
“Ask him why he stares at me so,” she said to the translator. “Is it because he finds me very beautiful or the opposite?”
Obviously, al-Ghazal said it was the former, and things went from there.
It’s an element of this kind of interaction that I hadn’t really considered before. I mean, maybe these particular conversations here never occurred at all, but it is something to picture. The one speaking, and then listening through the interpreter’s turn, not so much listening as watching, watching the other’s face, looking to see the reaction on their face, able to give that their full attention, wondering maybe if the translation was accurate. Or maybe rulers did not worry about such things.
The ambassador from Cordoba was an attractive 50, but when she asked, he replied, jokingly, that he was 20.
“With that hair?” she laughed. She had never seen a 20 year old with grey hair like that.
But what was so strange about his hair, he protested. Had she never seen a foal that was grey from its birth? It was perfectly natural. An answer worth some appreciation on her part.
She seems to have appreciated his presence in general and complimented him on the black dye he wore the next day, to which he responded in verse.
“In the morning she complimented me on the blackness of my dye
It was as though it had brought me back to my youth.
But I see my grey hair and the dye upon it
As a sun that is swathed in mist.
It is hidden for a while, and then the wind uncovers it,
And the covering begins to fade away.”
He followed up this bit of introspection with the declaration that it was, in any case, his intelligence and elegance she lusted after, so it wasn’t exactly all self-deprecation on his part.
Al-Ghazāl is said to have stayed 20 months and to have been a favourite of the Viking queen’s throughout. He would see her every day, speak of this or that, rarely part without gifts. It got so that his companions on the embassy began to talk of it in disapproving terms, and he was made known of this. At first, this made him decrease his visits somewhat, but when the queen found out why this was, she only laughed. She said that caring for such things was not the way of her people, so he resumed his more regular visits.
And what are we to make of this somewhat unlikely love story? Is that indeed what it was? It seems it perhaps was not.
Was she really so beautiful, al-Ghazāl is said to have been asked. Was she really all that?
“She had some charm,” he answered, “but by talking in this way I won her good graces and obtained more from her than I desired.”
As to whether those were diplomatic winnings or more personal ones, it wasn’t clear. It wasn’t clear what diplomatic gains were managed from this 20 months among the Viking. It isn’t necessarily clear that it happened at all.
As I said, this tale of a diplomatic trip to see the Vikings has sometimes been thought to not have been accurate. There’s the paucity of supporting sources, and there’s also the resemblance elements of the story bear to that of the “earlier” Constantinople mission, a resemblance that has led some to believe that the chronicle of the second voyage, the one to see the Vikings, was just a confused rendering of the first, that the whole thing was the invention of a 13th century poet working from the Constantinople story.
When al-Ghazāl had gone to that city, there’d been stormy seas that had inspired him to produce a poem. Emperor Theophilos had tried to force him to bow by lowering the entrance, and Empress Theodora had been quite smitten with this charismatic visitor who had composed a poem for her son Michael. Maybe the Viking embassy was all fabricated from such details. Or maybe “The Gazelle” just had something of a set way of doing things, a few extremely sharp arrows in the quiver that he’d reach for again and again.
Doubts aside, It is for all that, still, I think, a good story, an interesting blend of the kind of myth-making meets history that we’re often dealing with here with these sources, and, in its al-Andalusi/Viking connection, a depiction of a cultural exchange that I haven’t really covered on this podcast. I hope you have enjoyed it.
I won’t be adding bonus Patreon endings for these shorter episodes, these minis, but as ever, you can listen to them early and ad-free at patreon.com/humancircus and you can do so for as little as $1 a month, the different between getting a large coffee and a large-ish one per month.
I’ll be back soon, with the start of a new series, and I’ll talk to you then.