Isaac the Jew and the elephant: Charlemagne's embassy

In 797 Charlemagne sent three men to the caliph Harun al-Rashid: Lantfrid, Sigismund and Isaac, whom the annals call simply the Jew. The two Franks died on the road. Isaac finished the business alone and came back five years later.

Why a Jew was in an imperial embassy is a question the whole age answers. The Christian West and the Muslim East barely traded with each other directly: a frontier stood between them, and a merchant from either side crossed it as a stranger. The people who crossed it were Jews. They had kin and law on both sides, Arabic and Latin, and letters to a community at every stop. Isaac was almost certainly not a courtier but a merchant: a man who already knew the road.

He came back with the caliph's gifts, the chief of them an elephant named Abul-Abbas. The route ran through Iraq, Egypt and Ifriqiya, then by sea to Porto Venere near Genoa, landing in October 801; he wintered at Vercelli, crossed the Alps in spring, and on 20 July 802 the elephant entered Aachen. The Royal Frankish Annals note it with a chronicle's usual dryness, and Einhard recalls the elephant in his Life of Charlemagne.

What matters here is not the embassy but what it shows. This is the earliest surviving picture of a part the Jews would hold for the next three hundred years: the people who carried goods, letters and knowledge between two worlds at war with each other. Seventy years later the caliph's own postmaster described the same road from the other end (see 4630).

Of Isaac himself nothing is known beyond these lines: not where he came from, not what became of him. The chronicle gave the elephant more room than the man who brought it.