King John's Delegation to the Almohad Court (1212): Medieval Religious Interactions and Modern Historiography by Ilan Shoval

Abstract

Reviewed by: King John's Delegation to the Almohad Court (1212): Medieval Religious Interactions and Modern Historiography by Ilan Shoval Joel Pattison Ilan Shoval, King John's Delegation to the Almohad Court (1212): Medieval Religious Interactions and Modern Historiography ( Turnhout: Brepols 2016): xviii + 213 pp. Ilan Shoval's book takes as its subject a remarkable episode in Matthew Paris's Chronica Majora. According to Paris, King John of England (1199–1216) sent an embassy to the Almohad caliph al-Nāsir (1199–1213) in which John offered to convert to Islam and to hold the kingdom of England as a tributary of the caliph. Paris then alleges that the caliph, after a brief inquiry into the circumstances of England and King John, contemptuously refused the offer and [End Page 263] took the occasion to lecture John's ambassadors on the shamefulness of religious conversion, using the example of St. Paul. The details of the embassy came to Paris' attention, he writes, when Robert of London, one of the envoys, was subsequently rewarded by John for his diplomatic role with the custody of the monastery of St Albans, where the chronicler overheard his account of the mission to the Almohads. The embassy story has, understandably, attracted critical attention from English historians from the Victorian era to the present, whose views range from wholesale dismissal of the embassy as a malicious fiction, to a more nuanced acceptance of the bare outlines of an English diplomatic mission to Morocco without any offer or conversion or subjugation. Shoval's contribution to this historiography is a thick reading of the embassy episode in the wider context of Iberian-Almohad diplomacy, religious polemic, and English chancery records. Taking into account Paris' well-known animus against John and his awareness of earlier treaties between Christian monarchs and the Almohads, Shoval argues that Paris' account is suggestive of an authentic diplomatic mission that aimed at a "fairly standard offer of a defensive alliance" between John and al-Nāsir as part of John's grand campaign to confront Philip Augustus (23). Furthermore, he argues, Robert of London's alleged discussion with the caliph about St. Paul could indicate a real conversation between the two informed by longstanding Muslim anti-Christian polemic and by Robert's possible status as a converted Jew. While Shoval's overall conclusion about the possibility of an Anglo-Almohad alliance in 1212 is plausible, he occasionally relies on a rather strained reading of Paris' text to advance the argument. Shoval begins by setting the embassy story in its context as part of the Chronica Majora, introducing the difficult question of when and where it took place. Inserted by Paris under the year 1213 with the rubric "In what manner the desperate king sent to the Prince Murmelius," the embassy story was nonetheless clearly written to suggest that the Almohad campaign against Christian Spain, which culminated in July 1212 at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, took place with John's consent after the mission. Thus, Shoval argues, the embassy likely reached the Almohad court not in Marrakesh, as some earlier scholars have suggested, but in Seville, since the caliph crossed into alAndalus in 1211. The papal interdict of England, John's feud with his barons, and his desire for revenge against Philip Augustus all explain why the king was "desperate," but, Shoval argues, at no point was John's potential conversion to Islam part of the offer. Here, Shoval suggests that the lex Christiana of Paris' account, which John offered to abandon in favor of the lex Machometi, referred not to religion but rather to the "feudo-vassalic" laws of homage between Christian monarchs and their barons; in other words, John was offering to form an alliance without the help of 'Christian ritual elements' (24). In addition, John never intended to submit England itself to Almohad authority, but was thinking of his fiefs in Gascony and Aquitaine, whose revenues, Shoval suggests, he may have proposed to make available to the Almohads in the same way that the Almohads had done for their ally Sancho VII of Navarre (1194–1234) a decade earlier. [End Page 264] This is an unusual reading of the Latin...