Jonathan Wright - The Ambassadors - From Ancient Greece to the Nation State

Comparison was everything in the world of diplomatic gift-giving. Monarchs endlessly contrasted themselves with their peers and predecessors. When a Russian ambassador presented James I of England with a ‘rich Persian dagger and knife’ in 1617, ‘the king was very much pleased, and the more so when he understood Queen Elizabeth never had such a present thence’. 3 They also compared the different gifts offered up by rival ambassadors. In 1614, when the East India Company looked to recruit an ambassador to send to the north Indian court of the Moghul emperor Jahangir, its gaze settled on Sir Thomas Roe, ‘a gentleman of pregnant understanding, well-spoken, learned, industrious, of a comely personage’. 4 He left for India in February 1615 with a suitably impressive retinue: a chaplain, physician, apothecary, secretary and cook.

Unfortunately, his diplomatic gifts were decidedly uninspiring. Upon receiving a scarf, swords and some leather gods, Jahangir turned to a visiting Jesuit priest to ask whether James I was really the great monarch he purported to be. ‘Presents of so small a value’ did little to bolster the English king’s reputation. Jahangir had hoped, at the very least, for a cache of precious jewels. As for the coach that Roe also presented to the emperor, it simply did not measure up to the exacting Moghul standard of opulence. Jahangir has his servants dismantle it, replacing lacklustre velvet fittings with silk, and ‘instead of the brass nails that were first in it, there were nails of silver put in their place’.

Roe’s embarrassment turned to utter humiliation with the arrival of a Persian ambassador. Here was a diplomat who truly knew how to impress a Moghul emperor. As well as twenty-seven Arabian horses, nine mules and two chests of ‘Persian hangings’, he offered Jahangir ‘forty muskets, five clocks, one camel laden with Persian cloth of gold…twenty-one camels of wine of the grape, fourteen camels of distilled sweet water, seven of rose water, seven daggers set with stones…[and] seven Venetian looking glasses’. Roe contrasted the two assortments of gifts and confessed to being ‘ashamed of the relation’. 5

In this delicate game of cultural dialogue and rivalry, nothing was ever quite as impressive as the animals – whether the camels, bears and monkeys despatched to Frederick II of Sicily by the sultan of Cairo in 1228, the ten greyhounds taught to sit on horses’ backs that ambassadors from India brought to the Mongol court a few years later, or even the pandas Ching-Ching and Chia-Chia that Peking gave to Britain in 1974. Animals, especially when transported over long distances or into strange climates, did have a tendency to perish en route. In 1514, when the king of Portugal sent a rhinoceros to Pope Leo X, the creature drowned on its way to Rome. Even when they arrived in perfect condition, the animals were not always wonderfully well behaved. In the tenth century, dogs sent as gifts from the Hungarian king almost bit the Byzantine emperor’s hand and an unfortunate diplomatic incident was only narrowly avoided.

Such risks were well worth taking, however. Animals flattered even the greatest monarch. Very rarely, the gift of a curious animal was rejected. In 693 ad, Arab rulers suggested sending a lion to the Chinese empress. Unfortunately, it was a time of scarcity and famine in the east, and one of the empress’s advisors suggested that an animal that ate such a prodigious amount of fresh meat every day would be an unwelcome strain on the court’s limited resources. This was an aberration. 6 Throughout the world’s history, possessing exotic creatures was a hallmark of power and influence. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt ordered hunting parties that travelled as far as Somalia to capture monkeys and leopards, and rulers – whether Solomon or Kublai Khan, the Bourbons or the Medici – lavished untold wealth on their menageries.

Giraffes always made for unusually extravagant gifts. The Chinese emperor was delighted with the creature sent as tribute, via Bengal, from East Africa in 1414; four centuries later, in 1827, the pasha of Egypt scored a notable diplomatic triumph by despatching giraffes to the rulers of England, France and Austria. Two of the animals soon perished, but the giraffe that had been shipped to Marseilles and then marched through the French countryside would continue to delight crowds of Parisians at the Jardin des Plantes for the next sixteen years.

Most prized of all, however, was the elephant, a creature that had charmed and fascinated Europe for centuries. To the ancient world, elephants were ‘of all the brutes the most intelligent’, known to ‘have taken up their riders when slain in battle and carried them away for burial’. They were invested with the full gamut of human faculties and emotions. ‘It understands the language of its country,’ the Roman naturalist Pliny explained; ‘it obeys commands, and it remembers all the duties which it has been taught. It is sensible alike of the pleasures of love and glory, and, to a degree that is rare even among men, possesses notions of honesty, prudence, and equity.’ It had ‘a religious respect for the stars, and a veneration for the sun and the moon’, and, according to the Greek historian Arrian, ‘there was even one that died of remorse and despair because it had killed its rider in a fit of rage.’ 7

The typical elephant enjoyed ‘his bath with all the zest of a consummate voluptuary’, and he was endearingly temperamental. If his keepers did not fill his manger with just the right kinds of flowers, he would begin roaring in protest. Even when the requisite flowers had been located, he would refuse to eat if they were not properly arranged, ‘for he loves to have his sleep made sweet and pleasant’. A suitor’s promise of an elephant, Arrian revealed, had even been known to seduce chaste Indian women away from the path of virtue. To present an elephant to a coy mistress served as an irresistible flirtatious gambit.

Elephants also carried an air of menace, of course. They were formidable engines of war, able to turn the tide of any battle and to terrify the hardiest soldier. They would always be associated in the Western imagination with Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps in 218 BC, but their fabled military prowess only added to their mystique. As a result, there was obvious capital to be made from exhibiting mastery over such fearsome creatures.

In 55 BC, the Roman general Pompey treated crowds at the Circus Maximus to a banquet of cruelty and bloodshed, overseeing the slaughter of 500 lions and 400 leopards. Roman audiences were hardly squeamish, but the culling of seventeen elephants that came next was too brutal even for them. Realizing that their lives were in the gravest danger, the elephants sought to gain the compassion of the crowd by letting out desperate cries and wails. Suddenly, the formerly bloodthirsty crowds turned against Pompey and showered him in curses and abuse. It was perhaps wiser to treat elephants with greater respect, making use of them, for instance, as the very finest of diplomatic gifts.

In 1552, Suleyman the elephant trekked across central Europe from Genoa to Vienna. A present from the Portuguese king to the Holy Roman Emperor, it attracted huge crowds in all the towns and villages through which it passed, and inspired dozens of adoring songs and poems.

Three centuries earlier, Louis IX of France had also presented Henry III of England with an elephant, the first such creature to be seen on British soil since the Roman invasions of the first century AD. It took up residence in the menagerie at the Tower of London, already home to leopards sent by the German emperor and a polar bear, a gift from the Norwegian king, that fished for its supper in the Thames each evening. Sadly, the creature died within two years, most likely from overindulgence in the red wine prescribed to warm its blood. Not the worst of deaths, perhaps, but the English king was heartbroken and is said to have nursed his outrageously unusual pet through its final death agonies.