India, St Thomas and St Bartholomew in Anglo-Saxon England
One of the most intriguing pieces of evidence for long-distance contact and interaction between early medieval England and the wider world is the embassy to India that King Alfred the Great supposedly sent in 883, and the aim of this article is to offer an examination of the evidence for this voyage, before going on to consider its potential context and feasibility. Versions of this tale occur in the annal for 883 (or 884) in manuscripts B, C, D, E and F of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, although these vary in some important details. The relevant portion of this annal from MS D, which contains one of the fullest versions of the account, runs as follows:
883 … 7 Marinus papa sende þa lignum Domini Ælfrede cyninge, 7 þy ilcan geare lædde Sighelm 7 Æþelstan þa ælmessan to Rome þe Ælfred cyning gehet þyder, 7 eac on Indea to sancte Thome 7 to sancte Bartholomeae, þa hi sæton wið þone here æt Lundenne, 7 hy þær, Godes þances, swyðe bentigðe wurdon æfter þam gehatum. Footnote 1
883 … And Pope Marinus sent some wood of the Cross to King Alfred. And that same year Sigehelm and Athelstan took to Rome the alms which King Alfred had promised thither, and also to India to St Thomas and St Bartholomew, when the English were encamped against the enemy army at London; and there, by the grace of God, their prayers were well answered after that promise.Footnote 2
Needless to say, this passage has been the subject of considerable interest. Although it is missing from MS A of the Chronicle, it is thought to be a near-contemporary insertion into the Chronicle text, probably made during Alfred’s reign, given its presence in MSS B, C, D, E and F, and added by either an early redactor of the Chronicle or possibly even the compiler himself.Footnote 3 With regard to its content, some have suggested that ‘India seems an unlikely destination for two English thanes’ and argued that we might thus see Indea/India as a mistranscription of Judea, based on the variant form Iudea that occurs in MSS B and C.Footnote 4 However, whilst possible, this is by no means a necessary assumption, and a reading of Sigehelm and Æthelstan’s intended goal as indeed being India remains a defensible position.Footnote 5 In this context, it is worth noting that MSS B and C not only have a variant form of Sigehelm and Æthelstan’s intended destination, but also omit key phrases in their text of the annal, so rendering the whole tale obscure. This must raise questions about any claim of priority for their reading of Iudea over D, E and F’s Indea/India, and support the suggestion that B and C’s Iudea is simply an example of the common error of writing Iudea for Indea/India that is found in some other Old English texts too.Footnote 6
Certainly, a final destination for Alfred’s two emissaries at shrines in India, rather than Judea, would fit far better with contemporary Anglo-Saxon knowledge of the two saints mentioned in the Chronicle’s account than the reverse. As the ninth-century Old English Martyrology attests, both St Thomas and St Bartholomew were, for example, closely associated with India in tales that were current in King Alfred’s time. St Thomas the Apostle is said to have ‘travelled through the lands of pagan people and the eastern parts of the world, and in India he built their king’s hall in heaven, whose name was Gundaphorus’, something that the king’s brother saw when ‘his soul was led to heaven with God’s angels’, before he returned and ‘was alive again on earth’ and so able to report what the hall looked like.Footnote 7 St Thomas then travelled to ‘another Indian country’ (on oðre Indea mægðe), where he faced down a ‘horrible devil’, before
One of the pagan bishops then killed the servant of Christ, and the texts sometimes say that he was stabbed with a sword, sometimes they say he was stabbed with spears. He suffered in the city of Calamina in India…Footnote 8
St Bartholomew is likewise described as ‘Christ’s missionary in the country of India, which is the outermost of all regions … In this country he cast out idols which they had previously worshipped there’.Footnote 9 After an angel of God appears to reveal that the people of India had previously been worshipping devils, the Old English Martyrology goes on to say that
the king of that people received baptism and his queen too, and all the people who belonged to his kingdom. Then the pagan bishops went and complained about that to the king’s brother; he was in another kingdom, and he was older than he was. He therefore ordered Bartholomew, the servant of Christ, to be flayed alive. Then the believing king came with many people and took his body and transported it away with great splendour, and put it in a fantastically large church.Footnote 10
Subsequently, the unbelieving king ‘became insane’ and the pagan bishops ‘became insane and died’.
Cynewulf’s arguably ninth-century Old English poem The Fates of the Apostles also explicitly links these two saints with India:
Certainly, it has been no secret fact abroad that Bartholomew, a soldier strong in the strife, went to live among the people of India … So too Thomas bravely ventured to other parts in India, where the heart was illumined and the purpose strengthened in many people through his holy word. Then this man of exalted spirit by miraculous power, through the might of the Lord, revived the king’s brother in front of the multitudes so that he rose up from the dead … and then in the strife Thomas gave up his life to the people. A sword-assault by a heathen hand dispatched him where the saint fell wounded in front of the multitudes. From there his soul sought out the light of heaven in reward for his victory.Footnote 11
The same associations are present in Bede’s influential Martyrology and Vita metrica sancti Cuthberti,Footnote 12 and in texts by Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) and Isidore of Seville (d. 636) that were definitely circulating in seventh- to ninth-century England. For example, Gregory says in his Homiliae XL in Euangelia of 590–2 that on the day of judgement, the peoples of the world will be presented to God by their apostles, so that Peter ‘will appear there with a converted Judea, which he drew after him … and Thomas a converted India’.Footnote 13 Isidore also refers to Thomas being assigned India in his De ortu et obitu patrum of 598–615, whilst further stating that St Thomas died at Calaminia in India, ‘where he was buried in honour’ (ch. 73: ubi et sepultus est in honore), and that St Bartholomew was active in India as well, preaching the gospel of St Matthew there.Footnote 14
These links between St Thomas, St Batholomew and India are present in the works of Aldhelm of Malmesbury (d. 709/10) too, who King Alfred apparently considered to be England’s finest poet and whose works enjoyed a very wide circulation in Anglo-Saxon England, such that he became ‘one of the principal authors on the English curriculum’ and it might be said that ‘to the Anglo-Saxon reading public Aldhelm was the pre-eminent author, not Bede’.Footnote 15 So, in his Latin poem Carmina ecclesiastica IV (On the Altars of the Twelve Apostles), Aldhelm relates the following:
On Thomas: … Christ, therefore, the holy offspring of God, sent this man, who was performing many miracles with magnificent success, to convert the peoples of the orient with holy books. India at that time worshipped icons with unspeakable rites … but it confessed the true faith when Thomas won its salvation and (henceforth) believed in Christ, Who controls the sceptres of heaven. Accordingly, when his time in this present life had been spent, Thomas straightaway sought the ethereal heaven. A temple-priest, the officiant of an ancient shrine, transfixed (Thomas) with a hard blade so that he was dripping with blood (but) he is to receive his rewards when the earth of its own accord shall gape open and all corpses rise from their ancient tombs.
On St Bartholomew: Mighty India stands as the last of the lands of the earth … Given over to pagan rites, India used to worship idols. But Bartholomew destroyed the pagan shrines, duly smashing the images of the ancient gods …Footnote 16
Similarly, in his prose De uirginitate (On Virginity) of c. 675/86 we find reference to
Didymus [i.e. Thomas], at one time the disbelieving doubter of the Lord’s resurrection – but once the scars of Christ’s wounds had been seen, (became) its confident preacher – who illumined the tripartite provinces of eastern India with the clear light of evangelical preaching and totally annulled the execrable rites of (pagan) sanctuaries and the empty offices of their priests …Footnote 17
Interestingly, Aldhelm goes on to include a lengthy quotation from St Thomas in De uirginitate after this, which, as Augustine Casiday has noted, was taken from the fourth-century Passio sancti Thomae apostoli, a Latin translation and abbreviation of the originally Syriac Acts of the Apostle Thomas, confirming the circulation of this early account of St Thomas’s missionary activities and martyrdom in India in seventh-century England; the same text is also believed to have been used by both Cynewulf and the author of the Old English Martyrology in their accounts of St Thomas.Footnote 18
The Symbolism and Insular Context of Sending Alms to India
In light of all of the above, it is hard not to see the explicit mention of St Thomas and St Bartholomew as the recipients of Alfred’s alms in the annal for 883 as strongly supportive of the contention that Indea/India, rather than Iudea, is indeed the correct reading for the intended destination, and deliberately meant.Footnote 19 In fact, it may well be that, instead of India being an ‘unlikely destination for two English thanes’, its remoteness from early medieval England was, in fact, the very point of Alfred’s gift: that, in return for success against a Viking raiding-army that had occupied London,Footnote 20 King Alfred had deliberately pledged to send alms not simply to Rome – which was the frequent recipient of contemporary Anglo-Saxon alms and pilgrimsFootnote 21 – but to the very furthest-known reaches of Christendom, to the land that was conceived of as mirroring Britain’s position on the very far edge of the known world.Footnote 22 Whilst there was sometimes a degree of confusion over exactly what counted as ‘India’ in Late Antiquity and the early medieval period,Footnote 23 it is clear that India was indeed considered in Anglo-Saxon England to be ‘the last of the lands of the earth’ to the east and ‘the outermost of all regions’.Footnote 24 As such, it was the clear counterpart to Britain, which was frequently identified as being located ‘virtually at the end of the world towards the west and north-west’,Footnote 25 as Gildas writing in the sixth century put it, or ‘at the very ends of the earth’, as Bede and others describe it.Footnote 26 Even though England was arguably conceived of as being somewhat less liminal and more properly part of Europe by the ninth and tenth centuries,Footnote 27 its relative geographical position compared to that of India continued to be recognised. So, the only surviving Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, the Cotton World Map – which was probably drawn at Canterbury in c. 1025–50, although it is thought to have been based on a lost Anglo-Saxon exemplar of perhaps the earlier tenth centuryFootnote 28 – shows Britain and Ireland on the outer edge of the known world near the very bottom left (north-west) corner, whilst India and Sri Lanka are marked on the opposite edge of the map at the very top (east) and centre, with the eastern Mediterranean and Jerusalem lying at the heart of the world between them.Footnote 29 Although Ireland and Thule are even more peripheral than Britain on this map, the parallel between Britain and India’s respective locations on opposite edges of Afro-Eurasia remains clear.Footnote 30 A similar concept of the relative geographical positions of India and Britain is likewise present in the Old English translation and adaptation of Orosius’s Historiarum adversus paganos libri septem, perhaps written in the very late ninth century (or possibly the early tenth century), which identifies India as lying to the west of the Indus river and in the eastern part of the Earth, being the furthest east of all countries, whilst Britain – albeit with Ireland and Thule beyond – lay in the Ocean on the western edge of the world.Footnote 31
If India and Britain were thus conceived of as largely mirroring each other in their locations at the opposite edges of the known world, so that the pledge of sending alms to India could well have been a deliberate act of votive symbolism undertaken in return for victory over the Vikings at London, this may not have been the only potential motivation for such a mission being sent. Indeed, it has been suggested that this expedition would, moreover, have had a sound context in the geographical curiosity about the wider world and its limits that was in evidence at Alfred’s court and the desire of the king and his courtiers to ‘probe the horizons of their inherited geographical understanding’.Footnote 32 This desire is evidenced most notably by two accounts added into the Old English Orosius, these being the reports of the travellers Ohthere and Wulfstan on the physical, political and ethnographic geography of the north. Wulfstan, probably an Anglo-Saxon traveller, records his eastwards trip to the Baltic port of Truso and Estland,Footnote 33 whilst Ohthere’s report ‘to his lord, King Alfred’ (Ohthere sæde his hlaforde, Ælfrede cyninge), concerns two journeys from his home in Hálogaland in northern Norway, one to southern Norway and Hedeby, and the other around the North Cape into the White Sea – the latter trip is clearly stated to have been undertaken to see how far the land extended to the north and if anyone lived there, with the text suggesting that Ohthere was being explicitly questioned at Alfred’s court about the northernmost margins of the world and the geography of Scandinavia.Footnote 34 Given this, the idea that two emissaries of an Anglo-Saxon king might indeed have been sent to India in the 880s would appear to be not only defensible in terms of an awareness of St Thomas and St Bartholomew’s well-documented links to this region, but also to have credible motivations in terms of both India’s perceived position (and remoteness) relative to England and the intellectual and geographical curiosity of the West Saxon court at that time. Accepting this does, of course, raise a number of additional questions, including: what were Sigehelm and Æthelstan being sent to visit in India with their royal gifts? What was the wider context for such a visit, and how could they have travelled there? And who might these two travellers have been, and did they manage to undertake this journey and return to report what they had seen?
With regard to their intended destination in India, the usual and most credible interpretation is that alms were being sent to specific Christian sites associated with St Thomas and St Bartholomew that were believed to be located there. Certainly, it seems likely that this is what was envisaged by Alfred for Sigehelm and Æthelstan’s trip. As the above accounts make clear, there was a definite sense in seventh- to ninth-century England that St Thomas had successfully converted the people of India – who thus ‘confessed the true faith … and (henceforth) believed in Christ’, according to Aldhelm – before he was martyred and was, initially at least, buried at Calamina in India.Footnote 35 Likewise, although St Bartholomew would not lead and present to God the ‘converted India’ at the Last Judgement (this being St Thomas’s honour, according to Gregory the Great), he too had preached the gospel in ‘other parts in India’, to use Cynewulf’s phrase, and had converted and baptised a large number of people there, with the Old English Martyrology’s text implying that he had been martyred and buried in India ‘in a fantastically large church’.Footnote 36 Further support for the presence in England of this notion of a continuing Christian community in India to whom alms might be taken can be had from another text that was known in early medieval England. The Byzantine author and spice merchant known as Cosmas Indicopleustes probably wrote his Χριστιανικὴ Τοπογραφία (Christian Topography) in Alexandria, Egypt, in the mid-sixth century, and in this work he demonstrates a notable degree of knowledge of India and Sri Lanka, making a number of references to Christians in India and Sri Lanka in the following manner:
Even in the Island of Taprobane [Sri Lanka] in inner India, where also the Indian sea is, there is a church of Christians, clergy and believers … The same is true in the place called Male [Malabar, India], where the pepper grows, and in the place called Kaliana, and there is a bishop appointed from Persia … [Sri Lanka] has a church of Persian Christians who are resident in that country, and a priest sent from Persia, and a deacon, and all that is requisite for the conduct of the worship of the Church.Footnote 37
The circulation of this Greek work was not, it should be noted, limited to the Byzantine Empire or the Mediterranean world. Indeed, it now seems likely that at least one manuscript of Cosmas Indicopleustes’ Christian Topography was present at Canterbury in the seventh century, and it has been suggested that the Cosmographiorum codex that Benedict Biscop bought in Rome and subsequently sold to King Aldfrith of Northumbria (685–705) may in fact have been an illuminated copy of this too.Footnote 38 Cosmas’s illustrations are also thought to have influenced those of the famous Codex Amiatinus, which was produced before 716 in Bede’s monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow, with the suggestion being made that the monks preparing the Amiatinus illustrations consulted an illustrated copy of Cosmas’s Christian Topography when producing them,Footnote 39 whilst Simon Keynes has noted that at least one copy of the Christian Topography was probably still present in southern England in the early ninth century.Footnote 40 Cosmas’s work may also have influenced parts of the Old English poem Genesis A, which survives in a manuscript of c. 1000 but may have been composed in the eighth century.Footnote 41
Christians and Christianity in Early Medieval India
If King Alfred and his advisors thus may well have believed there to be a Christian community located in ‘the last of the lands of the earth’ to the east, mirroring the position of Britain, to which alms might be sent for sites associated with St Thomas and St Bartholomew, how well-founded was this belief? In this context, it needs to be acknowledged that the existence in India of an early and notable Eastern Christian community, known usually as ‘Thomas Christians’ after their claimed founder, St Thomas the Apostle, is well-established. Although the exact circumstances of this community’s origins are much debated, there is little doubt that stories of St Thomas’s missionary activity in India were circulating in the Mediterranean world by the third and fourth centuries AD, nor that there was indeed a permanent Christian community established in southern India by at least Late Antiquity.Footnote 42 So, for example, the Christian Arabic Chronicle of Seʿert, a universal history based on Syriac sources, is believed to offer plausible testimony for fifth- to sixth-century Christians in India, referring to Maʿna, a bishop of Rev-Ardashir at coastal Persis (Fars, Iran), sending materials for use among Christians in India in the late fifth or early sixth century.Footnote 43 Likewise, Ishoʿdad of Merv mentions that a certain ‘Daniel the Presbyter, the Indian’, assisted Mar Koumi in preparing a Syriac translation of a Greek text for Bishop Mari of Rev-Ardashir, something that must have taken place in the early to mid-fifth century.Footnote 44 Even more significant are two letters of Ishoʿyabh III, Bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon and Patriarch of the Church of the East from c. 649 to 659, which were written in the context of a dispute between him and the metropolitan bishop of Rev-Ardashir. These complaints indicate that the latter was responsible for administering Indian episcopal sees at that time, but had created a situation whereby ‘the episcopal succession has been interrupted in India’, and that he received taxes from the people of India. As such, the content of Ishoʿyabh III’s complaints point to the presence of an organised and presumably reasonably substantial Christian community in India at that time.Footnote 45 Moreover, India subsequently seems to have received its own metropolitan bishop at some point c. 650–790, though the date and context of this is not wholly certain.Footnote 46
Given all of this, the account of the mid-sixth-century church in India and Sri Lanka by Cosmas Indicopleustes that was circulating in early medieval England appears to have been reasonably accurate, in particular with respect to the close links to Persia that he notes, the presence of at least one Eastern Christian bishop in India, and the reference to Christians being found at a number of places along the coast of India and in Sri Lanka. Further references to this Christian community in India, showing its continued existence into the period of Alfred’s emissaries, are found in the works of Timotheos I, Patriarch of the Church of the East in 780–823. These include comments on the possibility of marriages between Christians of both Mesopotamia and India, a note that ‘many monks’ were accustomed to travel by sea from Mesopotamia to India (Beth Hinduwāyē) in that period, and a passing reference to the fact that the Christians of this region continued to be under the authority of the Patriarch.Footnote 47 Most interesting of all are two letters written by Timotheos I to the Indian Christian community that have been preserved by Ibn al-Ṭayyib, an Eastern Christian monk and secretary to the Patriarch, in his eleventh-century Fiqh al-naṣrāniyya. One talks about the election and ordination of the metropolitan bishop and advises that Indian Christians ought first to listen not to their king, but to the Patriarch, and only after the Patriarch’s approval should the matter be referred to the king, suggesting both the existence of a metropolitan bishop in India associated with a well-organised community at that time and that the king in this unspecified region of India had some rights over the election and ordination of the Metropolitan of India.Footnote 48 The other is addressed to ‘Arkn, the head of the faithful in India’, and makes mention of both the metropolitan bishop and subordinate bishops within India, before emphasising that they ought to obey canon law regarding ordinations.Footnote 49 The Metropolitan of India is moreover mentioned again a few decades later by the Patriarch of the Church of the East in 853–8, Theodosios, when he exempted the metropolitans of India and some other distant provinces from attendance at synods, instead requiring them to send a letter of adherence to the Patriarch every six years with details of the affairs of their dioceses.Footnote 50
In addition to such documentary evidence for the existence of Christian communities in India into the eighth and ninth centuries, there are also a number of relevant physical artefacts. The best known of these are the nine granite ‘Saint Thomas Crosses’ that have been discovered so far along the coast of India, from Goa in the west to Chennai in the south-east, along with one example from Sri Lanka.Footnote 51 In all but two cases, these crosses carry a Middle Persian, Pahlavi-script inscription that is the same on all the crosses that bear it, suggesting that they were copied from a single original, usually identified as that found in 1547 on the Great Mount at Mailapur/Myalpore (Chennai).Footnote 52 The most recent study of this inscription translates it as follows: ‘Our lord Christ, have pity on Sabrišōʿ, (son) of Čahārbōxt, (son) of Sūray, who bore (brought?) this (cross)’.Footnote 53 The Mailapur/Mylapore cross is often considered on palaeographic grounds to date from around the seventh or eighth century, although a sixth-century date has also been suggested,Footnote 54 and as a group the crosses have been assigned broadly to either the sixth to ninth centuries or the seventh to tenth centuries, with it being recently suggested that the copies of the original Mailapur/Mylapore cross found on the west coast of India in Kerala may have their origins in the ninth century or thereabouts.Footnote 55 Aside from these crosses, there is also the intriguing evidence of the surviving Kollam/Quilon copper plates, which date from 849–50 and are written in Old Malayalam in the Vatteluttu script. Kollam was the southernmost and largest medieval port on the Malabar coast of western India and a key stopping point on the route between the Persian Gulf and China according to the Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind, or al-Kītāb al-awwal, of 851–2.Footnote 56 It appears from the copper plates that the trade of Kollam and the taxes it generated were, at that time, partly under the control of mercantile groups headed by an Eastern Christian named Maruvan Sapirisho (Maruvān Sapir Īśō), who was both chief merchant and ‘Superintendent of Weights and Measures’ at Kollam.Footnote 57 The grant recorded on the plates was made in the fifth year of Stāṇu Ravi, the Cēra ruler of Kerala, and sets out the donation of land and tax privileges to a church apparently founded by Maruvan Sapirisho at Kollam, along with privileges and duties of the two trade groupings who controlled the market at Kollam, the Maṇigrāmam and the Anjuvaṇṇam; this was then witnessed by twenty-five men drawn from the Muslim, Christian, Zoroastrian and Jewish communities there.Footnote 58 Subsequently, the trade of Kollam appears to have continued to be under what has been described as ‘substantial Eastern Christian control’ until at least the fourteenth century, with the final elements of this apparently surviving until 1503.Footnote 59
The Tomb and Shrine of St Thomas in Southern India
In light of the above, it is clear that there was indeed a Christian community in India to whom Sigehelm and Æthelstan might have travelled in the ninth century with King Alfred’s alms. What, then, of the belief that there were also specific sites associated with St Thomas and St Bartholomew in ninth-century India that might receive these? With regard to St Bartholomew, no surviving medieval account identifies a particular site or specific area of India associated with his cult, although a link to the Kalyan area (near Mumbai) has been suggested on the basis of early accounts of Bartholomew’s activity in India, and there certainly seem to have been Christians present in this region in both the sixth and tenth centuries, some way to the north of the known distribution of ‘Saint Thomas Crosses’, which is noteworthy.Footnote 60 When it comes to St Thomas, however, there is much more certainty to be had. Indeed, by c. 500, the tradition had begun to circulate in Greek, Latin and Syriac sources that St Thomas had died at Kalamene/Calamina in India, a name believed to derive from Sanskrit Cholamandalam/Tamil Cholamantalam, that is the Coromandel coast of south-eastern India, and the appearance of this name in these sources has been argued to reflect a knowledge of the establishment of a tomb/shrine associated with St Thomas on the Coromandel coast by this point at the latest.Footnote 61 This location is, of course, mentioned in the ninth-century Old English Martyrology account of St Thomas, as well as by Isidore of Seville, whose De ortu et obitu patrum was undoubtedly circulating in Anglo-Saxon England and states that St Thomas was ‘buried in honour’ at Calaminia. Footnote 62 That such a tomb/shrine had indeed been established by the sixth century is moreover confirmed by Gregory of Tours’ Liber in gloria martyrum (Glory of the Martyrs). Written at Tours in north-western Gaul, where Gregory was bishop, and finished in c. 590, this account includes an important discussion of the tomb of St Thomas as part of Gregory’s wider treatment of that saint. In this he both recounts a number of significant details regarding the shrine of St Thomas in India and specifies that the source of his knowledge of the shrine and church there was someone who had actually visited it, a point of considerable import in the present context. The section in question runs as follows:
According to the history of his suffering the apostle Thomas is said to have been martyred in India … in that region of India where he had first been buried there are a monastery and a church that is spectacularly large and carefully decorated and constructed. In this church God revealed a great miracle. A lamp was placed there in front of the spot where he had been buried. Once lit, by divine command it burned without ceasing, day and night: no one offered the assistance of oil or a new wick. No wind blew it out, no accident extinguished it, and its brightness did not diminish. The lamp continues to burn because of the power of the apostle that is unfamiliar to men but is nevertheless associated with divine power. Theodorus, who visited the spot, told this to me.Footnote 63
This is, of course, arresting. Just who this Theodorus was is left unsaid – one possibility is that he was Gregory’s fellow Gaulish bishop of that name, who was at Marseille from c. 575–94 and who is depicted by Gregory as a ‘man of great sanctity’ in his Historia Francorum, VIII.12 – but in any case there seems little reason to doubt that this Theodorus had been to the tomb of St Thomas in India, as Gregory relates.Footnote 64 As such, the implication of this passage from Gregory’s Liber in gloria martyrum is that not only was there a Christian community and claimed tomb-site of St Thomas in India that people in western Europe were aware of, as indicated by the references to it made by Isidore of Seville and others, but that there was also a monastery and church – ‘spectacularly large and carefully decorated and constructed’ – located at this tomb-site which visitors from western Europe might credibly journey to during the early medieval period and then return home from to tell others about.
With regard to the specific location on the Coromandel coast (Kalamene/Calamina, Cholamandalam) where this shrine and church were found, it was presumably the site at Mylapore/Mailapur, Chennai, where Thomas Christians venerated his tomb in subsequent periods, and there is widespread agreement that such a location is credible, supported by the fact that the only ‘Saint Thomas Cross’ known from the Coromandel coast was found here, with this cross being usually considered to be sixth- to eighth-century in date and the original from which all other ‘Thomas crosses’ were subsequently copied.Footnote 65 Certainly, European travellers in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries report encountering a single important tomb-site and church associated with St Thomas on the Coromandal coast. For example, in about 1292, John of Montecorvino stayed for thirteen months at ‘the Church of St. Thomas the Apostle’ on the Coromandel coast (named Maabar/Maebar in his account, from the Arabic name for the Coromandel coast, Maʿbar), which he locates as in both ‘the country of India’ and ‘the territory of St Thomas’, with his companion Brother Nicholas of Pistoia being ‘buried in the same church’ on his death during their visit.Footnote 66 Similarly, the Travels of Marco Polo relates of the 1290s that ‘the body of Messer St Thomas the Apostle lies in a little town in the province of Maabar’, i.e. on the Coromandel coast, and that ‘many Christians … make pilgrimages to this place’,Footnote 67 whilst Odoric of Pordenone – who visited with his companion James of Ireland in the early 1320s – noted of the ‘realm which is called Mobar’, i.e. Maabar/Maʿbar, that
in this realm is laid the body of the Blessed Thomas the Apostle. His church is filled with idols, and beside it are some fifteen houses of the Nestorians, that is to say Christians, but vile and pestilent heretics.Footnote 68
The actual name of the ‘little town’ where this singular church and cult-centre were found on the Coromandel coast seems first to be documented by Europeans in the account of John of Marignolli, who visited Maabar and ‘the church of St Thomas’ in 1348–9. In his narrative, he supplies the name ‘the city of Mirapolis’ for the site of St Thomas’s church and death, which Yule and O’Doherty consider to be a ‘westernized but still recognisable’ form of Mailapur/Mylapore.Footnote 69 This location is further confirmed by the account of Niccolò de’ Conti’s visit here in c. 1420, where the name of the cult-centre is given as Malpuria and Malpuria/Mailapur is said to be
a maritime city … Here the body of Saint Thomas lies honourably buried in a large and beautiful church; it is worshipped by heretics, who are called Nestorians and inhabit this city to the number of a thousand.Footnote 70
The location of the tomb of St Thomas is mentioned in non-European sources too. The Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind of 851–2 – which is sometimes ascribed to Sulaymān al-Tājir – has been interpreted as indicating that the house, or tomb, of St Thomas was ten days sailing from the important southern Indian port of Kollam,Footnote 71 but the most notable and specific reference to the location of St Thomas’s tomb comes in an early thirteenth-century Syriac work entitled The Book of the Bee (Ktābā d-deboritā). Written by Soloman, the metropolitan bishop of Prāṭ d-Mayshān (Baṣra, Iraq), this says that
Thomas was from Jerusalem, of the tribe of Judah. He taught the Parthians, Medes and Indians; and because he baptised the daughter of the king of the Indians, he stabbed him with a spear and he died … he was buried in Maḥlûph, a city in the land of the Indians.Footnote 72
Needless to say, it is hard to avoid seeing the place-name Mailapur/Mylapore as underlying the Syriac form Maḥlûph found in this text.Footnote 73 Likewise, an Arabic text of the first half of the fourteenth century identifies the place in India where the tomb of St Thomas was located by a name, Meilan, that is generally agreed to derive from and reflect Mailapur too, with this information moreover apparently coming from an eyewitness report, given that the author also describes the tomb as lying ‘to the right of the altar in the monastery bearing his name’.Footnote 74 The reference to a monastery in the latter text is, incidentally, also of particular interest, given that a monastery at the tomb-site is mentioned both in the account reported by Gregory of Tours and in the mid-fourteenth-century Arabic Al-Nahj al-sadīd wa-l-durr al-farīd fīmā baʿd taʾrīkh Ibn al-ʿAmīd, written by a Coptic Christian named Al-Mufaḍḍal b. Abī l-Faḍāʾil. The latter notes that pilgrims in India and Sri Lanka go to
the monastery of Mar Touma [St Thomas] (مرتوما ديرىلا), which possesses the still preserved hand of one of the disciples of Our Lord, the Messiah; in the monastery there is a vaulted niche where the hand is found, and a holy oil which oozes from this hand.Footnote 75
A final interesting reference to this site comes from 1504, in a letter sent by Eastern Christian bishops in south-western India to the Patriarch of the East. They mention in passing ‘the monastery of St. Thomas the Apostle’, which ‘some Christian men … are now busy restoring’, before going on to say that this was located ‘on the shores of the sea in a town called Mailapore’.Footnote 76
In light of the above, it would thus seem clear that there was indeed at least one plausible and identifiable destination in India for Alfred’s emissaries to have visited with their alms, namely the tomb-site and cult-centre of St Thomas on the Coromandal coast that was recorded in Greek, Latin and Syriac sources from around 500 onwards as Calamina and which appears to have been visited by at least some people during the early medieval period. Furthermore, it seems likely that the location of this tomb/shrine was indeed at Mailapur/Mylapore, Chennai, at the northern end of the Coromandel coast, given both the archaeological evidence of the ‘Saint Thomas Cross’ found there and the repeated references to a single, important tomb-site and cult-centre for St Thomas on this coast, which, when it is named, is consistently identified as being located there.
Early Medieval Trade and Travel Between India and Europe
If it thus seems likely that India, not Judea, was indeed the place to which King Alfred sent Sigehelm and Æthelstan with alms in thanks for his victory over the Vikings at London, and that there was moreover a Christian community in India with a tomb-site and cult-centre of St Thomas on the Coromandel coast to which they might travel, what then of the wider background to this visit? How credible is it that Alfred’s emissaries could have genuinely travelled there, and how might they have done so? In this context, the early medieval journey of Theodorus (possibly the Bishop of Marseille) to St Thomas’s tomb in India then back to western Europe – where he could inform the Bishop of Tours, Gregory, of the magnificent monastery and church that he found there – naturally looms large as a definite instance of just this journey taking place. Similarly noteworthy is the case of the aforementioned mid-sixth-century Christian from the Mediterranean, commonly known as Cosmas Indicopleustes, whose epithet means ‘the one who sailed to India’.Footnote 77 Not only does his description of the Christians of India and Sri Lanka accord notably well with our evidence from other sources, as was observed above, but a recent examination of his text and the associated manuscript illustrations concludes that Cosmas’s account and image of, for example, pepper cultivation and harvesting in western India is ‘so detailed and accurate that personal inspection and experience are almost a certainty’ and ‘suggest that it is likely that Cosmas travelled to India’ too, despite the scepticism that has sometimes been expressed as to this.Footnote 78 Furthermore, Cosmas also mentions another Alexandrian merchant, Sopatros, who he indicates had visited Sri Lanka in around 500 and who had apparently told Cosmas about his time there.Footnote 79
Consequently, the combined weight of the accounts of Gregory of Tours and Cosmas Indicopleustes indicates that some people were indeed journeying from the Mediterranean world to India in the early medieval period and, moreover, returning with information about this region and its Christian community. We do, of course, need to recognise that these visits coincided with a period for which there is significant material evidence for contact between the Mediterranean and Europe on the one hand and the Indian Ocean world on the other, with Early Byzantine coins and pottery having been found in India and Sri Lanka,Footnote 80 and items from the Indian Ocean world in the Mediterranean region and Europe. For example, the enormous quantities of garnets used in the garnet cloisonné gold jewellery that is found widely distributed across early medieval Europe – notable examples include the late fifth-century burial of Childeric at Tournai, Belgium, and the early seventh-century Sutton Hoo burial in East Anglia – have been shown to have primarily had their origins in India and Sri Lanka.Footnote 81 Encountered not only in very wealthy graves, but also those of more modest means, the most recent study of these gems suggest that only from the end of the sixth century do European sources start to replace Indian and Sri Lankan garnets, and some Indian garnets continued to be used on the Continent until c. 680–90, something apparently true in Anglo-Saxon England too, with a notable number present on the early to mid-seventh-century garnet cloisonné items in the Staffordshire Hoard of c. 650–75.Footnote 82
Indo-Pacific beads produced in southern India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia – recognizable both morphologically/typologically and by archaeometric analysis due to their use of Southern Asian high aluminous soda (m-Na-Al 1) glass – have similarly been identified in very large numbers from cemeteries dating to c. 400–600 in western Europe, with one cemetery in France (Saint-Laurent-des-Hommes, Dordogne) containing as many as 3,037 of these miniature, monochrome, drawn beads.Footnote 83 These beads are also encountered at the Late Roman/Early Byzantine Red Sea port of Berenike, Egypt, where they make up 51% of all of the beads discovered there – providing a strong indication as to the likely route of travel for the European examples – and are found alongside other Indian imports including peppercorns (from the Malabar coast), coconuts, cotton textiles and rice.Footnote 84 As with the garnets, in western Europe these Indo-Pacific beads are found in graves of ‘varying degrees of richness’ and ‘do not appear to be the prerogative of a privileged few’, which is a conclusion of considerable interest when considering the scale and nature of the trading routes that brought them to the Mediterranean and Europe.Footnote 85 In this context, it is worth noting that neither the Indian/Sri Lankan garnets nor the Indo-Pacific beads are likely to have been the main objects of trade, and would instead have almost certainly formed a small part of larger cargoes that consisted of often-archaeologically invisible goods such as spices, incense, coconuts and textiles (as found at Berenike and Shenshef in Egypt), as well as other precious and semi-precious stones, like amethysts, sapphires and carnelians, all of which are thought to derive from India and Sri Lanka in this period too.Footnote 86 Certainly, this would seem to be supported by the account of Cosmas Indicopleustes, who mentions a wide range of trade-goods potentially involved in sixth-century Indo-Byzantine trade, including these items and more,Footnote 87 as well as by the evidence for the popularity and widespread usage of pepper in the Roman era and Late Antiquity.Footnote 88
However, there is no reason to think that subsequent centuries saw the complete severing of routes between India and the Mediterranean/Europe. Pepper from India definitely continued to be used in north-western Europe into the mid-seventh century and beyond, and in potentially impressive quantities: for example, the Merovingian king Chlothar III (657–73) granted to the monastery at Corbie in northern France the annual concession of toll income on 30 pounds of pepper (grown in India), along with sizeable amounts of other spices including cinnamon (from Sri Lanka) and cloves (from Indonesia), and this grant was reconfirmed by Chilperic II in 716.Footnote 89 Likewise, in England, Bede’s few personal possessions included pepper when he died in 735,Footnote 90 and Aldhelm at the end of the seventh century composed a riddle to which the answer was ‘pepper’, indicating that he expected his audience to be familiar with this spice:
I am black on the outside, covered with a wrinkled rind, yet inside I have a glistening core. I season the delicacies of the kitchen: the feasts of kings and extravagant dishes and likewise sauces and stews. But you will find me to be of no value at all unless my inwards are crushed for their shining contents.Footnote 91
Another reference to pepper comes in a letter of 739–41 written to an English abbess named Cuniburg that mentions sending both pepper and cinnamon (piperis et cinnamomi) to her, which is described as a ‘little gift’ from her three correspondents.Footnote 92 Indeed, in ‘Bald’s Leechbook’, probably written in the late ninth-century for Anglo-Saxon physicians in King Alfred’s reign, Indian pepper frequently occurs and is, in fact, mentioned more times than many native ingredients, being prescribed in more than thirty recipes in the first book alone, with cinnamon also appearing on occasion too.Footnote 93
In addition to spices, archaeological evidence suggests that gems and beads from India and Sri Lanka continued to find their way to Europe and England too. So, whilst Indian garnets become rare in most areas during the seventh century, amethysts and sapphires – both thought to be imports from India/Sri LankaFootnote 94 – continue to be utilised in both that era and afterwards, with amethyst being especially popular and widely distributed. For example, in southern Germany and adjacent areas inhabited by Franks, Alamanni and Bavarians, the first amethyst beads appear in the sixth century, but it has been noted by Jörg Drauschke that there are an ‘amazingly high number of finds’ from around the start of the seventh century and that amethysts then continued to be used through the seventh century until around 700, when the furnishing of graves ceases and so our ability to easily see these imports ends in this area,Footnote 95 a situation that is paralleled in Anglo-Saxon England too.Footnote 96
Sapphires are a much a rarer find,Footnote 97 but they likewise continue to be used into the seventh century and beyond. The Visigothic ‘Treasure of Guarrazar’ (Spain) is particularly notable here: the pieces from this treasure in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional and the Real Amería del Palacio Nacional in Madrid are decorated with 23 amethysts and 245 sapphires, with a date-range for the treasure as a whole being provided by the royal votive crowns of Swinthila (621–31) and Recceswinth (653–72) that form part of it.Footnote 98 Sapphires also occur in notable numbers on Carolingian items of the eighth to ninth centuries, including the original large, central Sri Lankan sapphire on the ninth-century Talisman of Charlemagne (which also features Indian garnets), the sapphires on both the mid–late ninth-century upper cover of the Lindau Gospels and the ninth-century reliquary of St Stephen that was once kept at Aachen Cathedral, and, most famously, the 209 sapphires found on the now largely destroyed reliquary known as the Escrain de Charlemagne. Footnote 99 In addition to these gems, recent studies also indicate that some glass beads in use in both Germany and Scandinavia in the early seventh to eighth centuries were made of glass from India.Footnote 100
Further to such documentary references and archaeological finds, it is worth noting that several trade routes leading from western Europe to India and beyond are, in fact, documented for the ninth century by ibn Khurdādhbih, a high-ranking Persian functionary and courtier who wrote the Kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik (‘The Book of Routes and Realms’) then.Footnote 101 He gives the following account of the Jewish Rādhānite merchants, or al-Rādh̲āniyya, who travelled from France to India and China and back again, which is worth quoting at length:
Itinerary/itineraries of the Jewish merchants (known as) Rād̲h̲āniyya, who speak Arabic, Persian, Rūmī (= Greek?), Frankish, Andalusian (= Romance) and Slavonic, and travel from the East to the West and vice-versa, by land and by sea. From the West they import eunuchs (k̲h̲adam), young slaves of both sexes (d̲j̲awārī and g̲h̲ilmān), silk brocade (dībād̲j̲), beaver fur (d̲j̲ulūd al-k̲h̲azz), [pelts of] the sable (sammūr) and [other] furs, as well as swords.
They embark in the land of the Franks (Firand̲j̲a) on the Western Sea (=the Mediterranean) and disembark at al-Faramā (= ancient Pelusium, on the eastern edge of the Nile delta), then they transport their merchandise by land as far as al-Ḳulzum (ancient Clysma, located at the head of the Gulf of Suez), a distance of 25 parasangs; they then traverse the Eastern Sea (= the Red Sea) from al-Ḳulzum to al-D̲j̲ār (the port of Medina) and to D̲j̲udda. From here, they continue their journey to Sind (=the Indus valley), to India and to China. From China, they bring back musk (misk), wood of aloes (ʿūd), camphor (kāfūr), cinnamon (dār ṣīnī) and other (products) which are imported from these countries. Thus they return to al-Ḳulzum, then transport their [consignment] to al-Faramā and embark on the Mediterranean. Sometimes, they made a detour through Constantinople with their merchandise, which they sold to the Byzantines. Sometimes furthermore, they went to sell them [in the land of the] king of Firand̲j̲a [= the land of the Franks].
When they chose to do so, on leaving Firand̲j̲a, they transported their merchandise by sea, on the Mediterranean, disembarking at Antioch, whence they made their way, in three overland stages, to al-D̲j̲ābiya; they then sailed on the Euphrates to Bag̲h̲dād, then on the Tigris to al-Ubulla (= a port city at the head of the Persian Gulf), and from here they gained access to Oman, Sind, India and China, all these countries being contiguous with one another.Footnote 102
Ibn Khurdādhbih later returns to the Rādhāniyya and describes two further trade routes they utilised, one overland across North Africa then through Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and thence to India and China, and the other ‘to the rear of Rome (Rūmiya), through the land of the Slavs’, into Khazaria and across the Caspian Sea before crossing through Afghanistan, Transoxiana and then into China.Footnote 103 Needless to say, the main section of ibn Khurdādhbih’s text is most intriguing, and accords well with other evidence for the activity of Jewish merchants in India. This evidence includes not only the four names of witnesses to the Kollam/Quilon copper plates of 849–50 that are given in Judaeo-Persian, i.e., Middle Persian written in Hebrew characters, but also a reference by Abū Dulaf to the presence of both synagogues and churches at Ṣaymūr (modern Chaul near Mumbai) in the tenth century.Footnote 104
In light of all this, it seems clear that Sigehelm and Æthelstan’s alleged late ninth-century journey from England to India was not only credible in terms of its proposed destination, as noted above, but also in the availability of routes for getting there. Both the continued circulation of imports from India (and beyond) in western Europe and ibn Khurdādhbih’s testimony as to routes accessible in the ninth century for travelling from West to East and back again would certainly seem to support such a position.Footnote 105 If the journey of Theodorus to the tomb and monastery of St Thomas in southern India and then back to Merovingian Gaul was possible in the later sixth century, there is thus no particular reason to think that such a trip would have become impossible by the late ninth century. Of course, a pilgrimage such as that of Theodorus would by necessity have been undertaken via a web of overlapping commercial, ecclesiastical and diplomatic networks between western Europe and southern India, as has been recently discussed by Nathaneal Andrade. The linkages between these networks would have created ‘social pathways’ that could have been used then to travel to the Indian tomb of St Thomas, and it seems entirely plausible that something similar was the case in Sigehelm and Æthelstan’s time too, given the evidence that we have available to us.Footnote 106 Certainly, the Irish pilgrim Fidelis appears to have travelled at least as far as the Red Sea via such linkages sometime around the start of the ninth century, with his journey and observations being recorded by Dicuil in his Liber de mensura orbis terrae of c. 825,Footnote 107 and Frankish embassies were likewise successfully sent to Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries too.Footnote 108
Alfred’s Emissaries: the Identity of Sigehelm and Æthelstan
Turning finally to the question of the identity of these two Anglo-Saxon royal emissaries, several candidates have been proposed. William of Malmesbury, writing in England in the early twelfth century, identified Sigehelm as a bishop of Sherborne in both his Gesta Pontificum Anglorum and his Gesta Regum Anglorum, and claims that the gems Sigehelm brought back from India could still be seen at Sherborne in William’s day:
He [Ealhstan, Bishop of Sherborne] was followed as bishop by Heahmind, Æthelheah, Ælfsige, Asser and Sigehelm. The last two are known to have been bishops under King Alfred, fourth son of Athulf … Sigehelm was sent across the seas, to further the almsgiving of the king and also to visit [the shrine of] St Thomas in India, successfully completing a journey that anyone nowadays might well regard with wonder. He brought back with him exotic gems of the kind abundant in that country; some can be seen still, set in objects ornamenting the church.Footnote 109
Being devoted to almsgiving, he [King Alfred] confirmed the privileges of churches as laid down by his father, and sent many gifts overseas to Rome and to St Thomas in India. For this purpose he dispatched an envoy, Sigehelm bishop of Sherborne, who made his way to India with great success, an astonishing feat even today, and brought with him on his return gems of exotic splendour and the liquid perfumes of which the soil there is productive …Footnote 110
This identification of Sigehelm is also briefly alluded to by John of Worcester in the early twelfth-century Chronicon ex Chronicis, in which he states of the ‘bishop of Sherborne’, Suithelmus [sic], that ‘he took King Alfred’s alms to St Thomas in India, whence he returned safely’.Footnote 111 Needless to say, the claim that Sigehelm returned from India bringing with him ‘exotic gems’ that ‘can be seen still, set in objects ornamenting the church’, suggests that William was basing his account on local traditions at Sherborne.Footnote 112 Nonetheless, his identification has been subject to some scepticism, largely on account of the fact that William omits the names of three bishops of Sherborne who come between Asser and Sigehelm in the preserved episcopal lists, and that Sigehelm signs charters as bishop from 925 to 932,Footnote 113 not in Alfred’s reign, 871–99.Footnote 114 Whether these discrepancies are fatal to William’s identification is open to debate, however. The mistaken attribution of Sigehelm’s episcopacy to Alfred’s reign and the omission of three intervening bishops in the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum may simply reflect an attempt by William or his source to reconcile a local Sherborne tradition that Sigehelm, Bishop of Sherborne, was Alfred’s envoy to India with the dates of King Alfred, working from a false and unnecessary assumption that Sigehelm must have been made bishop during the latter’s reign due to his role as emissary. In this light, it is worth pointing out that Sigehelm could conceivably have both travelled to India in 883 and attested charters from 925–32 if his pilgrimage carrying alms to India for King Alfred took place in his relative youth and he had become the Bishop of Sherborne in his relative old age.Footnote 115
On the other hand, if the early tenth-century bishop of Sherborne named Sigehelm was not the Sigehelm sent to India in 883, contrary to what William of Malmesbury appears to have been told and shown of his supposed spoils from his trip at Sherborne, then identifying him becomes significantly more difficult: he could be the western Kentish ealdorman killed by the Danes in 902, as some have suggested, but he could equally well be another Sigehelm active in the era, either recorded or otherwise.Footnote 116 As to Sigehelm’s companion, Æthelstan, he is even more obscure, and unfortunately no recorded traditions of his identity survive. He may well be a Mercian priest and chaplain of this name who was associated with Alfred according to Asser’s contemporary Life of Alfred, but we do need to be somewhat cautious, as the name is common and there are multiple alternative candidates available, including at least two thegns and an ealdorman active in Alfred’s reign.Footnote 117
Conclusion
What, then, can be said of King Alfred’s apparent embassy to India in the 880s? All told, it seems credible that India was indeed the intended destination for the alms carried by Sigehelm and Æthelstan in 883. Not only is this reading of the text backed by the majority of the manuscripts, but it also accords well with the identity of the two saints whose shrines were to be visited according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, St Thomas and St Bartholomew: these two were both explicitly and repeatedly associated with India in material current in Alfred’s day. Indeed, India’s remoteness from early medieval England could well have been the very point of Alfred’s gift, and it would moreover fit with what we know of Alfred’s own intellectual curiosity about the wider world and its limits. Beyond this, it would seem that such a journey would also have a good context. It is clear that there was indeed a Christian community present in India from at least Late Antiquity, as texts present in pre-Viking England claimed, and that the knowledge of a genuine shrine and church dedicated to St Thomas on the Coromandel coast of south-east India, probably at Mailapur/Mylepore, had moreover spread to western Europe by the sixth century. Indeed, Gregory of Tours’ account of the church and monastery of St Thomas in India indicates that Sigehelm and Æthelstan would have been by no means the first to visit this shrine from early medieval Europe. Furthermore, a journey from western Europe to southern India appears plausible in terms of not only its proposed destination, but also the availability of routes and networks for getting there, given the continued availability of imports from India and ibn Khurdādhbih’s account of the Rādhāniyya. Finally, whilst the identity of King Alfred’s two emissaries, Sigehelm and Æthelstan, remains uncertain, it can be tentatively suggested that we should be wary of rejecting outright the apparent Sherborne tradition recorded by William of Malmesbury in the early twelfth century that Sigehelm, Bishop of Sherborne, was one of those who travelled to India on Alfred’s behalf, before returning with ‘gems of exotic splendour’ which were still on display in Sherborne Abbey church.Footnote 118 Likewise, it is not impossible that Æthelstan may have been the Mercian priest of that name who appears in Asser’s contemporary Life of Alfred as Alfred’s close confidant.
Acknowledgements
I would like to gratefully acknowledge the comments and suggestions provided by Rose Broadley, Sue Brunning, John Hines, Philip Wood and Barbara Yorke; all errors and interpretations do, of course, remain my own.
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