69th Issue: The Abbasid-Carolingian Alliance and Kermit Roosevelt
Today’s newsletter is another grab bag of people, places, and things that have caught my interest lately.
The first is the Abbasid-Carolingian Alliance. As you may know, I’ve been doing a lot of research on Medieval Islam over the last couple of years for a book I’ve been writing – well, I wrote one and now I’m working on another sort of semi-sequel. I found this Wikipedia page on the Abbasid-Carolingian Alliance and found it so intriguing. In the 8th and 9th centuries, the Frankish Carolingian Empire (Germany, I guess?) and the Abbasid Caliphate in Al-Andalus (the Muslim rulers of Spain) had an alliance together. It started between Pepin and Al-Mansur and continued under Charlemagne and Harun Al-Rashid.
Apparently the Carolingians didn’t get along with the Ummayads, who had been in charge before the Abbasids took over, so Pepin was like let me be friends with Al-Mansur. A Frankish embassy (diplomats) went on a visit to Baghdad, and stayed there for three years, returning to Europe with lots of gifts. Then, an Abbasid embassy visited France a few years later. The two countries traded slaves, timber, iron, weapons, and coins. When the Ummayad Emirate of Cordoba threatened the Abbasid rulers of Northern Spain, they asked the Franks to help. Pepin obliged, strengthening their relationship.
Charlemagne took over after Pepin, and Harun Al-Rashid took over after Al-Mansur, and they sent various embassies back and forth to each other. They sent gifts – Charlemagne sent some money and some red fabric, and Harun Al-Rashid sent back silks, perfume, a tent, and an elephant named Abul al-Abbas (he was accompanied by a man referred to as Isaac the Jew, who was probably a translator).
Harun Al-Rashid’s son Al-Ma’mun also sent an embassy to Pepin’s successor, Louis the Pious. There were some issues over the next few decades over internal problems in the Carolingian Empire, but much later, Bertha, the mother of some Italian kings, sent an embassy to the Abbasid caliph Al-Muktafi, offering her friendship and even the possibility of a marriage to unite their two kingdoms.
Changing time and place, the second thing I want to talk about is a person – Kermit Roosevelt. He was a son of Theodore Roosevelt, and had a tumultuous and interesting life. Kermit had a bunch of siblings, the most famous one at least in my opinion being his older half-sister Alice who was known for being rambunctious. He was a sickly kid and loved to read and write.
Kermit went to Groton School and then enrolled at Harvard. When he was eighteen, he and his father went on a year long expedition in Africa funded by the Smithsonian. On the way back Kermit went through Europe and then sped through Harvard, graduating just two and a half years later. He was interested in wildlife conservation while he was at school, like his father.
Kermit and his father Theodore went on an expedition exploring the Brazilian jungle in the Amazon, specifically the River of Doubt which was renamed the Rio Roosevelt (another branch of it was named the Rio Kermit which I KNOW this Kermit existed before the frog but I still giggle).
The trip went badly. One person drowned, another was murdered. Theodore Roosevelt got malaria and a minor leg would got infected. He considered overdosing on morphine so he wouldn’t be a burden, but Kermit said he was bringing back his father dead or alive, and he’d be an even bigger burden if he was dead.
Kermit actually got malaria too, but he wanted the quinine to be saved for his dad, until the doctor who was with them insisted that he take some. When they got back, both Kermit and Theodore had to be hospitalized. The Rio Roosevelt is known as Rio Teodoro by locals because Roosevelt is hard to pronounce in Portuguese.
After Kermit got back, he married Belle Wyatt Willard, the daughter of the US. Ambassador to Spain. They had four children – Kermit Jr., Joseph, Clochette, and Dirck. If you’re so inclined, you should look up Kermit Jr. because he had an interesting life too, and then Kermit Jr.’s son, Kermit III, is an author whose book became a TV show.
Anyway, when he got home Kermit worked as an assistant manager in a bank in Buenos Aires. He was about to be transferred to a branch in Russia, but then World War I broke out. He was at a school for US Army officers for a while, but in 1917 he switched over to the British Army. Then he transferred back to the US Army. I’m not sure why. It doesn’t really matter too much, they were on the same side of the war. He fought in Mesopotamia, which is Iraq today. He learned Arabic and became a translator. He was also awarded a Military Cross. His younger brother was shot down over France and buried by the Germans. He returned home after the war and founded the Roosevelt Steamship Company.
In 1925, Kermit went with his brother Ted to the Himalayas, from Kashmir through to China, looking for a bighorn wild sheep. The brothers wrote a book about it, and collected various trophies. It was funded by a trustee of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, James Simpson. Three years later, Kermit and Ted went on an Asiatic expedition where they found pandas. Kermit also served as vice president of the New York Zoological Society whenever he was in town.
During World War II, Kermit went to be a Second Lieutenant for the British Army in Finland. He served also in Norway and then went to North Africa. He was injured in Norway, and began drinking again, a problem he had for years. He got malaria again, and in 1940 was discharged from the army. He tried to fight it, appealing up to even the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, his friend, but Churchill refused to let him keep fighting. He went back to the US and kept drinking. He didn’t come home, and his wife got his cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt to find him and bring him home. His brother Archibald had him committed to a sanitarium and then an institution.
FDR, who was President at this time, sent him to work as an intelligence officer in Alaska, to get his mind off his troubles. It didn’t work. Kermit ended up killing himself while he was there. At the time, his death was reported as a heart attack. The town of Kermit, Texas is named after him as well as the town of Kermit, West Virginia. I have no idea why.
I do have a couple more interesting people I’d like to cover, but I don’t want this to get too long, so, next time! Thanks for reading.