Ottewill-Soulsby, Sam. 2025. The circle of the world: The global diplomacy of Caliph al-Manṣūr. Bulletin of SOAS 88(3). 523–538.
Between 757 and 768, the second ʿAbbāsid caliph, al-Manṣūr, engaged in an unprecedented set of foreign relations which stretched across Afro-Eurasia, from Tang China to Carolingian Francia. The unique scale of this activity has previously gone unnoticed because much of the evidence comes from the caliph’s diplomatic partners. Al-Manṣūr’s dealings with these polities tend to be taken on a case-by-case basis, resulting in often-unconvincing explanations of his motives. By instead taking all of this activity together as a whole, we can see a deliberate policy of “prestige diplomacy”, in which the caliph sought to legitimize his regime to a domestic audience by bringing envoys and gifts to his court, following Sasanian models of universal kingship.
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Ellis, Caitlin & Sam Ottewill-Soulsby. 2026. The caliph and the falcons: A ninth-century history from Iceland to Iraq. Early Medieval Europe, Early View.
In the late ninth and early tenth centuries, an extraordinary number of falcons were given to the ʿAbbāsid caliphs in Baghdad, many of which were white. Gifts from competing dynasties in the northern provinces of the Caliphate, at least some of these birds were almost certainly gyrfalcons from near the Arctic Circle. This article argues that they came from Scandinavia and that their appearance in Baghdad can be linked to Norse settlement in Iceland. The journey of these gyrfalcons demonstrates the importance of access to northern goods for caliphal politics and the impact of scarce animal resources on early medieval trade.
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