The Emperor and the Elephant

"In the year 802, an elephant arrived at the court of the Emperor Charlemagne in Aachen, sent as a gift by the ¿Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid xtraordinary moment was part of a much wider set of diplomatic relations between the Carolingian dynasty and the Islamic world, including not only the Caliphate in the east but also Umayyad al-Andalus, North Africa, the Muslim lords of Italy and a varied cast of warlords, pirates and renegades."--