King Alfred and India: an Anglo-Saxon Embassy to Southern India in the Ninth Century

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the ninth-century embassy to India purportedly sent by King Alfred, examining the evidence for this voyage, as well as its context, feasibility and credibility. It is argued that India, rather than Judea, was the intended destination of the alms dispatched to St Thomas and St Bartholomew in 883, given contemporary Anglo-Saxon knowledge of the lives of these two saints, and that such a destination would fit with the intellectual climate of Alfred’s court and be a suitable symbolic gesture. A journey to India would have a good context in the evidence for both a Syriac Christian community and a significant shrine of St Thomas in southern India that people from early medieval Europe might visit, with the likely location of the shrine being investigated. The archaeological and documentary evidence for the availability of early medieval trade routes to India is also analysed, as are the identities of Alfred’s emissaries.