Anselm d'Ysalguier

Anselm d'Ysalguier (* before approx. 1380 in Toulouse , † after 1420 there) was a French knight, adventurer and traveler to Africa, whose existence is controversial.

Life

According to the Chronicle of Toulouse, written by Pierre Bardin (second half of the 15th century), the knight Anselm (also: Anselme) d'Ysalguier was supposed to be on an unspecified route through the Sahara to a large river (probably the Niger ) come and eight years at the royal court of Gago (likely to Gao , the capital of the Songhai Empire in what is now Mali ) have lived. There he married a black princess and returned to Toulouse with her and a small local entourage. If this report were to be true, it would be evidence of a European's first trip to West Africa.

Nothing is known about Anselm's life after his return. He is said to have written a detailed report on his trip to Africa and his stay there and a dictionary of the "African language", ie the Songhai . The documents that the local historian Guillaume Lafaille claims to have used for his Annales de la ville de Toulouse (1687) have disappeared without a trace. After Anselm's death in the 1420s, his widow entered a monastery, while his children in prestigious Gascon einheirateten noble families. His grandson Eustache de Faudoas is said to have been nicknamed "Le Morou (the Moor)". In the family trees of the families concerned, however, the children of d'Ysalguier are not identifiable or - if the names appear - not identified as descendants of an Anselm d'Ysalguier.

backgrounds

Apart from the few details that we have received about the chronicle of Pierre Bardin and the history of the town by Guillaume Lafaille, there is no further evidence of Anselm d'Ysalguier's journey. Even its existence has not been historically proven, although the dynasty d'Ysalguier played an important role in Gascon and Languedoc and its history, including the family tree, has been well researched. After the rather accidental discovery of the report on the trip to Africa by the naval historian Charles de La Roncière (around 1920), it was long assumed that the information provided by Bardin and Lafaille could be assessed as reliable. What is striking is the fact that Anselm left his homeland in 1402, exactly at the time when a number of knights from Gascony joined the adventurer Jean de Béthencourt (1362–1425) who wanted to conquer the Canary Islands . Charles de La Roncière, who discovered the report on d'Ysalguier, tried to make it appear credible and constructed the following scenario without any source evidence: The knight had been among the conquerors and had been captured during an attack on the Mauritanian coast. From the Moors he reached the Niger as a slave and was sold as a curiosity to the court of the Songhai king. Another speculation was that he first made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and then came to the Songhai Empire via Egypt and Nubia . But there is absolutely no evidence for this.

For a long time, historical scholarship has tended to the judgment that both chronicles contain largely invented material and that Anselm d'Ysalguier is to be regarded as a fictional personality. Bardin's work has not survived in the original anyway, but only in copies from the 17th century, which raises the suspicion that at this time - in the age of the incipient colonial conflict between France and Great Britain - French rights in Africa should be derived from history . It is also conceivable that the story of Anselm d'Ysalguier was unearthed again in the 17th century or was even invented (with other, similar "traditions") about the importance of Gascony for the development of the French monarchy at the height of the Hundred Years War to point out. In view of the efforts of the absolutist state to radically curtail the special rights of the old provinces, the lawyers and regional historians of the regions concerned often resorted to justifying their claims from the past, and they did not shy away from distorting history or falsifying documents, etc.

The fact that the historically highly dubious history of the early 20th century was taken seriously by French historiography is due not least to the fact that colonial historians like La Roncière saw the need to look at the deficit colonial empire in West Africa from the past justify, so to speak, as a legacy of those French who were the first to advance as far as the Niger and thus acquired a moral right to this part of Africa for their fatherland. While historians have massively questioned or even denied the existence of the knight d'Ysalguier, he is presented in popular science books as a real figure in African history.

Even the African sources know nothing of the presence of a white man at the court of the King of the Songhai, although the Timbuktu chronicles give a very detailed account of the time and even pass on banal events. Only one detail is astonishing: the princess who is said to have brought d'Ysalguier home to Toulouse had a name that is documented several times in a similar sounding form in the dynasty of the Songhai kings - also in the late 15th century. However, this isolated and perhaps accidental detail is not enough to prove the historical existence of the knight d'Ysalguier.

The black doctor from Gao

According to tradition, a eunuch named Aben Ali, who is said to have been a master of African healing arts, was in the entourage of d'Ysalguier . To the annoyance of Christian doctors, he settled in Toulouse and was consulted frequently. In March 1420, King Charles VII (1403–1461), who had not yet been crowned at that time, came to Toulouse in March 1420, where he became critically ill. In this situation, the art of all French doctors is said to have failed, so that the black eunuch was brought as a last resort, who healed the heir to the throne. Later, Aben Ali is said to have been poisoned by his envious colleagues. Like the person of the knight, the existence of the black doctor cannot be proven historically, whereas the illness of the heir to the throne is documented as a fact in contemporary literature.

In the past few decades, African and Afro-American authors have adopted the figure of the black doctor and built it into a myth. He is opposed to the Christian doctors, who supposedly only had confused and outdated book knowledge, as a kind of "wise shaman " from a world in which a closeness to nature and the belief in the healing power of nature are still valid. Aben Ali is a representative of the Islamic healing arts, especially authors from the Afro-American Muslim community, who regard him as an early prototype of the black African scholar class who were in constant intellectual exchange with the centers of Islamic education in Egypt or Spain. Here the alleged murder of the African healer by white doctors suits them very well because it allows a tradition of discrimination against “black physicians” to be constructed that extends into the 20th century. In doing so, they overlook the fact that Toulouse, due to its relative proximity to the Iberian Peninsula, was anyway a transit station for medical knowledge from the Muslim part of Spain and the healing methods of the doctors in Toledo or Granada no longer represented foreign knowledge. In a complete distortion of history, the claim is even made that the French kings of the late Middle Ages appointed black personal doctors from Timbuktu or Gao to their court.

literature

• François Galabert, “Le Toulousain Anselme Ysalguier est-il allé au Niger au XVe siècle?”, Mémoire de l'Académie des Sciences, Inscriptions et Belles Lettres de Toulouse sér. XII, 11: 1-45 (1933).
• Charles de La Roncière, La découverte de l'Afrique au moyen age. Cartographes et explorateurs. Cairo 1924–1927, 3 vols. (Here special vol. 3)
• Pekka Masonen, The Negroland Revisited: Discovery and Invention of the Sudanese Middle Ages. Helsinki 2000, (special p. 112 ff.)
• Philippe Wolff, “Une famille du XIIIe au XVIe siècle: Les Ysalguier de Toulouse”, in, Ders., Regard sur le Midi Médiéval. Toulouse 1978, pp. 233-259.

Novels

The Malian historian Ibrahima Baba Kaké wrote a 95-page novel about the alleged wife Salou Casais in 1975 in the series "Grandes Figures Africaines" intended for African students, but it is largely a fantasy product:

• Ibrahima Baba Kaké, Salou Casais. Une idyll franco-songhay au XVe siècle. Paris - Dakar - Abidjan 1975 ISBN 2-85-809-007-6

Recently, a historical adventure novel has been published which focuses on the stories of Anselme d'Ysalguier. In it, the author Philippe Frey creates an imaginative picture from the early 15th century, which, however, tends to serve European clichés and does not correspond much to historical reality, ie to the life and thinking of the epoch.

• Philippe Frey, Le chevalier songhaï. Paris 2000. ISBN 2221089839
• Synopsis of the novel

Remarks

1. ↑ Roncière, Découverte , vol. 3, p. 2. Pekka Masonen thinks this scenario is at least conceivable. See Masonen, Negroland Revisited , p. 114.
2. ^ Masonen, Negroland Revisited , p. 113.
3. ↑ See for example Jean-Marc Durou, L'exploration du Sahara . Vorw. V. Théodore Monod. Paris 1993, p. 50 f., U. Philippe Decraene et al. François Zuccarelli, Grands Sahariens à la découverte du “désert des déserts”. Paris 1994, p. 269. Here it is claimed that d'Ysalguier married the daughter of the Mali ruler, although if he had actually reached Niger in what is now Mali, he would have ended up in the Songhai realm. Both books present the hypothetical scenario developed by La Roncière as a proven historical fact.
4. ↑ One of the chronicles tells of a black blacksmith who freed himself from slavery on the west coast of Africa and returned across the Sahara to the Niger. See Masonen, Negroland Revisited , pp. 115 f.
5. ↑ Ibid. It should be noted, however, that the dynasty of the Songhai rulers, who resided in Gao around 1400, were driven out over the course of the century and replaced by the historically significant dynasty of the Askia , in whose family the said name was proven to be common. The extent to which the name of the princess can therefore be used as meaningful evidence of historical reality must therefore remain open.
6. ^ Quote from 3SAT: "Doctors from Timbuktu took care of the kings of France ..."