Note 806 — Chapter V · JOHN AND THE POPE 1210–1214

If we may believe Matthew Paris, the Pope was not the only potentate to whom John about this time offered homage and tribute. In Matthew’s Gesta Abbatum S. Albani, vol. i. pp. 236–40, and in his Chronica Majora, vol. ii. pp. 559–62, is a long account of an embassy which John is said to have sent to the emir of Morocco, Al Moumenim (Mohammed al Nassir), “significans eidem quod se et regnum suum libenter redderet eidem et dederet, et deditum teneret ab ipso, si placeret ei, sub tributum. Necnon et legem Christianam, quam vanam censuit, relinquens, legi Machomet fideliter adhaereret.” Matthew proceeds to give a lively account of the ambassadors’ adventures, and of the rebuke which the emir administered, through them, to the sovereign who had sent them on so shameful an errand; all of which Matthew professes to have heard from one of the envoys themselves. Unluckily for him, he has given two contradictory dates for the embassy. In the Gesta Abbatum he represents it as taking place during the Interdict; and Dr. Lingard has shown, by evidence drawn from Matthew himself, that if it was sent at all, it must have been sent in 1212 (Lingard, Hist. England, vol. ii. p. 325; cf. M. Paris, Chron. Maj. vol. ii. p. 566). But in Chron. Maj. Matthew puts it after the reconciliation with Rome, representing it as despatched by John in his disappointment at finding that transaction profit him less than he had expected. The story of the interview between the envoys and the emir, as Matthew tells it, has therefore a very strong appearance of having been invented by that writer, as a kind of satire on John’s submission to the Pope; though the mere fact of some overture on John’s part for an alliance with the emir is neither impossible nor unlikely.