Cockatoo sketches suggest wider trade routes

Historians have found drawings of a cockatoo in an 800-year-old book owned by the Vatican, suggesting far more extensive trade links between Europe and Australasia than previously thought.

The four images of the cockatoo – the oldest of their kind – appear in a medieval book called The Art of Hunting with Birds.

The bird, identified as either a triton or yellow-crested cockatoo, is native to northern Australia, the island of New Guinea and parts of Indonesia.

Scholars believe the cockatoo was given as a gift by the sultan of Egypt to Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, who ruled a vast swathe of territory from Sicily to modern-day Germany.

Four drawings of the bird were found in the book, entitled De Arte

Venandi cum Avibus in Latin, which dates from 1241-1248 and is kept in the Vatican Library. The sketches predate other depictions of cockatoos by more than two centuries – until now, the earliest known image of the white bird was in a 1496 painting.

The new discovery was made by Heather Dalton, from the University of Melbourne, and three scholars from the Finnish Institute in Rome, a research academy. The book they studied is a compendium of birds and animals that were owned by Frederick II.

The presence of a cockatoo in Italy in the 13th century ‘‘shows that merchants plying their trade to the north of Australia were part of a flourishing network that reached west to the Middle East and beyond’’, Dalton said. ‘‘Small craft sailed between islands buying and selling fabrics, animal skins and live animals before making for ports in places such as Java, where they sold their wares to Chinese, Arab and Persian merchants.’’

From around 1217, Frederick II corresponded with the sultan of Egypt. The fact that the sultan could procure a cockatoo from South East Asia was evidence of his ‘‘global reach’’, they said.

Their research was published in the journal Parergon .–