“The images conjure up a world where indigenous south-east Asians plied the waters to Australia’s north”
Images of an Australasian cockatoo, discovered in a 13th-century manuscript written by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, have sparked a dramatic reassessment of medieval trade routes. Dr Heather Dalton (left), co-author of an article on the discovery, explains why
Why would a cockatoo have been pictured in this document? As king of Sicily, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was heavily influenced by the island’s Islamic heritage, especially falconry. During their 21-year diplomatic relationship, Frederick and Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt discussed falconry and exchanged exotic animals. In 1233, al-Kamil sent a rare gyrfalcon to Frederick, who reciprocated with a polar bear and a white peacock. In return, al-Kamil sent the cockatoo.
Frederick not only hunted with birds, he wanted to know everything about them, recording his obsession in De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (On the Art of Hunting with Birds), a book written in Latin by, or for, Frederick between 1241 and 1244.
The Yellow-crested or perhaps even Sulphur-crested Cockatoo is pictured four times in the 900 marginal images that recorded the daily lives of Frederick’s falcons, their handlers, and all the species of birds he had seen, collected and studied.
Although we cannot make an exact identification of Frederick’s cockatoo, we think, from the flecks of red pigment in the irises of all four birds’ eyes, it was female.
How significant are these drawings? In 2014, I published an article about an Australasian cockatoo painted on an altarpiece by Andrea Mantegna in Italy in 1496 which, until recently, was assumed to be the earliest European image of this bird. The cockatoos in De Arte were either sketched in the early 1240s by Frederick or his scribe, or in the 1250s when the book was recreated from drafts stored in the emperor’s Apulian castles after the original was lost in the Siege of Parma. Frederick’s cockatoo images pre-date Mantegna’s altarpiece by 250 years.
What can the images tell us about medieval trade routes? When al-Kamil gifted the cockatoo, the bird’s natural habitat was east of the Wallace Line – the imaginary faunal boundary dividing Borneo and Bali from Sulawesi and Lombok. From the third century, these cockatoos had been imported into China, and Frederick’s cockatoo may have made its way into Europe via the myriad of overland routes collectively labelled the Silk Road. Alternatively, after being collected by South-east Asian traders from around the Indonesian archipelago and Torres Strait, it may have been sold to merchants in Java. From there it would have joined the cottons and silks of the Indian subcontinent and been traded through the Indian Ocean to the Arabian peninsula.
However it travelled, this cockatoo’s arrival in Europe throws light on the complex web of trade routes that connected areas previously dismissed as distant peripheries. While histories of maritime south-east Asia often emphasise the influential roles of outsiders from India, China and the Middle East, these sketches conjure up a world where indigenous traders plied the waters to Australia’s north, trading all matter of goods, including cockatoos.
Dr Heather Dalton, from the University of Melbourne, is author (with J Salo, P Niemelä and S Örmä) of ‘Frederick II of Hohenstaufen’s Australasian Cockatoo: A Symbol of Detente Between East and West and Evidence of the Ayyubid Sultanate’s Global Reach’, which appeared in issue 1 of Parergon (2018)