Gifts from afar

Frederick exchanged gifts of animals with several rulers, among them sultan al-Malik Muhammad al-Kamil (c.1177 – 1238 CE), the fourth Ayyubid sultan, also known as Meledin. The cockatoo featured in De arte was a gift from this ‘Emperor of Babylon’. The bird was used to visually communicate to the inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire the position of the emperor as a powerful man representing his political order. The ways by which the emperor received the bird, as an exchange gift with another political ruler, underlines this.

For those interested in world history and how connections developed, the image of Frederick II’s cockatoo challenges the previously dominant view that Australia and the wider Pacific were very late in joining the global networks that emerged over the course of the past millennia. Previous work had identified the presence of a yellow-crested cockatoo in the painting Madonna della Vittoria (1496) and raised questions about how this Australasian native came to be in 15th century Italy.Heather Dalton, ‘A sulphur-crested Cockatoo in Fifteenth-Century Mantua: Rethinking Symbols of Sanctity and Patterns of Trade’, Renaissance Studies, 28.5 (2014), 676-94; ‘Madonna della Vittoria’ Andrea Mantegna, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons But the drawings in De arte has allowed the connection with the Pacific world to be predated by several hundred years and demonstrates just how far trade routes had spread in the time of early modern Europe.Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Anne Marieke van der Wal, “Introduction: What is World History?”, in World History for International Studies (Leiden, 2022) Rebecca Mead, “Where Did That Cockatoo Come From?”, The New Yorker (July 5, 2021) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/where-did-that-cockatoo-come-from