Cockatoo identified in 13th Century European book | Hacker News Reader

Cockatoo identified in 13th Century European book

bbc.com

78 pointsclouddrover18 comments

I feel like this could be an interesting device for a novel. It could tell the stories of all the people involved along the journey from its home to the palace of Frederick II.

Or a computer game. I have fond memories of Sid Meier's "Pirates" on the Amiga. It taught me some stuff I wouldn't have known otherwise about the colonization of the Caribbean. I've always felt there was scope for a much richer world with modern computers. Probably it already exists, I don't follow computer games much these days.

The fact that a cockatoo reached Sicily during 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,"

North of Australia is a big place, the article mentions that the specie may have originated in Indonesia.

It also possible that the birds may have been bread in captivity for a while before one of them ended up in a book.

With this in mind , I find the quote curiously free of content.

It would be interesting to know when this cockatoo was last seen if at all in west papua or papua new guinia.

Even so it is a fascinating story.

For all we know, this cockatoo was born Europe.

They still managed to get a species of bird (possibly over several generations) from Indonesia or Northern Australia all the way to Europe, 50 years before Marco Polo visited Indonesia.

It is just medieval supply chain details. At one level the origin of the cockatoo might not have been important then to those entertained by such things, at another level the true origin of the cockatoo might also have been a closely guarded secret.

If you buy a fancy new car then the guy in the showroom has no idea who the supplier of the seats was, never mind who supplied the leather to the seat supplier or whom the farmer was that brought the cows to market for the supplier of the supplier to buy. This applies even if it is a Rolls Royce type of car where the marketing material says the leather comes from cows grown in Norway where there is no barbed wire. None of this information is secret but you are not going to find out the name of the farm the cows were 'grown' on.

With illegal substances - drugs - there is a matter of secrecy, the guy down the pub who can sell your intoxicant of choice is not going to tell you who he buys from and you wouldn't ask that question anyway. Then there is the rest of the chain to the port of entry and it gets to be a big mystery after there. Yet somewhere in the Bekaa valley or in darkest Afghanistan there is someone making the stuff that ends up a continent away. At each step of this black market supply chain things are far from transparent.

Spices and silk were like this for a long time, nobody knew where the guys in Venice got their silk from, they didn't even know yet they controlled that market until the Turks worked it out. Cockatoos were probably just another of those type of novelty items.

This story reminds me of the giraffes that were sent from Malindi (in modern day Kenya) as tribute to the Forbidden City in China in the early 1400's. (1)

1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/peculiar-story-gir...

This story reminds me of Abul-Abbas [1], an elephant given to Charlemagne by the caliph of the Abbasids. Frederick II wasn't the first Holy Roman Emperor to collect exotic animals, it seems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abul-Abbas

The Romans had war elephants [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_war_elephants

Hannibal? He fought the Romans in Spain and then took the elephants over the Italian Alps and attacks Rome from the North. That is the greatest military feat for me.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/03/where-muck-h...

Yes the Romans had elephant idea probably from Hannibal, the article references the Punic wars.

Not as surprising since the Elephants came from just a few hundred miles away accross the Mediterranean Sea.

The Romans used both north African elephants (now extinct) and Asian elephants which they got by long-distance trade.

Apparently the Asian elephants were larger; and besides I suppose India and Sri Lanka also had better infrastructure for catching and training war elephants than the Roman Empire did.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_elephant

Yes, but the Holy Roman Empire is a different kettle of fish.

a bit off topic, but does it exit a list of old books, sorted by dates ? I mean the really old ones. Wikiepdia gives this :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manuscripts

but is there something more graphical (to get a picture of the history of these books)

They should probably explicitly mention the native habitat for the species in such articles; it would clarify a lot.

That said, trade between Asia and the Mediterranean basin via the Red Sea was highly developed at that point, with seafaring trade routes over 2000 years old. So it's not exactly shocking.

They do mention it's Australasian.

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