Falcon (12 page)

inveterate falconer that he would hawk in any weather. D’Arcussia described him as ‘so sharp . . . a sportsman that he would not spare from his wrath anyone . . . who failed to observe any of the duties of Falconry’.
¹⁶
William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, complained that nuns taking their fal- cons into chapel with them interfered with the service, and it’s said that an enraged medieval bishop of Ely stormed back into the cathedral and threatened to excommunicate the culprit after he discovered his falcons stolen from the vestry.

the four corners of the earth

Holy Roman Emperor Frederick ii of Hohenstaufen infamously led a Holy Crusade even after he’d been excommunicated. His contemporaries called him
stupor mundi
, the wonder of the world. Modern falconers know him familiarly as ‘Fred the sec- ond’, consider him the world’s greatest-ever falconer and still glean his massive thirteenth-century work
De arte venandi cum avibus
, ‘On the art of hunting with birds’, – for practical hints. Eastern falconry techniques and technologies were imported into Europe through his court; his interpreter Theodore of Antioch translated Arab and Persian falconry works into Latin, and the emperor employed Arab, English, Spanish, German and Italian falconers ‘at great expense’. He wrote:

We . . . summoned from the four corners of the earth masters in the practice of the art of falconry. We enter- tained these experts in our domains, meantime seeking their opinions, weighting the importance of their knowl- edge, and endeavouring to retain in memory the more valuable of their words and deeds.
¹⁷

Falconry techniques and knowledges have been traded between disparate cultures for millennia. European knights took falcons with them on the Crusades, and learned how to hood falcons from their foes. In the early twelfth century, in what is now Syria, falconer Usamah Ibn-Muquidh complained that because his hunting land was now adjacent to Frankish territory, his falconry expeditions needed extra horses, atten- dants and weapons. Falconry’s symbolic system was largely shared between both sides, and so it was able to articulate power-struggles and conflicts in ways immediately compre- hensible to either. A besieged Richard i sent an envoy to Saladin to request food for his starving falcons; Saladin imme- diately delivered baskets of his best poultry for the falcons

A 19th-century rendering of Emperor Frederick ii of Hohenstaufen

(
r
. 1215–50) and one of his falconers.

alone. During the siege of Acre in 1190 a prized gyrfalcon belonging to King Philip i broke its leash and flew straight to the top of the city walls. Philip was horrified. An envoy requesting that the falcon be returned was refused, as was a second envoy accompanied by trumpets, ensigns and heralds, offering a 1,000 gold crowns to Saladin in exchange for the errant falcon.

Throughout the early-modern period, travelling European merchants and diplomats encountered falconry traditions that awed and bewildered them. Marco Polo was familiar with fal- conry, but its scale in Central Asia astonished him. With bated pen he explained that the falconry expeditions of the Great Khan involved a retinue of ten thousand falconers – a figure not to be taken literally, but surely indicating a sizeable army. On hawking expeditions the Great Khan was borne by up to four elephants. On their backs stood a pavilion furnished inside with gold braided cloth and outside with lion’s skins. ‘Such facilities’, he wrote, ‘are required by the Kublai Khan on these hunting excursions also, since he is very much bothered by gout in the feet’:

In this pavilion he always has with him twelve of the best gyrfalcons and twelve of his particularly beloved honour bearers for diversion and for company. The riders beside the Khan inform him when in the vicinity of cranes or other birds flying by. He then raises the curtain of the pavilion, and when he has seen the game, he casts the fal- cons, which hunt the cranes and overcome them after a long flight. The Khan lies on a comfortable lounge, and the sight of this gives him, as well as the gentlemen serv- ing him and the riders surrounding him, great pleasure.
¹⁸

Persian kings were so enamoured of falconry that they trained sparrows and starlings to catch butterflies, recorded Sir Richard Burton. In the late seventeenth century, English traveller Sir John Chardin enthused about the ability of Persian falconers. One could see them ‘all year round in the City and the Country . . . going backwards and forward with a Hawk on their Hand’. Chardin heard of some stranger and less sociable traditions here. It seemed that falcons were once commonly taught to assault men. ‘They say’, he wrote in won- derment, ‘that there are still such Birds in the King’s Bird-House. I have not seen any of them, but I hear’d that Aly-couly-can,

A late 15th- century gouache of a mounted falconer with white gyrfalcon.

Governour of Tauris, whom I was particularly acquainted with, could not forbear diverting himself with that dangerous and cruel sport, tho’ with the loss of his friends.’
¹⁹

And falconry’s reach was extraordinary. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, falcon-traders brought falcons to the French court from Flanders, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, Norway, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, Spain, Turkey, Alexandria, the Barbary States and India. The fifth Earl of Bedford imported hawks from as far afield as North Africa, Nova Scotia and New England. In many European countries only noblemen were allowed to use native falcons. In sixteenth- century England, a thriving smuggling trade developed after foreign hawks were classed as luxuries and were subject to an import duty of a shilling in the pound.

But by the end of the seventeenth century, falconry’s popu- larity was waning in Europe. Louis xiii was exceptional: so obsessed with falconry that he hawked most days of the week, he even composed a libretto for his ballet
La Merlaison
describ- ing the delights of hawking for blackbirds and thrushes. The use of falcons as diplomatic gifts gradually faded in the eight- eenth century, and falconry’s connection with royalty and nobility won it no favours after the French Revolution. Landowners converted their mews to other uses; new sports had become fashionable: shooting, fox-hunting and horse- racing. By the nineteenth century European falconry had become the pursuit of a very few individuals who had banded together into falconry clubs – and of eccentrics, among whom was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s father. Toulouse-Lautrec senior used to walk about the streets of Albi with shirt-tails flapping and falcon on his fist. ‘Not wishing, doubtless, to deprive his raptors of the succour of religion’, wrote Henri, ‘he would give them holy water to drink.’
²⁰

imperial falconry

But falconry was still practised elsewhere. In 1913 the American writer William Coffin explained that while in Europe ‘it exists

. . . only as a fad of a few medieval-minded sportsmen, in the East, where the art of falconry perhaps originated, it flourishes still’.
²¹
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers often used falconry’s persistence in non-Western cultures as evidence that such cultures either lagged far behind the West or, indeed, existed entirely outside the progress of history. And falconry had further roles to play in the age of Empire. Still the sport of elite or ruling classes in many countries, it seemed to offer a global naturalization of social hierarchy. Hunting-crazy officers in nineteenth-century British India took up falconry and employed local falconers. Not only did they enjoy the sport, but saw it also as a means of reinforcing their elite social status and winning loyalty from Indian soldiers under their command. In the North Punjab the Regiment of Guides (Cavalry and Infantry) kept a regimental establishment of saker falcons; officers flew them at ravine deer and houbara.
²²
Lieut. Col. E. Delmé- Radcliffe of the 88th Connaught Rangers famously responded to the first cries of his newborn child with the exclamation ‘Good God! There’s a
cat
at my falcons!’
²³
Lieut. Col. E. H. Cobb took up hawking while political agent in Gilgit in the 1940s because a shortage of shotgun cartridges precluded partridge shooting. But to his delight he soon discovered that in fal- conry at least ‘the local Chiefs readily supported the British Officers’.
²⁴
‘From time immemorial’, he wrote happily, falconry ‘has been considered to be a princely sport and nowhere can it be practised to such advantage as by the feudal chieftains of the Hindu Kush . . . for they have the power to control large areas of falconry ideally suited to falconry and also to command a large

Algerian falconers setting out for the field. Romantic, orientalist repre- sentations of falconry were commonplace

in the late 19th century, and this 1898 painting by Gustave Henri Marchetti is a prime example.

army of falconers.’ He added that as far as falconry goes, ‘the Asiatic methods are very similar to our own’.
²⁵

These imperial imaginings typically obliterated any drive to understand how falconry’s social functions differed across cultures. Such blindness is still encountered. Even today one encounters explanations of the rise of falconry in the Arabian Gulf as being a means for nomadic people to obtain additional protein to supplement a meagre diet. This functional explana- tion is as blind to cultural nuance as that of many a nineteenth-century commentator. For falconry has always had significant spiritual and social importance in Bedouin culture, where it is highly valued for its egalitarian nature and the qual- ities of self-denial and generosity it fosters. A hawking expedition grants falconers of all social backgrounds space to