History of a Fallen King ~

[brotherbear]

page #150 - Toward the middle of the thirteenth century, these two polar bears were 'curiosa exotica' of the kind that every menagerie of any importance had to possess in order to effectively function as an emblem of power. ( keeping up with the Jones' ) Owning a brown bear had become totally banal and held very little interest. Kings and princes gave up that animal, abandoning it to the menageries of towns and petty lords, or even to jongleurs, tumblers, and animal showmen who traveled from one village fair to the next. Lions, not bears, were now what every princely menagerie had to contain. It would be useful to know in detail the composition of thirteenth-century menageries, but, in the absence of plentiful documentation, we have only an approximate idea. Thanks to narrative texts and a few accounting archives, we know that they contained many lions that had to be fed, cared for, guarded, and replaced. Lions, but also panthers, leopards, and even some "tigers," about which we can guess that they were not the animals we know by that name. When medieval images intend to depict tigers, they never show felines resembling our Asian tigers, but quadrupeds with dark, sometimes spotted fur, resembling large wolves with enormous teeth and claws. In the closing years of the fourteenth century, King Charles VI of France adopted the "tiger" as an emblem that he used, among others, as a personal "device." Narative texts and accounting documents frequently mention this "tiger," but images never represent it as a large, striped wild animal, but rather as a kind of fox or wolf ( the latter was, incidentally the device of the king's brother, Louis d'Orleans ).
*Question: what animal in Europe once went by the name "tiger" ? Reply