Gift of the Mamelukes: Animal ambassades as vectors of exotic fauna introductions in the Spanish Middle Ages

Abstract

The number of exotic animal species that were introduced in Iberia during the Middle Ages constitute a defectively documented area of research, mostly addressed through historiographic methods. In this paper we evidence that even in the case of large, exotic animals exchanged as gifts among dignitaries the documentary data can be painfully incomplete. This is the case of the animal embassy that the Mamluk sultan Baybars al Bunduqdari sent in 1261 to the Castilian king Alfonso X. Although the written sources do not specify the complete list of species nor the reasons for mentioning some but not others, documentary and iconographic data suggest that, in addition to an elephant, a giraffe and a zebra, this lot included, in a decreasing order of probability, a lion, a dromedary, an ostrich, and a Nile crocodile. If such conspicuous beasts could pass unnoticed in a royal chronicle, one may contend that even in the most thoroughly documented cases, written sources may refer but a minimal fraction of the animals translocated into Iberia during the Medieval period. Such information vacuum stresses the difficulties of granting “indigenous” status to species traditionally assumed to constitute elements of the Iberian fauna when their historical contingencies are defectively known, a matter of concern for the current rewilding debate in Spain.