A History of the World in 100 Objects (64 page)

The unfortunate Ulugh Beg might not have agreed. By the time this cup was re-inscribed in Turkish, Russia was already expanding into the old Timurid Empire. In the nineteenth century the whole region would become part of the Russian imperial scheme, and Samarkand would be absorbed into another central Asian empire – first Tsarist, then Soviet, until in 1989 that in its turn collapsed, an upheaval which to the Timurids would have been very familiar.

One of the new states to emerge in the post-Soviet order is Uzbekistan. As it strives to define its identity it seeks in its past elements that are neither Russian, nor Chinese, nor Iranian, nor Turkish. The banknotes of modern Uzbekistan declare to the world that this new state is in fact the heir to the Timurid Empire: we see on them the mausoleum that houses the black jade monument where Tamerlane and Ulugh Beg lie buried.

There can be no doubt that Ulugh Beg achieved more as a scholar of the stars than as a ruler of his collapsing empire, so perhaps it is fitting that the crater on the Moon named after him is near the Oceanus Procellarum – the sea of storms – storms against which his jade cup might have given him solace, but not protection.

The tiny island of St Helena, in the middle of the South Atlantic, is famous above all as the open prison of Napoleon Bonaparte, banished there after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. But another great wonder of Europe also once stayed on St Helena – a being much less destructive than the French emperor and one that in the Europe of 1515 was truly a wonder: an Indian rhinoceros. He, too, was in captivity, but in a Portuguese ship stopping off on the long journey from India to Lisbon – a journey that was a triumph of navigation. Europe was on the brink of a great expansion that would lead to the exploration, mapping and conquest of much of the world, all made possible by new technologies in ships and sails. There was intense interest in recording and disseminating this rapidly expanding knowledge through another new technology – printing. All these disparate developments coincide in this object, one of the most famous images of Renaissance art. The Indian rhinoceros, in one respect at least, was luckier than Napoleon: his portrait was made by Albrecht Dürer.

In recent chapters I have been examining objects from four great land empires, all of them controlling huge tracts of the globe around 500 years ago. This object introduces a fledgling maritime empire, that of Portugal. For centuries there had been a steady trade in spices between the Indian Ocean and Europe, but by the late-fifteenth century the Ottomans dominated the eastern Mediterranean and blocked the traditional trade routes (see
Chapter 71
). Spain and Portugal began searching for new ways to gain access to Asian goods. Both ventured into the Atlantic – a very difficult ocean for long-distance sailing. In the quest for the Indies, Spain went west and found the Americas; the Portuguese went south, down the seemingly endless coast of Africa until they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and made their way into the Indian Ocean and to the wealth of the East. In Africa and Asia they established a slender network of stopping points – harbours and trading stations – and along that network travelled spices and other exotic goods, and also our rhinoceros.

Dürer’s Rhinoceros is a woodcut print, and it shows a massive beast, nicely identified over its head by the word RHINOCERVS, with the date 1515 above and the
AD
monogram of the artist below. The rhino is side on, looking to the right. Dürer has cunningly framed it to give a great sense of pent up force, packing the body into a tightly drawn frame which only just contains it – the end of its tail is partially cut off and its horn pushes aggressively against the right-hand edge. This animal will try to escape, we think – and it is going to be trouble.

Above the animal in its printed box is a text in German:

[In May 1515] Brought from India to the great and powerful King Emanuel of Portugal at Lisbon a live animal called a rhinoceros. His form is here represented. It has the colour of a speckled tortoise and it is covered with thick scales. It is like an elephant in size, but lower on its legs and almost invulnerable … It is also said that the rhinoceros is fast, lively and cunning.

The story of how the rhino came to Europe tells us that the Portuguese were not just trading with India but were trying to establish permanent bases there – this is the very beginning of the European land presence in Asia. They succeeded largely thanks to Alfonso d’Albuquerque, the first governor and effective founder of the Portuguese empire in India, and the man who brought us the rhino. In 1514 Albuquerque approached the sultan of Gujarat to negotiate the use of an island, accompanying his embassy with lavish presents. The sultan responded with gifts in return – including a live rhinoceros. Albuquerque seems to have been somewhat flummoxed by this living gift, so he took advantage of a passing Portuguese flotilla and sent the beast to Lisbon as a special present to the king. Getting a rhino weighing between one and a half and two tons on to a sixteenth-century ship must have been quite a task.

A little Italian poem celebrates the voyage that astonished all of Europe:

I am the rhinoceros brought hither from dusky India,

From the vestibule of light and the gateway of the day.

I boarded the fleet bound for the west, its bold sails undaunted,

Daring new lands, to see a different sun.

The rhino began its journey from India in early January 1515. He was accompanied by his Indian keeper, Osem, and vast quantities of rice – an odd choice of diet for a rhino but much less bulky than his usual fodder. We don’t know how the rhino liked his food, but he seems to have thrived, and after a sea journey of 120 days, with only three stops in port – at Mozambique, St Helena and the Azores – he arrived in Lisbon on 20 May. Crowds flocked in amazement to watch.

The rhino arrived in a Europe that was obsessed not only with a possible future that lay beyond its shores, but also with recovering its own deep past at home. Ancient Roman buildings and statues were being excavated with huge excitement in Italy, archaeological work that was uncovering the reality of the Classical world. The appearance of the rhinoceros – this exotic creature from the East – was, for educated Europeans, another piece of antiquity recovered. The Roman author Pliny had described such a beast, and they had starred in Roman amphitheatres, but none had been seen in Europe for more than a thousand years. It was an exhilarating retrieval of Classical antiquity – a kind of living zoological Renaissance with the added allure of exotic Eastern wealth. It’s not surprising that Dürer responded so strongly. The historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto explains:

The rhinoceros was so important because people looked at him and saw the embodiment of one of the most famous texts in the Classical world, Pliny’s
Natural History
, which devotes a very short chapter to the rhinoceros. And when people saw it they said, ‘You know, Pliny was right! This creature really exists! Here we’ve got evidence of the reliability of these texts from antiquity …’ That’s why Dürer drew him, that’s why engravings of him were sought after all over Europe.

The Portuguese king decided to send the rhino on as a present to the Pope, whose support he needed in establishing his claims to empire in the East. He knew that the Pope and all Rome would be enthralled by the creature. But the poor beast never made it to Italy. The ship carrying it was hit by a storm off La Spezia and sank with all hands. Although rhinos are competent swimmers, since it was chained to the deck it also drowned.

But the rhino lived on by reputation, and even while it was alive, accounts, poems and sketches of the exotic creature spread across Europe. One sketch reached Dürer, in Nuremberg; of course, Dürer had never seen a rhinoceros. We have no idea how much detail this sketch contained, but the finished print that Dürer derived from it clearly owes a great deal to the artist’s imagination. At first glance it looks very much as an Indian rhino should look – thick, solid legs, armoured back, a tail with a feathered end and, of course, the single horn. But something isn’t quite right – a lot of things, in fact, when compared with an actual rhino. The legs are scaled and end in large, splayed-out toes. The skin is pleated and lined and stands out stiffly from the legs – this is armour plating, not skin. It has a peculiar little extra horn on its neck – no one really knows where this came from – and the abnormally whiskery creature is covered in small scales and swirls which manage to look at once military and decorative.

It’s a long way from any actual rhino, but with the real animal drowned, Dürer’s imagined rhinoceros quickly became the reality for millions of Europeans. And he was able to satisfy the enormous curiosity in the beast by mass-producing its image, thanks to the new technology of wood-block printing.

Nuremberg, where Dürer lived, was a great commercial centre and home to the earliest printing shops and publishers. By 1515 Dürer himself was the master printmaker of the age, so he was ideally placed to convert his rhino drawing into a profitable print. Around 4,000–5,000 copies of Dürer’s rhino were sold in his lifetime, and many millions have sold in other forms since. The image stuck: in works of natural history, above all, Dürer’s rhino was unshiftable, even when more accurate depictions of the rhino later became available. In the seventeenth century copies could be seen everywhere, from the doors of Pisa Cathedral to a church fresco in Colombia, South America. And it now appears on mugs, T-shirts and fridge magnets.

Five years after Dürer produced his rhino, he had another exotic encounter. In 1520 in Brussels he viewed Aztec mosaics in the shape of masks and animals every bit as alien and exhilarating as the rhino: ‘all kinds of wonderful objects’, he wrote, ‘of various uses, more beautiful to me than miracles’. The new worlds that Europeans were encountering were going to change profoundly the way they could think about themselves.

The magnificent ship is masted and rigged, ready to sail. High on the stern sits the Holy Roman Emperor of the German nation. In front of him his grandest subjects parade one after another, turning and making obeisance. Deep in the hull of the vessel an organ plays music. Then the cannons fire in an explosion of noise and smoke, and the imperial galleon moves majestically forward.