presence of the Pope, it cried out: Pope Leo, hail! (5.109)
“At this,” the story concludes, “the Pope was rightly delighted, and often afterwards, as a relaxation from the labours of the day, he would talk to the parrot.” What pope and parrot said to one another has not been recorded, but the clear implication is that they shared some sort of meaningful conversation on a regular basis.
Of course, the Romans had already imagined parrots as companions of princes or as associates of the sacred. So to transfer the bird’s intimacies from emperor to pope may seem a small enough adjustment. Still, the shift has huge implications, for it endows the bird with a specifically Christian sanctity. This, in turn, is enlarged by the parrot’s reputation for saying meaningful, even prescient things, as in the anecdote about Charlemagne. Such stories combine and proliferate, generating a medieval view of the parrot as sentient, sacred, and prophetic.
Sometimes this reputation can carry ambiguous moral overtones. In his On the Nature of Things (c. 1180), for instance, Alexander Neckam remarks, like Thomas of Cantimpré, that the parrot is “admired of the Pope” (1.36). In fact, Neckam explains the origin of the parrot’s common medieval name—“popinjay” in English, “papagallo” in Spanish, “Papagei” in German, and so forth—in this same phrase, papae gabio (1.36). Such false etymologies provide a popular way of relating the names of things to their supposed natures. But Neckam declares that the parrot “has great ingenuity and is most prone to falsehood” (1.36) and illustrates this remark with a story:
In Great Britain there lived a knight of great generosity who owned a parrot and loved it most dearly. The knight, having set out on a journey around the mountains of Gilboa, saw a parrot there, and recalling the one that he had at home, said to it, “Our captive parrot, identical to you, sends greetings.” Hearing these words, the bird fell down as if dead. The knight grieved at this, being deceived by the bird’s trickery, and, having completed his journey and returned home, brought the tale back with him. The knight’s parrot listened attentively to his master’s words and then, feigning grief, fell from its perch as if dead, too. The entire household marveled at this sudden onset of grief, but the knight commanded that the bird be placed out in the open, so that it might be revived by fresh air. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, the parrot then flew off maliciously, never to be caught again. The master groaned and the entire household complained loudly that they had been tricked. (1.37; my translation)
Having thus deceived its master, the parrot presumably headed straight back to Mount Gilboa, which was becoming the preferred haunt of parrots in some bestiaries. After the Philistines had killed Saul and Jonathan there, King David prayed that no dew or rain should fall upon the place (2 Samuel 1.21). For whatever reason, the bestiarists had begun to insist that parrots could not stand to touch water (Neckam 1.36; Cantimpré 5.109).1
Of course, giving parrots a home in the Holy Land illustrates how well the bestiaries had absorbed these birds into the Christian tradition. Writers like Neckam might view parrots as too clever, but in general they were being reimagmed as miraculous and even sacred. For instance, one Jaco (perhaps Jacques de Vitry),2 the author of a fifteenth-century bestiary called The Waldensian Physiologus, explains the birds’ supposed intolerance of water by claiming that “they love purity above all other things, so that in the parts of the orient where they live there is neither dew nor rain,” and he concludes that “every Christian should observe this nature and quality devoutly so as to preserve his purity and integrity and follow them without sin” (Mayer 403–404; my translation).
While the bestiaries develop this distinctive view of parrots as fabulous birds with sacred associations, something similar happens in the geographical and mythographical writing of the Middle Ages. Pliny’s Natural History provides a source not only for medieval zoology but also for medieval geography. In Pliny, as in almost every classical writer to deal with the subject, the parrot is an Indian bird. As a result, the earliest European map to include an illustration of a parrot also identifies the bird with India: this is the so-called Ebstorf Map, attributed to Gervase of Tilbury and dating from about 1235 (Figure 4). This map divides the world into the three continents known to scholars in the Middle Ages: Europe, Africa, and Asia. In the process, it also provides numerous richly detailed illustrations of each region’s flora and fauna. In a time before cartography as we know it, maps functioned less as an independent mode of representation than as a subspecies of painting, and the Ebstorf Map makes an outstanding case in point. It is blanketed with pictures of birds and beasts, many of them mythical or semimythical, many of them drawn from Pliny, each one supposedly representing a specific region. Africa, for instance, holds not only an elephant, a leopard, and a hyena, but also a mirmicaleon, a cameleopardalis, and a tarandrius. Europe offers us not only lions and tigers and bears, but also an aurochs, a bonacus, and a gryphe. And in Asia, along with chameleons and antdogs and saiga antelopes, we encounter our parrot.
It’s right where it should be, on a mountain in India (Figure 5). But India itself may prove hard for a modern reader to recognize. For one thing, it’s covered with strange pictures. For another, there’s no wedge-shaped peninsula jutting into the expanse of the Indian Ocean, no island of Sri Lanka suspended from the tip like a teardrop. And even worse, India itself isn’t where we expect it to be; it occupies the upper right-hand quadrant of the map, roughly where modern maps locate Outer Mongolia.
Figure 4. The Ebstorf Map of the World, c. 1235, from the Miller reproduction (courtesy akg-images, London)
Part of the problem here involves the principle by which the map is organized. Although medieval navigators and cartographers understood that India lay to the east and south of them, Gervase did not therefore feel obliged to organize his map by the traditional points of the compass. Instead, he oriented it in the root sense of the term: toward the east. As a result, Asia occupies the entire upper half of the map, with Europe on the lower left and Africa on the lower right. East is up, south is right, west is down, north is left. And this entire rotation, haphazard as it may seem, is superimposed upon an anatomical model that lends method to the design; the body of Christ, feet at the Pillars of Hercules, head on the eastern horizon, spans the entire earthly creation. The parrot appears immediately below and to the right of Christ’s head, its placement there marking not only the geographical location of India on this topsy-turvy map, but also the medieval belief that parrots are created in the earthly paradise.
Figure 5. Detail of the Ebstorf Map, depicting the earliest appearance of parrots on a western map, just below and to the right of Christ’s head (courtesy akg-images, London)
This idea survived the end of the Middle Ages, appearing in Conrad Gesner’s History of Animals (1551–1558): “The parrot surpasses other birds in cleverness and understanding, because it has a large head and is brought into India from the true heaven, where it has learned not only how to speak but even how to think” (2Plr; my translation). It also appears in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Bucolicum Carmen (1370), where the Kingdom of Naples under Queen Joan and Louis of Taranto is a second Eden, for which the world’s parrots leave their home on Mount Gilboa:
Here the bright birds made their nests;
The parrot, much enraptured with the land,
Came all the way here from her dried-up fields. (5.43–45)
And in John Mirk’s book of homilies Festial (c. 1450), we learn that Saint Matthew included among the joys of paradise “popinjays and birds
