Dissertation on Birds of Prey and the Sport - the Falconry Heritage ...

CHAPTER 1 : Falconry as symbols before (and outside of) Italian literature.
Although keeping tamed hawks for recreational hunting is a practice that goes
back thousands of years in the Middle East and the steppes of Eastern Europe, and
although falconry was practiced for food hunting on occasion in the Greco-Roman world,
it truly finds its niche as a typical pastime of the nobility of Western Europe under the
conditions of the feudal system. The feudal nobility have capital, leisure time, and land
in abundance-exactly the qualities needed for recreational hunting. In addition, during
the Crusades, the contact of Western nobility with the Islamic world brings the expertise,
practices, and treatises of Arab falconers to Europe. The westerners, who enthusiastically
embrace this hobby, write many treatises of their own, culminating in the De Arte
Venandi cum Avibus written by Emperor Frederick 11.
The growth of the special role that falcons and hawks have in society can be seen
in their increasing inclusion in types of texts whose earlier incarnations omitted them or
had merely cursory comments. Such is the case with bestiaries and encyclopedic
literature, whose sections on falcons and hawks grow and multiply with the parallel
growth of popularity in the sport and its accompanying how-to treatises.
Because of this close relationship between people and their domesticated birds,
and because people admire them as fierce predators in the wild, they receive a unique
treatment in art and literature as well. In art they are ubiquitous; a hunting party sets off
with their falcons in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good Government in Siena; a
man with a hawk is on the Campanile of Florence as one of the seven mechanical arts;
this image appears on cassoni, seals, coins-the list is endless. The gentleman or