Among the hand-written documents, books, and ancient artefacts in the Vatican Library is a 13th century manuscript on falconry written in Latin by or for the Holy Roman Emperor - King Frederick II of Sicily.
Frederick’s De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (The Art of Hunting with Birds) dates from between 1241 and 1248. In its margins are nine hundred drawings of falcons, falconers and other animals kept by the emperor at his palaces.
The Holy Roman Emperor King Frederick II of Sicily’s falconry book, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (The Art of Hunting with Birds) features 900 pictures of birds in its margins.
Four of these images depict a white cockatoo, described in the text as a crested, talking parrot - a gift from ‘the Sultan of Babylon’.
The discovery of these images, which are published in the journal Parergon, highlight the fact that during the medieval period, merchants plying the waters just to the north of Australia were part of a flourishing trade network that reached west to the Middle East and beyond.
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-did-a-cockatoo-reach-13th-century-sicily
