Falcon currency..

A falcon perches on the arm, shoulder and head of its keeper. Falconry was a popular sport among the high officials in the Middle East, and many employed a falcon-master as part of their household.

In medieval times Falcons were so highly valued that they were worth more than their weight in gold when used as coinage in ransom negotiations. During one particularly bloody crusade in the late fourteenth century, the Ottoman Sultan Beyazid captured the son of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and turned down Philip's offer of 200,000 gold ducats for ransom. Instead, Beyazid wanted and was given something even more precious: twelve white gyrfalcons.

The birds were also used as offerings of peace. In 1276, the king of Norway sent eight gray and three white gyrfalcons to Edward I as a sign of peace. Three hundred years later, in 1552, Czar Ivan IV and Queen Mary I exchanged a gyrfalcon and a pair of lions after Russia and England established diplomatic relations.

Guillaume Tardif: Art of Falconry manuscript France: c. 1494 Sp Coll MS Hunter 269

The art of falconry has its origins in antiquity. For the medieval aristocracy, hunting with hounds or hawks was a consuming passion. A large literature of detailed, formal handbooks describing the procedures and rituals of hunting existed from the Thirteenth Century onwards. This manuscript compilation on the arts of hawking and the chase is a late example, commissioned by Charles VIII of France in around 1494. Beautifully written and magnificently illustrated throughout by lifelike pictures of birds, this manuscript demonstrates the perfection of book design achieved in France in the late Fifteenth Century.

The pages shown here are from the falconry part of the work; this includes a section that describes the signs of health and sickness in birds of prey. Hawks were prone to endless ailments and much of the falconer’s skill lay in maintaining the condition of the birds. Descriptions of ailments and medications usually form substantial sections of the medieval treatises on the art.