Hanno, the white elephant Manuel I sent to the Pope: Rome, 12 March 1514

At two in the afternoon of Sunday 12 March 1514, the Portuguese set off from a house and garden belonging to Cardinal Adriano, just outside the walls of Rome. The ambassadors of Poland, England, France, the Emperor, Castile, Milan, Venice, Lucca and Bologna had ridden out to greet them, and before the gates the papal masters of ceremonies put the whole procession in order.2 sources2 sources

Six trumpeters and six shawm players led the Portuguese column. Then came a hunting cat sitting on the crupper of a Persian horse behind its huntsman, and then the animal everyone had come to see: a young elephant, scrubbed clean, under a crimson cloth embroidered with the royal arms of Portugal, with a silver tower on its back holding the presents for the Pope. An Indian trainer sat astride its neck.2 sources2 sources

According to the American historian Silvio Bedini, a thunderstorm broke just as the column passed the Porta del Popolo and stopped as suddenly once it reached the piazza. People crammed the windows and the rooftops; constables had to force a way through the streets.2 sources2 sources

Pope Leo X watched from Castel Sant'Angelo, the papal fortress by the Tiber, while its guns fired salutes. When the elephant reached the castle it bowed three times. Then, Damião de Góis wrote, it filled its trunk from a great tub of water set there for the purpose and sprayed it so high that it went over the Pope's window and soaked many cardinals at the windows above, before turning to give the crowd the same treatment.2 sources2 sources

Giovanni de' Medici, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence, was elected pope on 11 March 1513 and took the name Leo X. He was a patron of scholars and artists, and under him Raphael finished the decoration of the Vatican rooms and directed the painting of the Loggia.1 source1 source

Manuel I had a great deal to announce. Portuguese ships had reached India in 1498, and in 1511 Afonso de Albuquerque had taken Malacca, the great market of the spice trade. On 6 June 1513 Manuel wrote to Leo about his successes in India, and the Pope's warm reply, along with news of victories in Morocco, persuaded the king to send an embassy of obedience grander than any before it.3 sources3 sources

There was business behind the show. Manuel wanted the new Pope to confirm his conquests and his rights over the churches of the lands he was taking, and Leo was known to love jewels and to keep a menagerie at the Vatican. The gifts were chosen with both facts in mind.2 sources2 sources

To lead the embassy Manuel chose Tristão da Cunha, who in 1506 had commanded the fleet that took Afonso de Albuquerque to India. With him went two doctors of law, Diogo Pacheco, a celebrated Latin orator, and João de Faria, and the courtier Garcia de Resende as secretary. Tristão also brought three of his sons, among them Nuno da Cunha, later governor of Portuguese India.3 sources3 sources

Damião de Góis later wrote that he was present when the elephant was embarked at the Cais da Pedra in Lisbon. It refused to step into the boat that would take it out to the ship. The king sent word twice to its Indian keeper, who told the animal, on the king's word, that it was going to a greater lord than Manuel and would be well treated, and that if it was not, it would be brought back to the same quay. Only then did it give two roars and go aboard, with tears running down its face.1 source1 source

Accounts of the embassy's size differ, depending on who was counted.2 sources2 sources

The ship called at Alicante, Ibiza and Majorca and reached Porto Ercole, a small harbour on the Tuscan coast then belonging to Siena, at the end of January 1514. At each port, crowds rowed out to look at the elephant and tried to climb aboard.2 sources2 sources

Tristão da Cunha rode ahead, reaching Rome on 14 February, and left Nicolau de Faria, a junior equerry of the king, to bring the elephant and the cat on at their own pace. The walk of about 70 miles was slow. People came from the fields and the towns to see the animal, the roads filled, and the elephant's feet were worn raw by the hard old Roman road.3 sources3 sources

Near the city the party took shelter in a cardinal's villa. The crowd, refused a look, broke holes in the walls and trampled the vineyards, and the Portuguese moved to the papal cannon foundry nearby to wait for the day of the entry.1 source1 source

On Monday 20 March, the Pope received the ambassadors in the first hall of the palace, seated on a raised dais among the cardinals. The secretary read Manuel's letter aloud, and Diogo Pacheco delivered his oration of obedience in Latin, describing the Portuguese conquests in Africa and Asia. Leo answered in Latin, at greater length than popes usually did, all of it in praise of the king and the Portuguese.2 sources2 sources

The gifts were presented the next day in the Belvedere, the Vatican's garden courtyard, because the elephant could not climb up to the palace. The vestments were passed from hand to hand among the cardinals. Then the Pope went into the garden to watch the elephant's tricks and the cat at work: animals were brought for it to hunt, and it killed them.2 sources2 sources

Leo was generous in return. He sent Manuel the Golden Rose, a papal honour for Catholic rulers. A bull of 7 June 1514 gave the king the right to appoint to church benefices in Africa and every other land taken overseas, under the Order of Christ, the Portuguese military order that Manuel governed. On 3 November 1514 the bull Praecelsae devotionis renewed all the earlier papal grants to Portugal and extended them to lands won from non-Christians anywhere, even lands still unknown.2 sources2 sources

Not everything Manuel asked for came to pass. His general requests, for a church council, reform of the Church and a war against the Turks, came to nothing, Góis noted. As Tristão was about to leave, the Pope offered him command of a fleet against a Turkish armada said to be heading for Sicily. Tristão declined, since he had no licence from his king, and the embassy left Rome in late May or early June.2 sources2 sources

The elephant stayed. The Romans called him Annone, which English writers turned into Hanno. Bedini thought the name came from the trainer's answer when asked what the animal was called: ana, the Malayalam word for elephant.1 source1 source

A shelter was built for him against the wall of the Corridore, the raised passage from the Vatican palace to Castel Sant'Angelo, where the Borgo met St Peter's Square. The area became known as the Borgo del Lionfante, and an inn called At the Sign of the Elephant served pilgrims across the street for a century. Leo visited often and let the public in to see Hanno every Sunday. His keeper was the Pope's chamberlain, Giovanni Battista Branconio.1 source1 source

Hanno danced to music and performed tricks, and he took part in papal processions through the city. The most famous was a joke played on Giacomo Baraballo, abbot of Gaeta, a poor poet who believed himself a new Petrarch.2 sources2 sources

On 20 May 1515 a ship from India brought Lisbon an animal no European had seen alive since Roman times. The rhinoceros, called ganda in India, was a gift from Sultan Muzaffar II of Gujarat to Afonso de Albuquerque, governor of Portuguese India, who sent it on to the king.3 sources3 sources

Ancient writers said elephants and rhinoceroses were born enemies, and Manuel wanted to see for himself. On 3 June 1515 the two animals were brought into a walled yard in front of the Casa da Índia, the crown's trading house by the river. The elephant was not Hanno, who was in Rome, but a young animal from the king's menagerie with tusks barely three palms long. The rhinoceros strained at its chain towards it. The elephant turned, forced its head through the iron bars of a window, bending two of them, and fled back through the streets to its quarters.3 sources3 sources

Pleased with how the elephant had gone down in Rome, Manuel sent the rhinoceros to the Pope too, with a set of gilded silver plate. Its ship, under João de Pina, called at Marseille, where Pina landed the animal so that King Francis I of France could see it. Off the coast of Liguria a storm sank the ship with everyone on board. The rhinoceros was washed ashore dead, and its skin, stuffed with straw, went on to Rome, where it arrived in February 1516.3 sources3 sources

Its image survived it. Letters and a sketch from Lisbon reached Nuremberg, and Albrecht Dürer, who never saw the animal, made a drawing and then a woodcut. He gave it armour-like plates and a small twisted horn on the shoulders that most rhinoceroses do not have, and that the Lisbon animal very probably lacked. The woodcut was copied in books and artworks for more than two centuries and became the standard picture of a rhinoceros.2 sources2 sources

In the first week of June 1516 Hanno fell ill. The Pope's own surgeon and the court physicians examined his blood and urine and diagnosed angina, a choking disease of the throat. They gave him a strong purgative, reportedly containing gold, and he died on 8 June.2 sources2 sources

Leo, himself unwell, wrote an epitaph that the court poet Filippo Beroaldo put into Latin verse, and had it carved on a marble tablet at the entrance to the Vatican. He then ordered Raphael to paint the elephant beside it, life-size and in its natural colours, so that the people of Rome would still have him to look at.3 sources3 sources

The painting and the inscription survived the sack of Rome in 1527. The Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda sketched both on his visit to Rome in 1538 or 1539, and his copies are now in the library of the Escorial, near Madrid. The wall was demolished about a century after Hanno's death, when Pope Paul V rebuilt the entrance to the Vatican, and the gate that replaced it later gave way to Bernini's colonnade.2 sources2 sources

Almost nothing of the embassy's gifts survives. In the late 1790s Pope Pius VI had to raise the ransom demanded by Napoleon's France under the Treaty of Tolentino, and the pearls and stones were stripped from old papal vestments, Manuel's among them. In February 1798 a French commissioner had the bare cloth burned in the Belvedere courtyard to recover the gold and silver thread.1 source1 source

Hanno himself turned up in February 1962. Workmen digging a pit for an air-conditioning unit in a corner of the Vatican Library courtyard found bones they first took for a dinosaur's. Specialists at the Smithsonian Institution identified parts of a jaw and a cheek tooth of a young Indian elephant under fifteen years old, and tusks of an elephant of the same age were later found at the Vatican. Bedini concluded they were Hanno's.3 sources3 sources

The embassy was a piece of political theatre with a legal purpose. Within eight months of the parade, Leo had confirmed Portugal's claims to lands taken from non-Christians anywhere on the eastern route, at a time when Portugal and Castile were arguing over whose side of the line the spice-rich Moluccas lay on.1 source1 source

Hanno also changed how Europeans drew elephants. Bedini found that the sketches made of him in Rome by Raphael and his assistants turned up for decades in the work of other artists, recognisable by the goad, the trainer, the ribbed ears and the short tusks. Dürer's rhinoceros, drawn from someone else's sketch, had an even longer life.2 sources2 sources