The cat sat on the mat
Medieval leopards, lions, and a cheetah in Peterborough
In February 1393 Henry of Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, son and heir of the great John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, visited the island kingdom of Cyprus. He and a close-knit band of friends and servants had just made a pilgrimage to the holy places of Jerusalem. Now they were on their way back across the eastern Mediterranean towards Venice, the glittering city where they had borrowed the galley in which they were travelling.
When they set sail again after a brief stay in Famagusta and Nicosia, they did so with a new companion, for whom a cabin had to be specially constructed and supplies freshly laid in. Henry was bringing a leopardus home to England.
Adding a big cat to the crew, it turned out, required quite a bit of managing.
They already had falcons on board, for which they had to find regular supplies of chickens as food, along with the fish, figs, olive oil, honey, bread, herbs, salt and wine they needed for Henry and his human company. But now, every time they put in to port, they also had to buy sheep, in quantity – one for every two or three days – to feed the leopardus.
Once they reached Venice and began travelling overland, the clerk keeping track of the household accounts became less specific about the animal’s diet: ‘meat’ was the most common item. One entry, for two days spent at Treviso, read simply ‘for the leopardus’s expenses’ (‘pro expensis leopardi’).
But it was nowhere explained how a big cat had come to join Henry’s household. A present from King James of Cyprus seems the most likely explanation – but why this particular choice of gift? And, behind that question, an even more fundamental one. What specific feline was it?
It’s hard to look at the Latin word leopardus and not see a leopard, but beware of the cat: for the people of medieval Europe, it wasn’t that simple.
They distinguished by name between the spotted ‘leopard’ and the black ‘panther’ – as we still do today, even though we now know they’re the same animal in different colourways. (Apologies: I’m no zoologist, but you get the gist.)
But a ‘pard’ – in Latin, pardus – could be either a leopard or a panther, or even overlap with the category of ‘lion’. Medieval bestiaries, following the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, supposed that a leopard – a leo-pard – was the hybrid offspring of an ‘adulterous’ union between a male pard and a lioness.
Not all medieval leopards had spots, therefore. In fact, the ‘three lions’ on the arms of England (and the chests of modern football shirts) were so interchangeably described as leopards that lions depicted in that specific position – passant guardant, in a walking pose with their heads turned full face – are now technically called ‘leopards’ in the vocabulary of heraldry.
Meanwhile, amid these indistinct hordes of pards and panthers, leopards and lions, there was no way to articulate – and no certain knowledge – that what we now call a cheetah is a completely different animal. (The word ‘cheetah’ arrived in English from India only in the eighteenth century.)
Leopards are big and muscular, with a large head and spots grouped in rosettes. Cheetahs are smaller, built like greyhounds, with long legs, a delicate head, face marked with dark ‘tear-streaks’, and fur patterned with small individual spots. Leopards are ferocious, and prohibitively difficult to tame. Cheetahs are the fastest land animal in the world; and they can be trained.
That fact offers our first clue about the nature of Henry’s leopardus. The animal came with a handler, variously described in the Latin account-book as custos, magister or gardianus (keeper, master or guardian), words that indicate authority and specialist knowledge. Henry spent significant amounts of money buying him equipment, horses, and – once they reached the chillier climate of France – a new set of clothes. In other words, the man had skills worth paying for, which means the animal was trained; and if the animal was trained, it was a cheetah.
Why would the rich and powerful in medieval Europe covet a trained specimen of the fastest land animal on earth? Like Henry’s falcons, the leopardus – his new cheetah – was intended for the hunt.
The Arab world, unlike the Latin west, had known for a long time how to tell the difference between a cheetah and a leopard. Hunting with cheetahs was well established in the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates in the tenth century; in the later middle ages it was practised in the Mamluk sultanate and in Byzantium, the Christian empire of the east. Trained cheetahs rode to the hunt on horses, seated behind their keepers, before being unleashed to chase down hares or gazelles at spectacular speed. By the thirteenth century, the thrill of the cheetah hunt had spread into southern Europe, into Sicily and Cyprus. The animal acquired no new name, but still: an Italian pilgrim who visited Famagusta and Nicosia in the 1390s reported that King James kept twenty-four leopardi – sometimes called ‘domestici leopardi’, ‘domesticated leopards’ – specifically for hunting.
The detail of Henry’s accounts makes clear that his gift from King James was a leopardus of exactly this kind. Once the party reached Italy and swapped the sea for the road home, payments were made for horses to be used by the keeper and by the leopardus: this was a cat that knew how to ride.
And in order to do so, it was a cat that, literally, sat on a mat. The ‘matte’ for which payment was made at Treviso – ‘pro leopardo’, the account says, ‘for the leopardus’ – must have been what was known as a horse carpet, a piece of thick and often richly ornamented fabric specially made so that cheetahs could ride to the hunt behind their handlers without ripping the horse’s hide to shreds.
The journey was long, but at last Henry and his cheetah came home to Peterborough, where his young wife Mary was waiting with their four little sons and new baby daughter. Back in Italy the duke of Milan, Henry’s new friend Gian Galeazzo Visconti, was enthusiastically adding cheetahs to his hunting stables. Petrarch had already written in his Trionfi of the speed with which a ‘leopard’ could chase a fleeing deer. But Peterborough, it seems, offered less conducive ground for a cheetah than Lombardy or Tuscany.
Mary preferred the quiet life of home and family to the spectacle of aristocratic display. She was pregnant again within weeks of Henry’s return, and died in the summer of 1394 after giving birth to their sixth child. In his grief, and under the darkening clouds of his cousin Richard’s rule, Henry had little inclination or opportunity to stage the elaborate theatre of a cheetah hunt.
Already, in the months after his return, payments had been made to an apothecary for supplies ‘pro leopardo’. The items bought for the animal on the journey from Cyprus had included spices, oils and unguents, and perhaps this was more of the same; or perhaps the cheetah, unused to the cold and damp, was ailing.
Either way, that’s the point at which Henry of Bolingbroke’s cheetah – tantalisingly – disappears into historical darkness.
So fascinating! I wonder if the trained hunting cheetahs were a bit smaller than our current wild cheetahs — thinking about the logistics of training a horse to tolerate having one riding on its back! The horses transporting the cheetahs during the hunt must have been incredibly well trained as well in order to go against their instincts to flee from predators like cheetahs. I’ve known horses who don’t mind having small barn cats on their backs, but I think a cheetah might be a different story! Loved learning about this — thank you!
Reminds me of “meeting” a cheetah once at an industry convention where a celebrity from the San Diego Zoo had a meet-and-greet for attendees. Approach the cheetah slowly and let him see your hand before you quietly stroke him….he sat upright with his head about level with my chest and purred like a Mazda on idle. Needless to say, I really enjoyed your post and remembered a mention of the cheetah from The Eagle and the Hart.