The king pitted a rhino against an elephant. The elephant fled.

The story

In May 1515 a rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon from India, the first live one in Europe since Roman times. On 3 June King Manuel I decided to test Pliny's claim that elephants and rhinos are bitter enemies. A young elephant was brought out before a crowd. It panicked at the noisy crowd and fled before a single blow was struck.

Context

The rhino was a gift from Sultan Muzaffar of Cambay (Gujarat) to the governor Afonso de Albuquerque, who sent it on to Manuel after a four-month voyage. It lived in Europe from 20 May 1515 to January 1516. A year earlier Manuel had sent Pope Leo X an elephant, Hanno, and in December 1515 he decided to send the rhino too. The ship sank in a storm off La Spezia at the end of January 1516, and the animal drowned. Accounts of the body differ: most say it washed ashore and was stuffed and sent on to the Pope, others that the skin went back to Lisbon first. We found no trace of a stuffed rhino today. Albrecht Dürer never saw it: he worked from a sketch and a description from Lisbon, but his woodcut, with its extra horn on the shoulder, became Europe's standard rhinoceros for centuries. In Lisbon, a stone rhinoceros is thought to look out from a corner turret of Belém Tower, built in those same years.

Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, 1515. Woodcut. National Gallery of Art, Washington (Rosenwald Collection).Image: Albrecht Dürer · Licence: CC0 · Source: Wikimedia Commons