the mediterranean and the indian ocean 471
attempting to plot the same routes is to misread as new a development that has a
much longer history and to misrecognize the intent and justifications of those who
followed in the wake of earlier empires. Vasco da Gama, Afonso de Albuquerque,
and those who sponsored them would likely have known the claims of Necho II, the
exploits of Alexander, and the foiled efforts of Augustus, and hoped to one-up these
great leaders of the past. Those living at the heart of Europe in the early sixteenth
century were certainly captivated with fascination for the wonders of India that the
Portuguese opening of the circum-Africa route brought. Albrecht Dürer fashioned a
woodcut of an Indian rhinoceros which had been given as a gift by the Indian king
of Gujarat to Afonso de Albuquerque, and passed by the latter on to the Portuguese
king in Lisbon, where its arrival caused such excitement that detailed descriptions
reached Germany and informed Dürer’s image (BM 1895,0122.714). Dürer himself
never saw this rhino; rather, he included on his woodcut’s inscription details about
the rhino gleaned not from personal observation but from Pliny’s millennium-and-
a-half old Natural History (NH, 8.29). An embodiment of Mediterranean expendi-
ture poured into acquiring Indian Ocean goods, the complexity of political–military
endeavors, early-modern awareness of their classical heritage and continuities, and
the supremely impractical if high ideological/propagandistic value of many of the
items that made their way from the east, the animal that came to be known as
“Dürer’s rhino” was lost when King Manuel of Lisbon sent it as a gift to Pope Leo
X and the ship carrying this Indian Ocean treasure sank to the bottom of the
Mediterranean Sea.
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