Chapter IV: Of Dragons in Modern Europe

It will be well to begin this section with short accounts of the two most satisfactory Renaissance dragons: the Dragon of Rhodes and the Dragon of Bologna.

“The history of the ancient Order of the Knights of St. John (not yet removed to Malta) records that about the year 1330 Dieudonné de Gozon, afterwards third Grand Master of the Order, joined the Knights in Rhodes, and was filled with pious zeal to kill a terrible dragon which ravaged the Island; but the then Grand Master considered such extravagant gaieties too dangerous for a knight vowed to the defence of Christendom, and roundly forbade it. On this de Gozon returned to the castle of his ancestors near Tarascon in France, and, with the help of an ingenious dummy dragon (so little does the art of war change), trained his horses and dogs to face the monster, and, returning, killed it and removed its tongue as evidence. A lying Greek (so little does the Greek nature change) found the carcase and claimed the victory; but de Gozon showed him up by producing the tongue――and was put in prison for disobedience. The Pfalzgraf Ottheinrich made our first written record of this feat when passing through on a pilgrimage in 1521, and the corroborative evidence is indisputable: the feat is said to have been recorded on the tombstone of the knight (we have the tombstone, and it isn’t); there are said to be pictures of it in a wall-painting in a house in Rhodes (which cannot be found); and the family are said to have preserved the draconite taken by the hero from the monster’s forehead (the family has disappeared); the head itself was seen by a seventeenth century traveller still nailed to a gate in Rhodes, though it disappeared during the last century. For countless years the simple islanders had displayed it for the glory of God and without thought of gain, and it would perhaps be uncharitable to connect its disappearance with the recent development of transatlantic transport, or with the discoveries of modern science, which have shown that the skeleton of the dun-cow at Warwick is simply that of a whale. And, finally, they will show you to this day in Rhodes the cave where the dragon lived.”

The story of the Dragon of Bologna is tame by comparison. It is recorded in great detail in _The Natural History of Serpents and Dragons_ by Professor Ulysses Aldrovandus, published at Bologna by Mark Antony Bernia in the year 1640, at his own charges, with a dedication to the Prince-Abbot Franciscus Perettus, and with the approval of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph, the Rector to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Bologna, and the legal adviser to the Most Holy Office of the Inquisition in that city.

The story is as follows (p. 402): “In the early summer of the year 1572, to wit on the 13th of May, the dragon appeared in the outskirts of Bologna, hissing horribly. It was caught the day after Ascension Day by a cowherd called Baptista of Camaldulus, about 5 P.M. and about seven miles out from the City, on the high road. His cows saw it and stopped dead, and Baptista, who was behind with his cart, pricked them on with his goad; but they went down on their knees and wouldn’t budge. Then he heard a great hissing and beheld the astounding monster: but though frightened out of his wits, he up with his stick and knocked it on the head so that it died. The brave herd, fearing it might not be dead, cut off one of its feet and brought it into Bologna as evidence. After three days the noble Horatius Fontana gave orders for the carcase to be sent to the great naturalist Aldrovandus, who declared it to be unique in all Italy and all Europe, and had it stuffed and put in the museum (whence it has unluckily disappeared). It was about this same time that the flying dragon appeared by night in the sky, and no sane man will doubt that these portents were sent in honour of Pope Gregory XIII, who took office in that year and who sported a dragon on his coat-of-arms.”

This same Aldrovandus is our chief source of information on the modern dragon. He sets out, in due scholastico-scientific style, first the alternative meanings of the word “dragon,” with a note that Virgil is very haphazard in his use of “dragon” or “serpent” for snakes in general; then the synonyms, as “syren,” “leviathan,” and the Hebrew _oach_ (whence perhaps our word “hoax”); then size――5 to 100 cubits (we may split the difference and safely say about 50); habitation――Libya, India, Atlas, Æthiopia, Florida, etc. (with a caution that the species born of a wolf and an eagle is probably fabulous and nowhere to be found); colour――red, black, ashen, pea-green, indeed the evidence is hopelessly conflicting; description――head of a virgin or wild-boar, goose-feet or talons or hoofs (they probably vary); St. Augustine confirms Herodotus’ opinion that they fly; poison――more virulent in the hotter climes; jaw――some say very large, some say very small, some say two rows of teeth, some say three, and the number is in any case uncertain; manners and customs――very vigilant and fond of gold (so we see why they are normally set to guard treasures), not afraid of men, and able to throw elephants with their tails: four or five, says Pliny, will twine their tails together for a long flight and so cover the distance at an incredible speed; very fierce, but Heracleides, the philosopher, had one so tame that it followed him about like a dog; birth――the evidence is conflicting as to whether from eggs or immediately. Remedies against their poison――red mullet applied externally or (better) internally, or (best of all) the head of a dragon skinned and applied to the bite. Capture――men of the most magnificent courage drug them with opium-seeds, so as to obtain the draconite; a scarlet cloak and the appropriate incantation are effective, and an axe has been tried with success: a useful trick is to catch them when they are preoccupied with an elephant-fight (their customary recreation), and another very good plan is to put down sulphur, which the creature eagerly gulps down and then moving to the nearest river drinks until it bursts. (This was the device of the great Cracus, who gave his name to Cracow. It is an elaboration of the Prophet Daniel’s method of dealing with Bal’s dragon――that holy man’s mixture, it will be remembered, itself exploded the dragon; but the march of science and the closer study of animal-habits no doubt made Cracus’ scheme more convincing.)

The eyes are precious stones and the teeth ivory; the fat is a sovereign remedy against poison, fever, and blear-eyes; the spine is a great cure for toothache; the gall-bladder and intestines mixed with wine effect more than was ever claimed for Colman’s mustard in the bath, removing warts. It is very lucky to bury a dragon’s head under the front doorstep, and the eyes make a fine poison and send away nightmares: and so on and so forth――all this less than three centuries ago.

A little later, about 1660, the learned Jesuit Kircher visited the Alps, and, though discounting many devils as due to the credulity of the peasantry, could not resist the conclusion that so horrid and inhospitable a country could only have been intended by God to harbour dragons, especially when a public notice in the Church of St. Leodegarius (our old friend St. Leger, the patron-saint of bookmakers?) in Lucerne told how a man “paused some months in a cave with two dragons, who were either naturally amiable or were calmed by his energetic appeals to the Virgin, and finally escaped by holding on to their tails when they flew away after their period of hybernation” (History does not record whether they adopted Pliny’s plan, or whether by a merciful dispensation of Providence they flew so close together that he suffered no strain).

The anonymous author of _The Golden Coast, or a Description of Guinney_ (London, 1665) has little reliable information on this or any other subject. The people, he tells us, are Nigritæ “from their colour, which they are so much in love with that they use to paint the Devil white”; and of the elephant, “which some call Oliphant,” that “they have continual war against dragons which desire their blood because it is very cold.” The book abounds in such old tales out of Pliny and Bartholomew Anglicus, and has all the appearance of a literary puff of the Company of Royal Adventures of England trading to Africa (est. 1662); for what honest man could have waxed so enthusiastic over that death-trap of a country, where (says he) “a man may gain an estate by a handfull of beads, and his pocket full of gold for an old hat; where a cat is a tenement and a few fox tails a Mannor; where gold is sold for iron, and silver given for brasse and pewter?” The Company failed shortly afterwards and was replaced by the Royal African Company (1672), and this may well have been to over-spending in the Advertising Department.

Doctor Thomas Browne, in his “_Enquiries into very many received tenents, and commonly presumed truths_” (London, 1686) (commonly called Browne’s _Vulgar Errors_) is more modern, but, he, like a sensible man takes a middle path between scepticism and faith――thinks we cannot safely deny that there is such an animal as the basilisk; but we are not to confuse it with the cockatrice, a mere hieroglyphical fancy, though even the cockatrice he will not declare to be impossible (he does not see how such an oddity _can_ be hatched from “a cock’s egg” (_sic_: the phenomenon occurs only in a cock’s eighth year, and causes it acute discomfort put under a toad or serpent)); but many inventions, he says, are really “the courteous revelations of spirits,” and we must not be too cocksure of our merely human faculties.

Scheuchzer, the learned Botanist who toured the Alps in the first ten years of the eighteenth century, frankly adopted the compromise implicit in Aldrovandus――always to believe half of what he was told; but he thought the dragon-stone in the museum at Lucerne entirely convincing; for (says he) a dishonest man would not have invented so simple a story as its falling from the sky――but rather some fabulous tale about its coming from the farthest Indies; and the stone not only cures simple hæmorrhages, which ordinary jasper or marble might well do, but dysentery and fevers and all those ills of which, to judge from the advertisements in the local press, Glastonians may now rid themselves so much more simply. Item, a respectable citizen returned home one evening lately “with a swimming in the head and a marked uncertainty about the motions of his legs, and how can we doubt his word when he attributes these unprecedented phenomena to the influence of the dragon who encountered him in the forest?” Scheuchzer’s scientific journals were published at the expense of the Royal Society of London. Credible witnesses of to-day maintain that “not the vestige of a dragon is to be found, even in those wildest regions of the Alps which ... were especially adapted for their generation.” Thus do beauty and romance fade before the advance of Winter Sports and Grand Babylon Hôtels.

_References_: Aldrovandus, _op. cit._

Thomas Browne, _op. cit._

Leslie Stephen, _The Playground of Europe_ (London, 1871).

E. Ray Lankester, _Science from an Easy Chair_ (London, 1910).

F. W. Hasluck, _The Dragon of Rhodes_ (British School at Athens, 1914).