Falkenhaube

Europe witnessed a renewed flowering of falconry that began in the High Middle Ages and was probably inspired by contact with the Middle East – the use of leather hoods for the trained birds of prey before and after they were flown was pioneered in the Arab world. In his treatise De arte venandi cum avibus (‘On the Art of Hunting with Birds’), written in the 1240s, Emperor Frederick II noted that the Arabs had been the first in the Middle East to introduce such hoods, and because we ‘appreciated their great usefulness we, too, decided to use the hoods’.

This hood is one of a set of five (originally there were probably at least six) almost identical objects. Two of the extant hoods were worn by hawks, three by falcons. The cheekpieces of each hood are decorated with an escutcheon; one side shows the emblems of the Order of the Golden Fleece (St Andrew’s cross and fire steel), the other the royal Roman-German eagle emblazoned with the arms of Hungary, Austria, Burgundy, and the Tyrol. On one hood, the emblems of the order have been replaced by the arms of Milan-Savoy.

These heraldic devices allow us to attribute the hoods to King Maximilian I and his second wife, Bianca Maria Sforza, and to date them to between 1494 and 1508; Maximilian married Bianca Maria Sforza, the daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan and Bona of Savoy, in 1494. Maximilian was proclaimed Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1508, after which he replaced the single-headed (German) royal eagle in his coat of arms with the double-headed imperial eagle.