A few months before the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, workers were digging in the Vatican’s Belvedere courtyard to work on an air conditioning system and to their surprise, found very large animal bones.
At first, they thought to had found a dinosaur but the bones were not fossilized. When the custodian of the Vatican Library collection had examined them, he concluded that they belonged to a contemporary mammal – an elephant.
But how did elephant bones got to be buried in the middle of a Vatican courtyard?
The origins of the bones remained a mystery until the 1990s, when the Smithsonian’s Historian Emeritus, Silvio Bedini, finally pieced the story together.
He published the results of his research in 1997, in “The Pope’s Elephant.”
The story dates back to the 16th century when on 9th March, 1513, Giovanni Lorenzo de’ Medici was elected Pope Leo X.
The elephant was named Hanno after the Carthaginian sovereign and seaman and it was the gift of King Manuel I of Portugal on the Pope’s coronation. Hanno was the first elephant that had been seen in Rome since the Roman Empire.
Born in Cochin (India) in 1510 and then shipped to King Manuel I in Lisbon, the rare albino elephant became a real sensation when he arrived in 1514.
It is said that when Hanno entered Rome in a grand procession, he stopped in front of Castel St Angelo (where Pope Leo was watching) and knelt to the ground.
Pope Leo X loved the elephant and ordered for a special enclosure to be made only for Hanno between St. Peter’s Basilica and the Apostolic Palace, which he opened to the public on every weekend.
The Pope Leo X wanted to thank King Manuel for the extraordinary gift so he wrote him a letter:
“The elephant brought a great astonishment to the whole world, as much from the memories it evoked from the ancient past, for the arrival of similar beast was fairly frequent in the days of ancient Rome … One is almost tempted to put faith in the assertion of the idolaters who pretend that there is a certain affinity between these animals and mankind. The sight of this quadruped provides us with the greatest amusement and has become an object of extraordinary wonder to our people.”
Hanno lived for two years in Rome and in 1516, he suffered from respiratory issues. He was given a treatment that included gold which poisoned the pachyderm and he died the next day.
Pope Leo loved Hanno enough that he buried him beneath a courtyard and he even commissioned the great artist Raphael to paint a fresco in Hanno’s honor. Leo composed a lengthy memorial epitaph that accompanied the painting.