the Crusades

The Crusades appear in Helen Macdonald’s history of falconry as a period when hawks crossed cultural and political boundaries. Frankish knights learned to use falcon hoods from Arab falconers, and a king’s gyrfalcon became the subject of diplomacy at the Siege of Acre. The episode makes a small, carefully made piece of falconry equipment a point of entry into a larger history of exchange, status, and war.

Falconry across cultures

Macdonald emphasizes that the hood was not a European invention. Frankish knights learned its use from Arab falconers during the Crusades, a history reflected in the range of hoods she considers: from American and Bahraini designs to Syrian, Turkmen, Afghan, Indian, and Central Asian examples. The hood’s varied forms register falconry as a practice shaped through contact across regions, rather than as the possession of one culture.

That history becomes political as well as technical. Macdonald writes that a shared love of falconry made hawks political pawns in the wars of the Crusades. The bird and the equipment used to handle it therefore carry meanings beyond hunting: they belong to a world in which admiration for an animal could intersect with rivalry, authority, and claims of possession.

The gyrfalcon at Acre

Macdonald recounts an episode involving a white gyrfalcon owned by King Philip I of Spain. During the Siege of Acre, the bird broke its leash and flew to the city walls. Philip sent an envoy to request its return; Saladin refused. Philip then sent another envoy, accompanied by trumpets, ensigns, and heralds, offering a thousand gold crowns for the falcon.

The account gives the bird an unusual role within the conflict: it is not merely a possession lost in the confusion of war, but the focus of a formal request and an elaborate offer. Macdonald cannot recall whether the falcon was returned. That uncertainty leaves the episode’s emphasis on the negotiation itself, and on the extraordinary value attached to the bird, rather than on a known outcome.

The hood and the meaning of control

The Acre story comes to Macdonald while she is examining a modern hood made by the American falconer Doug Pineo. Its near-weightlessness and fine workmanship prompt her to think about the long history of hoods, including their use in distant wars. The object’s practical purpose—covering a hawk’s eyes to keep it quiet—becomes inseparable from questions about ownership and control.

Her reflections also turn toward modern photographs of a hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib. Macdonald does not treat the two histories as identical; instead, the association reveals how the word and image of a hood can gather meanings beyond falconry. The historical connection to the Crusades thus becomes part of a present-tense unease about what it means to calm, possess, or restrict another being.

Status and the history of hunting

The Crusades sit within a wider history in which falconry was shaped by unequal access to land and leisure. Macdonald contrasts falconry with goshawk training: a goshawk’s close-range dash from the fist makes it possible to fly the bird in many places, whereas flying falcons properly requires open ground such as grouse moors, partridge manors, or extensive farmland—resources more readily available to the wealthy or well connected. Historical writing accordingly associates the noble falcon with aristocratic privilege and casts the solitary austringer, who trains goshawks and sparrowhawks, as socially inferior.

Her comparison with hunting in Maine sharpens the point. There, common-law access to land is described as supporting a more egalitarian hunting tradition, unlike Britain’s exclusive estates and sporting grounds. Against this broader contrast, the falcon episode at Acre is more than a colorful incident: it belongs to a history in which birds, land, and the right to hunt are entangled with social rank and political power.