The Medieval view of Alexander the Great and elephants

The BL Medieval Manuscript blog has another post arising from the Alexander the Great: The Making of a Myth exhibition.

This one looks at how the romance tradition wrote about, and illustrated, Alexander’s way of dealing with elephants. It is clear that the elephant was well known to medieval western Europeans, even if actually seeing a living one - such as the one presented by King Louis IX to his brother-in-law King Henry III and drawn by Matthew Paris in his Chronicle - was indeed rare. 

The article can be seen at Alexander the Great versus the elephants