Hello dear community, at the beginning I would like to welcome you all to my new post and hope you had a day that has been full of positive experiences! In this post, I would like to shed more light on a historical topic and hope you can learn new things.
Recently I had the opportunity to take pictures of these wonderful pigeons and I would like to go into a little more detail about the importance of these animals during the Middle Ages. Even then, the pigeon was strongly anchored from a symbolic point of view in the Middle Ages and was revered as a peaceful animal and there was the view that if you had pigeons at home, they could protect you from negative influences and was closely connected to people at that time. Pigeons were also regarded as a religious animal that had the ability to contact higher worlds and in the beginning of the Middle Ages pigeons were mainly used as farm animals for food purposes and in the early Middle Ages it was even sometimes common to keep pigeons as pets and this privilege had particularly noble families and the tradition of keeping pigeons probably dates back to Roman times. Agriculture in particularly benefited from the breeding of pigeons as a source of food and a large market was created around these animals and they were considered valuable animals and have often been linked to their own property rights. During the time of Charlemagne from the Carolingian dynasty, the knowledge came to Europe that pigeons could also be used to deliver letters and the origin of this knowledge can probably be traced back to the Spaniards who shared their knowledge of how to train pigeons especially for these purposes and it did not take long until this potential was discovered and more and more people held pigeons for these purposes. At that time, it was considered very easy to keep pigeons because they looked for their own food and multiplied very quickly and therefore it was also considered a symbol of fertility and over the centuries, countless of different breedings were created. The pigeon also became more and more popular in heraldry and was depicted in more and more coats of arms and pigeons also had a great importance for the alchemists of the Middle Ages and were linked to transformation processes and according to alchemical philosophy, nigredo or blackness was also associated with a black raven which turned into a white pigeon which is connected by the albedo and then it was linked to the yellowness or citrinitas and in addition the pigeon was also associated with salt.
Thanks a lot for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about history! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens.
