The collections, too, of foreign animals not only gratified curiosity, but served also the higher purposes of observation. The facility of transport from the southern and eastern harbours of the Mediterranean and the mildness of the Italian climate, made it practicable to buy the largest animals of the south, or to accept them as presents from the Sultans.[666] The cities and princes were especially anxious to keep live lions, even when the lion was not, as in Florence, the emblem of the state.[667] The lions’ den was generally in or near the government palace, as in Perugia and Florence; in Rome, it lay on the slope of the Capitol. The beasts sometimes served as executioners of political judgments,[668] and no doubt, apart from this, they kept alive a certain terror in the popular mind. Their condition was also held to be ominous of good or evil. Their fertility, especially, was considered a sign of public prosperity, and no less a man than Giovanni Villani thought it worth recording that he was present at the delivery of a lioness.[669] The cubs were often given to allied states and princes, or to Condottieri, as a reward of valour.[670] In addition to the lions, the Florentines began very early to keep leopards, for which a special keeper was appointed.[671] Borso[672] of Ferrara used to set his lions to fight with bulls, bears, and wild boars. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, true menageries (serragli), now reckoned part of the suitable appointments of a court, were kept by many of the princes. ‘It belongs to the position of the great,’ says Matarazzo,[673] ‘to keep horses, dogs, mules, falcons, and other birds, court-jesters, singers, and foreign animals.’ The menagerie at Naples, in the time of Ferrante and others, contained a giraffe and a zebra, presented, it seems, by the ruler of Bagdad.[674] Filippo Maria Visconti possessed not only horses which cost him each 500 or 1,000 pieces of gold, and valuable English dogs, but a number of leopards brought from all parts of the East; the expense of his hunting-birds which were collected from the countries of Northern Europe, amounted to 3,000 pieces of gold a month.[675] ‘The Cremonese say that the Emperor Frederick II. brought an elephant into their city, sent him from India by Prester John,’ we read in Brunetto Latini; Petrarch records the dying out of the elephants in Italy.[676] King Emanuel the Great of Portugal knew well what he was about when he presented Leo X. with an elephant and a rhinoceros.[677] It was under such circumstances that the foundations of a scientific zoology and botany were laid.