Why are lions so popular in European heraldry if they don’t live in Europe?

Question

For example, there are lions on the coat of arms of Britain or Norway, but there are no lions there.

In: Other

Answer 1

There’s a lot of wrong or incomplete answers in this thread. Talking about extinct European lions is kind of a red herring because it doesn’t help people know what a lion is if somebody saw one a thousand years ago.

The real answer is books. We often forget that important medieval people were either literate themselves, or literary, in that they liked to hear stories and could get a literate person to read to them. There are lions in the bible, in classical literature, and in martyrdom stories of saints (fed to lions in the arena and all that). All of these kinds of literature made their way north with Christianity. People became familiar with symbolically important animals and their literary associations as a result, and they then got used in heraldry.

Moreover, Medieval Christians believed that the world itself was a kind of artifact of God, since God created everything in it, so cataloging everything in creation seemed like a worthwhile project. Hence, the medieval bestiary. A good example is the [Aberdeen Bestiary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberdeen_Bestiary) from the 12th century. Now crucially these were not field guides, they were not made by people going out into nature and observing all the animals that were there. Instead they were made by reading christian and classical texts and cataloging the references. So in the Aberdeen bestiary, for example, you can learn about lots of animals that the authors had never seen, but knew about from old texts, including lions, apes, and crocodiles, but also satyrs, basilisks and dragons.

It’s kind of funny to note here that because these texts don’t distinguish what is fantastical and what is real but exotic, there were probably a lot of cynical medieval people who assumed lions were made up. Or, there may have been knights who went on crusade expecting to see dragons and leucrottas and unicorns in the holy land as much as they expected to see lions and elephants.