I have been watching Vikings and noticed this in one of the recent episodes. I believe that Ragnar Lothbrok, who is the main character of the show and a Viking leader, was shown in his field tent with a rat in one hand and a python in the other. Separately, the character of Queen Kwenthrith of the English Kingdom of Mercia is shown, presumably in her palace/castle, in a room with cages holding monkeys and parrots, and maybe other animals too. It is worth noting that the Queen is portrayed as an off-the-rails type character, you know, the type where you're like "of course she's got monkeys". Additionally, when the Viking leader is shown with the rat and python (the snake looked like a ball python or a snake that otherwise came from very very far away), it seemed as if there was possibly some religious connotation or that it was associated with preparing for an upcoming battle. Generally, the Vikings are portrayed on the show as having pagan rituals that seem to heavily involve animals and animal sacrifice (note I have little to no historical knowledge regarding the shows accuracy).
So what is the context for these royal figures having these kinds of animals, is this purely added entertainment value, was this a general practice, or were these specific animals actually owned/'used' historically? I'm interested in the case of these early Viking, English, and Frankish kingdoms that are depicted on the show (I think in the period of 800-1000 CE) , but if anyone has some specialized knowledge in the history of exotic animals at royal courts I'd be curious to hear about the practice from any time or place. If real, was this mostly done in the way any other thing of value would be collected, to simply display court wealth and prestige? Or did some animals have religious or political connotations and other attached significances?
So, there actually is a specific instance in history that I can talk about here, and it is a tale of Charlemagne, the Abbasid court, international diplomacy, and an elephant.
During the early Middle Age, the Roman Emperor Charlemagne (crowned as emperor by the Pope on Christmas Day in 800) was the most powerful ruler in Western Europe. However, abroad there were much larger and richer lands. The Byzantine Empire (or Eastern Roman in you prefer) had not looked kindly on Charlemagne's pretension to imperial titles, and both the Franks and Abbasids had grievances to air with the Ummayads of Spain. So a rapprochement between the two realms, ignoring their religious divide (and the vast geographic distances) made diplomatic sense, and economic sense as well, given that neither group competed directly with each other in trade. Abbasid trade was largely linked into the far East routes through the silk road and Arabian/Indian trade and Frankish trade was centered on the Rhine and North Sea (the Mediterranean trade ways had become less lucrative in the aftermath of Roman collapse).
At the time the Abbasid Caliphate was at the height of its power under Harun al-Rashid and there is evidence that both powers had earlier contacts with each other, but I'm going to focus specifically on the overlap of these two individuals, Charlemagne and Harun al-Rashid.
At this time diplomacy (and government) in western Europe was highly personal and focused on the exchange of gifts between people of importance. The great lords of the early Middle Ages were the ones who were the most generous with their gift giving and able to muster the most supporters because of their generosity (this would of course also extend beyond physical gifts such as rings, weapons, novelties etc... and also include lands). This also applied to international diplomacy, and over the course of diplomatic embassies it was normal for gifts to be exchanged between the two parties as a symbol of friendship. These gifts could be practical (such as jewelry, expensive fabrics, money for the construction of certain buildings), symbolic (exchanges of words of friendship and guardianship), but also novelties. Among the novelties that Charlemagne received from the East were items such as a chiming clock, chess pieces, and a live elephant named Abul-Abbas. The elephant apparently survived for some time in Europe at Charlemagne's court before dying in the year 810 while Charlemagne was on campaign.
I cannot speak the presence specifically of the animals shown in the tv show, monkeys, parrots, etc, but there was at least one elephant that went from its home in the far east and lived at the court of an early Medieval monarch and did so for several years.
The range of OP's question is so broad that I afraid whether I can answer in enough depth in a single post (so sorry for a bit cluttering to the links to some of my previous posts concerning the topic).
First of all, the Vikings certainly practiced animal sacrifices mainly as a part of their seasonal offering (blót), though I'm not so sure whether its portrait in TV show is totally accurate in accordance with the extant written sources as well as archaeological finds.
The following passage is taken from the writing of Thietmar of Merseburg, a early 11th century bishop in Germany and I regard this as the most trustworthy written account of the human/ animal sacrifice than famous Adam of Bremen on the sacrifice feast held in Gamla Uppsala, Sweden:
'.....In those parts, the center of the kingdom [of the Danes] is a place called as Lejre, in the region of Seeland [Sjaelland in Denmark]. Every nine years, in the month of January, after the day on which we celebrate the appearance of the Lord [6 January], they all convene here and offer their gods a burnt offering of ninety-nine human beings and as many horses, along with dogs and cocks - the later being used in place of hawks. As I said, they were convinced that they would do service for them with those who dwell beneath the earth and ensure their forgiveness for any misdeeds. Our King [Henry I of Germany] did well when he forbade them to practise [sic] such an execrable rite......' (Thietmar, I-17, Warner (trans.) 2001: 80).
Emphasis on the names of some animals (as well as humans) are done by me.
Several skeletons of Horse, dogs, and hawks (exactly speaking, gyrfalcons were favored, see also In the "Life of King Alfred" the author mentions both "Falconers" (falconarios) and "Hawk-handlers" (accipitrarius). What was the difference between the two) have been found in the graves from Viking Age Scandinavia, so they can be categorized as animals (and birds) pretty close to the Scandinavians already during that period, probably also held as pets. As I mentioned in Did the vikings have dogs? What kind? Are there depictions of them in their art?, 10th century Danes buried a dog leashes for hounds, together with hounds themselves, in a human grave. Not only the buried had a deep affection to these hounds, however, the act of burying the elite with hounds could be also regarded as a kind of status symbol as well, as suggested that geese (!) might have played a similar role in Denmark in Roman Iron Age (source: note: linked to tertiary article)
I suppose that not only dogs (hounds), but also hawks (especially gyrfalcons and falcons) should have belonged to 'historically useful' categories of animals and birds already in the Middle Ages, as proposed in Were gifts between kings supposed to be useful?
On the other hand, as for snakes (not pythons), we can confirm that some Old Norse (male) names like Ormr ('snake' itself) deriving from the snake were present in Scandinavian runic inscriptions from the Viking Age (not earlier, though). While I cannot say for sure whether any of the Scandinavians held snakes as pets, as assumed by the literal tradition of 'snake pit' in which Ragnar was put into to be executed, they were at least fairly familiar with snakes (Jennbert 2011: 184-88). As I illustrated in We know that ravens have a significant role in Norse Mythology, with Odins two ravens, but what were the real life vikings relationship with these birds like?, I'd also like to put ravens into the same category of animals/ birds as snakes. (familiar, but not pets). Ravens occupied a prominent place in a war imaginary of the Vikings, featured in their banner as well as poems, but we don't have any extant archaeological evidence of their remains from human graves.
I also mentioned in How did medieval people capture and transport dangerous animals while keeping them alive? that medieval Norse settlers in Iceland and Greenland sometimes 'exported' polar bears, in addition to gyrfalcons to the ruler of Continental Europe as diplomatic gifts.
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Then, I suppose it's time to turn our focus from the Scandinavians to the Europeans in Early Medieval West. To our disappointment, I don't know any evidence that neither a monkey nor a parrot was held as pets, as shown in TV show, in the Early Middle Ages.....at least prior to the 13th century for the latter (I'll return to this topic in the last of this post).
British as well as Frankish elites were known to practice hunting with hounds and falcons. While 2nd (local) church council of Mâcon in Merovingian France forbade the clergy to have falcons in 585 (that presupposed the relatively widespread holding of these kind of birds of prey), a Pict cross-slab in Elgin Cathedral, Scotland, depicts a hawk (?) on the shoulder of the standing figure, probably representing the hunting noble.
On the other hand, we can encounter some exotic animals in the court of King/ Emperor Charlemagne of the Franks (d. 814) for sure: He had a menagerie in his court, and the biggest animal he held there was an elephant. A biographer of Charlemagne (Einhard) states that the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid present this elephant, called Abulabaz, to the king of the Franks as a sign of friendship, and a Jew merchant was responsible for the transport of the elephant by way of the Mediterranean to Northern Italy (Portovenere, If I remember correctly). In short, the presence of the exotic animals mainly represented the connection of the Europeans with the Mediterranean as well as the global Islam trade as well as cultural network that extended far into the Indian ocean (iconographic sources suggests that Abulabaz had indeed possibly come from India to the Middle East at first, i.e. he? was an Indian elephant). During the Crusading period, some more European rulers like King Louis IX of France (d. 1270) and King Henry III of England were known to have a elephant as a symbol of wealth and prestige (as for the latter, we can see the illustration in the contemporary manuscript in this linked blog entry)
Recently, another surprisingly 'exotic' visitor to the court of medieval European rulers has newly been identified: Emperor Frederick II of HRE (d. 1250) loved the falconry and wrote himself a treatise of the ornithology as well as the falconry, called de arte venandi cum Avibus ('The Art of Hunting with Birds'). A (probably female) cockatoo illustrated in the manuscript of this emperor's work turns out to have been of Australian origin (see this newspaper article for the illustration) (Dalton 2018). The research supposes that she was a diplomatic gift to the emperor of HRE from the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, and it was customary for the Islamic rulers to exchange this kind of exotic animals each other (Cf. Takayama 2010). Without the very extensive, Eurasian-wide trading networks of the Islamic merchants in the 12th and 13th centuries, she could not arrive in the court of Frederick in Southern Italy (probably in Sicily) more than almost 3 centuries before the first circumnavigation by Magellan.
Then, the last question remains: How wide this trade network, backed by the Abbasid Empire, was extended in the oceans in South-Eastern Asia in ca. 800 to transmit the parrot to Anglo-Saxon England? Up to India, as testified by Abulabaz? Certainly. But beyond that, I'm not so certain at that time. It's worth noting that a wreck of the Islam (Persian) dhow was found near Java and dated to about the middle of the 9th century, however.
Selected References:
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