Medieval people dreamed of taking to the skies long before balloons and aeroplanes became reality. From daring inventors strapping on wings to fantastical tales of flying ships and sky-borne creatures, the Middle Ages was full of attempts—both real and imagined—to conquer the air. Some ventures ended in spectacular failure, others in lasting legends, but all reveal the ingenuity, curiosity, and boldness of people who refused to keep their feet on the ground.
Myths and Legends of Medieval Flight
For inspiration, medieval people could turn to tales from the distant past. One of the best-known was the Greek myth of Daedalus, who crafted wings for himself and his son Icarus. The daring escape ended in tragedy when Icarus soared too close to the sun, melting the wax in his wings and sending him plunging into the sea.
Christian tradition also offered cautionary tales. In early accounts, the sorcerer Simon Magus confronted Saint Peter in Rome, claiming divine powers. Before a crowd in the Roman forum, he began to rise into the air. Peter prayed for God to stop him, and Simon fell heavily to the ground—only for the angry onlookers to set upon him.
Alexander the Greats flying machine – Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Français 9342 . fol.180v
Not all legends ended in disaster. One story about Alexander the Great tells of his desire to see the entire world from above. He is said to have harnessed giant birds—or even mythical griffins—to pull a carriage high into the sky. The image of Alexander in flight proved enduring, appearing in manuscripts and artwork from medieval Europe to the Middle East.
Using wings: Imitating the birds
In the western medieval world, attempts to fly were often inspired by the movements of birds. One of the earliest recorded efforts comes from al-Andalus around the year 875, when a physician and inventor named ‘Abbas ibn Firnas set out to test his own wings. Chronicler al-Maqqari describes the event in detail:
Among other very curious experiments which he made, one is trying to fly. He covered himself with feathers for the purpose, attached a couple of wings to his body, and getting on an eminence, flung himself down into the air, when, according to the testimony of several trustworthy writers who witnessed the performance, he flew a considerable distance, as if he had been a bird, but in alighting again on the place whence he had started his back was very much hurt, for not knowing that birds when they alight come back down upon their tails, he forgot to provide himself with one.
Other figures tried similar feats. The English chronicler William of Malmesbury records the story of Eilmer, another monk at Malmesbury Abbey, who launched himself into the air in the first decade of the eleventh century:
By the standards of those days he was a good scholar, advanced in years by now, though in his first youth he had taken a terrible risk: by some art, I know not what, he had fixed wings to his hands and feet, hoping to fly like Daedalus, whose fable he took to be true. Catching the breeze from the top of a tower, he flew for the space of a stade and more; but with the violence of the wind and eddies, and at the same time his consciousness of the temerity of his attempt, he faltered and fell, and even thereafter he was an invalid and his legs were crippled. He himself used to give as a reason for his fall, that he forgot to fit a tail on his hinder parts.
If this account is accurate, Eilmer’s flight covered more than 200 metres—lasting perhaps 15 seconds—before ending on Olivers Lane, a spot still pointed out in local lore.
Medieval images of angels, like these from the 11th century, depict them with wings and able to fly. British Library Harley MS 603, fol 9r.
Not all such flights had survivors. In the Iranian city of Nishapur, one scholar attempted to fly from the top of a minaret using two large wooden wings. They failed instantly, and he plunged to his death.
Some flights, however, were never intended to leave the ground. The thirteenth-century chronicler Salimbene de Adam tells of a teacher at Bologna named Boncompagno of Florence, notorious for his mischief. One day, Boncompagno announced he would take to the air. Word spread quickly, and crowds of men, women, and children went to a nearby mountain to watch. Salimbene recounts what happened next:
Boncompagno had constructed wings for himself, and he stood on top of the mountain looking down at them. And after they had been gazing at each other for a long period of time, he shouted down to them audaciously, “Go, with God’s blessing, and let it suffice that you have looked upon the face of Boncompagno.” Then they had all departed, realising full well that he had been mocking them the whole time.
Kites in Asia: Riding the wind
On the eastern side of the medieval world, attempts at flight took a very different form: kites. Made of paper, they originated in ancient China, but by the medieval period they were common and used for both recreation and military purposes. In the thirteenth century, for example, Chinese troops fighting the Mongols sent kites carrying written messages to their captured comrades, urging them to revolt and escape.
One of the most remarkable accounts of kite use comes from the sixth century, when Emperor Gao Yang of the Northern Qi Dynasty carried out a purge of his rivals. From his palace in the city of Ye, he devised a particularly grim execution method:
Gao Yang made Yuan Huang-Thou and other prisoners take off from the Tower of the Golden Phoenix attached to paper (kites in the form of) owls. Yuan Huang-Thou was the only one who succeeded in flying as far as the Purple Way, and there he came to earth. But then he was handed over to the President of the Censorate, Pi I-Yun, who had him starved to death.
By one estimate, Yuan Huang-Thou managed to travel two-and-a-half kilometres before landing—an impressive achievement, though his success did not save his life.
The popularity of using kites to lift people even reached the ears of Marco Polo. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, the Venetian merchant described how Chinese ship captains used the practice to predict whether a voyage would be fortunate:
And so we will tell you [he says] how when any ship must go on a voyage, they prove whether her business will go well or ill. The men of the ship will have a hurdle, that is a grating, of withies, and at each corner and side of this framework will be tied a cord, so that there be eight cords, and they will all be tied at the other end to a long rope. Next they will find some fool or drunkard and they will bind him on the hurdle, since no one in his right mind or with his wits about him would expose himself to that peril. And this is done when a strong wind prevails.
Then the framework being set up opposite the wind, the wind lifts it and carries it up into the sky, while the men hold on by the long rope. And if while it is in the air the hurdle leans towards the way of the wind, they pull the rope to them a little so that it is set again upright, after which they let out some more rope and it rises higher. And if again it tips, once more they pull in the rope until the frame is upright and climbing, and then they yield rope again, so that in this manner it would rise so high that it could not be seen, if only rope were long enough.
The augury they interpret thus; if the hurdle going straight up makes for the sky, they say that the ship for which the test has been made will have a quick and prosperous voyage, whereupon all the merchants run together for the sake of sailing and going with her. But if the hurdle has not been able to go up, no merchant will be willing to enter the ship for which the test has been made, because they say that she could not finish her voyage and would be oppressed by many ills. And so that ship stays in port that year.
From China, kite technology spread to other parts of East Asia. In Japan, a tenth-century dictionary described them as Kami Tobi—“paper hawks.” Large kites were sometimes used to carry people, for instance to bypass the walls of a fortress.
In Europe, kites did not appear until after the Middle Ages, but similar devices were known. The windsock, for example, was familiar and sometimes adapted for military purposes. The historian Clive Hart records cases where windsock-like kites were used in warfare. A 1326 illustration in De nobilitatibus, sapientiis, et prudentiis regum by Walter de Milemete shows such a device being used to drop an incendiary onto a town.
The sketch found in De nobilitatibus, sapientiis, et prudentiis regum, by Walter de Milemete
The Bellifortis, a military manual written by Konrad Kyeser in the early fifteenth century, offers a vivid description of this kind of flying war machine:
The flying dragon may be made with parchment for the head, the middle of linen, but the tail of silk, the colours various. At the end of the head let a triple harness be attached to the wood, moved by the middle of the flail. Let the head be raised into the wind, and when it has been lifted two men may hold the head while the third carries the reel. It follows him while he rides. The movement of the line causes the flight to vary up and down, to right and left. Let the head be coloured red and made to look real, the middle should be of moon-silver colour, the end of several colours.
Rider with a dragon kite – Bellifortis, Clm 30150 fol 91v
The sky ships in Ireland
The Annals of Ulster record a strange event in the year 749: “Ships with their crews were seen in the air above Clonmacnoise.”
Clonmacnoise was one of medieval Ireland’s most important monastic centres, and over time it became the focal point of legends about flying ships. The stories survive in scattered accounts and even in an eighth-century carving that may allude to the phenomenon.
The Irish writer Seamus Heaney created this poem referencing the airship of Clonmacnoise is his 1991 work Seeing Things.
One of the most detailed versions appears in the Konungs skuggsjá, a Norwegian text written around 1250. There, the author describes what he calls “the most wonderful” thing to happen at Clonmacnoise:
And there it thus befell on a Sunday, when people were at church and were hearing Mass, there came dropping from the air above an anchor, as if it were cast from a ship, for there was a rope attached to it. And the fluke of the anchor got hooked in an arch at the church door, and all the people went out of the church and wondered, and looked upwards after the rope. They saw a ship float on the rope and men in it. And next they saw a man leap overboard from the ship, and dive down towards the anchor, wanting to loosen it. His exertion seemed to them, by the movement of his hands and feet, like that of a man swimming in the sea. And when he came down to the anchor, he endeavoured to loosen it. And then some men ran towards him and wanted to seize him. But in the church, to which the anchor was fastened, there is a bishop’s chair.
The bishop was by chance on the spot, and he forbade the men to hold that man, for he said that he would die as if he were held in water. And as soon as he was free he hastened his way up again to the ship; and as soon as he came up, they cut the rope, and then sailed on their way out of the sight of men. And the anchor has ever since lain as a witness of the event in that church.
Whether taken as a miracle, a vision, or an allegory, this story endured in Irish tradition, adding a fantastical dimension to medieval ideas of flight.
Flying machines
As the Middle Ages progressed, some thinkers began to imagine devices that could propel a person into the air. In the thirteenth century, the scholar Roger Bacon proposed the idea directly:
an instrument for flying can be made, such that a man sits in the middle of it, turning some sort of device by which artificially constructed wings beat the air in the way a flying bird does.
In reality, the first medieval flying devices were toys. A manuscript from 1325 contains an image of a small helicopter-like contraption powered by a pull-string, and a similar toy appears in Pieter Bruegel’s sixteenth-century painting Children’s Games.
The toy helicopter in Children’s Games, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Leonardo da Vinci remains the most famous medieval and Renaissance mind to tackle the problem of flight. He sketched gliders, helicopters, and parachutes, many of them based on close observation of bird flight. In his notebooks, he explained his reasoning:
An object offers as much resistance to the air as the air does to the object. You may see that the beating of its wings against the air supports a heavy eagle in the highest and rarest atmosphere, close to the sphere of elemental fire. Again you may see the air in motion over the sea, fill the swelling sails and drive heavily laden ships. From these instances, and the reasons given, a man with wings large enough and duly connected might learn to overcome the resistance of the air, and by conquering it, succeed in subjugating it and rising above it.
Dating to the 1470s, this is the oldest depiction of a parachute – British Library MS Add MS 34113 fol. 200v
Leonardo was not alone in his ambition. In the sixteenth century, Giovanni Battista Danti designed a flying machine that he first tested over a lake. In 1503—or 1498, according to some sources—he staged a public flight during wedding celebrations in Perugia. A chronicler recorded the dramatic scene:
When a crowd of people were gathered in the great square for jousting, behold, suddenly there was Danti, flying through the air from a high part of our city with a great rushing sound, enveloped in various kinds of feathers, crossing from one side to the other of the square with his great pair of wings, so astonishing everyone, and indeed terrifying quite a few, that they thought they were witness to some great and portentous monster. But when, having left the low earth behind, he was trying with his proud limbs to attain the high air of the summit of his genius, envious Fortune, indignant at so much audacity, broke the iron bar which controlled the left wing, and as Danti could not sustain the weight of his body with the help of the other wing alone, he fell heavily on to the roof of the church of St Mary, and to his great distress, and that of everyone, injured his leg.
Although Danti and many others failed to master flight, their efforts show the determination and ingenuity of those in the Middle Ages who dreamed of taking to the skies.
From mythical griffins carrying kings to monks gliding over abbey grounds, from prisoners strapped to kites to inventors sketching machines that would never quite leave the earth, the dream of flight ran through the Middle Ages in many forms. Some ventures were born of scientific curiosity, others of religious symbolism or pure spectacle, but all reflected a willingness to push against the limits of what seemed possible. While it would take centuries before humans truly mastered the skies, these medieval attempts—half legend, half engineering—kept the idea of human flight alive long before the first balloon or airplane ever rose from the ground.
Medieval people dreamed of taking to the skies long before balloons and aeroplanes became reality. From daring inventors strapping on wings to fantastical tales of flying ships and sky-borne creatures, the Middle Ages was full of attempts—both real and imagined—to conquer the air. Some ventures ended in spectacular failure, others in lasting legends, but all reveal the ingenuity, curiosity, and boldness of people who refused to keep their feet on the ground.
Myths and Legends of Medieval Flight
For inspiration, medieval people could turn to tales from the distant past. One of the best-known was the Greek myth of Daedalus, who crafted wings for himself and his son Icarus. The daring escape ended in tragedy when Icarus soared too close to the sun, melting the wax in his wings and sending him plunging into the sea.
Christian tradition also offered cautionary tales. In early accounts, the sorcerer Simon Magus confronted Saint Peter in Rome, claiming divine powers. Before a crowd in the Roman forum, he began to rise into the air. Peter prayed for God to stop him, and Simon fell heavily to the ground—only for the angry onlookers to set upon him.
Not all legends ended in disaster. One story about Alexander the Great tells of his desire to see the entire world from above. He is said to have harnessed giant birds—or even mythical griffins—to pull a carriage high into the sky. The image of Alexander in flight proved enduring, appearing in manuscripts and artwork from medieval Europe to the Middle East.
Using wings: Imitating the birds
In the western medieval world, attempts to fly were often inspired by the movements of birds. One of the earliest recorded efforts comes from al-Andalus around the year 875, when a physician and inventor named ‘Abbas ibn Firnas set out to test his own wings. Chronicler al-Maqqari describes the event in detail:
Among other very curious experiments which he made, one is trying to fly. He covered himself with feathers for the purpose, attached a couple of wings to his body, and getting on an eminence, flung himself down into the air, when, according to the testimony of several trustworthy writers who witnessed the performance, he flew a considerable distance, as if he had been a bird, but in alighting again on the place whence he had started his back was very much hurt, for not knowing that birds when they alight come back down upon their tails, he forgot to provide himself with one.
Other figures tried similar feats. The English chronicler William of Malmesbury records the story of Eilmer, another monk at Malmesbury Abbey, who launched himself into the air in the first decade of the eleventh century:
By the standards of those days he was a good scholar, advanced in years by now, though in his first youth he had taken a terrible risk: by some art, I know not what, he had fixed wings to his hands and feet, hoping to fly like Daedalus, whose fable he took to be true. Catching the breeze from the top of a tower, he flew for the space of a stade and more; but with the violence of the wind and eddies, and at the same time his consciousness of the temerity of his attempt, he faltered and fell, and even thereafter he was an invalid and his legs were crippled. He himself used to give as a reason for his fall, that he forgot to fit a tail on his hinder parts.
If this account is accurate, Eilmer’s flight covered more than 200 metres—lasting perhaps 15 seconds—before ending on Olivers Lane, a spot still pointed out in local lore.
Not all such flights had survivors. In the Iranian city of Nishapur, one scholar attempted to fly from the top of a minaret using two large wooden wings. They failed instantly, and he plunged to his death.
Some flights, however, were never intended to leave the ground. The thirteenth-century chronicler Salimbene de Adam tells of a teacher at Bologna named Boncompagno of Florence, notorious for his mischief. One day, Boncompagno announced he would take to the air. Word spread quickly, and crowds of men, women, and children went to a nearby mountain to watch. Salimbene recounts what happened next:
Boncompagno had constructed wings for himself, and he stood on top of the mountain looking down at them. And after they had been gazing at each other for a long period of time, he shouted down to them audaciously, “Go, with God’s blessing, and let it suffice that you have looked upon the face of Boncompagno.” Then they had all departed, realising full well that he had been mocking them the whole time.
Kites in Asia: Riding the wind
On the eastern side of the medieval world, attempts at flight took a very different form: kites. Made of paper, they originated in ancient China, but by the medieval period they were common and used for both recreation and military purposes. In the thirteenth century, for example, Chinese troops fighting the Mongols sent kites carrying written messages to their captured comrades, urging them to revolt and escape.
One of the most remarkable accounts of kite use comes from the sixth century, when Emperor Gao Yang of the Northern Qi Dynasty carried out a purge of his rivals. From his palace in the city of Ye, he devised a particularly grim execution method:
Gao Yang made Yuan Huang-Thou and other prisoners take off from the Tower of the Golden Phoenix attached to paper (kites in the form of) owls. Yuan Huang-Thou was the only one who succeeded in flying as far as the Purple Way, and there he came to earth. But then he was handed over to the President of the Censorate, Pi I-Yun, who had him starved to death.
By one estimate, Yuan Huang-Thou managed to travel two-and-a-half kilometres before landing—an impressive achievement, though his success did not save his life.
The popularity of using kites to lift people even reached the ears of Marco Polo. In his Book of the Marvels of the World, the Venetian merchant described how Chinese ship captains used the practice to predict whether a voyage would be fortunate:
And so we will tell you [he says] how when any ship must go on a voyage, they prove whether her business will go well or ill. The men of the ship will have a hurdle, that is a grating, of withies, and at each corner and side of this framework will be tied a cord, so that there be eight cords, and they will all be tied at the other end to a long rope. Next they will find some fool or drunkard and they will bind him on the hurdle, since no one in his right mind or with his wits about him would expose himself to that peril. And this is done when a strong wind prevails.
Then the framework being set up opposite the wind, the wind lifts it and carries it up into the sky, while the men hold on by the long rope. And if while it is in the air the hurdle leans towards the way of the wind, they pull the rope to them a little so that it is set again upright, after which they let out some more rope and it rises higher. And if again it tips, once more they pull in the rope until the frame is upright and climbing, and then they yield rope again, so that in this manner it would rise so high that it could not be seen, if only rope were long enough.
The augury they interpret thus; if the hurdle going straight up makes for the sky, they say that the ship for which the test has been made will have a quick and prosperous voyage, whereupon all the merchants run together for the sake of sailing and going with her. But if the hurdle has not been able to go up, no merchant will be willing to enter the ship for which the test has been made, because they say that she could not finish her voyage and would be oppressed by many ills. And so that ship stays in port that year.
From China, kite technology spread to other parts of East Asia. In Japan, a tenth-century dictionary described them as Kami Tobi—“paper hawks.” Large kites were sometimes used to carry people, for instance to bypass the walls of a fortress.
In Europe, kites did not appear until after the Middle Ages, but similar devices were known. The windsock, for example, was familiar and sometimes adapted for military purposes. The historian Clive Hart records cases where windsock-like kites were used in warfare. A 1326 illustration in De nobilitatibus, sapientiis, et prudentiis regum by Walter de Milemete shows such a device being used to drop an incendiary onto a town.
The Bellifortis, a military manual written by Konrad Kyeser in the early fifteenth century, offers a vivid description of this kind of flying war machine:
The flying dragon may be made with parchment for the head, the middle of linen, but the tail of silk, the colours various. At the end of the head let a triple harness be attached to the wood, moved by the middle of the flail. Let the head be raised into the wind, and when it has been lifted two men may hold the head while the third carries the reel. It follows him while he rides. The movement of the line causes the flight to vary up and down, to right and left. Let the head be coloured red and made to look real, the middle should be of moon-silver colour, the end of several colours.
The sky ships in Ireland
The Annals of Ulster record a strange event in the year 749: “Ships with their crews were seen in the air above Clonmacnoise.”
Clonmacnoise was one of medieval Ireland’s most important monastic centres, and over time it became the focal point of legends about flying ships. The stories survive in scattered accounts and even in an eighth-century carving that may allude to the phenomenon.
One of the most detailed versions appears in the Konungs skuggsjá, a Norwegian text written around 1250. There, the author describes what he calls “the most wonderful” thing to happen at Clonmacnoise:
And there it thus befell on a Sunday, when people were at church and were hearing Mass, there came dropping from the air above an anchor, as if it were cast from a ship, for there was a rope attached to it. And the fluke of the anchor got hooked in an arch at the church door, and all the people went out of the church and wondered, and looked upwards after the rope. They saw a ship float on the rope and men in it. And next they saw a man leap overboard from the ship, and dive down towards the anchor, wanting to loosen it. His exertion seemed to them, by the movement of his hands and feet, like that of a man swimming in the sea. And when he came down to the anchor, he endeavoured to loosen it. And then some men ran towards him and wanted to seize him. But in the church, to which the anchor was fastened, there is a bishop’s chair.
The bishop was by chance on the spot, and he forbade the men to hold that man, for he said that he would die as if he were held in water. And as soon as he was free he hastened his way up again to the ship; and as soon as he came up, they cut the rope, and then sailed on their way out of the sight of men. And the anchor has ever since lain as a witness of the event in that church.
Whether taken as a miracle, a vision, or an allegory, this story endured in Irish tradition, adding a fantastical dimension to medieval ideas of flight.
Flying machines
As the Middle Ages progressed, some thinkers began to imagine devices that could propel a person into the air. In the thirteenth century, the scholar Roger Bacon proposed the idea directly:
an instrument for flying can be made, such that a man sits in the middle of it, turning some sort of device by which artificially constructed wings beat the air in the way a flying bird does.
In reality, the first medieval flying devices were toys. A manuscript from 1325 contains an image of a small helicopter-like contraption powered by a pull-string, and a similar toy appears in Pieter Bruegel’s sixteenth-century painting Children’s Games.
Leonardo da Vinci remains the most famous medieval and Renaissance mind to tackle the problem of flight. He sketched gliders, helicopters, and parachutes, many of them based on close observation of bird flight. In his notebooks, he explained his reasoning:
An object offers as much resistance to the air as the air does to the object. You may see that the beating of its wings against the air supports a heavy eagle in the highest and rarest atmosphere, close to the sphere of elemental fire. Again you may see the air in motion over the sea, fill the swelling sails and drive heavily laden ships. From these instances, and the reasons given, a man with wings large enough and duly connected might learn to overcome the resistance of the air, and by conquering it, succeed in subjugating it and rising above it.
Leonardo was not alone in his ambition. In the sixteenth century, Giovanni Battista Danti designed a flying machine that he first tested over a lake. In 1503—or 1498, according to some sources—he staged a public flight during wedding celebrations in Perugia. A chronicler recorded the dramatic scene:
When a crowd of people were gathered in the great square for jousting, behold, suddenly there was Danti, flying through the air from a high part of our city with a great rushing sound, enveloped in various kinds of feathers, crossing from one side to the other of the square with his great pair of wings, so astonishing everyone, and indeed terrifying quite a few, that they thought they were witness to some great and portentous monster. But when, having left the low earth behind, he was trying with his proud limbs to attain the high air of the summit of his genius, envious Fortune, indignant at so much audacity, broke the iron bar which controlled the left wing, and as Danti could not sustain the weight of his body with the help of the other wing alone, he fell heavily on to the roof of the church of St Mary, and to his great distress, and that of everyone, injured his leg.
Although Danti and many others failed to master flight, their efforts show the determination and ingenuity of those in the Middle Ages who dreamed of taking to the skies.
From mythical griffins carrying kings to monks gliding over abbey grounds, from prisoners strapped to kites to inventors sketching machines that would never quite leave the earth, the dream of flight ran through the Middle Ages in many forms. Some ventures were born of scientific curiosity, others of religious symbolism or pure spectacle, but all reflected a willingness to push against the limits of what seemed possible. While it would take centuries before humans truly mastered the skies, these medieval attempts—half legend, half engineering—kept the idea of human flight alive long before the first balloon or airplane ever rose from the ground.
Further Readings:
Tom D. Crouch, Wings: A History of Aviation from Kites to the Space Age (W.W. Norton and Company, 2003)
Lily Ford, Taking to the Air: An Illustrated History of Flight (British Library, 2018)
Richard P. Hallion, Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity through to the First World War (Oxford University Press, 2003)
Clive Hart, The Dream of Flight: Aeronautics from Classical Times to the Renaissance (Faber and Faber, 1972)
Clive Hart, Kites: An Historical Survey (Paul P. Appel, 1967)
Michael McCaughan, “Voyagers in the Vault of Heaven: The Phenomenon of Ships in the Sky in Medieval Ireland and Beyond,” Cultural Traditions, Vol. 48 (1998)
Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China – Volume 4, Part 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1965)
David W. Wragg, Flight before Flying (Osprey, 1974)
Top Image: Leonardo da Vinci’s aerial screw – his version of the helicopter
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