Dragons weren't always feared. Then they became the monster of the Middle Ages.

The dragon is one of the most emblematic images of medieval culture. Far from being a fantastical invention or a modern product of J. R. R. Tolkien’s sagas, the dragon emerged from symbolic worlds created in ancient times and has survived to the present day. In medieval societies, the dragon was classified within the same framework as regular animal species. Legends, stories, and images turned it into a symbol of the Middle Ages that would transcend time.

Even earlier than the Middle Ages, in the civilizations of antiquity, a whole menagerie of mythological beings with dragon- or snakelike features already existed. In ancient Mesopotamia, Marduk, the supreme deity of Babylon, clashed with the demonic dragon Tiamat, the symbol of primordial chaos and seawater, to establish order in the cosmos and create the world. In ancient China, dragons were revered creatures who protected and controlled water sources. They represented health, strength, and good luck. Greek myths abound with both vicious serpents and drakontes, gigantic serpents that acted as protectors of people, places, or prodigious objects while symbolizing the indomitable force of nature. In the story of Hercules, he was attacked in his cradle by two serpents sent by the goddess Hera. Later in Hercules’s life, as punishment for his crimes, King Eurystheus commissioned him to kill the Hydra of Lerna, a great serpentlike sea monster with nine heads.

(Here are 6 of the world’s coolest dragon myths.)

Taking shape in the Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages, these fearsome monsters were adopted from antiquity and adapted to fit the mindset of the time. In A.D. 313, the Edict of Milan established legal tolerance for Christianity across the Roman Empire, later enabling Theodosius I to make it the official religion of Rome in A.D. 380. It was within this context that the dragon of antiquity gradually became co-opted to suit the visual codes of the new imperial faith. This can be seen in paintings from the Christian catacombs in Rome and in reliefs found on early Christian sarcophagi. Here, the dragon becomes associated with the devil. In Christian iconography, dragonlike monsters being vanquished by saints and beings representing Christ came to symbolize the triumph of the Church over pagan cults and heresies.

In the apocalyptic events described in the biblical Book of Revelation, a red dragon with seven heads plays a central role. Its form recalls the Hydra of antiquity. With a thrash of its tail, it sweeps away a third of the stars in the sky before the archangel Michael wins the battle and hurls it out of heaven. In Genesis, it’s a serpent that tempts Eve to pick the fruit of the forbidden tree, thereby committing the original sin and causing what Christians call the Fall of Man. The water serpents of the Greek world became conflated with Leviathan, a sea monster cited several times in the Bible, as well as with the big fish (dag gadol in the original Hebrew) that swallowed the prophet Jonah for three days. Across cultures and continents, there were very different visualizations of the dragon.

It was Isidore of Seville, archbishop and scholar, who consolidated the early profile of the dragon that would become widespread in the Middle Ages through his descriptions in Etymologies (an encyclopedia of sorts from the beginning of the seventh century). Drawing on various ancient sources, the Spanish theologian classified the dragon as belonging to the serpent family and being the largest of all the animals. According to Isidore, dragons were crested and usually came from Ethiopia and India. They dwelt in caves, could fly, and annihilated their prey not with their venom or bite but with their tails, which they used to lash or constrict their victims (Etymologies, book XII, chapter IV).

As a predominantly Christian country, Ethiopia was no stranger to dragon legends. St. George, the patron saint of Ethiopia, England, and several other countries, is depicted prominently across Ethiopia’s Christian iconography, slaying dragons and leading soldiers against enemies who sought to colonize them. Pictured in a serpentlike manner, dragons were also a representation of the devil.

While in the Byzantine world the dragon was represented entirely with the attributes of a serpent, in the medieval West it was given a range of physiognomies, from feline or canid to avian. The shape-shifting nature of the medieval dragon only strengthened its association with the devil. The Romanesque art of the 11th and 12th centuries includes bipedal winged dragons with bulkier bodies and catlike or doglike faces. These creatures have scaly skins, long ears, and tails tipped with vegetal forms. There are also dragons similar to the griffin, a hybrid creature from antiquity with the head, torso, front legs, and wings of an eagle and the hindquarters of a lion.

The Romanesque dragons, as depicted in the capitals, corbels, and tympana of churches and monasteries, are usually trying to attack knights, saints, and creatures that symbolize Christ, such as the lamb or the lion. Dragons, mermaids, harpies, apes, and other “evil” beings were carved into church architecture as a warning. When the faithful, many of them illiterate, gazed up at these terrifying stone bestiaries, they would surely be mindful of infernal punishment and what they might do to avoid it. These images were diffused across Europe, reaching a wide audience thanks to the growing popularity of pilgrimages to Rome and Compostela, Spain. Both places saw large numbers of travelers, with their associated religious paraphernalia, on the move around the continent.

(These dragons don’t breathe fire—but they’re very real.)

Bats, lizards, and crocodiles

In the Gothic art that developed from the 13th century onward, the design of dragons became more complex. The rediscovery of Aristotle’s writings on nature and the study of Arabic treatises on optics were among the factors that encouraged a more empirical approach to depicting nature.

The dragons of this period bear a closer resemblance to real animals, whether reptiles, amphibians, or birds of prey. At the time, anatomy was being carefully studied and, as the 20th-century art historian Jurgis Baltrušaitis observed, the Gothic dragon was often depicted with membranous wings, similar to those of a bat or a moth, and with recognizable crests, spines, and a darting tail. There were more and more representations of quadrupedal dragons, based on real lizards and crocodiles. By the end of the Middle Ages, the monstrous face of the Gothic dragon was being used for the devil himself.

Dragons had an important role in several legends and hagiographies (lives of saints) that attained great popularity in medieval times. In these stories, saints achieve redemption by destroying dragons or serpentine creatures: St. Patrick expelled snakes from Ireland, while St. Hilarion consigned a dragon to flames that threatened Dalmatia. It was also said that St. Marcellus, bishop of Paris who lived between the fourth and fifth centuries, heroically confronted a dragon that guarded the tomb of a pagan woman and threatened the peace of the residents. Trusting in God’s protection, Marcellus approached the beast and touched it on the head with his staff, after which he ordered it to disappear from the city.

Many of these stories were hugely popular thanks to widespread circulation of the Golden Legend, a collection of tales about the lives of saints compiled around 1265 by Jacobus de Voragine, a preacher and the bishop of Genoa. One of the stories included in this work was that of St. Margaret (or St. Marina) of Antioch. In this city of the Eastern Roman Empire, Olibrio, governor at the time of Emperor Diocletian, asked the young Christian Margaret to abandon her faith to marry him. When the girl refused, he ordered her to be arrested. Timothy (Theotimus), a captive who shared the cell with Margaret, witnessed the revelation that the young woman experienced when she had to face a dragon: “After she finished praying there was a great tremor [...]. A huge and terrifying dragon with multicolored skin emerged from a corner. His crest and beard were like gold. His teeth flashed and his eyes were like pearls. Fire and smoke billowed from his nostrils. His tongue was like a sword. Snakes were coiled around his neck.”

This terrifying creature promptly swallowed Margaret. But with the help of a crucifix, she split open the beast’s stomach and emerged unharmed.

Many medieval stories situated the dragon in the hostile environment of the forest. According to the Golden Legend, Martha of Bethany, a follower of Jesus Christ, later settled in Provence in southern France. In the forests of the Rhône, there was a dragon that the locals called the Tarasca, after Tarascon, an area known for its black lake and dark forests. The terrible dragon threatened all who crossed the forests that bordered the river. St. Martha “poured holy water on him, brandishing a cross,” and the monster “as biddable as a sheep, was immediately killed by the people with spears and stones.”

(Dreaming of dragons? Here’s where they really live.)

Battling saints and knights

The violent vanquishing of dragons became a favorite subject in medieval culture, especially in stories featuring epic heroes and knights. Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon epic poem dating to between the eighth and 12th centuries, features a dragon that guards a valuable treasure. When a thief steals a goblet, the dragon attacks local people, leading the hero Beowulf to slay the monster. In chivalric novels, knights took on the dragons that stood guard over places such as the Valley of No Return in the Arthurian legend. In this case, it was Sir Lancelot who defeated the dragon on guard duty.

But the most famous dragon story in the medieval world was that of St. George, a Roman army officer from Cappadocia (in modern-day Turkey) who converted to Christianity. George heard that the king of Silene, a city in Libya, had to satisfy the appetite of a dragon by giving it townspeople to eat. When it was the turn of the king’s own daughter to be sacrificed, George confronted the monster. After wounding it with his lance, George had the princess lead him into the city, where he vowed to slay the dragon in return for the townspeople converting to Christianity. They agreed and so George cut off the dragon’s head. Later in his life, St. George would be martyred for his faith during the Great Persecution in A.D. 303.

In the art of the late Middle Ages, both St. George and the archangel Michael were typically depicted wearing contemporary military armor, as if they were feudal knights. The warrior saint embodied the ideals of martial valor and altruism that were central to medieval chivalry. It’s no surprise then that the stories of St. George and the archangel Michael were so popular at the time.

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The dragon, on the other hand, represented all that was chaotic, disorderly, sinful, even demonic, and had to be controlled and eliminated. Though in some senses an animal, it was a monstrous one: strange, anomalous and magical. It’s this fantastical aspect rather than the demonic one that prevailed as the centuries passed and dragons soared into the popular culture of today.

(Go inside China's lively dragon boat festival celebrations.)