The second rhinoceros in Europe came to Lisbon in 1579, as a gift to the Spanish King Phillip II...An Italian in the court wrote a leter hoome that the rhinoceros is "beyond the imagination of anyone who has not seen it"; he compared it to Petrarch's Laura.

When Phillip returned to Madrid in 1583, the rhinoceros went with him, and was often displayed in the garden of the Escorial It was described by a visitor as "curious, melancholy, and sad," and after it suddenly charged and overturned a carriage carrying royal guests, its horn was cut off and its eyes put out.

[...]

The fifth rhinoceros in Europe, perhaps the most famous rhinoceros who ever lived, the cause of a continental "rhinomania," was trapped in the kingdom of Assam, presented ot the director of the Dutch East India Company in Bengal, and sent to Holland in 1741. It toured Europe for sixteen years.

In Berlin, Frederick the Great viewed the rhinoceros at a fish stall in the Spittelmarkt and left a tip of eighteen ducats. [...] In Vienna, the Empress Maria Theresa came down from her country house, Schloss Schonbrunn, to see it, and made its owner, a Dutch sea captain, a Baron of the Empire. The boy Archduke Karl Joseph was painted on a miniature holding a book with a drawing of a rhinoceros. In Dresden, at the Red Stag near the Prina Gate, Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, and his heir, the sickly Elector Prince, came for a viewing. In Leipzig, the popular hack poet, Christian Furchtegott Gellert wrote a poem about it, and the scholar Friedrich Gotthilf Freytag, a pamphlet in Latin with quotations in Greek. In Mannheim, the Elector Palatine, Carl Theodor, came with his heir presumptive, Duke Christian IV of Zweibrucken, the Duke's brother, Prince Frederick Michael, and their wives. In Strasbourg, three commemorative medals were struck; in Nuremberg, a medal was struck weighing 5000 pounds. In Wurzburg it was given the nickname "Miss Clara," which stuck. In Versailles, its owner tried to sell it for 100, 000 ecus to Louis XV, but the king refused.

from "The Rhinoceros," in An Elemental Thing, Eliot Weinberger