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Primary Source 2.6

MEDIEVAL INDUSTRY AND INVENTIONS1

In the early Middle Ages, Europe lagged far behind the Islamic world and China in technology, industry, and invention. From the 1100s, however, technological innovation gradually developed in Europe. The mechanical clock, invented in China and then forgotten, emerged independently in Italy and then came into far greater use throughout Europe than in any other culture. Other important inventions like the eyeglasses were devised. The European economies also grew vibrant. Trade circulated across the continent and connected with trade networks in the rest of Afro-Eurasia. Cities thrived economically and gained political independence. The following excerpt is from a historical account describing commercial and industrial development in medieval Europe. It focuses on the manufacture and trade in silk in Italy and woolen fabrics in the region of modern-day Belgium, since those were the most important commodities of the medieval European economy. The full text can be found here.

SILK . . . For several centuries the Byzantine empire exclusively supplied silken fabrics to the rest of Europe; the rivalry of the Saracens,2 who early established a thriving silk industry in Sicily, being comparatively insignificant in so far as Europe itself was concerned. The chief seat of this silk culture and manufacture, besides Constantinople, continued to be Greece, especially the Peloponnesus, henceforward to be called Morea3 from the number of mulberry trees which afforded sustenance to the worms. The looms of Thebes, Corinth, and Argos,4 not merely revived but increased their ancient fame, and a great and lucrative trade sprang up in that land of many memories. These conditions continued practically unaltered till about the middle of the twelfth century. But by that time Sicily had fallen into the hands of Norman pirates, and in 1147 Roger, one of these, calling himself King of Sicily, attacked the Peloponnesus and laid it utterly waste. He also carried away with him many of the industrious inhabitants whom he settled at Palermo; and others escaped into Italy and elsewhere. These last carried the knowledge of the silk manufacture to the now rising towns of Lucca, Milan, Florence, Modena, and some others, which henceforward became famous seats of that industry. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the Morea passed under the dominion of Venice, which now entered also into the silk manufacture, an opportune tumult which occurred at Lucca5 in 1310 having the effect of placing many already highly skilled workmen at its disposal. From thenceforward for upwards of a

1 Richard Whately Cooke-Taylor, Introduction to a History of the Factory System (London: R. Bentley, 1886), 227-34. 2 A term used for Arab tribes and later Muslims in Europe. 3 The name of the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece during the medieval period. 4 Cities in Greece. 5 A city in Central Italy. 2 century the Venetians were the greatest manufacturers, as they had for some time been the greatest merchants, of silk. The industrial supremacy of the Greek Empire was by this time a thing of the past, and next to Italy in importance ranked Spain. Thither the Saracens had carried the knowledge and manufacture of silk, as they had carried so much other useful knowledge and so many other useful arts; and towards the end of the Middle Ages, Grenada, Murcia, Almeria, and Cordoba were great producers of silken fabrics. The third- named town was especially renowned. A Cordovese historian, one Ash Shakandi, who wrote at the beginning of the thirteenth century, speaks of it as being then “an opulent and magnificent city—the greatest mart in Andalusia;” while another writer of the same age (Almakkari) gives this further particular description of it:—”But what made Almeria superior to any other city in the world was its various manufactures of silk and other articles of dress, such as the dibaj, a sort of silken stuff surpassing in quality and in durability anything else manufactured in other countries, the tiraz,6 or costly stuff on which the names of sultans, princes, and other wealthy individuals are inscribed, and of which no less than 800 looms existed at one time; of more inferior articles, such as the holol (stripes, silks), and brocades, there were 1000 looms, and the same number were continually employed in weaving the stuffs called iskalátón (scarlet). There were also 1000 for weaving robes called Al jorjani (Georgian), and another 1000 for weaving robes called Isbahani (from Ispahan), and a similar number for Atabi.” It remains to speak of France and the Netherlands. Italian silk-weavers had crossed the intervening mountains now and then at intervals long before a regular French silk manufacture was established on the other side of them. This we can hardly put before the reign of Louis IX.7 But that date brings us to the very limit of the period we are now dealing with, and belongs rather to the history of modern manufacture. Similarly with regard to the Netherlands. It was not until a period even later than this that Antwerp8 became so celebrated for her silk manufacture as she did become; not in fact until the religious persecution of the sixteenth century had sent the Italian workmen flying across the Alps to seek a land where superstition and intolerance were not yet supreme.

WOOL

Passing next to the more homely product wool; scarcely any notice at all of its manufacture in eastern or western Europe is to be found during the early Middle Ages, and it is certain that it suffered a great decay. The barbarous nations that overthrew the Roman Empire in the fifth century felt few of the wants of civilised life, and were rather animated by a brutal hatred of its comforts and refinements. Even agriculture and the care of stock was at first neglected almost wholly by them, and the provision of clothing was left to individual effort. So late as the ninth or tenth centuries, the only mention of anything approaching a woollen manufacture which Hallam can remember to have met with, “is in Schmidt, who says that cloths were exported from Friesland,9 to England and other parts.” But this account is certainly overstated; or perhaps Hallam was not as well informed as

6 A line of inscription in the upper sleeves or a robe or a turban sash. 7 Louis IX, or Saint Louis (r. 1226–70). 8 A city in Belgium. 9 A province in the north of the Netherlands. 3 usual on this head. Under date 810 A.D., Anderson gives a list of places, quoted from Voltaire’s General History of Europe, where several manufactures were at that time carried on, which puts a very different complexion on the case. “At Lyons, Aries, and Tours in France,” he writes, “and at Borne and Ravenna in Italy, they had many manufactures of woollen stuffs, and iron manufactures inlaid with gold and silver, after the manner of Asia. They likewise made glass. But silk was not as yet woven in any town in the Western Empire, nor till near 400 years after this period. Yet about this time the Venetians began to import wrought silk from Constantinople; but it seems that linen was very uncommon.” Here then is already a textile factory system in operation in the west also, at the very beginning of the ninth century. The same author gives the following instance of the rarity of linen (which, however, he seems to mix oddly with woollen) cloth, namely, that St. Boniface10 in a letter to a German bishop about this time desires him to send cloth with a large nap: “I suppose, he says, he meant woollen cloth for him to employ in washing his feet.” Probably, adds Voltaire, this want of linen “was the cause of all the diseases in the skin known by the name of leprosy, so common at that time.” In the next century we have still more certain notice of a woolen manufacture northwards, where it was soon fated to become famous. Under date 960, Anderson writes as follows:—“About this time, or rather somewhat sooner according to the great pensionary De Witt, Interest of Holland, part i. chap, ii., the woollen manufacture of Flanders and other parts of the Netherlands, which make so great a figure for the six succeeding centuries, took its rise;” and the writer thus quoted (De Witt) makes the further comments: “ that till now there were scarcely any merchants in all Europe, excepting a few in the Republic of Italy, who traded with the Indian caravans of the Levant;” and that, “the Flemings, lying nearest to France, were the first that began to earn their living by weaving, and sold the produce of their labour in that fruitful land (France), where the inhabitants were not only able to feed themselves, but also, by the superfluous growth of their country, could put themselves into good apparel. Which Baldwin the Young, or the third Earl of Flanders”—he continues—“about the year 960, considerably improved by establishing annual fairs or markets in several places without any toll being demanded for goods either imported or exported.” Upon which narrative Anderson observes that “this judicious account from so great a man must naturally carry much conviction along with it, as what may be deemed an authentic, though brief, view of the rise of the famous Netherland woollen manufacture, probably prior to that of linen; the former being in a manner absolutely requisite for preserving men from the inclemency of the weather, the latter rather a species of luxury; many barbarous nations at this day living without any linen at all:”—a quaint old-fashioned fancy which illumines a prosaic theme. The nascent manufacture prospered greatly. “About the tenth century,” writes Mr. Warden, “the woollen cloth manufactures of the Flemings11 had gained a high name in Britain and in Germany, and large quantities of them were exported in exchange for the products of these lands.” They were in fact exported far more widely; and in a little while the Netherlands became the principal producer of woollen goods for all the north of produced after a while a corresponding expansion of commerce, even as we have elsewhere seen how expanding commerce promotes increased manufacture, has been already told in the short sketch of the fortunes of that great corporation. This trade

10 A missionary who propagated Christianity in the Frankish Empire during the 8th century. 11 A Germanic ethnic group native to Belgium. 4 continued to flourish and increase for about 400 years, which takes us to about the time that it commenced to settle definitely in England. We shall hereafter have to relate from the English side the history of this transference; the story told from the Flemish side is no less instructive, and should not be omitted. It is given Europe, the carrying trade being done by the vessels of the Hanse League.12 How this great eminence in manufacture in a thoroughly philosophical spirit by Anderson, supplemented by the authority of De Witt, under date 1301, as follows:—“It happened about this time that the halls of those Netherland cities who had at first made restrictive laws, under pretence of preventing deceit by the debasing of those manufactures (exactly answerable to our own mechanical companies in England, Scotland, and Ireland), but which were in reality principally intended for fixing and confining them to the cities alone, forced at length much of this weaving trade out of the cities, where those halls exercised their restraint, into the villages. The wars between France and Flanders drove it back from those villages to Tienen and Louvain in Brabant.” But “the Brabanters (says the great pensionary De Witt, in his judicious book), nothing wiser than the Flemings, ran into the like restraining law of the halls of laying imposts on the manufacture; which imprudent methods had before occasioned many tumults and uproars amongst the weavers in Flanders; for, in the year 1300, in a tumult at Ghent, two magistrates and eleven other citizens were slain. In the year following the above 1500 persons were slain at Bruges on the same account. And in a similar riot and on the same score all the magistrates of Ypres were killed. Some time after this also, at Louvain, in a great tumult of the cloth-weavers and their adherents, several magistrates were slain in the Councilhouse, and many of the offenders fled to England, whither they first carried the art of drapery. Many other clothweavers with their followers, as well Brabanters as Flemings, dispersed themselves into the countries beyond the Meuse, and into Holland, and amongst other places.”Mr. Anderson conjectures that those who took refuge in England at this time were “the same with those mentioned in the Foedera13 under the year 1351, who had licences from King Edward III., and privileges granted by him for settling in England;” scarcely a happy conjecture, as a full half century intervened. However, “these cities of Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres in Flanders; and Brussels, Tienen, and Louvain in Brabant, soon lost much of their trade and manufactures.” The importance of the loss thus sustained, and the extent of their woollen manufacture at the period named, may be further gathered from the facts, also mentioned by Anderson (p. 273), that those engaged about it in Louvain alone amounted to “no less than 4000 woollen drapers, clothiers, or master-weavers; and above 150,000 journeymen weavers.” Of the prosperity of Bruges at the same time, resulting in a great measure from the same trade, something has already been said; and that the outward symbols of wealth were lavishly displayed is exemplified in the recorded remark of a Queen of France, wife of Phillipe le Bel,14 who was visiting there: “I thought I was the only queen here, but judging from the apparel of those I see around me, there must be many wives of kings and princes present.” Another story told of this city, in company this time with Ghent and Ypres, will suffice to fill up the picture of the pride and power of

12 A commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and their market towns that dominated trade along the coast of Northern Europe from the 14th until the 17th centuries. 13 A sixteen-volume collection of treaties signed by the English crown with other states; published from 1704 to 1713 by Thomas Rymer (c. 1643–1713). 14 King of France (r. 1285–1314). 5 those mediaeval factory towns. It is given thus in Mr. J. Hamilton Fyfe’s pleasant and compendious volume entitled Merchant Enterprise “When in 1351 the burgomasters15 of Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres, went to Paris to pay homage to King John, they were received with much pomp and distinction, but yet found reason to be dissatisfied. Being invited to a grand feast, they observed that their seats at table were not furnished with cushions. In order to make known their displeasure at this want of regard to their dignity, they took off their richly embroidered cloaks, folded them, and sat upon them. On rising from table, they left their cloaks behind them; and being informed of their apparent forgetfulness, Simon von Eertrycke, burgomaster of Bruges, replied, ‘We Flemings are not in the habit of carrying away our cushions after dinner.’” Ghent was in 1400 a city able to furnish 80,000 persons capable of bearing arms, and the weavers alone “provided a formidable contingent of 20,000” (idem). Ypres, Oudenarde, Denderrnont, Lille, and several other towns were only in the second rank as compared with these, but were very prosperous centres of manufacture as well. We have no suggestion of factories in connection with this manufacture. It seems to have been wholly of the individualistic handicraft kind. . . .

15 Masters of the towns.