The following tables have been compiled from data contained in two loose, untitled manuscript pages preserved in the Archivio Storico Civico di Milano, Materie Cartella 429. The pages appear to have originally formed part of a private account book of a cotton textile firm, as indicated by the notation at the bottom of page 2: ‘In the above price we have not included rent of the shop nor salaries of factors nor our other annual business expenses. ’ The folios, which are undated, are written in Italian in an early sixteenth–century hand. Marginal notations giving the length of each type of cloth in braccia have been added in another hand.

According to the information presented below, the highest labor costs were represented by weaving and spinning. The cost of weaving was determined by both the dimensions and the density of the cloth. The piece rate for fine, closely woven cloth which required more time and skill was higher than that for grosser fabrics. In the tables of cloth production, the cost of spinning is included in the total price of cotton weft yarn. However, two separate tables provide a breakdown of the costs incurred in the processing of one libbra of dyed cotton yarn. According to these figures, spinners were paid from 4 to 10 soldi per libbra, depending on the fineness of the yarn.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed the rapid development of cotton manufacture in northern Italy based on a high level of technological innovation and the creation of new commercial outlets in European markets. In the early fourteenth century this trend was reversed. The rate of growth slackened and in some areas halted. The level of production and exports fell off, thus initiating a long and gradual decline which extended across the following two centuries. The setbacks which occurred in this industrial sector were both coincident with and intimately related to a general economic crisis in the European economy in the fourteenth and the early fifteenth centuries. The causes, geographical extent and duration of the crisis are still the subject of intense debate. So too is the degree of economic slump and the rate of recovery, the assessment of which is hampered by the lack of reliable statistical indicators either for single regions or for Europe as a whole. Perhaps the most salient feature of this period is the dramatic contraction caused by the Black Death. However, the effects of the plague must be carefully distinguished from the longterm trends which manifested themselves in the late thirteenth century and were in turn an outgrowth of basic imbalances in economic development in the preceding age of prosperity.

By the late thirteenth century, the basic thrust toward agricultural expansion which had begun around 1050 was largely spent, although it continued in certain regions such as the eastern Baltic for some decades beyond this period.

The emphasis given to the spice trade in Western commercial development has tended to overshadow the larger and far more important role of raw materials and foodstuffs which in volume far outweighed spices in Mediterranean cargos. The expansion of the Western economy was directly linked to the emergence of innovative entrepreneurial structures in the large-scale textile industries which were dependent upon the maintenance of a consistently high level of imported raw materials. Beginning in the eleventh century, the conquest of Eastern territories and the founding of commercial stations overseas gave European merchants a foothold in the major production zones of raw materials, which included textile fibers (wool, cotton, silk), dyes, alum and potash. While the importation of oriental luxuries continued and even increased, commercial activity from the twelfth century on was oriented more and more toward the acquisition of industrial raw materials and the opening of foreign outlets for finished goods.

Silk and dyestuffs which commanded a high price per unit of weight, were officially classed as ‘spices’ and formed part of the valuable cargos of the Italian galleys in the late Middle Ages. By contrast, the bulky commodities of wool, cotton, alum and potash were carried on slower ships of both large and small tonnage in a complex and highly diffuse pattern of traffic. The transport of mundane industrial commodities was at the heart of a complex system of commercial financing and capital investment which attracted the wealth and attention of the greatest merchants of the period.

One striking aspect of the rise of the north-Italian cotton industry in the twelfth century was its total dependence for raw materials on areas of supply where cotton cultivation had been either recently introduced or had undergone a dramatic expansion in the previous three hundred years. Changes in patterns of cultivation in the zones of European commercial and political penetration along the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea were part of a broader agricultural boom in both foodstuffs and industrial crops in Asia and the Islamic world between 800 and 1100 A.D. The geographical spread of the cotton plant was linked in a cause and effect relationship to the intensification of textile production in Eastern manufacturing centers. Through increased output and lower costs, cotton was transformed from a luxury commodity for an elite into an article of popular consumption. It continued to play the same role in the developing economy of western Europe where the success of the medieval Italian industry was based on production for mass markets.

The importance of this agricultural and industrial transformation has often been overlooked owing in part to the subsequent disappearance of the crop from many of the original zones of production. The present chapter attempts to reconstruct the geographical radius of the cotton plant and the distribution of textile manufacturing centers in the ancient and medieval world, with particular attention to those areas which constituted the main sources of supply for the early European industry.

This book is a result of years of research in Italian archives and libraries during which period I incurred innumerable debts to many scholars. My greatest debt of gratitude is owed to David Herlihy, who first introduced me to the field of medieval economic history and has since lent his support to all my endeavors. I also wish to thank: Egidio Rossini, with whom I have collaborated on other works, for his encouragement and advice and for his willingness to share his extensive knowledge of Italian archival collections; Frederic C. Lane, whose knowledge and expertise saved me from naive errors in my chapter on the Mediterranean cotton trade; and Domenico Sella, whose incisive questions helped me to focus on broad trends in the transformation of the Lombard cotton industry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In addition to substantive suggestions on content, Norman J. G. Pounds kindly offered to draw the scale map of Mediterranean cotton cultivation and, in the process, greatly improved my original raft.

In attempting to trace the connections between the Islamic and Italian cotton industries, I benefited from the exchange of ideas and information with Andrew Watson who shares my interest in the expansion of cotton cultivation in the Islamic world. Kemal Karpat and Halil Inalcik helped me to gain some insight into trends in cotton production and manufacturing in the Ottoman empire.

Technological innovation which permitted the mass production of cotton goods at relatively low cost represented one facet of the successful growth of cotton manufacture in northern Italy. A second dimension was the aggressive marketing of cotton cloth which involved the emission of a diversified range of products into regional and international trade and the stimulation of new patterns of taste and consumption in European society.

By the last decades of the twelfth century, the products of the north-Italian cotton industry were firmly established in international commerce. The extant documents indicate exports to Spain, southern France and Sicily. Another important market was North Africa. It is probable that Italian textiles passed together with locally produced cloth across the Saharan caravan routes. In the eastern Mediterranean the two main outlets were Byzantium and the Black Sea ports. From the time of the Mongols, Syrian and Turkish merchants had exchanged cotton fabrics and other goods for Russian furs and slaves in the Crimean port of Sudak. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries the establishment of Italian colonies in Caffa, Tana and Trebisond was accompanied by a lively commerce in cotton cloth, part of which was re-exported to Russia and central Asia where it was utilized for tents, clothing, and household furnishings. The intensity of this traffic is indicated by the fact that throughout the region, cotton cloth (bucherame, boccasino) was adopted as the monetary unit according to which the price of other merchandise was reckoned.

The transplantation of an industry such as cotton manufacture across political, cultural and linguistic frontiers is part of a broader process of technological transmission. This aspect of medieval economic history has been relatively unexplored despite its obvious significance in the total picture of Islamic–Western relations from the late eleventh century on. The present lack of systematic research on the technology of Near Eastern manufacturing makes it difficult to chart with accuracy the spread of individual tools or techniques across Asia toward Europe. The difficulties are compounded when attempts are made to estimate the date when a single implement or a modified version of it was adopted by one branch or by the entire textile industry in any part of Europe. Our discussion here shall be limited to technological changes in cotton manufacture which are known to have been introduced in Europe through contacts with Islam in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, whatever their ultimate origin and channel of adoption, which remain highly speculative.

Technological change, in addition to the complex and still unsolved problems of chronology and modes of dissemination, raises also the fundamental question of receptivity. Meaningful change requires not merely technical know-how, but the willingness to experiment and to adapt implements developed elsewhere to the requisites of existing forms of production in the place of adoption.

In contrast to the large body of literature on other branches of the textile industry, the history of cotton manufacture in medieval Europe has been largely neglected. Apart from scattered references in general works, to date there have been few attempts to assess its over-all dimensions or significance within the urban economy of the later Middle Ages. The present study seeks to partially fill this gap through a detailed examination of north-Italian production between 1100 and 1600. In size of the labor force, extent of capital investment and its broad commercial ramifications, cotton ranked with wool and silk as one of the ‘great industries’ of this region. As the first largescale industry on European soil, the Italian manufacture marked the initial stage in the spread of cotton goods and the techniques of processing from the Mediterranean to northern Europe, a trend that ultimately culminated in the Industrial Revolution.

The implications of the Italian achievement for later European industrial growth obviously merit a close investigation. But the origins of the industry must be seen in a wider context. The Italian enterprise was the end phase in a centuries-long development within the advanced economies bordering the Mediterranean basin. In the Middle Ages cotton manufacturing experienced its maximum historical growth across a large geographical expanse which encompassed the most powerful empires of the known world. From a costly luxury commodity limited to the privileged classes of ancient society, it became the clothing material par excellence of the common man.

For approximately 250 years (1350–1600) the Lombard and the Swabian industries were the primary suppliers of cotton goods to the rest of Europe. Their hegemony was seriously undermined in the last decades of the sixteenth century as the cotton trade shifted away from Venice and Genoa to the western-Mediterranean and Atlantic ports of Marseilles, Rouen and Amsterdam. Although Levant grades still predominated, New World and especially Brazilian cotton was increasingly represented in incoming cargos. These supplies were channeled toward new cotton industries in northern Europe. In the seventeenth century European markets were further disrupted by the Thirty Years War which crippled Swabian production. In addition, Italian and German producers faced growing competition from Dutch imports of Indian calicos. As a result of these pressures, the traditional manufacturing centers entered a period of rapid and unrelieved decline.

The downward slide can be clearly traced in Cremona. According to the registers of the University of Merchants of Cremona, ‘a great number’ of fustians and valesine were still manufactured in that city in 1588. However, the industry entered into crisis in the first half of the seventeenth century. The number of firms producing cotton cloth rose gradually from 91 in 1615 to 138 in 1627 and then fell precipitously to 60 in 1631 and 41 in 1648. The moderate rise in guild membership between 1615 and 1627 did not indicate an increase in production.

The history of the Mediterranean cotton trade provides a basic framework for the study of the spread of cotton manufacturing in medieval Europe. A viable commercial apparatus which permitted the cheap transport of bulky raw materials was a primary prerequisite for the establishment of the industry. However, the successful development of cotton manufacture also depended upon an assimilation of foreign technology, the creation of new markets and the adoption of an effective system of large-scale production. Following the opening of new trade connections to the Levant, there were several limited attempts to introduce the techniques of cotton weaving in various parts of Europe. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the processes of cotton manufacture first took firm root in northern Italy which alone provided the essential conditions for the growth of an export industry geared to the mass production and marketing of cheap textiles. Together with silk and woolen production, cotton manufacturing contributed significantly to the prosperity of the north-Italian towns at the height of their economic expansion.

The importance of cotton manufacturing in the north-Italian economy has often been underestimated. In contrast to wool, both cotton and silk were ‘transplanted’ industries which were a direct outgrowth of expanding commercial contacts in the Mediterranean. Silk manufacture, which involved the greatest complexity in products and processes, developed very slowly before the fourteenth century. Its labor force was relatively small and almost entirely composed of urban craftsmen.