Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Sericulture remained a Chinese secret until two Christian monks brought back some silk moth eggs and seeds of the mulberry tree; according to legend, on the journey to Constantinople they hid them in a bamboo stem, just as Prometheus had hidden fire in a hollow reed. In any case, sericulture flourished in the coastal towns of Italy, and particularly in thirteenth-century Venice. There was a boom in farms growing mulberry trees in Veneto, Tuscany and Lombardy. However, in Italy the spring frosts prevented the cocoons of the silkworms maturing on the mulberry leaves, as they did in China and Persia. The larvae had to be reared indoors, spread out on special tables, fed with chopped mulberry leaves and kept at room temperature. The maturing of the cocoons was stimulated by particular flowers which had to be brought indoors. At the right moment, the cocoon had to be soaked in hot water, killing the larva inside it, and then unravelled. The process required the cleanliness of a lab and the exact control of temperature and timing – hardly typical conditions for peasant work.

The domestic part of this work, when the larvae needed warmth and care, was carried out by women. In spring, when the mulberry trees came into leaf, the Italian women collected silk moth eggs in little bags and carried them against their breasts. Their body heat made the larvae hatch. In Samarkand there was a belief that if a man looked at the larvae they stopped spinning their cocoons. A source of female employment and family prosperity, silk saved many regions of Southern Europe and Central Asia from economic stagnation. The farmers kept no larvae or grubs after they unravelled the cocoons – no seed corn for the following year’s crop. The supply of quality larvae to a farm was a separate business. These specialists ensured the continuity of sericulture; they were also the commercial agents, who benefited from the silk business more than anybody else. In manufacturing and selling finished goods, these people are usually called entrepreneurs; but, when it comes to the extraction and distribution of raw materials, I prefer to call them curators . In Italy, these silk curators supplied the larvae, collected the fibre, placed orders for spinning and weaving, and then sent the finished silk to the end user. Organised in a guild or cartel, these curators had a group monopoly on the whole industry. It is not clear why the farmers themselves could not have kept a small number of cocoons and allowed a new cycle of moths to hatch – this was, after all, what they did every year with seed corn. But if the curators had given up control over the silk moth eggs they would have lost control over the whole silk industry. These curators dominated the silk business just like the merchants who traded across the Atlantic dominated the production of tobacco. But, in the silk trade, the producer and the buyer might live only a few miles apart from each other. 4

The elaborate processing of the silk filament was concentrated in towns; the lion’s share of the profits also remained there. Mulberry trees are nice and shady, and the people of Verona planted them in disused moats. The more expensive sorts of silk were spun in Venice, Florence and Pisa. Bologna catered for the mass end of the market. In the mid-fifteenth century, every third Florentine family depended on sericulture. The first water-powered machines appeared in the silk factories of Bologna as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century. The number of hand looms could be counted in their thousands. Patent rights furthered technical progress; in Venice, inventions had been legally protected since the fifteenth century. In 1410 the Silk Guild achieved a complete ban on importing ready-made silk into Venice, but the import of the raw material for processing received every encouragement. This was an early version of mercantilism. Venice had a monopoly on the import of raw silk from Persia and Syria; processed in the city, the manufactured goods were exported by sea or across the Alps at great profit. In the sixteenth century this profitable business collapsed because of the Turkish wars and competition from other European countries; having set up their own silk manufacturing, they drove up the price of raw silk. Still, it remained a diffused raw material with a high production cost, which made up more than half the price of the finished goods. The secret of this rare success was the easy transportation by multiple routes that could not be monopolised by a handful of curators. As happened with other luxury commodities, the use of silk underwent top-down democratisation. Silk garments, stockings and hats became standard wear for doctors, lawyers and prostitutes. It helped that the guilds relaxed their regulations that prohibited the blending of different sorts of silk. Moreover, silk was now blended with wool or cotton to create a warm, cheap fabric. Whole towns in Flanders and southern Italy specialised in creating these blends. Italian craftsmen established sericulture in Spain, the American South and Crimea. But attempts to establish sericulture north of the Alps failed.