New fabrics: cotton, indigo and velvet

Cotton is native to India. When Muslims conquered northern India, they found cotton fields and production into cloth, which they sent back to Damascus. Egypt and Spain were growing cotton by the 10th century. Europeans at first used cotton only for padding out quilted blankets under chain mail armor or stuffing quilted winter coats.

During the later medieval years, the Po River valley of Italy became a cotton manufacturing powerhouse. Much raw cotton was imported from Egypt, but Italy began to plant it, too. But the home spinning system that was traditional for linen and wool never incorporated cotton. From the start, Po River towns used water power for mechanized spinning wheels. (While hand spinners felt that the spinning wheel did a worse job on wool and flax, it actually produced superior cotton thread.)

Italy’s cotton was simple utility cloth. It could be substituted for linen, which was still considered a finer fabric but which took much more work to produce. Europe began to use cotton underclothes, towels and sheets. Cotton took dye easily, so colored cotton was turned into vests and short jackets. The doublets of the Tudor era and Shakespearean stage were creations of Italian cotton. As a side benefit, daily use of cotton produced cotton rags. The paper industry was growing rapidly at this time, so rag buyers began to turn over a business in recycling cotton.

Europe had always used woad, the native blue dye, but woad had a few problems that made India’s imported indigo dye welcome. It didn’t dissolve in fabric dyeing vats until Marco Polo’s travel notes explained what needed to be added, so at first it was used only by artists. But by the 15th century, blues were darker and more color-fast. Black became the official color of mourning in the 14th century, so more dyers were creating strong, dark colors.

Velvet was the last major fabric invention in the medieval period, following the same path of introduction that other fabrics had traveled: from China and India by way of Damascus, Egypt and Spain, then into Italy, last into France and Belgium (a center of cloth manufacture). Velvet was made of fine silk; the trick of its weaving was to create two pieces of plain fabric that were connected very closely by fine threads. A sharp knife cut the two fabrics apart, through the short weft threads, to roll them separately. Each roll was like the finest, softest fur. It was horribly expensive at first, thus restricted to royal and high aristocratic use. It remained associated with royalty for a long time. When Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded in 1587, the execution team unrolled a large carpet of black silk velvet to absorb her spilled blood.

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