Introduction

Textile production was unquestionably the most significant of medieval industries, on account of its practical usages, the volume of work it involved, and its economic impact on society. Surviving material evidence, although scant, is the most important testament to the textile industry of the period.

This chapter gives an explanatory outline of the manufacturing processes, surveying the most common techniques found in extant examples of 13th- and 14th-century textiles produced on the Iberian Peninsula.

Fibres

Medieval textile fibres are traditionally classified according to origin. Especially prominent among vegetable fibres were flax and cotton, as well as hemp and ramie (nettle family). Animal fibres included wool and silk. As natural fibres, these all needed to undergo cleaning, sorting and preparation before being spun and subsequently dyed (if desired) and woven. Metallic fibres also played an important role in the period.

The majority of the fabrics crafted for the elite of the period were made from the most prestigious and valuable fibre, silk. Silk is produced chiefly by domesticated silkworms (Bombyx mori L.), which feed on mulberry leaves. Of the various species of mulberry trees, two are particularly relevant to silk culture: the black mulberry (morus nigra) and the white, common, or silkworm mulberry (morus alba). Both were cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula from at least the late Middle Ages.

Silk culture was introduced to the Iberian Peninsula gradually, at varying speeds, and early, but there is no doubt that silkworm cultivation and the textile industry associated with silk had attained great importance by the 9th and especially by the 10th centuries under Islamic influence. Documentary references from those centuries refer to silk fabrics (including Gregory IV’s Liber pontificalis of the first half of the 9th century, which mentions silks described as spanica) and there is information about silk cultivation in the Calendar of Cordoba. Silk production and sericulture in al-Andalus have been studied by Vallvé and subsequently in greater detail by Lagardère. Knowledge of silk progressively spread to the other kingdoms of the Peninsula and by the Modern Age there were various centres of production located chiefly in the South and East.