The Chinese Lion of San Marco

 The cathedral of San Marco (Saint Mark's) in Venice, with its surrounding piazza, is decorated with art work taken from many other places.  The famous horses of San Marco, for example, came from Constantinople, when the Fourth Crusade raided this supposed ally of the Christian West at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

Less well known is the lion of Saint Mark—all four evangelists were associated with a symbol, and Saint Mark's was a lion.  This is not just an ordinary lion.  It's a Chinese lion.

A Chinese lion with wings.  So how, you ask, did a Chinese lion end up at the head of the Adriatic in the Middle Ages?

It's huge, made of bronze, thirteen feet long (without the tail) and weighing some three tons.  Venetian records note the lion's presence, atop a pillar of Egyptian granite, no later than 1293.  Recent studies of the isotopes in the bronze suggest that most of it dates to eighth-century China.  During the Tang dynasty, such enormous creatures, often winged, were erected as tomb guardians by the wealthy and powerful.  Such tomb guardians were more commonly ceramic, however, though at the same time small bronze creatures might be erected at Buddhist temples.  Whatever this lion might have stood for originally, the Venetians saw it and coveted it.

So this lion's presence at San Marco indicates that the trade routes that brought spices and silks from the far East to medieval Europe also brought larger and heavier objects.  Something this size would have had to have been cut up for transport and then reassembled on site.  The Venetians must have paid a whole lot to have something like this brought overland some 4500 miles.

But this was the era of Marco Polo, when Italians were very interested in the East.  The whole Italian peninsula thrived on trade that brought goods from very far away to Europe.  As well as objects to sell, the Venetians were eager to obtain goods they could display.

Much of the recent work on the lion of San Marco has been reported by Sarah E. Bond.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval trade, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.

Clothes and Clothes Moths

 Clothes moths have been with us for a very long time.  They are mentioned in the Bible.  The New Testament urges readers to store up treasures in heaven rather than on earth, preferring a place where thieves cannot break in and steal, and where moths cannot get in and munch holes in the woolens (I'm paraphrasing here).

It's actually not the moth itself but the worm, the larval form, that eats your woolens.  Moths lay eggs in what seems a good place, on your sweater shelf, and the eggs hatch into worms.  The moths themselves are very adept at eluding being swatted.  A human can chase a moth for quite a while, clapping her hands together where the moth was a second ago, without success.  (Handy household tip:  Use a cat.  A cat's reflexes are faster than yours.  Pick up Tabby and aim her at the moth.)

Medieval people, like biblical and modern people, had trouble with clothes moths.  Whereas probably the majority of our modern clothing is cotton or synthetic (polyester, nylon, etc.), the default fabric for medieval people was wool.  The moths thought that was great (well, moths don't think anything, but you know what I mean).  Since most medieval people only had two outfits at any one time, one to wear and one to wash (assuming they didn't just have one), the moths didn't have many opportunities in everyday wear, but a heavier (or fancier) outfit, or a winter cloak, or blankets, anything stored away in a chest in warm weather, might well be full of holes when brought out.

We have moth balls that can be put among the woolens, heavy-duty chemicals that were unknown in the Middle Ages (and are probably carcinogenic, but we needn't go into that now).  We have cedar chests that the moths really do not like.  There is no evidence one way or the other that medieval people knew (or didn't) of the value of cedar chests.  But for most people in the Middle Ages a storage chest would not be lined with nice pieces of cedar, instead being something fairly rough made of plain wood.  We can (and should) take our woolens outdoors in very cold weather, hang them up, and brush them, getting rid of moth eggs and killing them with cold, but this doesn't help when the woolens are being nibbled in the summer.

One medieval response was to try to find cloth that moths wouldn't eat.  Those who could afford it loved silk (on which see more here).  Clothes moths won't touch silk, plus it takes dye well and is smooth and gentle on your skin, unlike wool (unless very carefully prepared).  It was however outrageously expensive.  Silk worms (look! a worm related to cloth! but good this time! let's not get into that now) only became widely known and raised in the West at the end of the Middle Ages, so silk needed to be imported from China via the long, long land route across central Asia (the Silk Road, of which you may have heard).

Cotton first started appearing in Europe with any regularity in the late twelfth or thirteenth century.  It too was a luxury fabric, but not nearly as expensive, because it could be grown (rather than harvested from cocoons, a long and tedious process) and did not have to travel nearly as far.  Clothes moths won't touch cotton either.  But good old wool, with the issue of moths, remained the standard.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023E

For more on life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook retailers.  Also available in paperback!

Silk

 Medieval people valued silk cloth.  It was smooth next to the skin (unlike homespun wool), it took colors well, it was lustrous due to the structure of its fibers, it didn't fade, it was very strong for its weight, and moths wouldn't eat it.  (Clothes moths have been a perennial issue for people and their clothes--there are clothes moths in the Bible, where heaven is described among other things as a place where moths will not crawl around and chew holes.)

But the early medieval West did not have silk worms.  In fact, the general belief was that silk was spun from some special stone, found in the fabled East.  The Obviously False slur of silk coming from some worm was roundly rejected.

Now in fact silk does come from worms, raised in China for for at least the past four thousand years.  The worms graze on mulberry leaves, then spin cocoons, which can be carefully unwound to produce the filament, after boiling up the cocoons to kill the pupae.  They would emerge as a moth (not a clothes moth! which eats wool, not mulberry leaves) if they lived.  In fact, so-called raw silk or wild silk is made from cocoons where the moth has emerged, breaking through the cocoon and breaking a lot of the filaments, so the result is a less smooth texture.

Silk was extremely valuable in medieval Europe.  One of the things that Charlemagne ordered the overseers of his manors to do each year was count up how many lengths of silk cloth they had, as recorded in his "Capitulare de villis."  The epics and romances showed how luxurious their heroes and heroines were by insisting that they wore silk, slept under silk blankets, and had silk tents.

 

The above is a nice piece of silk from eleventh-century Egypt, revered for many years at Cadouin as a Holy Hanky (see more on the Hanky here).

A big part of the expense was getting the silk over thousands of miles from China.  The Silk Road (not really a road, a network of routes) led from China across central Asia and ended up eventually at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.  There in the Middle Ages it was picked up by Italian trading ships and taken to Italy.  From there it was sold throughout Europe.

The Near East was also where spices from southeast Asia were bought by Italian merchants.  The spices had not come via the Silk Road, however.  Instead they had come on Arabic dhows, across the Indian Ocean.  But in the medieval mind, silk and spices both came from the mystic East, which was why Columbus was distraught when the "Indians" he encountered seemed to have neither silk nor spices.

Understandably, the medieval West was eager to find the secret of silk production.  Silk worms appear to have reached Byzantium in the sixth century AD, smuggled there probably from India.  By the twelfth century some Italian cities had figured out about the worms and were raising them in secret, while still putting out the story of the special, magical stone.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval clothing, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.