Medieval Paris and the Mediterranean: The Evidence from the Silk Industry

Farmer, Sharon, “Medieval Paris and the Mediterranean: The Evidence from the Silk Industry”, dans French Historical Studies, vol. 37, n° 3, 2014, p. 383-419.

Abstract

By the last decades of the thirteenth century Paris had a luxury silk cloth industry. Because the demands of weaving silk were considerably different from those of working with wool and linen, the introduction of silk weaving was usually accompanied by the immigration of silk weavers and entrepreneurs. Sources suggest that such immigrants did indeed make a contribution to the nascent silk industry of Paris: the mercers of Paris, who managed silk production, included men with roots in nearly every silk-producing region around the Mediterranean, and several silk workers were from Venice and Cyprus. The presence of these immigrants suggests that we need to rethink the composition of the population of Paris at this time and take into consideration the ways in which the Mediterranean transformed the material culture of northern France towards the end of the age of crusades.

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