A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire

A Perfect Red

Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire

Amy Butler Greenfield

For my family,

at home and abroad

Contents

Prologue: The Color of Desire

One: The Dyer’s Lot

Two: The Color of the Sun

Three: An Ancient Art

Four: The Emperor’s New Dye

Five: A Profitable Empire

Six: Cochineal on Trial

Seven: Legacies

Eight: Trade Secrets

Nine: Pirates’ Prize

Ten: Wormberry

Eleven: Through the Looking Glass

Twelve: A Curious Gamble

Thirteen: A Spy in Oaxaca

Fourteen: Anderson’s Incredible Folly

Fifteen: Red and Revolution

Sixteen: Scarlet Fever

Seventeen: A Lump of Coal

Eighteen: Renaissance Dye

Epilogue: Cheap Color

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Searchable Terms

Photos

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

The Color of Desire

HUMANS SEE THE WORLD IN A CASCADE of color, with eyes that can distinguish any single shade from more than a million others. As a species, we prize color and attach great significance to it. Yet few colors mean as much to us as red. Proof of our attachment lies in many of the world’s languages, English among them. We roll out the red carpet, catch crooks red-handed, and dread getting caught in red tape. We stop at red lights, ignore red herrings, and celebrate red-letter days. Depending on our political persuasions, we wave the red flag or fear the red in the bed. When hot rage overpowers us, we say we see red.

Many of these expressions are fairly modern, dating back less than three hundred years. Radical politics, for instance, have been called red only since the bloody European uprisings of 1848, while red tape is an eighteenth-century idiom that alluded to the red ribbons or tapes that tied together official documents in Great Britain. Yet red itself is a concept with much deeper roots in the human psyche. Although many mammals have trouble perceiving red, the human eye is strongly sensitized to the color. An affinity for red seems almost hard-wired into us. Perhaps this explains why, in language after language, the word for red is an ancient one, older than any other color term save black and white. Before there was blue or yellow or green, there was red, the color of blood and fire.

Sacred to countless cultures, red has appealed to humans for time out of mind. Neanderthals buried their dead with red ochre, as did the Cro-Magnons, who painted cave walls with the same iron-rich ore. In ancient China, red was considered a lucky color, symbolic of prosperity and health. In the Arab world, it was sometimes construed as a sign of divine favor, sometimes as the mark of the damned—but above all as a male color, emblematic of heat and vitality. South of the Sahara, red was a color of high status, while in ancient Egypt it was the harbinger of danger, sacred to the trickster god Seth. Among the ancient Romans, red light was equated with divine fire. In primitive societies, the color has often been credited with magical powers, including the ability to exorcise demons, cure illness, and ward off the evil eye.

Throughout much of the world, red represents events and emotions at the core of the human condition: danger and courage, revolution and war, violence and sin, desire and passion, even life itself. No wonder our poets sing of it. O, my luve’s like a red, red rose, croons Robert Burns, while Tennyson warns us that Nature is red in tooth and claw. Friday I tasted life, wrote Emily Dickinson in 1866. A circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my mind.

It is one thing, however, to assign meaning to a color, quite another to create the color itself. For thousands of years artists met with disappointment as they tried to reproduce the flaming scarlets and deep crimsons they saw in nature. The best red these artists knew was ochre, the Cro-Magnon’s pigment, which produced a color that was muddied with orange and brown.

Sometime before the fifth century B.C., painters in Asia discovered that a far more satisfactory red could be made from the mineral cinnabar, or mercuric sulfide, a compound also known as vermilion and minium. Used to striking effect in Chinese scrolls and later on the frescoed walls of Pompeii, cinnabar did have several disadvantages: it was expensive, poisonous, and had a disconcerting propensity to turn black with exposure to light. Yet because it was by far the most brilliant red paint available, cinnabar continued to be used and celebrated for more than a thousand years.

If artists found it difficult to find a stable and vivid red, dyers faced an even greater challenge: their reds had to stand up to sunlight, sweat, and repeated washing. Because neither ochre nor cinnabar yielded a bright red when applied to cloth, dyers were forced to look elsewhere. Their quest was rather like alchemy: a secret art by which practitioners sought to transmute base materials—leaves, bark, blood, dirt, and even cow dung—into a gold mine of brilliant red dyes.

Unlike the alchemists, the dyers were successful—but only to a point. Although they learned to make russets and orange-reds cheaply and easily from plants, true red proved a much greater challenge. Before the invention of artificial dyes in the nineteenth century, it could be obtained only from exotic substances and secret techniques that few dyers ever mastered.

Elusive, expensive, and invested with powerful symbolism, red cloth became the prize possession of the wealthy and well-born. Kings wore red, and so did cardinals. Red robes clothed the shah of Persia, and in classical Rome red became so synonymous with status that the city’s most powerful men were called coccinati: the ones who wear red.

It was big news, then, when Spain’s conquistadors found the Aztecs selling an extraordinary red dyestuff in the great marketplaces of Mexico in 1519. Calling the dyestuff grana cochinilla, or cochineal, the conquistadors shipped it back to Europe, where it produced the brightest, strongest red the Old World had ever seen. According to the eminent English chemist Robert Boyle, cochineal yielded a perfect Scarlet. A master dyer went farther and called it the finest and best dye drug in the world. Cochineal became Europe’s premier red dyestuff, and Spain made a fortune selling it to dyers around the globe.

As far as Europe was concerned, the only trouble with cochineal was that Spain controlled the supply. Indeed Spain guarded its monopoly so jealously that the dyestuff ’s very nature remained a mystery. Was cochineal animal, vegetable, or mineral? The best minds in Europe argued the point for more than two centuries.

Few, however, disputed the new dyestuff ’s value. In an age when textiles were a major source of wealth, cochineal was big business. Determined to break Spain’s lucrative monopoly, other nations turned to espionage and piracy. In England, the Netherlands, and France, the search for cochineal soon took on the tone of a national crusade. Kings, haberdashers, scientists, pirates, and spies—all became caught up in the chase for the most desirable color on Earth.

The history of this mad race for cochineal is a window onto another world—a world in which red was rare and precious, a source of wealth and power for those who knew its secrets. To obtain it, men sacked ships, turned spy, and courted death.

This is their story.

ONE

The Dyer’s Lot

FORTY MILES WEST OF FLORENCE, IN A fertile Tuscan valley not far from the Mediterranean Sea, lies the serene and sunlit city of Lucca. Known throughout the region for its trade in olive oil, flour, and wine, modern-day Lucca is not much more than a provincial market town, but its great piazzas, Romanesque churches, and medieval towers bear mute witness to a more illustrious past. Eight hundred years ago, Lucca was a power to be reckoned with: its luminous silks, dyed in jewel-like tones, were one of the wonders of the thirteenth century. No one on the Continent could equal them, though many tried. Sold only by Europe’s most exclusive merchants, Lucchese silks included smooth taffetas, intricate damasks, and elaborate brocades figured with fleur-de-lis, griffins, dragons, peacocks, and even entire hunting scenes. All were fabrics fit for noblemen, princes, and kings.

Advantageously situated on a major road between Rome and northern Europe, Lucca enjoyed peace and prosperity for many years. Like most Tuscan towns, however, it had its share of long-standing family feuds. These quarrels blazed into open warfare in 1300, intertwining with a larger struggle that was raging throughout much of Tuscany, forcing many people, including the poet Dante, to flee the region. A rich prize in a troubled land, Lucca found itself under frequent attack from both without and within. The violence culminated in 1314, when a band of Lucchese exiles joined a Pisan army and sacked the city, robbing, raping, and murdering their enemies.

Fearing for their lives, many of Lucca’s dyers and silk workers fled to Venice, a neutral city a hundred miles away. The Council of Venice offered the refugees generous loans, but to no one’s surprise there was a catch to the deal; the Venetians, after all, hadn’t created an empire out of their swampy archipelago by giving their money away. Eager to learn the secrets of Lucchese silks, they required the refugees to repay the loans, not in cash but in Lucchese goods and tools.

Destitute, many refugees accepted these terms. In doing so, however, they betrayed their city and put their own lives in peril. They would spend the rest of their days with a bounty on their heads, because Lucca’s guild laws prescribed death for any Lucchese practicing the silk trade outside the city. According to statute, the men were to be strangled, the women burned.

Lucca’s draconian guild laws were a sign of the times, for textiles were a matter of life and death in Renaissance Europe. In many ways, they were to the Renaissance what computing and biotech are to our own time: a high-stakes industry rife with intense rivalries and cutthroat competition—an industry with the power to transform society.

With textiles, the transformation began in medieval times and accelerated after 1350. Aristocrats who survived the Black Death had inheritances to spend, and rising merchants and lawyers were eager to ape their fashionable ways. As each tried to outdo the other, they insisted on wardrobes far larger and fancier than their grandparents had known; their houses, too, were more extravagantly furnished. People of lesser station were also buying cloth at market stalls and clothier’s shops—and buying more of it as the decades wore on. Bolt by bolt, their purchases helped fuel the rise of Europe.

Like the spice trade, the textile industry created new markets and trade networks, but its importance did not end there. Spices were usually grown and processed in the Far East, but textiles were something Europeans could produce for themselves, and for this reason their impact on Europe was more profound. Textiles spurred the invention of new technologies—new types of spinning machines, new methods for bleaching—and shaped the very pattern of work itself.

By the fifteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Europeans, from humble shepherds to great merchants, made a living from textiles, and many a nobleman depended on the wealth they created. Because each step in the cloth-making process was handled by different craftsmen, more than a dozen people could be involved in fashioning a single piece of fabric. The silk workers of Lucca, for example, included in their ranks a host of specialized workers: reelers to unwrap the cocoons, throwers to twist the thread, boilers to clean it, dyers to color it, and warpers and weavers to turn the thread into cloth.

Wool, the most common fiber in Europe, required even more specialization. After shepherds raised the sheep and shearers fleeced them, washers cleaned the raw wool and carders pulled the fibers apart with bristles. Spinners spun those fibers into yarn with distaffs and spindles and passed the yarn to the weavers, who wove it into cloth. Wool cloth then had to be finished, a process that involved fullers or walkers who washed the fabric in troughs of water treated with fuller’s earth, a mineral compound that promoted absorption. (Many walkers trampled the mixture into the cloth with their bare feet, but prosperous fullers kept their boots on and used a millwheel and hammers instead.) The soaking-wet cloth was then hung out on wooden frames called tenters; tenterhooks held the fabric fast and stretched it to the right dimensions as it dried. While still damp, the cloth could be brushed and sheared several times for a finer, softer nap. The fabric was then handed to the dyers. Although dyers usually worked with finished cloth, sometimes they treated the unspun wool instead, a costly practice that yielded the most intense and enduring colors and gave us the expression dyed in the wool.

No matter what fiber was used, the textile industry required immense amounts of skilled labor, which is why textiles were a lifeline for many communities. A thriving cloth business meant jobs, and jobs meant coins in the purse and food on the table. If the business faltered or failed, people went hungry and lost their homes. If worse came to worst, they starved on the streets—an eventuality that was no mere figure of speech to the people of Renaissance Europe. During the Great Famine of 1315–1317, when crops across Europe failed for two years running, people died by the thousands. Many other famines followed during the rest of that grim century, and for generations afterward the suffering remained vivid in European memory, inspiring dozens of folktales—the Renaissance equivalent of the urban legend—that told harrowing stories of people who ate their dogs, their shoes, and even their children before they succumbed to starvation.

Weavers, dyers, and other cloth workers lived in constant fear of such an end, for the textile industry was a crowded and competitive field. Those who produced low-grade cloth faced the most competition, made the smallest profits, and were most likely to lose their jobs when business contracted, as it periodically did. Those who knew the secrets of making fine cloth were, as a rule, much better off. They had fewer rivals and made most of their sales to the wealthy elite, who could afford to pay a high price for their luxuries, even during hard times.

As it was with workers, so it was with countries. England, which primarily exported raw wool and plain cloth, was considered a backward place in late medieval times; its leaders were desperate for the kind of success enjoyed by more exemplary industries across the Channel, where Holland was famous for its high-quality linen and Flanders for its woolens. These nations, in turn, envied Italy, where cities like Lucca and Venice produced exquisite satins, brocades, and velvets in a multitude of rich hues. Wealthy Europeans were willing to pay astronomical prices for these dazzling Italian textiles, which they wore as badges of rank, not least because of their color.

Today dressing for success often means donning gray and black suits, beige blouses, and black pinstripes; subdued colors are considered classy. To the people of Renaissance Europe, however, such thinking would have seemed entirely backward. In their day, gray and beige were the colors of poverty: only the poorest of the poor—and lowly priests, monks, and nuns—wore such undistinguished garb. More prosperous peasants, craftsmen, and other middling folk dressed in muted clothing colored with cheap, domestic dyes. Although such dyes could sometimes yield strong blues, yellows, oranges, and greens, the fabrics tended to fade quickly, especially if the wearer worked outdoors.* The most brilliant, intense, and lasting colors came from imported dyestuffs that only the rich could afford. Bright clothing was therefore a mark of high status, a code for power that even the illiterate could read at a glance.

The association of color and rank was reinforced by sumptuary laws that decreed what each level of society was allowed to eat, drink, and wear. Passed by medieval rulers who wished to discourage vanity and extravagance in their subjects—an aim that met with the full approval of the Church—these codes of consumption also ensured that no one ever looked grander than the monarch himself. To this end, sumptuary laws regulated all kinds of apparel. In Nuremberg, such laws forbade ordinary men from wearing gold lace, velvet, pearls, ermine, and weasel fur. Farther south, in Siena, veils, trains, and platform shoes were tightly regulated. In England, fourteenth-century yeomen and artisans could not wear silk, rings, jewels, or buttons—buttons being new to Europe and extremely fashionable at the time. Yeomen could, however, wear cat fur without penalty.

Many sumptuary laws also concerned themselves with color, reserving bright fabrics for aristocrats and the well-to-do. One of the earliest of these regulations dates back to the eighth century, when Charlemagne ordered peasants to clothe themselves in black and gray, a dress code similar to that of fifteenth-century Florence, where female slaves were restricted to coarse woolens and expressly forbidden to wear coats or dresses or sleeves of any kind in any bright colors. In many parts of medieval Europe only aristocrats were entitled to wear scarlet cloth; some types of purple fabric were also restricted. On the whole, however, color was most effectively regulated by the many laws that severely limited what middling and poorer people could spend on their clothes; on such restricted budgets, expensively dyed cloth was out of the question.

As the centuries passed and bright fabrics became more widely available, it became more difficult to prevent people from dressing above their station. In 1583, a curmudgeonly Elizabethan commentator complained that now there is such a confuse mingle mangle of apparel…that it is verie hard to knowe who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not. It seems likely, however, that such confusion was largely confined to prosperous members of the middling and upper ranks: peasants simply could not afford the best and brightest fabrics. According to another Elizabethan writer, they dressed instead in a dull tweed called medley and "graye and russet, never dy’de."

Aristocrats, on the other hand, were a colorful lot, especially in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Although a few played against type and wore black—fine, deep-dyed black cloth was both dramatic and expensive—most reveled in gaudy display. Flashy cloth-of-gold, fashioned with twisted filaments of the precious metal, was reserved for royalty, but richly colored damasks and silks delighted all the nobility. Throughout Europe, courtiers favored luminous garments decorated with spangles, ribbons, and beads. In Italy, the sons of noblemen wore multicolored hose with contrasting doublets and capes, a fashion that spread to much of the Continent. Slashed sleeves and breeches in a kaleidoscope of colors were all the rage, as were luxurious velvet fabrics in polychrome stripes. Nor were rulers immune to the craze; Henry VIII prided himself on a spectacular wardrobe that included a green velvet gown, a purple tinsel cloak, and bright blue and red doublets.

Those who could cater to this rage for color were assured of plentiful jobs and handsome profits. But the production of bright cloth was no easy road to riches, for dyeing was a difficult and dangerous art—no fit job for the faint of heart.

DURING THE RENAISSANCE, DYERS HAD TO SPEND many years apprenticed to a master, learning their trade. Their days were long, often beginning before dawn and ending after sunset, and the work was both exacting and exhausting.

The dier…in smoke, and heate doth toile,/Mennes fickle mindes to please, runs a sixteenth-century poem. The accompanying illustration shows a well-muscled dyer, shirtsleeves rolled up, hoisting wet cloth from a bricked-in cauldron. Steam and smoke fill the room, a potent reminder of how hazardous the job was. Each day, dyers and their apprentices worked with fiery furnaces, boiling water, corrosive acids, poisonous salts, and fuming vats. Accidents were common.

Amid these dangers, apprentice dyers attempted to master the mysteries of the trade, of which there were many (see fig. 1). Before the invention of artificial dyes in the mid-nineteenth century, most dyes came from plants, and there was no rhyme or reason to the colors they yielded. Green woad produced a blue dye, purple loosestrife a brown one. Red blossoms might turn cloth orange or yellow—if, that is, they produced any lasting color at all. To make matters even more complicated, the dye in some plants was found in their flowers, while others had it in their leaves or roots. Nor was the amount of dye consistent; it depended instead on a variety of factors, including where the plant was grown, when it was harvested, and how soon it was used.

And the secrets of dyeing did not end there. Apprentice dyers soon learned that a few dyes were naturally fast, holding their color through years of wear and washing. Most, however, required the addition of chemical binding agents such as tannin, cream of tartar, alum, iron, and chrome—known as mordants because they helped dyes bite into the cloth. Mordants, while necessary, were a challenge to master, especially as each produced different colors from the same dyestuff. The temperature of the dyebath—the mixture of water, dyestuffs, and other ingredients—was often crucial to the color, as was the amount of time the cloth remained in the dyepot. Even the dyepot itself could affect the color of the cloth, if its metal reacted with the dye.

Nor were dyepots the only tools that dyers needed. The high-tech specialists of their day, they often possessed a dizzying array of equipment. In 1394, when two Tuscan dyers fell into debt and their shop was inventoried, the list ran to nearly a hundred items, including vats, washboards, winches, scales, tubs, shovels, and a small sieve for fishing the wool out of the boilers. All told, their equipment was worth over 400 gold florins, with dyestuffs and mordants adding another 200 florins to the total. In an age when 20 florins sufficed to buy a small farm, this was a substantial sum, which may explain why the dyers were in debt in the first place. Such investment, however, was necessary for those who wished to excel in the business.

Succeeding despite the many complications of their craft, the best dyers were part artist and part scientist, at a time when art and science were not yet regarded as divisible realms. Like modern scientists, they engaged in methodical experimentation and set great store by their ability to reproduce results. They also developed accurate testing techniques to check the quality of their raw ingredients and to detect fraud among their fellow dyers. Yet their science was necessarily imprecise. Lacking thermometers and stopwatches, they spoke of dyepots that seethed or boiled, or of holding cloth under the water for a space of three paternosters. To judge when a cloth was colored to perfection, dyers relied less on exact formulas than on training, experience, and keen artistic instinct.

ALTHOUGH THE BEST DYERS PRODUCED COLORS OF such rare beauty that people would pay a king’s ransom to possess them, dyers themselves ranked very low on the social ladder. From ancient times, people had regarded them with suspicion and distaste. The finger of a dyer has the smell of rotten fish, sniffed the author of an ancient Egyptian papyrus. His eyes are red from fatigue. In India, dyers were considered unclean.

Because dyers changed the outward appearance of objects, the ancient Greeks regarded them as dabblers in deception, a shifty-eyed lot who had to be kept under close watch. The Greek word dolon, to dye, had a second meaning: to deceive, and the uncompromising Spartans considered dyers such tricksters that they forbade them to dwell within the city.

Under the Romans, dyers fared better. Highly organized and politically active, they were believed to enjoy the protection of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. Nevertheless, few people wished to be their neighbors. Dyers made frequent use of noxious chemicals, including urine, which was both a bleaching agent and a key ingredient in blue dye. Not surprisingly, the dyeing district of any city could be found by smell alone.

After Rome fell, dyers in Europe lost both status and skill. During the turmoil of the Dark Ages, the art might have died out altogether had it not been for a few dedicated practitioners and patrons. Important, too, were the monks and nuns who wrote treatises on dyeing. Intent on preserving paint recipes for their illuminated missals and codices, they recorded many secrets of color for posterity.

European interest in dyeing rekindled with the Crusades. Christian soldiers who traveled to the East marveled at the brilliant colors and luxurious feel of Arab fabrics, and many brought samples home as souvenirs, gifts, and articles of trade. In Spain and Sicily, Arabic dyeing manuals were translated into Latin, and rulers of both kingdoms sought to encourage high-quality cloth making. It was during this period that Lucca’s rise to fame began, with the arrival of Jewish textile workers in the eleventh century, who came to the city by way of southern Italy and Sicily. They brought with them the secrets of dyed silk, an art that was far more advanced in their eastern homelands than in Europe.

If by the eleventh century Europeans were starting to show a new respect for the dyers’ craft, they nevertheless continued to despise dyers themselves. Church leaders, who had no great liking for tradesmen of any description, considered dyers especially disreputable because they had contact with so many foul and unclean substances. Delicate ladies scorned them for their stained fingernails; according to the thirteenth-century grammarian John Garland, the only reason any lady ever married a dyer was for money. Dyers’ odorous workshops and their habit of dumping their stinking vats into nearby streams made enemies of just about everyone. In twelfth-century England, they were held in such low esteem that merchant companies expelled any members caught practicing the art.

Attitudes toward dyers began to change in the thirteenth century. The European market for fine textiles was expanding, and skilled textile workers found themselves in demand. The competition for dyers was especially fierce, since their work was so complicated and since they added so much value to the cloth. Edward III did his best to woo Flemish dyers to England, and many cities, including Volterra and Siena, offered assistance to foreign master dyers who agreed to set up shop within their walls. As the experience of the Lucchese in Venice suggests, poaching experienced dyers was a well-trodden path to success in the textile business; whenever disaster struck a dyeing center, other cities hoped to profit from their rival’s misfortune and attract the fleeing craftsmen.

Like many other medieval artisans, dyers took advantage of their new power and organized themselves into guilds, or trade associations. Each of these guilds attempted to regulate the profession for the benefit of its most skilled members. Their chief aim was to prevent rivals from driving prices and quality down, and to this end they established working hours, conditions, and wages, all of which differed from city to city. To keep competition down, they also set up systems of apprenticeship which limited entry into the profession.

In some regions, dyers had trouble establishing their own guilds, ending up instead as minor members of more powerful guilds run by wool merchants or weavers, who often ruled with an iron hand. One of the most infamous of these guilds, the Arte di Calimala in Florence, burned any cloth not dyed to standard and fined the dyer. If the dyer could not pay the fine—and many dyers had little cash to spare—the Arte di Calimala chopped off one of his hands instead.

Needless to say, dyers preferred to form their own guilds wherever they could. In Venice, Lucca, and many other medieval cities, such guilds prospered and helped raise members to new heights of respectability. In London, the dyers’ guild was even allowed the rare privilege of keeping swans on the Thames, a privilege once reserved solely for royalty.

Over time, dyers’ guilds became quite specialized. Dyers who worked with different fabrics often belonged to different guilds, as did dyers who worked in different colors. Blue, black, and green were one common range, and red, violet, and yellow another. A dyer caught using colors outside his chosen specialty could be fined and thrown out of his guild.

Depending on the dyestuffs they employed, dyers were also categorized—at least in some regions—as either plain dyers or high dyers. Plain dyers, known as schwarzfärber in Germany, teinturiers en petit teint in France, and tintori d’arte minore in Italy, were by far the largest group. Their dyes used comparatively inexpensive ingredients, usually in simple recipes, though simple was a relative term. In some cities, the apprenticeship of plain dyers lasted three years, followed by at least five years’ practice as a journeyman working in a licensed master’s shop. Guilds allowed only so many of these journeymen to attain the rank of master, and to achieve that status each candidate had to pass rigorous tests. One such examination required a master-piece of forty-eight yards of linen dyed blue, along with several pounds of woolen thread dyed in blue and green.

High dyers specialized in fine fabrics and rare and expensive dyes. Called schönfärber in Germany, teinturiers en bon teint in France, and tintori d’arte maggiore in Italy, they were far less numerous than the plain dyers, in part because their apprenticeship could last twice as long. Independent masters of the art, they did not always form guilds, although some knew one another personally. When they did band together, they often specialized in a single color. Scarlet dyers, for example, formed their own guilds in Venice, Genoa, Marseilles, and several other cities.

Whatever its specialty, every dyers’ guild was in a sense a secret society, guarding the mysteries of its art from outsiders. Members who violated the rule of secrecy were punished, expelled from the guild, and—if the offense was grave—outlawed from the city. Guilds also established standards for their members, discouraged them from taking shortcuts, and prohibited the substitution of cheap ingredients for expensive ones. In this, the dyers’ guilds could be quite as ruthless as the Arte di Calimala; for example, the statutes of the dyers’ guild of Lucca, recorded in 1255, decreed that any member who used cheap red dyestuffs—thereby compromising the city’s excellent reputation for quality goods—would be fined one hundred lire or else lose his right hand.

That this regulation concerned red dye is no coincidence. Although Lucca was not the only European city that made red cloth, its scarlet silk was famous. The techniques for making this