A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on the parts of history that make modern readers and authors—or at least me—uncomfortable. Specifically, although I talked quite a bit about attitudes and behaviors that were widely accepted in the past, the post focused on silk production and the massive numbers of caterpillars destroyed during the process.
Fast forward a few weeks, and after a detour to find out more about fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Armenia, I am back to researching silk. Again, this is not “find out something the world has never known or properly appreciated” research but more an exercise in imagining what it would be like to weave silk for a living. My questions include what the caterpillars would look like, how they turn into cocoons, the appearance of the room, and the size and shape of the looms. In search of answers, I picked up a fascinating new book, published just this spring: Aarathi Prasad’s Silk: A World History.
I don’t know what I expected, to be honest—a discussion of trade routes and merchants’ lives, probably—but I wasn’t five pages in before I discovered that I knew even less about silk as a world product that I had imagined (and believe me, I had no illusions about the extent of my knowledge).
Specifically, I discovered that there is and for millennia has been an entire industry of silk production that has little to do with Bombyx mori, mulberry leaves, or even, in some cases, moths. And when it does involve moths, they can live in the wild, have a wingspan the size of your palm, lay eggs that grow into four-inch caterpillars, and fly miles through the forest in pursuit of prospective mates.
Nor do these moths resemble their pale, flightless Bombyx cousins, who stagger out of their cocoons (assuming they’re given that opportunity) and live only long enough to lay eggs before they die. Some of these critters are gorgeous, like the Antheraea assamensis (known as the tasar moth or muga moth, depending on where it is found) pictured above. The larvae may be raised in gardens or plucked from forest trees and, although most often the caterpillars are left in the sun to expire before the cocoon is boiled to release the silk, even that is not a given. Especially in Buddhist regions, the moth may be allowed to chew its way out of the cocoon and fly free, although that breaks the threads and makes them less usable to the producers. As a result, Ahimsa silk, as it is known, carries an even higher price tag than the less humane varieties.
Moreover, the silk thread from these wild cocoons is not always white. It may be pale yellow or beige or even brown; it can resist dye or absorb it, be stronger or weaker than the silk cultivated for millennia in China and for centuries in various parts of the Middle East and Europe.
Now, you may ask, is any of this information useful? At this moment, I’m not sure. As a historian, I love to dig into the past just for the sake of it, so I’m having fun even if I can’t find a way to work the details into a book. And given that the center of tussar (tasar) and muga silk production seems to be Assam in northeastern India, bordering on modern-day Bangladesh and southwestern China, there is a strong possibility that my characters may never have encountered wild silk. They were located, after all, right on the Northern Silk Road between China and the Ottomans, although that route had fallen into disuse by the time my novel opens in the 1550s.
But I can’t rule out the possibility altogether, at least not yet. During that dive into the history of Armenia, I began to realize just how tightly trade linked India, Central Asia, Anatolia, and the various countries of the Middle East (Armenian merchants accounted for a big part of the whole). By 1500, the main silk route went through Tabriz, at the time controlled by the Turkmen Safavid dynasty, and into Anatolia, then on to Bursa, on the Mediterranean just beyond Constantinople. From there, Italian merchants ferried it on to Europe—although Venice established its own silk industry as early as the fourteenth century. From Tabriz, routes also went up to Astrakhan and Russia, as well as down to Aleppo and eventually to Egypt. There were links over the Himalaya to Central Asia, though, especially Bukhara—so the brown silk sari that Anfim bought for Solomonida could have originated in Assam.
Another angle I’d like to investigate is the supposed coarseness of Central Asian silk, blamed for its decline in popularity (although the turmoil caused by the breakup of the Mongol Empire probably had more significance). “Coarse” fibers are a structural thing, reflecting the shape of the strands—altered by prolonged breeding—and they typify wild silk, especially muga silk, which would indicate that my characters may have been raising those caterpillars instead.
So, to be continued. But at least I can be reasonably sure that Kiraz and her family were not profiting from a truly bizarre source of wild silk: the Pinna nobilis shellfish (relative of the mussel), which lives in the Mediterranean Sea!
Images: Tussar saris, © Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY 3.0; Antheraea assamensis © lovelymon lamin—https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/85494584, CC0; muga caterpillars © Nayan J Nath—own work, CC BY-SA 4.0; Pinna nobilis public domain, all via Wikimedia Commons.
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