Italian Silk with Paired Eagles, about 1300
A woven silk of about 1300, in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Silk weaving became a major Italian industry in the thirteenth century, above all at Lucca and Venice, and the paired eagles here follow patterns learned from the established workshops of Islamic Spain.
What Lucca guarded was not the loom but the pattern and the process: the throwing of the thread, the drawloom setup, the dyes. Those were trade secrets in the literal legal sense, protected by guild statute and by the city's willingness to pursue a weaver who took them elsewhere. The designs themselves were borrowed — from Byzantium, from Islamic Spain, from Central Asian textiles arriving along the same trade roads as the raw silk. See how Lucca's silk guilds turned technique into wealth and power.
CC0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
