y
travelled to other parts of the interior of the country, where
they loaded their vessels with such goods as they wanted. Costly
silken robes of the brightest colours are manufactured in Almeria."
Granada was famous too, a little later, for its silks and woven
goods. About 1562 Navagiero wrote: "All sorts of cloth and silks
are made there: the silks made at Granada are much esteemed all
over Spain; they are not so good as those that come from Italy.
There are several looms, but they do not yet know how to work them
well. They make good taffetas, sarcenet, and silk serges. The
velvets are not bad, but those that are made at Valencia are better
in quality."

Marco Polo says of the Persians in certain sections; "There are
excellent artificers in the cities, who make wonderful things in
gold, silk, and embroidery.... In veins of the mountains stones
are found, commonly called turquoises, and other jewels. There
also are made all sorts of arms and ammunition for war, and by the
women excellent needlework in silks, with all sorts of creatures
very admirably wrought therein." Marco Polo also reports the King
of Tartary as wearing on his birthday a most precious garment of
gold, while his barons wore the same, and had given them girdles of
gold and silver, and "pearls and garments of great price." This Khan
also "has the tenths of all wool, silk, and hemp, which he causes to
be made into clothes, in a house for that purpose appointed: for
all trades are bound one day in the week to serve him." He clothed
his armies with this tythe wool.

In Anglo-Saxon times a fabric composed of fine basket-weaving of
thin flat strips of pure gold was used; sometimes the flat metal
was woven on a warp of scarlet silk threads. Later strips of gilded
parchment were fraudulently substituted for the genuine flat metal
thread. Often the woof of gold strips was so solid and heavy that
it was necessary to have a silk warp of six strands, to support
its wear.

Gold cloth was of varying excellence, however: among the items in
an inventory for the Earl of Warwick in the time of Henry VI., there
is allusion to "one coat for My Lord's body, beat with fine gold;
two coats for heralds, beat with demi-gold."

It is generally assumed that the first wire-drawing machines were
made about 1360 in Germany; they were not used in England until
about 1560. Theophilus, however, in the eleventh century, tells
"Of the instruments through which wires are drawn,"