Chapter summary:
By the time the Nung Shu was published in 1313, the Chinese had been spinning yarns for 1000 years, using all sorts of materials but silk was the finest and most valuable. China had been exporting silk to Italy for a millennium by the time Taccola and di Giorgio saw the Nung Shu. In return for fine silk, Chinese merchants sought gold, silver, coral and glass. During the Tang dynasty, monks smuggled silk worms from China to the West. Pictures of quilling machines, which wind silk thread onto bobbins, can be seen in the stained glass windows of Chartres cathedral, dating between 1240 and 1245.
By the time Zheng He’s fleet visited in 1434, Europeans had silk worms and knew how to wind silk thread and to make silk cloth, but in small quantities. However, tens of thousands of mulberry trees were planted in Northern Italy between 1465 and 1474 and this combined with mechanical reeling and weaving machines led to soaring silk production in Florence and Venice.
The raw silk and silk thread produced in the Terra firma encouraged a new breed of entrepreneurs to buy silk forward. Many were financed by the Medici. By these means, first Venice and Florence, then the whole of Italy came to dominate the raw silk market of Europe.
Florence’s silk-based economic boom required more workers and more workers required more food and as Braudel has pointed out, the yield from rice fields is some six times that of wheat. Rice is the basic food of Southern China and had been known in the Mediterranean world since the Roman era, but it was used only for medicinal purposes. The first known reference to rice being grown in Northern Italy is a letter of 1475 from the ruler of Milan Galaezzo Sforza to the Duke of Ferrara concerning twelve sacks of Asian (Oryza Sativa) rice grown in the Po valley.
The Nung Shu illustrates all manner of techniques for the vital task of regulating water supply to the rice fields – many types of bucket and chain pumps, locks and sluices, dams and conduit channels. Taccola and di Giorgio drew an array of pumps as well as dams and sluice gates. The chain pumps first shown in the drawings of Taccola are still in use today in Northeast Italy, where the local people call them “Tartar” pumps.
In many ways, the Po resembles a smaller version of the Yangtze. Both rivers carry melting snows from the mountains eastwards to the sea. Both suffer from flash floods and are controlled by a network of canals, locks, sluices and dams. The waters of both are used to form extensive rice fields. The exact date when the Po was first utilised for rice is not known. Clearly it predated the 1475 letter, but by how much? I suggest it was after 1435, when Taccola’s first drawings of pumps appear, and probably after 1438, when his drawings of lock and sluice gates first appear.
By the 1450’s, Florence had silk and food. The Medici had derived unprecedented riches from the silk trade and had used their wealth to fund astronomers, mathematicians, engineers, sculptors, artists, explorers, cartographers, historians, librarians, archaeologists and geographers. The Renaissance was in full flood. Thanks in part to Chinese inventions and plants – free use of machines powered by wind and water, Chinese rice, mulberry trees and silk worms.
