Paper arrives in Europe

The story

Books written on animal skins

In medieval Europe books were usually written on parchment, that is, on the skin of sheep, goats or calves, washed, scraped and stretched. Parchment was tough and beautiful, but expensive: a whole Bible needed the skins of hundreds of animals. For this reason books were rare, and very precious. Anyone writing a letter, a contract or an account had to think twice, because material could not be wasted.

Meanwhile, in the East, a much cheaper material had been used for centuries: paper. According to Chinese tradition it was an official named Cai Lun who, in AD 105, presented to the emperor a new way of making it, with rags, bark and fishing nets, reduced to a pulp and then spread out to dry on a frame. In fact archaeologists have found older fragments of paper, but Cai Lun improved the technique.

The long journey westward

For centuries China kept the secret. Paper reached the Islamic world, according to tradition, after the battle of Talas (751), in Central Asia, where some Chinese prisoners are said to have taught the craft at Samarkand; historians are cautious about this story, but they know that paper was made at Samarkand in the 8th century. In 794 a paper factory was set up at Baghdad, and the craft spread to Syria, Egypt and the Maghreb.

From the Arab world paper reached Europe through Muslim Spain. The town of Xàtiva, near Valencia, became famous for its paper mills: around 1150 the Arab geographer al-Idrisi wrote that paper was made there of a quality second to none, and exported to East and West. The memory of that centre has remained: the name of Xàtiva is linked to one of the oldest paper productions in Europe.

Fabriano and European innovations

In Italy paper arrived at a few ports, such as Amalfi and Genoa, but the most important centre was Fabriano, in the Marche, where from the second half of the 1200s paper mills became numerous. The Italian papermakers improved the process with several inventions. They used water wheels to drive hammers that shredded linen and hemp rags; they replaced starch glue with gelatine made from animal skins, which made the paper more resistant to ink; and they created watermarks.

A watermark is a design, or a mark, that appears as a transparency when you hold the sheet up to the light. It is made with a metal wire bent into a shape and sewn onto the frame in which the pulp is collected. The first watermarks appeared at Fabriano in 1282. They helped the makers to recognise their own sheets, and today they help historians to date documents.

At first, in Europe, paper was looked on with suspicion, because people thought it would last less long than parchment and that it was a product of the Muslims. It is said that the Emperor Frederick II, in 1231, forbade its use for the most important public documents. In time, however, the low price won out: merchants used it for account books, notaries for contracts and teachers for students' notebooks.

The rag-and-bone trade

To make paper, huge quantities of linen, hemp and cotton rags were needed. Ragmen collected them from houses and sold them to the paper mills. The rags were left to rot, then beaten in the mills until they became a pale pulp. The papermaker dipped a mesh frame into the vat, lifted it with a thin layer of pulp and shook it; the newly formed sheets were stacked, pressed and hung up to dry.