ABSTRACT
When historians have discussed the import trade in textiles from the Ottoman realm to western or southern Europe, until quite recently they have focused on the importation of raw fibers. The cottons ‘en laine’ from Syria or western Anatolia that filled the holds of Venetian ships in the 1400s have been studied in detail, and the same applies to the wool from Balkan sheep that, throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, traders from Dubrovnik marketed in Italy.1 Before about 1400, finished fabrics from the Middle East had played an important and sometimes decisive role in European markets. To mention but one example among many, textile experts have long acknowledged the impact of Mamluk designs upon medieval European silk weaving.2
