Date: Wed, 27 Apr 1994 09:34:57 -0400 (EDT)
From: Christopher Belknap <topher@giant.IntraNet.com>
Subject: Episcopal Purple.  I Thought people might be interested.
To: carolingia@bloom-beacon.mit.edu
Message-Id: <0097D9392735A760.2180118F@giant.IntraNet.com>
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A little while ago we were discussing gaiters and other ecclesiastical
accoutrements, and I asked whether bishops had always worn purple.

This appeared on another list a couple of days ago and is reproduced
with permission of the author.

> From: velde@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu (Francois Velde)
>
> [a poster] writes:
> >... My
> >question: are R.C. bishops or cardinals wearing the "imperial purple?" Is
> >the purple snail totally extinct, so the color cannot be duplicated? Or
> >was the hue of the dye dependent on the manufacturing conditions and so
> >uneven?
>
> Purple (purpura) was the color of the dye extracted from a Mediterranean
> shell-fish.  The city of Tyr in Phoenicia was especially famous for
> producing the dye.  The color was of many possibile shades depending
> on the actual production process, but it was described as "blood-red".
> One of its attractions was that it was the only color-fast dye known
> to the Ancients: you could wash your toga many times and it would still
> be bright red.  It was also expensive: the combination of the two made
> it a status symbol from very early times, through the Greeks and to the
> Romans.  By the late Empire, some types of purple were reserved for the
> Imperial family and officials.  After the conquest of Tyr by Arabs in
> the 7th c. the manufacturing continued in the Byzantine Empire, and
> they supplied courts and Church with died wool and silk.  After the
> fall of Byzantium in 1453 the supply disappeared, and in 1464 the Pope
> authorized the use of cochineal as an ersatz to die cardinals' and
> archbishops' robes.  It also seems to be about that time that the
> meaning of purple started slipping from crimson-red or blood-red to
> our modern mix of red and blue.
>
> The shell-fish (murex) still exists, but there are several varieties,
> and in spite of Plinus' explanations it is not quite clear how the

("Plinus", i.e., Plinius, Pliny the Elder)

> dye was made.  There have been modern attempts at duplicating the
> color, but the pictures I saw were not very convincing, and the
> colors ranged from orange to violet.
>
> The color purple has a strange history in heraldry as well.  I will
> repeat what I posted a while back on the topic.
>
> * Purpure:
>
> The Spanish kingdom of Leon was blazoned: argent, a lion purpure
> as early as 1245.  The color originally was a brown-grey obtained by
> mixing together the four other colors (azure, gules, sable and vert).
> In the 16th c., the etymology of the color purple was rediscovered
> and the heraldic color reinterpreted.  Originally, in medieval French
> the word "pourpre" or "porpre" was a kind of fabric, and if no color
> was specified (as in "porpre noire", "porpre verte") it was a low-grade,
> brown-grey fabric.  There are about 200 arms in Europe using purpure.

and

> You may want to include the source I used:
>
>  Author:         Reinhold, Meyer, 1909-
>  Title:          History of purple as a status symbol in antiquity.
>  Published:      Bruxelles, Latomus, r. Colonel Chaltin 60; 1970.
>
> (This is where the bit on substituting cochineal in 1464 comes from;
> the book spends a lot of time debunking the myth that the color
> purple was "reserved" for princes or emperors).
>
> There is another curious book that describes attempts at recreating
> the color from the shell-fish murex (with only mild success, judging
> by the color pictures in the book):
>
>  Author:         Doumet, Joseph.
>  Title:          Etude sur la couleur pourpre ancienne : et tentative de
>                    reproduction du procede de teinture de la ville de Tyr
>                    decrit par Pline l'Ancien / Joseph Doumet ; <English text
>                    translated by Robert Cook>.
>  Published:      Beirut : Imprimerie Catholique, 1980.
>
> --
>         Francois

--
simon
simon.kershaw@smallworld.co.uk
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