Of seas, peoples, words and wool

The journey, however, begins inside a word. For us, wool is a trade before it is a passion, and it was by working with it that we encountered the first trail in this research: a name.

The name Merino, which we now immediately associate with sheep and fine wool, may have a far less linear linguistic history than we imagine. Medieval documents contain words such as marina, ultramarina, merinus and merina. At times they indicate origins, at times commercial grades, at times administrative functions; only later does the term appear clearly in reference to particular sheep.

Today, the name Merino almost automatically evokes Australian wool. This is a contemporary simplification: Merino refers to a much broader livestock history, developed through different populations and crossbreeding, not to a single commercial origin.

The resemblance between these words does not by itself prove derivation. It would be convenient, but too easy: Merino cannot be said with certainty to descend from marina or ultramarina simply because their sounds echo one another. Yet the trail deserves attention, because those wools really did travel by sea — and a sea, before becoming a trade route, is a boundary to cross.

That boundary, in truth, existed only when viewed from here. For centuries, the Mediterranean was above all a road. Merchants, armies, pilgrims, animals, textiles, seeds, techniques and words travelled along it. Wools left the ports of North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and southern Italy; they were bought, classified, blended and transformed elsewhere.

Along that route, at a precise point in time, lies the first document on which we truly worked. On 23 June 1307, in Pisa, a deed by the notary Gioachino Nepitella records forty-nine sacks arriving from Tunis or its territory. The goods are described with a precise formula: lana que appellatur merin(us), “wool that is called merinus”. The deed is held by the State Archives of Genoa, Notai Antichi, 147.II, fol. 42r.

Forty-nine sacks do not prove that the modern Merino breed, as we know it, already existed in 1307. Nor do they show that the name had an exclusively North African origin. They do, however, establish something important: at the beginning of the fourteenth century, in an Italian commercial context, merinus was already the name given to a wool that had arrived from across the sea.

Behind those sacks is a story of departures and returns, in which it is difficult to establish who first gave what to whom. Ancient sources recall the reputation of southern Italian wools and practices of crossing fine-wool sheep with African rams on the Iberian Peninsula. Centuries later, according to a tradition we are verifying, Iberian breeding animals are said to have reached the Kingdom of Naples and contributed to the improvement of local populations.

Not a straight line. Rather, a continuous back-and-forth of exchanges and influences.

There is also a version of this back-and-forth with a name and a date, handed down more often than the others. The best-known account says that, in the fifteenth century, Alfonso of Aragon introduced Merino sheep or rams from Spain into southern Italy and entrusted them to breeders in Abruzzo. These crossings and the subsequent selection are said to have begun the process of “refining” local flocks that would eventually lead to the Gentile di Puglia.

It is a plausible reconstruction, repeated by historians. Genetic studies show links between Merino and several derived breeds, but they cannot identify or date that transfer. When we looked for a document that directly proved it, the path became more complicated.

The Aragonese registers do tell that story — just not at the point where we were looking for it. On 20 July 1441, the king ordered 10,000 sheep and 1,000 large animals to be driven from Abruzzo towards Apulia and Capitanata. By January 1443, a commissioner of the Dogana, or Mena, was already responsible for animals, routes and pastures. Merchants, shepherds, grazing rights, safe-conducts, officials and large movements of livestock emerge from the records.

These acts show that the Crown had the means to move and administer thousands of animals. They do not, however, say that those 10,000 sheep were Merino, that they came from Spain or that they were intended for breeding.

Our work begins precisely in this gap — between what documents show and what we wish they showed. We do not want to erase a historical tradition merely because we have not yet found the decisive sheet of paper. But neither do we want to turn a possibility into a certainty convenient to the narrative. We are returning to the records, shelf marks and original images. Sheet by sheet. It is slow work — archives, after all, are under no obligation to fulfil our hopes.

Not all trails, however, are equally blind. One in particular has taken us further than the others: a mandate issued by Charles I of Anjou on 2 September 1279, ordering the purchase in Barbary of seven hundred ewes and three hundred young, fertile rams with excellent wool, to be transported by sea to Castellammare di Stabia. The original Angevin register was lost in the destruction of the Naples archives in 1943; the text reached us through the nineteenth-century edition by Camillo Minieri Riccio.

Here, unlike in the Aragonese records, there is an order, and it is precise. We still do not know whether it was fully carried out — whether those thousand animals reached Castellammare alive or were taken on to Apulia. But it is the strongest trail we have, and the next entries in the Notebook will follow it closely.

While we wait for the archives to answer, words are the first things to move. Vocabulary also requires patience. In the Middle Ages, the same word could indicate an official, an origin or a grade of merchandise. Gentile was not necessarily the name of a breed as we understand it today: in later texts it could indicate a selected, improved or fine quality. Applied to wool and animals, the word eventually linked together livestock type, fleece quality, manufacturing purpose and economic value.

For this reason, our research follows three parallel histories, interwoven like the threads of a warp: the biological history of movement and crossbreeding; the commercial and linguistic history of how wools and animals were named; and the institutional history of the rules of transhumance, the Dogana delle pecore and the pastures. The three often meet, but they do not automatically coincide. A word is not a gene. A customs administration is not a breeding programme. A possible route is not yet proof of a journey.

For now, we can tell only the beginning of this journey. This article opens the Magazzino della Lana Notebook: a place where we try to present the documents, questions and doubts that have emerged from working with Italian wool.

We begin with the Gentile di Puglia, but the path will touch the ancient Mediterranean, medieval Spain, the Mesta, the Kingdom of Naples, Abruzzo, the Tavoliere and the mills that learned to distinguish a rustic wool from a gentile, or fine, wool. Modern genetics will come later, as a means of comparison: it can show relationships and admixture, but not the name of the ship or the day on which a ram crossed the sea.

Magazzino della Lana does not claim to own this history. It wants to gather it, verify it and make it readable — even when a document contradicts an idea to which we had grown attached.

Perhaps we will not find a single place and a single date when everything began. We may discover that Merino and the Gentile di Puglia are the result of much longer encounters: between peoples, animals, territories, trades and words. And, probably, between routes we do not yet know.

Columella, De re rustica, Book VII, chapter 2, for the reputation of Apulian and Tarentine sheep and the account of crossbreeding with rams from Africa.

State Archives of Genoa, Notai Antichi, 147.II, fol. 42r, Gioachino/Iachinus Nepitella, Pisa, 23 June 1307: forty-nine sacks of lana que appellatur merin(us), shipped from Tunis or its territory.

Camillo Minieri Riccio, Il regno di Carlo I d’Angiò dal 2 gennaio 1273 al 31 dicembre 1283, entry for 2 September 1279, p. 19; original shelf mark ASNa, Reg. Ang. 1277 F, no. 28, fol. 277v, lost register.

Archive of the Crown of Aragon, Cancillería, reg. 2905, fol. 150v, order of 20 July 1441; reg. 2902, fols. 156v–158r, commission of January 1443. These acts document the movement and administration of livestock, not an importation of Merino sheep from Spain.

Elena Ciani et al., “Merino and Merino-derived sheep breeds: a genome-wide intercontinental study”, Genetics Selection Evolution, 47, 64 (2015), DOI 10.1186/s12711-015-0139-z.

Note on method. In this Notebook we always distinguish between what a document proves directly, what it merely makes plausible and what still remains to be verified. The sources will be updated whenever new reproductions or archival readings allow the account to be refined or corrected.