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Stones and Power
The stones of state shine from crowns and scepters, raise and line the great halls. They describe not only the mineral wealth of a territory, but also the reach of its power. In the stones of a palace and its regalia can be read the command of trade routes and control of distant territories: lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, rubies from Burma, Colombian emeralds, or marble from the Mediterranean. Catherine the Great wore the wealth of Russia in jewels stitched onto her bodices. Queen Elizabeth I's robes coruscated with virginal pearls. Gemstones help construct an otherworldly aura of power, like celestial light.
Through legend, stones came not only to express power, but also to bestow it. The Lia F‡il marking the ancient seat of the Kings of Ireland in County Meath was a coronation stone, said to roar when touched by the rightful king. St. Edward's Sapphire in the British Crown Jewels was supposedly worn by Edward the Confessor. The godly monarch found himself without alms for a beggar so gave the ring from his finger. Years later, two pilgrims stranded in the Holy Land were offered shelter: their host produced the sapphire ring with a message from John the Evangelist that the King would join him in heaven. The stone was thus considered to endow divine authority.
The struggle for territorial power is often the struggle for mineral wealth: ore, fuel, construction material and other precious substances extracted from the Earth, enriching monarchs (and corporations) hundreds of miles distant. The science of geology does not play a neutral role: there is power bound up in the acts of analyzing, categorizing, and naming things. In the nineteenth century, geological surveys made the race to extract resources more efficient, and provided fuel and materials for expanding empires: the East India Company's 1851 Geological Survey of India identified coal and iron ore to supply the railways.
In Invisible Cities (1972), Italo Calvino describes the divided city of Sophronia. On one side are circus acts and rollercoasters, on the other, stone and marble-clad banks, palaces, and schools. Half the city is permanent, the other itinerant: "And so every year the day comes when the workmen remove the marble pediments, lower the stone walls, the cement pylons, take down the Ministry, the monument, the docks, the petroleum refinery, the hospital, load them on trailers, to follow from stand to stand their annual itinerary."
Stone and marble communicate permanence, and with that, trustworthiness and authority. In London, the architecture of power is dressed in pale oolitic limestone quarried on the Isle of Portland in Dorset. Portland is the stone of the Palace of Westminster, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Bank of England, the British Museum, parts of Buckingham Palace, and Tower Bridge.
Yet stone ruins are, in themselves, a potent symbol of the impermanence of power: the empire fallen, the despot toppled, the rubble of a plantation house watched over by its ghosts.
#01
Alunite
You could make a fortune from rock and old urine. You just needed the right rock. And the right recipe.
Alum was an alchemist's mainstay. Known and used in China, North Africa, and the Middle East for as long as humans have brewed potions, this di-sulfate salt is one of the few identifiable compounds mentioned in ancient proto-scientific texts. It was used in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt for tanning, textile production, and (distinctly toxic) medical preparations. Among other things it acts as a mordant (from the Latin mordere-to bite) allowing dye to take and hold fast. This quality made alum and the recipe to extract it from alunite stone extraordinarily valuable, and the European alum trade between 1400 and 1700 a mess of wrangling, skulduggery and rank manipulation (much of that last conducted in the name of the pope).
For centuries Europe looked to Constantinople for colored textiles. The great domed Byzantine city was the source of silks that floated on the air and caught the eye like exotic plumage; its workshops produced shimmering embroidery, and its merchants supplied the dyestuffs and mordants that allowed woolen textiles to be processed in glorious colors. Europe produced woad for blue, madder for pink, and other vegetable dyes, but none of these matched the intensity achieved with imported indigo, kermes, and saffron. In return for silks, dyes and spices were traded timber, honey, salt, wax, furs, and, until the ninth century, enslaved members of other European tribes.
In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman army. The great Muslim empire led by Sultan Mehmet II supplanted Christian Byzantium and gained control of trade routes through the Eastern Mediterranean. Italian merchants traded with the Ottomans for alum and dyestuffs, but it rankled that their textile industry was held ransom to a hostile and capricious power.
Among the Italians to have worked in Byzantine Constantinople was Giovanni de Castro, a well-connected textile agent who had run a dye factory and seen rock worked for alum near Smyrna. De Castro investigated the country around Rome and found alunite in the Tolfa Hills near Civitavecchia, forty miles from the Vatican. Envoys sent from Rome "shed tears of joy, kneeling down three times, worshipped God and praised His kindness in conferring such a gift on their age." Alum works were established and in production by 1459. Pope Pius II "determined to employ the gift of God to His glory in the Turkish War and exhorted all Christians henceforth to buy alum only from him, and not from the Unbelievers." The European alum trade thus became a papal monopoly, run by the Medici family who engaged muscular tactics to suppress rival sources.
So began an elaborate dance between the powers of prejudice, fashion, economics, and the Catholic Church. The vivid textiles with which Byzantium once led European fashions now acquired the "taint" (as in tinted-dyed-but also morally blemished) of the East. Bright color was non-European. The great European courts instead turned to black, led by Charles V of Spain, who, by no coincidence at all, also had dominion over Flanders-since the eleventh century, the center of the north European textile industry and source of luxurious, saturated black cloth. Importing wool from England, they dyed first with woad, then in madder and alum. Flanders supplied the Catholic courts of Charles V and Philip II with their gorgeously worked black garb. Philip II would only receive visitors to court if dressed in black, which in turn enriched the northern parts of the empire. Dress codes set by the royal court stimulated an appetite that trickled down through all social ranks.
Later, black clothing would be adopted by the godly Protestants of Northern Europe, for it answered both to a love of fine things and desire for outward modesty: monochrome set it apart from imported luxuries. As demand for alum rose, so did the price set by the Vatican.
Born Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici, Pope Leo X spent his own fortune and that of the Vatican on art, books, and the construction of St. Peter's Basilica. To recoup funds he raised the price of alum and ordered the selling of indulgences-the waiving of penance for sins and wrongdoing in return for a fee. As a consequence of the former policy, Flanders and other territories succumbed to the temptation of trade with the Ottomans. As a consequence of the latter, the German theologian Martin Luther made public his "Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences," starting a chain of events that would lead to his excommunication and the Protestant Reformation.
As the Flemish had before them, the English realized that selling undyed wool was less profitable than trading finished cloth, and from the early sixteenth century took measures to improve their domestic textile industry. In 1545 the now Protestant Henry VIII made a substantial purchase of alum from the papal works, for which he paid with the large quantity of lead mysteriously at his disposal after the dissolution of England's monasteries.
There would not always be lead to trade, but alum was needed if England was to produce finished cloth. Monopolies for the search and production of English alum were granted as early as the reign of Elizabeth I, though with no success. Prolonged hostilities with the Spanish had seen boats laden with alum apprehended as they passed through the straits of Gibraltar. The state of the domestic dyeing industry was parlous, even by contemporary accounts: "Anyone who can afford it wyll not meddle with any cloth that is dyed within this realm." Dyers' lists of the late sixteenth century reveal such appealing shades as sheep's color, motley, new sad color, puke (a blue-black), devil in the hedge (off-red), pease-porridge tawny, and goose-turd green.
In 1607, alum shale was finally discovered, by a consortium led by Sir Thomas Chaloner, in northeast Yorkshire. Chaloner was a worldly man and had traveled to mines in Germany and Italy and visited parts of the alum works at Civitavecchia. He had found the rock, but lacked the recipe. Unable to break into the private workings of the alum house, he went one better and persuaded Italian workmen to accompany him back to England. According to the second-bottle version of the tale, Chaloner had two workmen smuggled out of the port of Civitavecchia hidden in a barrel.
Whitby became the center of English alum production, though it took decades to manufacture the compound in profitable quantity. Gouged out of the cliff face, and dropped onto pyres of brushwood, the carbon-rich alum shale was roasted at a slow burn for nine months. By then, the rock had turned powdery, a mix of ferrous sulfate and aluminum sulfates mingled with insoluble silicate residue. The substance was then washed through with water to capture the sulfates, and the liquid carried to the alum house to be converted into ammonium aluminum sulfate by the addition of urine, shipped to Whitby from Sunderland and Newcastle. The final step was to bring this delectable potion to the precise point of saturation at which alum would crystallize, leaving behind unwanted ferrous sulfate. This, writes geological historian Roger Osborne, was the nub of the alum maker's secret, the moment of alchemy that could turn rock and urine into gold: if an egg placed in the alum liquor floats to the surface, the concentration is right.
With its own source of alum, England was able to produce finished woolen textiles for international trade. Cloth in somber tones-once favored because of the cultural and economic boycott of the "exotic" East-became the mainstay for gentlemen's suiting. The penguin dress code of business, law, and diplomacy has come down to us through the earliest chemical industry, centuries of hostilities between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, papal trade monopolies, and great vats of rock and urine.
#02
Amber
Elektron is a Greek name for amber (it migrated into Latin as electron). In the third century b.c.e., the natural philosopher Theophrastus observed amber's static electricity, a "power of attraction" which he likens to a magnet. He also describes the curious substance lyngourion, which shared amber's powers-indeed it was simply the stone by another name-"some say that it not only attracts straws and bits of wood, but also copper and iron, if the pieces are thin." Lyngourion was supposedly formed from lynx urine: "better when it comes from wild animals rather than tame ones and from males rather than females." Theophrastus's On Stones remained a source for lapidaries until the Renaissance, and the formation of lyngourion a popular fixture for illustration.
William Gilbert was the first to give a name to an "electrick force" in De Magnete (1600), where he proposed that the Earth is a giant magnet. Building on the work of Theophrastus, Gilbert documented the origins of amber and its performance in a series of experiments. Amber "comes for the most part from the sea, and the rustics collect it on the coast after the more violent storms, with nets and other tackle." It is the sea water that firms it, thinks Gilbert, "for it was at first a soft and viscous material" that permitted the entombment of the flies, grubs, gnats, and ants now "shining in eternal sepulchers."
Through his exploration of "electrick force" Gilbert came to understand the nature and limits of amber's static electricity, and its power relative to other substances: "Amber in a fairly large mass allures, if it is polished; in a smaller mass or less pure it seems not to attract without friction."
In Gilbert's time the principle source of amber was the German state of Prussia, which controlled the southern Baltic coast. Here the stone had been central to power plays of a political rather than a geological kind. For centuries, the region had been the monastic state of the Teutonic Knights, a bellicose, acquisitive order formed in Palestine in the twelfth century. In 1230, the Teutonic Knights were invited to engage in a northern Crusade to convert the pagans of Old Prussia. By merciless use of both sword and gallows, they subdued the Prussians and, as was their wont, took control and expanded across the region. This is prime amber territory and in taking Old Prussia, the Teutonic Knights also took control of the lucrative amber trade, and its routes to Rome, Athens, and Constantinople.
Laced with tiny bubbles, most amber sinks in fresh water, but in the brine of the sea it dances, half suspended in the waves, when loosened from its ancient subaquatic bed. Until the nineteenth century, seaborne amber was so plentiful that no one thought to mine it: why bother when the stones arrived in the shallows, or washed onto the beach? The Teutonic Knights entered the gem trade with all the charm and equanimity they had brought to baptizing Old Prussians. They set up strict rules for collecting, carving and dealing: apprehended smugglers were hanged from the nearest tree. The destiny of this brutally controlled material was rosary beads, devotional images, and carved saints. Trade was brisk, and profitable, "for throughout Christendom no price was too high for a rosary strung with lucent amber beads."
Once the healing, antiseptic sap of ancestral pine trees, amber is petrified but retains its chemical composition. To qualify as amber, tree resin needs to polymerize, a transformation that can take millions of years-the oldest retrieved amber dates back to the Upper Carboniferous, about 320 million years ago. Colors range from blood red to a milky white caused by tiny air bubbles: evocatively named varieties include Fatty Amber, Foamy Amber, and Cloudy Bastard Amber. Dabbed with alcohol or acetone, true amber will not become sticky: if it's susceptible to solvents, the substance you're holding is merely hardened resin (copal). As its German name-Bernstein-suggests, it takes a flame keenly. Rubbed, amber releases a resinous aroma, a sought-after quality for handheld amulets and rosaries.
