Purple and power
Twelve thousand sea snails made enough purple to trim one garment. No wonder emperors kept it to themselves.
- Snails for 1.4 g of dye
- About 12,000 (Friedländer)
- Price cap, 301 AD
- 150,000 denarii per pound of purple silk
- Born in the purple
- Byzantine porphyrogennetos
For two thousand years the most powerful color in the Mediterranean came from sea snails. Tyrian purple, named for the Phoenician city of Tyre, was drawn from the glands of murex shellfish. When the chemist Paul Friedländer tried it in the early 1900s, 12,000 snails gave just 1.4 grams of pure dye, about enough for the trim of one garment.
That cost made purple a badge. Rome's senior magistrates wore a white toga with a purple border, and a general in triumph wore one dyed solid purple and edged with gold. By the 4th century AD only the emperor could wear true purple, and 'taking the purple' meant becoming emperor. Diocletian's price edict of 301 AD capped a pound of purple silk at 150,000 denarii, the same price as a lion.
In Byzantium a child born to a reigning emperor was porphyrogennetos, 'born in the purple'. The color Byzantium still carries the empire's name. When crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, imperial purple production ended, and Western Europe turned to red kermes for its grandest cloth. Purple kept its prestige in the church, in the violet of Advent and Lent.
Then chemistry made purple cheap. In 1856 the 18-year-old William Perkin made mauveine from coal tar, and within a few years mauve and then magenta dresses filled the streets of London and Paris. The color of emperors became the color of anyone who could afford a ribbon.
Swatches
- Tyrian purple · emperors (approx.)
- Violet-purple · church penance
- Mauveine · purple for everyone (approx.)
- Magenta · the 1859 dye
Colors
Sources
- Cooksey, C. J. (2001). Tyrian purple: 6,6'-dibromoindigo and related compounds. Molecules 6(9): 736–769.
- Jacoby, D. (2004). Silk economics and cross-cultural artistic interaction: Byzantium, the Muslim world, and the Christian West. Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58.
- Diocletian, Edict on Maximum Prices (301 AD).
- Garfield, S. (2000). Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World. Faber & Faber.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.