Dutch requirements for skins mounted rapidly with the coming of the Renaissance. Even a brisk market for worn, discarded and inferior pelts was maintained in Holland. The pinch for pelts came about as a result of a tremendously stepped-up demand for fur in manufacture—in the felting of hats!
In Holland, as in other countries crawling out of the Dark Ages, beaver skin had been permitted as headgear to almost all who could afford it. Beginning with the time that the wearing of hats became fashionable in Europe this costly fur was used extensively for that purpose by people of means. It would appear, in fact, that in England from the time of Chaucer the word beaver was practically synonymous with hat.
Now, felt hats, which had brims and other advantages over those fashioned from pelts, were being pressed out in quantity by the trade-conscious Dutch for world commerce. Dutch beavers, they were called, and they came in a variety of shapes and quality.
Due to the peculiar matting quality of fur filaments, felting had been a profitable manufacturing art for centuries. The Greeks had practiced it. The Mongolians of Kublai Khan’s time used felt matting for tents; rich Tartars sometimes furred their robes with pelluce or silk shag. The Normans who wore felted articles of dress brought the art to England.
Fur is made up of short, barbed hairs that are downy and inclined to curl. Matting or felting, which would expose a live animal to cold and storm, is prevented in most animal coats by relatively stiffer guard hairs lying alongside the fur filaments and keeping them separated. But, the ancients had learned that by first plucking the coarser guard hairs from a pelt, the downy fur that remained could easily be removed from the hide, processed, pressed into felt mats and blocked into any shape.
Although many other furs were used in the manufacture of hats, the best felts were of beaver. For one thing they were practically indestructible. Discarded beaver hats could be worked over and made like new. Then, a new method of combing out the fur filaments of the beaver pelt was developed, to better utilize the skins. This left the pelts with the guard hairs to be worked into stoles for clerics and officials, and the combed-out fur fibers of course for the manufacture of hats.
Dutch beavers for both men and women found their way to England, to Baltic countries, to France, Portugal and into the Mediterranean. These, as well as other products of the north, were eagerly sought in trade-hungry Venice, until recently the mistress of a thriving Mediterranean carrying trade.
Venice had reached this position of trade eminence in the Mediterranean after a bitter, hundred years’ war to eliminate Genoa as her rival. The most savage of the battles between the fine navies of these two medieval states had been fought over the Black Sea fur trade. But then the Turks, taking Constantinople in 1453, erected a toll-gate at this ancient Eurasian cross-roads, and the bite they took as middlemen all but stagnated world trade through the Mediterranean.
To make matters worse, the Portuguese, who had been exploring the south Atlantic, rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa in 1488. An alternative route to India and Malaya had been discovered!