cardinal purple

chained_bear commented on the word cardinal purple

"... the pope decreed in 1295 that cardinals would henceforth wear 'red' robes--actually a reddish shade of imperial purple--which Church officials obtained at great expense from Byzantine Constantinople, by then the sole source of the old Roman dye. This source dried up completely when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453; the secret of imperial purple perished in the chaos. Soon afterward, the Church switched to a red European dye made partly with alum, a key mordant for many Renaissance dyes.* From then on its cardinals dressed in scarlet robes--a fact which militant Protestants later construed as proof positive that the Catholic Church was Revelation's Scarlet Woman and the pope the Antichrist.

"For most Europeans, however, the new 'cardinal purple' was simply a visible sign of the pop's temporal and spiritual power. For them, red had long since become the color of kings, in part because imperial purple was so scarce in medieval Europe that most monarchs had trouble obtaining it. During the centuries between the fall of Rome and the fall of Constantinople, only the Byzantine emperors and the very highest echelons of the Church hierarchy had anything like a satisfactory supply of the dye."

"*For centuries Europeans had been forced to import most of their alum supply from the Middle East, but in 1460 the pope's nephew had discovered enormous deposits of alum in papal territories in Tolfa, Italy. The discovery greatly enriched the Church and helped make its cardinals brighter than ever."

Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 22-23 and footnote.

October 4, 2017