The Textile Arts

In Islam

Muslims depended on the textile arts for everything from everyday clothing and furniture to the satisfaction of their refined taste in luxury and splendour. Better than any other artistic domain, the textile arts expressed the Muslims’ art de vivre and sense of beauty; furthermore, it was an art based on the marvellous and the sacred.

In line with Semitic custom and the example given by the Prophet, Muslims are expected to wear long and flowing garments. Robes, cloaks, turbans and shawls confer them with majesty and a supplement to the soul, raising them above the other beings of Creation. On this point, as on many others, Muslims, Jews and Eastern Christians have much in common. This simple and dignified dress was also a means for expressing power. A whole hierarchy grew out of the quality and finery of a garment, even if its components were fixed. During the caliphate period, an institution inspired by Byzantine and Sassanid models established a close link between textiles and power, giving rise to the term tirâz: a workshop that manufactures vestments for a sovereign, a true monopoly of the State, comparable to currency or paper. The word tirâz, connected to the idea of embroidery, is of Persian origin and applies primarily to the epigraphic border inscribed with the name of the ruling caliph, his titles and praises. By extension, it designates the cloth that carries these bands, and finally the royal manufacture of its production. The dâr al-tirâz could be private (khâssa), set up within the complex of the palace, or public (‘âmma). In the latter case, the proceeds from its production went to the Treasury and represented a significant source of revenue. The tirâz workshops turned out the “khila”, the robe of honour distributed to the caliph’s subjects two times a year (the sole personal possession a Muslim could carry to his grave). Its other productions—sumptuous vestments and fabrics—satisfied a politics based on prestige and gifts.  

During the Middle Ages, furniture was essentially composed of textiles: covers, cushions, carpets, wall hangings and draperies, all part of life in the desert and the luxury of Byzantine and Sassanid monarchs.  The Arabs liked this ambivalence between a sedentary and nomadic lifestyle, a lifestyle that called for light materials. This is evident in the accessories of the life of the court. If the curtain that hid the caliph from his servants had an echo of life in the Sassanid palaces, the carpet that configured the area reserved for power, the draperies forming the inside rooms of large halls and the cushions for reclining on all recalled the tents of the patriarchs. Many chroniclers make reference to the cloth temples surrounded by a wall of linen, true cities of woven cloth, where Abbasids and Fatimids, alike, sought pleasure and rest. These rich cloth pavilions decorated with figurative motifs filled the boutiques of the palace. In Cairo, during the sacking of 1067, the dwelling of ’al-Mustansir turned up a staggering number of such pavilions. Sumptuous textile furnishings together with precious garments fabricated in the tirâz formed a significant build up of capital and were held in a sort of metallic cubicle, the “khizana”, an Arabic word that designates both a wardrobe and the Treasury, a reminder that salaries and remunerations often translated into fabric. We find a trace of this in the structure of large cities where the textile markets are never far from the banks. This luxury in textiles would reach a climax during festivities, such as those in Cairo celebrating the opening of the canal—an occasion for the prodigious display of carpets, parasols, banners of all kinds, horses’ trappings and livery.

This splendour was not without its religious connotations. Take the prayer rug, for instance, which is full of promise, displaying as it does a small mihrab or a mosque. Its symbolism consists in that prodigious territory it designates for devotion. Very different is the kiswa—a garment embroidered with pious phrases used for the Ka’ba, a robe of honour cut from some 700 m² of precious cloth, turned out by the caliphal workshops and delivered to the sanctuary of Mecca. Here we enter into the mystical dimension of fabrics, for this cloth as well as shrouds and delicate funeral drapes with their fabulous figurations were capable of forming a sort of subtle body. The interlacing of the warp and weft has an immaterial aspect to it and hence it brings us one step “closer” to the Creator— different, in any case, from the immediate elements. It is in this sense that Islamic art, in particular architectural decoration, shares many traits with the aesthetic of textiles—the same two-dimensional stylised motifs, infinitely repeated. Hanging a veil over a supporting structure evokes an unstable and fragile world beyond the real, halfway between tangible form and the abstract number.

Faced with a technically weakened West after the Barbarian invasions and the protectionist silk trade of Byzantium, Muslim lands developed their own textile art and to a very high degree that matched their vibrant interest for the art. The circumstances were ripe: The conquests of the first centuries had joined in one block Spain, the Maghreb, the Byzantium Near East and the Sassanid Empire. A vigorous manufacturing activity thus fell into the hands of the Arabs—in Alexandria, Tyre and Antioch with their trade in twill—and that of the Fayums who specialised in linen cloth used as a ground weave in tapestries. This area of the trade thus opened up; natural resources circulated freely and a flourishing exchange of repertories and procedures ensued, along with the cultivation of textile fibres and plants used in dyeing.  Egypt and North Africa developed a culture of indigo and Spain saffron. Traditional textiles such as wool and linen began to evolve as new textiles entered into the picture such as cotton and silk, which propagated from East to West. Silkworm breeding in Byzantine Syria, launched by Justinian (6th c.), was acclimatised in the Spanish Levant and in the North of Sicily. In Andalusia it gave birth to an industry of luxury goods based in Almeria. The weaving of lampas, which appeared in Baghdad in the eleventh century, slowly entered the textile trade in Syria, Egypt and Spain and replaced that of the Samit. The Latin West followed suit. With the vibrant growth of cities following the Muslim expansion, the luxury of the courts and the needs of the army and the navy, textile production expanded rapidly. The new capitals of Fustat, Kairouan, Raqqada, Sabra Mansuriyya, Mahdia, Fez, Madinat al-Zahra, Cairo—and much later Marrakech—were among the centres that consumed and created textiles, having also the highest concentration of specialised labour.  In the markets, the muhtasib (the controller), his manual always handy, would keep a close watch on the quality of the textile goods in an effort to stabilise prices. His large lexicon of fabrics covered information from procedures, the places of fabrication and sales to details about decorative motifs. And while these terms are not exhaustive when it comes to identifying all of the techniques employed, they do reveal the impact and importance of this art in Muslim culture, a civilisation that is sometimes referred to as the civilisation of textiles.

Plain Weave Textiles

Thanks to its climate, Egypt has conserved fragments of textiles dating from the first centuries of the Hegira period. For the most part, they are linen plain weave tapestries: The weave crosses in successive intervals the odd and even threads of the warp. During the weaving process, a decorative tapestry was inserted with the aid of a needle, introducing into the warp not only a weft in linen but wefts of coloured wool. Invented in the third century by the Copts (Christians from the Nile valley), this procedure was in full force when the Arabs conquered Egypt in 641. And while their repertory had conserved certain themes from late antiquity, it had been enriched by more stylised decorative patterns adopted from Asia Minor and Sassanid Persia. And with their new masters, no rupture occurred. During the Tulunid epoch, however, the motifs become more accentuated and larger. With the Fatimids (969-1171) everything changed: The very thin linen fabrics were interlaced with bands of tapestry in silk polychrome and gold twisted threads. They were characterised by twisted cords and medallions, an ornamentation of repeated patterns of animals and minute vegetation, often bordered by inscriptions. The “Shroud of Turin” from Cadouin, also known as the “Veil of Veronica” of Apt, which purportedly arrived in France during the crusades, is a fine illustration of this trend. The technique disappeared in the productions of the royal workshops or tirâz with the fall of the Fatimids; but meanwhile it had spread to Muslim Spain (very likely with the dispersion of artisans), for this is the procedure that was used on the cape inscribed with the name of Hishâm II, or again for the fragment of peacock silk conserved at the Instituto Valencia of Don Juan.

Another heritage from antiquity was the Samit weave. These were silks that used a ground characterised by ribbed edges: for each shot, the binding of the floats crosses over two warp yarns (we sometimes call this a twill weave) and then comes back to its initial position after one row, making for a complete cycle of weave. This technique used in Alexandria from as early as the first century AD called for a complex horizontal loom or a “draw loom”. The Syrians were first to employ the technique before it was introduced in Persia between the fourth and fifth centuries. On the other hand, it was Sassanid Iran that gave its repertory to most of the Byzantine and Muslim Samit weaves of the Late Middle Ages. The imperative style at the time was a pattern of tangential wheels, touching or separate, with a cruciform element in the intervening spaces. The motifs generally sprang from a heritage of old Persian and Mesopotamian designs: confronted birds on each side of a tree of life, two-headed griffons or eagles carrying nimbused figures, and opposed wild animals being dominated by a paladin. One of the oldest examples of Muslim Samit textiles comes to us from a fragment inscribed with the name of Marwân, undoubtedly the Umayyad Caliph Marwân (744-750); it carries the mention Ifrîqiya (Tunisia). The Arabs called these “siqlâtûn” cloths, or “sigillies”, while their Latin name was pallia rotate. From the twelfth century, the motifs were freed from their circular inscription, an example being the leopard cover of Saint Mexme, woven in Egypt or Syria, or the fragment with a two-headed eagle in conservation at the textile museum in Lyon, which is the production of an Andalusian workshop.

While other ancient techniques continued to be employed on Muslim looms—gold brocaded silk taffetas or taffetas without a reverse side as the decoration on one side appears as the negative of the other—the great innovation of the eleventh century became the lampas weave. Lampas are silk weaves whose ornamentation is created by a weft of floats regularly repeated and bound by an auxiliary warp called the binding warp; the motifs thus formed by the weft usually appear on a satin ground, which takes up the dominant warp. Presumably, these were produced by the workshops of Baghdad or Chiraz during the dynasty of the Bouyid emirs (945-1055) who were the precursors of this procedure. It was soon taken up by the workshops in Antioch and later in Egypt and al-Andalus, eventually spreading to North Africa and to Ottoman Turkey. By the early thirteenth century, the Italians knew about it and lampas co-existed alongside Samit weaves, as they did for the Muslims, before they replaced them altogether, a trend that continued all the way to the fifteenth century. Then velvet took over, both in the Orient and the West. The thirteenth century was thus the turning point in the history of precious textiles in the Mediterranean. Advances in machinery, the introduction of pedal operated looms (known in the East ever since the Arab conquests) and the arrival of Sicilian silks allowed first Tuscany and then Venice to rival the Muslim workshops.  Christian Spain, having taken over the manufacturing of al-Andalus, followed suit. Furthermore, a certain cleavage in decorative styles became apparent. The Eastern Mediterranean—Syria and Egypt—opened up to the vast repertory of Asia, a repertory transmitted from the Ilkhandid workshops and later from the Timurids of Persia, while an increasingly geometric and abstract decorative style began to take hold of productions in Muslim Spain and later North Africa. In the Mamluk register, the silk trade embraced the motifs of small almond sprigs enclosing lotus blossoms or large inscriptions interspersed with figurative medallions; in the West, textiles showed an abundance of very small motifs, tightly held in complex networks. The Mudejar and Sicilian workshops, both guardians of Muslim traditions, followed the same trend, a style that could almost pass for Gothic in its formulation. While still a Samit weave, the fragment (in the museum of Lyon) with two eagles interspersed with a network of eight-pointed cartouches and crosses is very much in that line. This geometric tendency took root during the Nasrid epoch with its style known as “the Alahambra”. Under its influence, lampas abounded with polylobed star-shapes, intersected by bands of calligraphy and merlons. Certain belts from Fez, in Morocco, reflect this heritage.

The velvets of Ottoman Turkey were contemporaneous with the Renaissance. In velvets, the pile is produced by an extra set of warp yarns (the warp pile), which is raised above the ground weave by sticks. The loops thus formed are then cut. Bursa, which mastered this technique, became a centre of sericulture, producing brocade silk velvets in gold and silver. The ornamentation on a large scale was composed of pomegranates, almonds enclosing tulips, but also motifs from Asia such as three balls held between two undulating lines. Genoa, Florence, Lucca and Venice often copied these themes. Unlike in Turkey, however, their velvets were generally “raised” velvets, meaning they were cut at different heights and often had raised portions that were uncut, the loops being left intact. The commercial potential of these precious fabrics in the Mediterranean basin tended to stimulate such imitations.

Embroidery

Embroidery, which was widely developed in Islamic lands, is an application by means of a needle on a woven fabric that is stretched over a hoop or a tilted frame. Embroidery thread can be made of cotton, wool, silk or gold and silver. Pearls and precious stones were also used. The stitches that compose the decorative motif fall into four categories: running stitches, used for making simple lines; cross stitches such as the herringbone stitch; satin stitches for filling colour. The flat fishbone stitch falls into this category and is frequently used for filling in an area; it can be seen in much of the embroidery from the Maghreb. What is referred to as “feather stitch” is often employed for decorating quilts and for creating effects of relief. This is the technique that has been employed, using metallic threads, for most 19th-century velvets. And lastly, loop or pile stitches such as chain stitch, used for creating motifs, a technique very frequent in Turkish and Algerian crafts. An art that requires little material but a great deal of patience, embroidery has customarily been women’s work and executed inside the home. On the other hand, embroidery that employed metallic thread tended to be done by men, in the workshops. 

The Orient and Anterior Asia are now viewed as the cradles of embroidery, a hypothesis that new archaeological finds in Syria and Mesopotamia have confirmed. During the sacking of Ctesiphon in 637, an immense carpet decorated with needlework came to haunt the imaginations of the Arabs: Known as the Springtime of Chosroes or Bahar-i-Khusraw, it reproduced, using precious stones, all the marvels of an interior Persian courtyard. And again, there was a legendry carpet decorated with tales from Persia and embroidered portraits of the caliph al-Mantasir, son of al-Mutawakkil, who was able to read into it his approaching downfall. During the Middle Ages, the work of embroidery, while known to Byzantines, would be considered in the West as a specialty of the Muslim world. The word “raqqâm”, which in Arabic designates to embroider, passed into the Medieval Latin with the word recamare: “embroider”, from the Italian ricamare and the Spanish recamar. Some of the earliest examples of embroidered inscriptions produced in the tirâz can be attributed to Iraq. They carry the name of the Abbasid caliph al-Muktafi (902-908) and are characterised by embroidery on white cotton; others, stitched on linen, are considered to be Egyptian. This is proof that the procedure was already firmly in place in the State workshops and exclusively the handiwork of men. Another factor that has contributed to tying embroidery with the Muslim world is a notable increase in the use of gold and silver thread in productions during the Fatimid epoch and the Umayyad dynasty in Córdoba. In Cairo, during the 11th century, during the canal festival, the traveller Nasir-Khusraw noted that all the costumes and accessories were embroidered with gold thread. And ibn Zuluq also noted that during the time of pilgrimage, a textile with all-over embroidery in gold thread and precious stones, the “Shemsa” or “Sun”, was either sent to Mecca or displayed from the heights of the palace walls, making the ruling Fatimid caliph the focus point of the community of the Faithful.

But Egypt was not alone in this. The tirâz workshops under the orders of the Córdoba caliphate were producing similar embroideries. The “Shroud of Autun” in Spain that supposedly wrapped the relics of Saint Lazarus is an extraordinary blue cloth covered in medallions and embroidered with princely emblems. It is thought to have been manufactured in Andalusia around 1007 as a repayment to ‘Abd al-Malik, son of al-Mansûr and has been coupled with another embroidered silk and gold piece in conservation in Spain in the Oña Church. A later piece is the chasuble which purportedly belonged to Thomas Becket in deposit at the cathedral of Fermo (Italy) which was made in Almeria in 1116. It is comparable to the two other pieces both in terms of its technique and its astrological iconography. All three bear witness to the capacity of embroidery to develop decorative motifs that imported spiritual meaning and hence raised the status of the finished textile to that of a sacred object. When analysing the silk productions of Norman Sicily, we should bear in mind that the Christian world was very sensitive to this. A prime example is the silk coronation robe made for the Norman king Roger II of Sicily, a robe manufactured in Palermo in 1133 (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). The robe is encircled by a propitious Kufic inscription and decorated on both sides with a lion defeating a camel. The embroidery in gold and silver has a total of five thousand pearls. Judging from its technique and iconography, then, it makes a convincing claim for belonging to the Muslim art. Its semi-circular shape, its pure luxury and the technique employed present all the qualities of the “pluvial”, that liturgical cape that would be frequently produced in Christian Spain; yet, all the way up to the sixteenth century, the cape kept its Oriental aspect, most notably apparent in the vestments of southern Germany, Spain and Italy.

The advance of the Turkish people intensified in the Eastern Mediterranean—Seldjukids, Mamluks, and then Ottomans—an historical fact that is not unrelated to the rise of embroidery and its steady replacement of woven textiles. This trend could be seen in Egypt as early as the Ayyubid epoch (1171-1250). The canvases of linen once used for tapestry weave gave way to embroidered registers or assemblages of pieces of silk used in applique and enriched with embroidery. In Lebanon, under the Mamluks, the tunics with embroidered plastrons discovered in the Quadisha caves show a clear Turcoman influence in their geometric ornamentation. The handiwork of women, these embroidered silks on cotton, which date from around 1300, are comparable to robes we see today in certain villages in Syria and Palestine.

In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean came to popularise embroidery through its intercultural exchanges. In Istanbul, all textile furnishings in the house—table cloths, wall hangings, bed covers, the cloth for covering bread (bohça) and hammam towels were embroidered. The fashion continued to spread, resulting in the embroidered scarves (tanchifa) and curtains sewn by Algerian women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The designs in polychrome silk on muslin are composed of veined corollas, miniature flowers and intertwining stems. While the same predominantly blue and red palette and applique technique can be seen in crafts from Istanbul and in the Bukhara suzani, the ornamental vocabulary also borrowed from Renaissance Italian and Spanish velvets—themselves very similar to Ottoman productions. Among some of the oldest embroideries we know of from Algiers is a scarf used as a decorative cloth for a statue of the Virgin in the Chartres Cathedral. It was presumably offered as gift in 1650 by the Prince of Condé. This penchant for embroidered garments infused with Turkish or European motifs became the typical style of Moroccan embroideries from Fez and Tétouan but also of those in Tunis, where gold “passing” and sequins were very much in vogue.  This was primarily an urban art, transmitted from city to city, from seraglio to seraglio, a blend of “noble” themes, as that of the four flowers created for Soleiman the Magnificent, and traditional themes that originated in the Balkans, in Aegean cities and southern Italy or that were transmitted from the Arabs and Jews of Andalusia.

Carpets

By the power of its ornamentation, the knotted carpet is one of the emblems of Muslim art. The fabrication process is simple. After stretching the warp threads tight, the weaver introduces a stick to separate them into two layers. A beam attached to the ends of the loom allows the pile yarn to be brought forward, forming small loops. When the stick is lowered, it sends them back and when it is lifted the yarn at the back comes forward. This system allows the weaver to form a band of tapestry that will form the border of the carpet. The knotting process can now begin. With the aid of a blade fitted with a hook, the weaver knots a strand of wool on two consecutive warp yarns and proceeds to do the same on the next two yarns to form a whole line. On the line the weft is usually passed through twice and then pushed down with a comb. The knot is either symmetrical, that is when its two extremities appear side by side and asymmetrical when it surrounds only one warp yarn before rising to the surface at right angles to the next knot.

In the early days of Islam, carpets already had a long history. A fragment excavated in Pazyryk in eastern Siberia, decorated with horsemen and deer, dates from the fifth century BC. In Morocco, in the Haouz of Marrakech, there is a fragment of a carpet that has the rough aspect of a fleece. The Muslims exalted the carpet’s territorial function by associating it with their religious practice; in the protocol of the courts, it was framed with a sort of writing. At prayer times, it played the role of an oratory and moreover, at least beginning in the tenth century, it was decorated with a mihrab.

Despite certain written testimonies, our vision of carpet designs from the beginning of the thirteenth century has become clearer thanks to the discovery, in 1905, of eight Seljukid carpets in the Ala’eddin Mosque in Konya, to which were added three pieces found shortly afterwards in the Beyshehir Mosque. Their framework of stylised vegetal elements surrounding a striking Kufic border has a markedly “Oriental Gothic” style—so predominant in the silk trade of the period. But one of the fragments from Konya with its red half octagons is more in line with the art of Central Asia.

Spanish carpets from the fifteenth century perpetuated the medieval aesthetic. Their lengthened format takes up a field of star-shaped octagons and palmettos in the shape of artichokes. Eleven of them have blazons, as those of Enriquez, a line of Castilian admirals. These Mudjar productions, woven in Létur, Liétor and Alcaraz in the Aragonian fiefdom of Murcie, take up from those produced during the Muslim period, of which there remain the fragments of Fustat and a “synagogue” carpet from the fourteenth century, decorated with a tree of fleurons and a border inscribed with the name of Allâh (Berlin). Their technique is very particular: the knot only wraps around one warp yarn and is set off from the adjacent yarn to the next row, and only one warp thread is passed through. These were the first carpets in Europe. They were admired in London in 1255 when Eleanor of Castile married Edward I. An example appears in the frescoe of the Palais des Papes in Avignon, painted in 1344, and another in the painting the Très Riches Heures by Duc de Berry. Later, the production moved to Cuenca and imitated the Turkish carpet, then declined in the seventeenth century, after the expulsion of the Moors.

The Mamluk carpets of Cairo, undoubtedly fabricated from the beginning of the Qâ’it-Bey dynasty (1469-1496), were very different, characterised by majestic designs in tones of green and red that took up a central plan with a large octagon in the centre, surrounded by satellite-medallions and minute vegetal elements: papyrus, cypress and clusters of lupins. This creates either a kaleidoscopic effect or one of a lantern set on top of a square podium. When it is repeated in an oblong format, this construction recalls those ceilings in marquetry with their combinations of polygons that are designed to evoke the Celestial Sphere. The technique and style is particularly Egyptian: glossy wools, S-twist yarns, worsted warp yarns and high density velvets with asymmetrical knots. Among these refined productions, most likely controlled by the State, exceptions must be made for the monumental silk specimen in the Vienna Museum and the Judaic carpet from Padua decorated with a chandelier and an inscription in Hebrew, as well as a portico taken from a frontispiece of a printing house. Brought to Europe via Venice and Genoa and commissioned by the Medicis, Mamluk carpets were often reproduced in embroidery in the monasteries of Portugal, and later in the eighteenth-century Aubusson workshops. In 1530 or thereabouts, Cairo began producing “floriated Ottoman” style carpets but still in keeping with their earlier techniques. The “Damas” carpets, which were very similar to the Mamluk’s, adopted a composition of lozenges. 

The Turkish carpets or hangings of Anatolia were given new life with the successive influence of Seljukid and Ottoman carpets that had come from High Asia. These mysterious works, with their striking colours, were greatly admired by the Renaissance painters who often included them in their paintings and, hence, a description of a carpet is often facilitated by simply calling it a “Holbein” or a “Lotto”. They are characterised by a balanced structure: worsted white wool warp yarn, Z-twist, two shoots of weft in red wool, equal tension, symmetrical-knotted velvet of medium density. The oldest examples (with the exception of fragments from Konya), which can be attributed to the fifteenth century came from western and central Anatolia. Their ornamentation shows a geometric field pattern made of small wheels and crosses (small-pattern type Holbein) or a suite of large octagon boxes (large-pattern Holbein). Another model, frequently represented in European painting, is the “Lotto carpet” (in reference to the painter Lorenzo Lotto)—lacy yellow arabesques on a red ground—very likely a Moorish creation. Under Mehmed Fateh (1441-1481), and Bayezid II (1481-1512), more ambitious compositions were elaborated by the seraglios. Carried over to large formats, they were manufactured far from Istanbul in Ushak, a small Anatolian town in the central western region. First of all they develop clusters of stars, tomato red on night blue, followed be a majestic medallion in the form of an almond. These representations of the Heavens and the Throne, which predate those in Safavid Persia, are magnificently accompanied by the Anatolian style of carpet: The separation of pattern fields by an opposition of shapes and colours, a continuous type of ornamentation that gives the impression of the passing of figures behind the frame’s border. The iconographic repertory—fleurons, silhouetted poppies, star-shaped lotus flowers, almonds—takes its inspiration from the designs of ceramics from Tabriz, manufactured under the reign of Kara-Koyunlu. Very sought after in Europe, Ushak hangings can be seen in portraits of Henry VIII and his court. Imitations of the design in embroidery or lock stitch began to appear in England, Poland and Hungary. During the reign of Soleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566), a new style was born, that of “four flowers” or saz. When the carpets adorned with this opulent floral repertory were knotted in Cairo, in the palette of the Mamluk carpets, they shared the same aesthetic of the Renaissance; others came out of the Ushak workshops. In the eighteenth century, the role of the seraglios disappeared. The “Smyrnas”, poor renditions of Ushak productions, were widely exported to Europe: We see them at the foot of the main alters in cathedrals. What was left of the industry belonged to small towns and villages. The Ottoman flowers, treated in a naïve style, were combined with older decorative elements. Prayer rugs with mihrabs, sometimes carrying the imprint of Sufism, were made in Koula, Ghiordès and in Kirchéir. The Anatolian themes spread throughout the Balkans and into North Africa; in Algeria in the carpets of southern Constantine; in Morocco in the carpets produced in Rabat.

R.G.