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This article tries to refute the conventional opinion that the cotton products began to witness a great success in 17th and 18th century Europe. Many medieval documents show that the cotton products were consumed on a massive scale already in the Later Middle Ages.
The cotton industry, whose origin in Europe is difficult to date, had been in existence in the 11th century, specially in Northern Italy, from where it spreaded out to other regions, and was being operated in Italy, France, the Iberian Peninsula, the Central Europe, the Netherlands and England in the Later Middle Ages. The greatest cotton textile producers in the Later Middle Ages were Northern Italy, an established center of the cotton industry, and Southern Germany, a new arriver, which initiated her industry in the 1360s under the aegis of the emperors and the German merchants. The output of those both industrial centers was so grandiose that their cotton textiles such as fustian and barchent were commercialized all over Europe by international merchants, especially Italians or Germans.
Therefore, the consumption of cotton products was on increase. The introduction of cotton in Occident led to the birth of a new vogue in clothes called jupon in medieval French, in medieval European society. Besides the use of material for making clothes, the cotton had many other usages, for instance, canvas, papers, napkins, table clothes, blankets, accessories, and candles. Finally, various kinds of cotton products became familiar to the medieval Europeans irrespective of their economic status.
Numerous evidences such as chronicles, letters, notarial contracts and guild regulations, reveal that the consumption of cotton products became common during the Later Middle Ages. This fact refutes the conventional opinion that the widespread consumption of cotton products in Europe had come through in the 17th and 18th centuries. It also suggests that in the Later Middle Ages the commercial networks and the transporting infrastructure were sufficiently established to make possible mass supply of raw material, mass transportation, and mass textile production.