Two groups of stately gentlemen look our way from a long table decorated with an Anatolian tapestry (Figure 1). Both are dressed in the early modern Spanish style – simple pitch-black robes and white ruffs. An untrained observer in the 16th century might have assumed that these men were all from the Spanish monarchy’s highest councils. They certainly looked the part.

But the participants’ dignified and calm expressions conceal a crisis and a fierce rivalry. The year was 1604, and these two groups were adversaries, gathering to negotiate the end of a long and bruising conflict over European and New World dominance. The cohort on the left represented the Spanish crown, yes. But the almost identical one on the right was British. They were meeting at Somerset House in London in 1604 to sign a peace treaty and end decades of New World warfare and intrigue. Though these governments were at odds, both their officials’ clothing styles and their designs for overseas supremacy were nearly indistinguishable.

These diplomats’ black robes were also bound up in the imperial struggle. The Spanish Habsburg court had an obsession with black-hued clothing, a trend it exported to Britain and all of Europe starting in the 1550s and 1560s. This Habsburg fashion was bolstered by a certain tropical dyewood from the Yucatán, palo de Campeche (historically called simply palo campeche), or Campeche wood. This plant’s rich dye made it popular in classical Maya high society, a staple of the Spanish golden era’s black fashion and, only decades after the 1604 Somerset House conference, a trigger for bloodshed in the Caribbean.

The reverberations of these imperial struggles are felt even today, for Maya-, Spanish- and English-speaking loggers remain in Mexico and Central America where their ancestors felled these trees centuries before. Black’s era of Spanish glory from roughly 1550 to 1650 also indelibly marked the fashion world then and now. After a brief and colourful French interlude, black has reclaimed its place as the foremost shade of high fashion and statecraft. And while palo de Campeche is now largely obsolete due to synthetic dyes, the tree’s creeping invasion of the Old World tropics suggests that of all the empires at the table in Somerset in 1604, palo de Campeche’s may be the longest lived.

In the early to mid 16th century, Europe was on the search for the perfect black dye. From antiquity to the 1200s, black evoked all things ‘dirty, sad, gloomy, malevolent, deceitful, cruel, harmful [and] deathly’.¹ By the late 1200s, increasingly powerful lawyers and judges in Italy, France and England, as well as religious orders like the Dominicans, embraced the tone, most likely for its association with frugality, moral gravity and dignity. Merchants and aristocrats soon embraced black fabrics that were deemed simultaneously austere and opulent. Indeed, in the 1400s black clothing was replacing its wildly expensive scarlet alternatives as the favoured hue of European princes and aristocratic men.

During the 15th century the Spanish court had selectively embraced the hue. When the Austrian Habsburg dynasty ascended the throne in 1506, its black-clad Burgundian courtiers brought Europe’s craze for black fashion to fever pitch. Spanish style had long been influential throughout the Catholic world and beyond, but by the 1520s the Spanish court had become a true epicentre of fashion. Whatever its courtiers wore, Europe wore – Britain included.

Beginning in the 1550s, Hispanic King Philip II’s unmistakable style established the fashion of combining black robes with white ruffs. By the 1560s, some women, and especially men, adopted this fashion – and not only in Spain, Portugal and Britain. The Viennese, the Bohemians, the Hungarians, the Transylvanians and the Swedish, among others, breathlessly awaited shipments of the latest Spanish styles. Spanish Habsburg processions stunned even the fashion-forward and colour-loving Northern Italians and Tuscans. Everywhere in Europe, women used black as a striking contrast against their gold jewellery and pearls, while retaining colourful fashions. On the other hand, high-ranking men almost entirely embraced this hue as an administrative and aristocratic uniform.

In subsequent years high-ranking Christians around the world embraced courtly black. Among New World officials and nobles, it spread quickly. The Portuguese carried this fashion to their outposts in Goa and Macau. And by the early 1600s, some Japanese converts to Christianity like the samurai courtier Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga (支倉六右衛門常長) of Sendai, who travelled to Spain and the Vatican by way of Mexico, adopted the austere Spanish fashion, as shown in his 1615 portrait (Figure 2). In the Spanish Habsburg global sphere of imperial and cultural domination, ‘black held the highest position’.²

It was the golden age of black. However, the Europeans caught in this craze faced a problem. Dye-makers could only produce a deep, uniform black from oak apples, which were very difficult to procure. Despite their name, these were neither fruits nor oak proper – they were sap-covered wasp larvae. These gall-like protrusions were also only common outside of Western Europe. Alternatives to oak apples were almost always mediocre and required repeated dyeing to achieve a deep tone – and this process often destroyed fabrics. Perhaps the prestige of black was due to these dye-makers’ difficulties in obtaining the perfect midnight shade.

Part of the mystique of the Spanish Habsburg court was its signature ‘crow’s wing’ black clothing. This had a deep, lustrous blue tint and lacked the brownish shade of earlier dyes, including oak apple blacks. A major source of Spain’s rich black hues came to Europe from the faraway Yucatán peninsula, where in the mid to late 1500s Mayans, Spaniards and other groups eked out a difficult living under the blazing heat. Here in southern New Spain or Mexico, especially in its namesake Campeche region, palo flourishes. This tree grows best in tropical lowlands, especially where rivers and marshes meet hillsides. Palo is gnarly and bush-like, with flaky bark, normally growing only to some 25 feet. It sprouts heart-shaped leaves and racemes of small yellow flowers (Figure 3).

Palo wood has received over 60 names, thanks to its ability to produce many colours, from yellow to red to purple to black. The Mayans call it ek, the British ‘logwood’ or ‘campeachy’, and the Spanish palo de tinta, palo de Campeche or simply palo. In Linnaean taxonomy, it is Haematoxylum campechianum, the ‘bloodwood of Campeche’. The tree’s heartwood lives up to these labels. When split into small pieces and boiled in water, it bleeds the reddish haematoxylin (Figure 4). This substance, if exposed to the proper mineral agents or mordants, produces a rich blue-black. Other additives yield, in the 1704 words of German doctor Michael Bernhard Valentini, ‘an indescribable range of colours’ from brilliant yellow to purple.³

Pre-classical Mayans had used the wood since at least 400 BC. In classic period Yucatán (AD 250–900), black paint, most likely derived from palo, appeared in the portraits of powerful lords. Black had multiple connotations for the classical Maya; they associated it with the western cardinal direction, as well as with death and sterility. Black dye was also fashionable; indeed, palace elites embraced it long before Europeans. Courtiers carefully applied black make-up to their faces, especially their eyes and lips, in pursuit of a striking aesthetic impact. Ball players, young unmarried men, warriors and those undergoing fasts also often coated their bodies in black stripes, or even entirely in black. Before and immediately after the conquest, Mayan women and men continued dyeing their clothing with the wood.

Spaniards invaded and settled the Mayan Yucatán in the 1540s. As they struggled to adjust to Campeche’s landscape, some turned to palo de Campeche as a means of survival. Conquistador Marcos de Ayala received a royal grant of Indian labour tribute, but when the local Maya revolted against him and left the region, he improvised. Sometime in the 1540s he began experimenting with palo, surely with the help of Mayan acquaintances. In the 1560s and 1570s, he petitioned the viceroy of Mexico and the Council of the Indies for a ten-year monopoly on the wood. He first travelled to Mexico City, where he brought master dye-makers before the high court and viceroy to demonstrate the dye’s ‘perfection’ and its perfect adhesion to silk and other fabrics. Ayala had already begun exporting it to Spain and even Peru. Indeed, by the early 1560s merchants in Seville were informing him that the wood’s value was increasing exponentially in Europe. One official wrote from the capital of the Yucatán, Mérida, with excitement, that Ayala’s discovery promised to yield great profits in Spain’s ‘kingdoms, and in Flanders, Germany and England, and other states’.⁴

The Yucatán entrepreneur persuaded the crown that he was palo de Campeche’s ‘inventor’. It was to be a short-lived victory. In the 1570s procurator Juan Arévalo de Loayza of Mérida complained that palo de Campeche was not Ayala’s discovery since it had been ‘freely harvested’ by Indians and Spaniards for decades.⁵ The governor ruled this monopoly unjust to both peoples, and when Ayala’s son petitioned to renew the privilege, the Council of the Indies rejected his request.

Ayala may well have pioneered a method to make palo de Campeche’s haematoxylin compound bond to fabrics, which other Europeans struggled to achieve. In 1575 the Italian Francesco dalle Arme claimed that his fellow countrymen regarded the dye as ‘false and lying’ because its blue variation did not fast as perfectly to fabrics as indigo, Isatis tinctoria. However, Arme claimed to have a chemical solution to the problem.

The Council of the Indies asked Yucatán officials to investigate Arme’s claims. The royal magistrates did not find the dye to be weak. It provided an excellent black, which was their main concern. Moreover, these authorities reported a robust demand for the wood in Europe. Over 30,000 quintals (1.38 million kilos) had gone to Spain in the past eight years. The real problem with palo, they warned, was that foreigners in Seville were monopolising and hoarding the dye for resale at excessive prices. This is probably why the crown balked at the Italian’s request to receive 20 per cent of all arriving palo as a reward for his chemical discoveries.

Many Spaniards believed their global commer-cialisation of palo de Campeche would bring the empire riches, as well as moral and geopolitical superiority. The dye from this tree was capable of imitating the blues of indigo, a monopoly of their rival, France. In addition, Emperor Charles V feared that purchasing black-producing oak apples from hostile Islamic powers went against his conscience and hindered his war efforts.

By the 1560s, then, palo de Campeche was not merely lending a special sheen to the Spanish court; it was consolidating the empire. Spain had broken free from dependence on the monopolies of her enemies with this and other dyes. Mexico exported more than 3.68 million kilos of palo in 1598. At the rate Ayala was selling his heartwood, four ducats a quintal (46 kilos), merchants were probably selling some 320,000 ducats’ worth. This sum was more than the empire’s average yearly tax revenue from the entire New World for the years 1510–50. One scholar has suggested that during the 1600s, palo became the second most valuable Caribbean product after sugar. Whether this product reached Asian markets in large volumes during this period is unclear, but its profits certainly strengthened the mercantile networks which were linking Europe to the Far East through Mexico.

Already by the late 1500s, Spaniards eager to make a profit were attempting to force Mayans to harvest the wood. The ‘royal protector and defender of the Indians’ Francisco Palomino warned that local elites obligated Indians to travel many miles to work the tree along its riverbank habitats. Their axes often splintered against its hard wood, he warned, causing ‘many deaths of Indians’.⁶

What many Indians made of the Spaniards’ black fashion demands further study. In central Mexico, local Indian elites took on Spanish clothing, with men often adopting black robes with white ruffs. This was likely a trend throughout the Indies, although we often cannot determine precisely who wore what. Certainly, the many Indians from Mexico, New Granada, Quito, Peru and beyond who visited Madrid would have donned the court’s attire. Meanwhile, by the 1560s black clothing had reached another court – that of the sovereign Inca ruler. Spanish officials in the Peruvian Andes employed sartorial diplomacy to bolster treaties with the Inca ruler Titu Cusi Yupanqui, who adroitly refused Spanish rule and had his own dominion deep in the Eastern Andes stronghold of Vilcabamba, beyond Machu Picchu. Peru’s governor Lope García de Castro, hoping to win the Inca’s trust and perhaps secure his surrender, sent his rival black velvet clothing embroidered with fine gold threads. The sovereign thanked the governor effusively for the gifts – though what the Inca really made of this fashion is hard to say.

The craze for Spanish black fashion certainly spread rapidly in Europe – even as religious warfare began to tear the region apart. In the early to mid 1500s, mortal enemies Emperor Charles V and Martin Luther had both adopted black, attracted by its grave monastic symbolism. With King Philip II in power, British, Dutch and Bohemian Protestant men not only donned sombre Spanish robes but adopted the court’s ruffs, coats, cloaks, stockings and other trademark styles. Even Gustavus Adolphus, an indefatigable enemy of Catholics, was a devoted Hispanophile in his sartorial choices. A warring Europe had come to a rare consensus for black.

Spain’s imperial asset soon drew unwanted attention to its Yucatán dominions. As Europe’s interest in palo rose, Spain’s Caribbean society had become, in the 1666 words of the British duke of Albemarle, ‘very weak and very wealthy’.⁷ Trouble soon began to ferment in Campeche’s swamps. The British, who in the early 1600s were still novices at imperialism, found that the wood provided them with a foothold on the Caribbean mainland. The Bermudans’ sale of one stolen shipment of palo de Campeche alone provided double the profits of the struggling island’s tobacco economy. Soon, unemployed pirates and woodcutters arrived with axes and explosives to hack and blast palo roots out of the soil. Passing British merchants bought heartwood from these loggers, often for little more than rum, before reselling it in England at extravagant prices. The famous Caribbean pirates of the so-called golden age of piracy from roughly 1650 to 1720 had found in ‘campeachy wood’ one of their chief sources of income.

Brits and other Europeans, eager to profit from this dyewood, began enslaving Indians and Africans to harvest it in Campeche. How much mayhem ensued is unclear, but it must have been great. One British captain enslaved several Algonquians in New England with plans to either sell them or force them to log campeachy wood. When this slave-master found no buyers in Jamaica, he sailed down the Campeche river. There, these Indians revolted and killed him, and began their tragic journey back home through Mexico by foot. What became of those Algonquians stranded in southern Mexico remains unknown.

Similar British provocations pushed Spain’s empire over the brink. As impoverished British lumberjacks began exporting thousands of tons of the dyewood, they invited skirmishes with locals and triggered a long-armed conflict with Spanish authorities. The empire was not going to surrender such a profitable region without a fight. In 1660s the Council of the Indies regarded the Yucatán as its third most prized dominion after Mexico and Peru. Sure enough, the Spanish triumphed against the loggers and expelled them from Campeche by the early 1700s. However, these haggard frontiersmen increasingly turned to piracy in the wider Caribbean. They recovered their foothold by resettling in palo-rich Belize and the coasts of what are today Honduras and Nicaragua. This time, despite repeated Spanish attacks, these so-called baymen endured. In what is today Central America, they created a largely autonomous ‘republican’ slave-holding society outside of both Spanish and British rule.

The Spanish Empire’s mid 1600s decline not only invited pirates and loggers into its prized dominions but also marked Spain’s downfall from the heights of fashion. As the monarchy’s stock fell, so too did black. The Thirty Years’ War, Spain’s economic woes and the rising financial might of Protestant merchant states rattled Hispanic Habsburg power. In the meantime, the colourful styles of the increasingly prominent French court became steadily more fashionable, not only among women but also men. The Spanish resisted this change well into the middle of the century and continued to don themselves – and their slaves – in black. For example, master painter Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez famously portrayed his slave Juan de Pareja in this style in 1650 (Figure 5). Pareja manumitted himself several years later, and, having become a painter himself, depicted various aristocrats in the same garb.

Nonetheless, Habsburg black fashion was on the way out by the 1650s. Already in the 1660s the British were mocking Spanish dress; by the 1680s, elite of both nations were clad in French styles. A whole spectrum of French blues, as well as yellows, pinks and other colours, became the rage. By the time the French Bourbons defeated the Habsburg rulers in Spain in the early 1700s, the transformation was visible throughout Europe. Its impacts transformed Indies dress as well. For instance, we see this in an early 1700s genealogy which an aristocratic family of central Mexico’s Tezcoco Indians crafted to defend their royal privileges. ‘Gentile’ feathered sovereigns give way to Habsburg vassals whose men wore black robes, and then to the lighter and more playful French styles of the Bourbon era (Figure 6). Playfulness of hue and form had triumphed over sobriety, at least for the time being.

Black’s second golden age was yet to come. By the 1790s, the republicanism of the American and French Revolutions had overthrown the aristocratic aesthetics of the 18th century. Already by the 1820s, with coal ash blanketing European cities, romanticists brooding, anti-aristocratic sentiments strong and a Protestant ethos of thriftiness prevailing, black was back. In the 19th century, simple black had become republican, workmanlike and masculine (Figure 7). Republican governments and the male business class from all of Europe, Latin America and many parts of Asia adopted the black suit, which was a peculiar mix of British capitalist fashion, French tailoring, the Croatian tie and the hybrid Burgundian-Spanish-Mayan black.

Spanish women of the 19th century largely continued to wear black clothing, but they were the exception. Most of Europe’s middle- and upper-class women tended to don Victorian whites and French-influenced colours and prints. Black clothing’s general prominence in women’s fashion arose only later, beginning in the 1920s. World War I briefly doused French tastes for ornament and colour. Coco Chanel’s ‘little black dress’ debuted at this juncture, appealing to artists and less traditionally heteronormative consumers, as well as to anyone obsessed with the modern and cutting-edge.

Basque designer Cristóbal Balenciaga was perhaps equally pivotal. After fleeing the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he began a fashion house in Paris. There, his love for the ‘monastic and austere aesthetics characteristic of Catholic convents’ merged with French haute couture standards (Figure 8).⁸ Balenciaga’s fashion house would pivotally influence Chanel, Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Dior, and many celebrities – including famous Hollywood actresses like Audrey Hepburn. Balenciaga thus helped reinvent (Spanish) black as modern aristocratic women’s couture hue of choice. In 2019, curator Eloy Martínez de la Pera dazzled audiences in Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum with an exhibition explicitly demonstrating the link between Balenciaga’s epoch-making designs and 16th-century Habsburg court fashions. Black clothing thus remains fundamental to high fashion in Europe, buttressed by the legacies of Maya palace elites, the austere 14th-century magistrates of Europe, the courtiers of Habsburg Spain and their rival Protestants. Now, the liberal-era triumphs won by little black dresses and business suits have fastened their legacies for a second time to the fabric of global consumer culture.

Palo de Campeche’s late modern rebirth was not as glorious. The wood’s usefulness as a dye for textiles would endure only until synthetics increasingly displaced haematoxylin between the 1850s and 1920s. Today this tree’s legacy is most obvious not in fashion but in Caribbean society, where many campeachy loggers’ descendants still speak and govern themselves in English. These woodcutters even feature on Belize’s flag and currency. Outside of the Caribbean, historians and scientists are among a small group who appreciate the tree’s importance. Biologists and other researchers very often stain cells with haematoxylin tint to improve their visibility under high-power microscopes. This process (called H&E staining) is particularly notable for its fundamental role in furthering research on cancer, contagious diseases, parasites and other maladies.

Despite the destruction of tropical forests around the world, which worsens rapidly with each passing year, palo is thriving from global society’s general lack of interest in its numerous properties. In a somewhat sinister turn, due to entrepreneurs’ efforts to cultivate palo de Campeche around the world, the tree has become invasive far from its original habitat. Throughout the tropics, from the Caribbean to West Africa, Southeast Asia, Hawaii and beyond, palo has established a presence in riverine systems not unlike those of its native southern Mexico. Time will tell what the consequences of this species’ spread will be. A plant that made empires, and survived them, is now quietly putting down the roots of an empire of its own.

FURTHER READING

Colomer, J.L., and A. Descalso (eds.) (2014) Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe, vol. 2 (Madrid: CEEH).

Contreras Sánchez, A. (1990) Historia de una tintórea olvidada: el proceso de explotación y circulación del palo de tinte, 1750–1807 (Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán).

Cooper, M. (1974) Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China (New York, NY: Weatherhill).

Elliott, J.H. (1990) Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: Penguin Books).

Harvey, J. (1995) Men in Black (New York, NY: Columbia University Press).

Jarvis, M.J. (2010) In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).

McDonald, K.P. (2018) ‘“Sailors from the woods:” Logwood cutting and the spectrum of piracy’, in The Golden Age of Piracy: The Rise, Fall, and Enduring Popularity of Pirates, edited by D. Head, 50–74 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press).

Netherton, R., and G.R. Owen-Crocker (eds.) (2007) Medieval Clothing and Textiles, vol. 3 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press).

Pastoureau, M. (2008) Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Record, S.J., and R.W. Hess (1943) Timbers of the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

Richmond Ellis, R. (2012) They Need Nothing: Hispanic-Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

Roquero, A. (2006) Tintes y tintoreros de América (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura).

Tiesler, V., and M.C. Lozada (eds.) (2018) Social Skins of the Head: Body Beliefs and Ritual in Ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press).

Valentini, M.B. (1704) Museum Museorum, oder Vollständige Schau-Bühne aller Materialen und Specereyen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlegung Johann David Zunners).

¹ M. Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 35.

² M. Pastoureau (2008), Black: The History of a Color (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press), 133.

³ M.B. Valentini, Museum Museorum, oder Vollständige Schau-Bühne aller Materialen und Specereyen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlegung Johann David Zunners, 1704).

⁴ AGI, Mexico 98, ‘Justicia que a hecho’, 20 February 1565, Doctor Diego Quexada.

⁵ AGI, Patronato 64, R.7, 90r–92v.

⁶ AGI, Indiferente 1391, ‘Franco Palomino’, 1580.

⁷ N. Sainsbury (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America and West Indies, 1661–1668 (London: Longman & Co. et al., 1880), 359.

⁸ M. Walker with A.M. Balenciaga, ‘The Impact of Cristobal Balenciaga’, Balenciaga and His Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 15.