Whether it was that the crusaders made Sicily so often the halting spot on their way to the holy land, or that knights crowded there for other purposes, and thus dazzled the eyes of the islanders with the bravery of their armorial bearings, it is certain that the Sicilians were particularly given to introduce many heraldic charges--wyverns, eagles, lions rampant, and griffins--into their designs. The occasions in which such elements of blazoning come in are so numerous that one of the features belonging to the Sicilian loom in its third period is that, bating tinctures, it is decidedly heraldic. [Illustration: Silk damask--Sicilian: fourteenth century.] All this beauty and happiness of invention, set forth by bold, free, spirited drawing, were bestowed too often upon stuffs of a very poor inferior quality, in which the gold if not actually base was always scanty, and a good deal of cotton was wrought up with the silk. Till within a few years past the royal manufactory at Sta. Leucia, near Naples, produced silks of remarkable richness; and the piece, no. 721, does credit to its loom, as it wove in the seventeenth century. Northern Italy was not idle; and the looms which she set up in several of her great cities, in Lucca, Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Milan, earned for themselves a good repute and a wide trade for their gold and silver tissues, their velvets, and their figured silken textiles. Yet, in the same way as each of these free states had its own accent and provincialisms in speech, so also had it a something often thrown into its designs and style of drawing which told of the place and province whence the textiles came. Lucca at an early period made herself known in Europe for her textiles; but her workmen, like those of Sicily, seem to have thought themselves bound to follow the style brought by the Saracens of figuring parrots and peacocks, gazelles, and even cheetahs, as we see in the specimens no. 8258 and no. 8616. But with these eastern animals she mixed up emblems of her own, such as angels clothed in white. She soon dropped what was oriental from her patterns which she began to draw in a larger, bolder manner, and showing an inclination for light blue as a colour.