The development of paper-making in Europe cannot be traced with any degree of certainty. There are Italian authors who assert that linen paper was made in Lombardy and Tuscany as early as the year 1300, and that the Italian knowledge of the art was derived not from Spain or Sicily, but through the Greeks at Constantinople, who had been taught how to make paper by the Saracens. The earliest authentic mention of an Italian paper-mill is that concerning the mill of Fabiano, which had been in operation for some years before 1340, and which produced at that time nothing but the cotton card-paper. There is no record of paper-mills in the Netherlands during the fourteenth century. Paper was made at Troyes, France, in the year 1340. In the British Islands there was no paper-mill before that of John Tate, who is supposed to have established it in the year 1498. In Germany, a paper-mill was established at Nuremberg by Ulman Stromer about the year 1390.[63] But the different paper-marks in the home-made paper of German manuscripts of this period are indications that there were paper-mills in many German towns. [p142] The gradual development of paper-making in Europe is but imperfectly presented through these fragmentary facts. Paper may have been made for many years before it found chroniclers who thought the manufacture worthy of notice. The Spanish paper-mills of Toledo which were at work in the year 1085, and an ancient family of paper-makers which was honored with marked favor by the king of Sicily in the year 1102, are carelessly mentioned by contemporary writers as if paper-making was an old and established business. It does not appear that paper was a novelty at a much earlier period. The bulls of the popes of the eighth and ninth centuries were written on cotton card or cotton paper, but no writer called attention to this card, or described it as a new material. It has been supposed that this paper was made in Asia, but it could have been made in Europe. A paper-like fabric, made from the barks of trees, was used for writing by the Longobards in the seventh century, and a coarse imitation of the Egyptian papyrus, in the form of a strong brown paper, had been made by the Romans as early as the third century. The art of compacting in a web the macerated fibres of plants seems to have been known and practised to some extent in Southern Europe long before the establishment of Moorish paper-mills.