barracan

The Persian word barak meant a fabric woven from camel or goat hair, dense enough to resist water and durable enough to last a decade of travel. Arab traders carried both the cloth and the word into the markets of Damascus and Baghdad during the Abbasid period, when the 9th and 10th centuries made those cities clearinghouses for everything moving between Asia and the Mediterranean. The Arabic barrakan became a technical trade term for a particular weight of cloth: neither silk nor wool, but harder and more weather-proof than either.

Venetian and Genoese merchants encountered barrakan in Levantine ports during the 12th and 13th centuries, when the Crusades had made the eastern Mediterranean a corridor of continual commercial traffic. The Italians wrote it "barracano" and used it for a heavy outer garment. The Spanish "barragán" was in use by the 14th century, and a 1378 Castilian document describes "barragán azul" as appropriate dress for a court servant.

French weavers in the 17th century made a version called "bouracan," lighter than the Levantine original, mixing silk with the wool. English clothiers imported both the fabric and the French word, landing on "barracan" in the 1680s as the standard form. Trade inventories of the late 17th century list barracan alongside camlet and serge as a weather-resistant outer cloth.

The fabric fell out of use through the 18th century as lighter European weaves replaced the heavy Oriental imports. Barracan survived longest in military tailoring, where its water-resistance made it useful for campaign cloaks. By 1800 it was an antiquarian curiosity, surviving mostly in trade ledgers and theatrical costume inventories where someone needed a word for a heavy, weatherproof cloth with an exotic pedigree.