Smuggling a merino sheep out of Spain could once cost you your life
For centuries Spain guarded its fine-wooled merino sheep so jealously that exporting one was a capital crime. Then kings began giving flocks away as diplomatic presents, and in 1786 Louis XVI received 366 of them. One descendant ram, shipped to Australia in 1860, helped shape the country's entire wool industry.
The merino took shape in the Iberian Peninsula during the High Middle Ages, but how is debated. One theory imports it wholesale from North Africa in the twelfth century; another credits early breeding in Extremadura. Genetic studies back a third view: Spain's native churro sheep, meat and milk animals with coarse, coloured fleece, were crossed over centuries with outside rams, Italian ones in Roman times, North African in the medieval period and English fine-wool rams in the fifteenth century. Fine merino wool does not clearly appear before the 1400s. Even the name is disputed, linked either to a Castilian official called a merino or to the Berber Marinid dynasty, and both explanations have problems.
Spanish wool was long used only for cheap cloth. Quality rose sharply in the late fifteenth century, helped by Ferdinand and Isabella, and by the mid-1500s merino wool matched the finest English product, just as English wool was increasingly woven at home rather than exported. Spain gained a near monopoly on fine wool exports and Castile a rich income. Huge migrating flocks wintered on the southern plains and summered in the northern highlands, moving along royal sheep-walks under the Mesta, a herders' organisation that included many small owners as well as nobles and the church.
The monopoly cracked in the eighteenth century. A few went to Sweden in 1723, and Charles III sent a major consignment to Saxony in 1765, followed by Hungary and Prussia. Louis XVI's flock founded the royal stud at Rambouillet, and Joseph Banks acquired sheep for George III's flock at Kew in 1792. Through a Rambouillet ram named Emperor, imported by the Peppin brothers of New South Wales, French bloodlines deeply influenced the Australian Merino.
Merino types now range from the American Delaine to the hornless Australian Poll Merino; rams of other strains grow long spiral horns. Several European merino breeds are now endangered, while Spain keeps a purebred historical strain near Córdoba that shows signs of inbreeding.
Source: Merino
