"Minairons: "Some WSS Related News"" Topic

Great stuff. I was always curious why the Spanish Republic used purple as one of the colors of its flag, but I see that purple was a surprisingly common uniform color in the early modern period. Surprising, in any event, to those of us more accustomed to French and English uniforms, where it rarely appears. I assume the purple dye was made from various sea snails. Yet historically, this dye was expensive to produce, and seemed to remain so until synthetic dyes were developed in the 19th cent. It does seem that the "purple" had a strong reddish hue. See Wikipedia article on "Tyrian purple."