Living beforeglasses

Rome, 1st century: water, and an emerald

Seneca, in the Natural Questions:

He credits the water, not the glass, and no glasses came of it.

Pliny the Elder says flat emeralds reflect like mirrors, then: “Nero princeps gladiatorum pugnas spectabat in smaragdo”, the emperor Nero used to watch the gladiators fight in an emerald (Natural History 37.64, our translation). He never says how or why. Elsewhere Pliny calls Nero’s eyes weak unless he narrowed them (Natural History 11.144), but he never connects that to the emerald; the eyeglass story does.

Europe, 1260s to 1300: the reading stone

Roger Bacon, in the 1260s, describes glass placed on the letters, the smaller part of a sphere with its curve toward the eye: “longe melius videbit literas et apparebunt ei majores”, he will see the letters far better, and they will look larger to him. And: “hoc instrumentum est utile senibus et habentibus oculos debiles”, this instrument is useful to the old and to those with weak eyes (Opus Majus, Perspectiva 3.2, ed. Bridges 1897, vol. 2 p. 157; our translation).

Bacon is not proof that anyone owned such a glass. The evidence that such glasses were made and sold is a Venetian glassmakers’ rule of 2 April 1300 against passing off ordinary glass as crystal in roidi da ogli, “discs for the eyes”, and lapides ad legendum, “stones for reading”: one of the earliest dated documents to name either.

Florence, Wednesday 23 February 1306

That morning (1305 by the Florentine calendar) Giordano da Pisa preached at Santa Maria Novella, and someone wrote down what he said:

“The lector” is Giordano himself, his teaching title; the transcript is a listener’s record, so he appears in the third person. Taken at his word, that puts the first pair after 1286, most likely in northern Italy.

A Pisa chronicle gets one step closer, still nameless. Of Brother Alessandro della Spina (died 1312) the chronicle of Santa Caterina says: “Ocularia, ab aliquo primo facta, et comunicare nolente, ipse fecit et comunicavit, corde ylari et volente”, spectacles, first made by someone who would not share them, he made himself and shared, with a cheerful and willing heart (Narducci 1857, p. 23; our translation).

China: the emperor’s gift, and a pair bought with a horse

The Ming word, aidai, is probably a loanword from Arabic al-ʿuwaynāt, “little eyes”, or Persian ʿaynak (Heroldová 2019). The best early account is Zhang Ning’s Fangzhou za lu, quoted in the 1726 Gujin tushu jicheng:

Our English

“Once, in the capital, at the lodging of Commander Hu Long, I saw two things his father, the Minister of Rites, had been given by the Xuande emperor. They were the size of coins, in shape and colour very like mica, like the glass of our day but very thin. They were rimmed in gold, the gold drawn out into a handle, joined at the end; folded, they were one, opened, two, like the little case of a shop scale. When an old man’s eyes have dimmed and he cannot make out small characters, he opens them out over both eyes, and the characters become clear and twice as large. Lately, at Councillor Sun Jingzhang’s, I saw another pair and tried them: the same again. Jingzhang said: ‘I got them in exchange for a good horse, from a foreign merchant of the Western Regions.’ I seem to have heard them called aidai.”

Zhang Ning, Fangzhou za lu, via the Gujin tushu jicheng, 1726. Punctuation and translation ours.

Chinese

予向在京時，嘗與指揮胡豅寓所見其父宗伯公所得宣廟賜物如錢大者二，形色絕似雲母石，類世之硝子而質甚薄，以金相輪廓而衍之，為柄紐制其末，合則為一，岐則為二，如市肆中等子匣，老人目昏，不辨細字，張此物于雙目，字明大加倍。近者又于孫景章參政所再見一具，試之復然。景章云：「以良馬易得于西域賈胡滿剌。」似聞其名為僾逮。

The Xuande emperor reigned in the 1420s and 1430s, so spectacles were in China by 1435 at the latest, within 130 years of the Florence sermon. 滿剌 Manla, the last two characters of Sun’s sentence, can be the merchant’s name, a title (mullah) or Malacca, so they stay off the English.

The name that stuck was yanjing, eye-mirror, from the 16th century. By the 17th century the booklet of a lens-maker, Sun Yunqiu, advertised that each customer’s sight was measured and the lenses made to fit (Chen 2018, via Heroldová). In late Qing China a pair might be tied on with a silk ribbon, it was rude to look at a new acquaintance through spectacles, and officials took them off at court (Laufer 1907 and Bock 1903, via Heroldová).

Spectacles were in Syria in the 1300s, most likely through Italian traders (Mazor and Abbou Hershkovits 2013), and India by the late 15th or early 16th century (Agarwal 1971, via Heroldová).

Japan, 1593 onward

Tokugawa Ieyasu owned tortoiseshell glasses late in life, probably imported. A Kyoto court noble wrote in his diary that Ieyasu gave him a pair in 1593 (Japan Tourism Agency, Kunōzan Tōshōgū). By 1791 a woodcut from Osaka could show a fisherman in spectacles (Shunchōsai): one man in one print, but a thing a printmaker could draw by then.

After 1306: a trade

In October 1462 Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan ordered 3 dozen pairs from Florence, including the first documented lenses for the short-sighted; in 1466 Galeazzo Maria Sforza ordered reading pairs graded by age. By one estimate, 6 spectacle-makers in Florence in 1525 turned out at least 42,000 pairs a year, in a city of about 60,000 (Ilardi, via Baldanzi and Farini 2024).

The stories that don’t hold up

“Salvino degli Armati invented spectacles.”

In 1684 Leopoldo Del Migliore named a Florentine, Salvino degli Armati, and quoted an epitaph nobody has found. Around 1841 a tomb for him appeared in the cloister of Santa Maria Maggiore, built from an ancient bust, another man’s statue and a sarcophagus dated 1272, before spectacles existed. In 1885 Pasquale Villari composed a plaque for a house on Chiasso degli Armati, and a school took his name.

Isidoro Del Lungo exposed it in 1920 (Baldanzi and Farini 2024). The documented Salvino never dealt with glasses. On 30 July 2023 one of the article’s two authors asked ChatGPT who invented glasses and got Salvino, called a monk; by the time the article appeared, they report, the answer had been corrected.

“Alessandro della Spina invented them.”

His convent’s chronicle says someone else made them first (above).

“Nero had an emerald eyeglass.”

Pliny mentions Nero’s weak eyes in one book and the emerald in another, and never links them (above).

“China had spectacles in the Song dynasty.”

The Kangxi Dictionary (1716) quotes a line on aidai from the Dongtian qinglu, a Song book of the 1240s. The line is missing from all 3 transmitted texts we checked; later editions of Song books carry additions.

“Malacca made them.”

The Ming texts say aidai “come from” Manla, a claim of origin; they cannot settle where the lenses were ground.

“The Treviso fresco shows the first wearer.”

Tommaso da Modena’s 1352 frescoes at San Nicolò, Treviso, show 3 Dominicans with spectacles, a hand lens and a lens on a stand (Daxecker 1999): painted in 1352, it shows how a painter pictured scholars then, not who wore spectacles first.