The thin gauze-like silken garments of Cos were of a pure quality and were imported to Rome in the second century and were reckoned worth their weight in gold. About this time great quantities of the raw silk were brought from the East by the overland route and by sea, and in the end of the fourth century silk had become so cheap as to be within the reach of the common people (Marcellinus, A.D. 380). Tyre and Berytus were the chief seats of silk manufacture from which the Roman markets were supplied.
In the year 552 an event is recorded that revolutionised the manufacture of silk in Europe. The story is related that two monks, either Greeks or Persians, were sent as ambassadors to China, and there learnt the arts and methods of silk production from the natives. They succeeded in secretly conveying in their hollow cane walking-sticks a quantity of silkworms’ eggs which they brought to Constantinople, where they were hatched in warm manure, and the grubs were fed on the leaves of the mulberry-tree. Very soon after this a royal factory was set up in the palace at Constantinople. Women weavers were pressed into the Emperor’s service, and a state monopoly was set up for the manufacture of silk fabrics.
The introduction of the silkworm did not cheapen the price of silk; on the contrary, the production of the royal looms were sold at excessive prices, and far beyond those paid for the material before the silkworm rearing period in Europe.
The court of the Eastern Empire did not hold the silk-weaving monopoly long, for very soon after the secret of the rearing of the worms spread to the Peloponnesus and the isles of Greece, where, from the sixth to the middle of the twelfth centuries, Europe was supplied with nearly all the silk it required.
In the year 1130 Roger I., the Norman King of Sicily, brought a colony of silk weavers from Athens and induced them to settle in Palermo, where an extensive silk industry was already developed under the former Saracenic rulers, who were vassals of the independent Fātimy Khalifs of Egypt, during the ninth and tenth centuries.
After the introduction of the Greek weavers into the Palermo workshops we find the Siculo-Arabian designs altering from the older circular panels of Saracenic ornament, which consisted of the designs of birds and animals placed back to back, or vis-à-vis, of Mesopotamian origin, to bands of birds, animals, and fishes, grotesque and otherwise, mixed with foliage and scrolls containing mock Arabic inscriptions.
To trace the analysis of patterns in silk fabrics is to trace the historical development of the fabrics themselves, for pattern and manufacture, historically considered, have developed side by side.
When we consider the varieties indicated by the names of Byzantine, Saracenic, or Arabian in its various forms, Italian and French, we shall find that in the order mentioned the chronological development of material and pattern run concurrently.
Silk, in its raw state, during the first few centuries of our era arrived in the principal towns of Asia Minor, in Alexandria in Egypt, and in Byzantium (Constantinople), from China, by the way of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, and overland by caravans.
The Persians and the Byzantine Greeks, from the first to the eighth centuries, monopolised the Western silk manufacture, as they already possessed the looms on which they had made linen, woollen cloth, and carpet tapestry. It required very little adaptation to convert them into silk looms, and towards the early part of the seventh century the new material had firmly established itself in Persia, Syria, and Constantinople.