As trade followed the same lines as in ancient days, so the great commercial routes remained the same. To obtain the products of the Levant, the merchantmen of the West, not knowing the route by the Cape of Good Hope, confined themselves to the short voyage through the Mediterranean or the waters which communicate directly with it. There they were certain to find, along the shore, markets already famous in ancient times, Alexandria, Tyre, Berytus, Antioch, Byzantium, Trebizond; the creation of a new market was a great exception. Merchandise still arrived at the ports of the Mediterranean or of the Pontus from the remote East by the old ways of the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf; that coming from the centre of Asia overland still followed the route we find already quoted in Greek and Roman geographies from the narratives of the merchants.
The only elements which had changed in commerce were the mediums; Italians, Provençals, and Catalans had taken the place of Greeks and Romans as commercial nations. But, with respect to this, do not let us forget that the transition between antiquity and the Middle Ages was gradual. In fact, when the empire was divided into two parts, the Byzantine half had inherited the commerce of the East as a natural result of its geographical situation. Having survived invasions, it played the part of medium in the commercial relations between the West and the East, until the time when the citizens of the sea-port towns of Italy, southern France, and Spain were grown strong enough to do without one.
We possess a sufficient number of documents dating from the time of Justinian (527-565 A.D.) to make a complete picture of the state of the East at this time, from the commercial point of view. The most remote countries of Asia with which the Greeks of Byzantium maintained a regular commerce were also those which furnished the most precious and choice products. For centuries, the silk industry had flourished in China, but the secret of it had been so well kept that strangers had never been able to learn the process of its manufacture. At length there came a time when another country was able, in its turn, to cultivate this important branch of industry. This good fortune fell to the lot of the small kingdom of Khotan, in the centre of Asia, in consequence of the marriage of its king with a Chinese princess who, it is said, betrayed the secret of her compatriots and, managing to elude the supervision of the custom-house officers, brought silkworms, eggs, and the seeds of the mulberry tree into her new country.
We cannot say with certainty whether, in the seventh century, the manufacture of silk had already spread from the East to the West, and passed beyond the borders of Khotan, but we may assume that the greater part of the silk which the western merchants received came from China. The Chinese exported their products themselves; but at this time, with rare exceptions, their ships only conveyed them as far as Ceylon, and their caravans did not go beyond the frontiers of Turkestan. There other nations received the precious wares and carried them farther west. But it is difficult to make a distinction, for the ancient classical writers, and those of the Byzantine epoch after them, gave the name of Seres, not only to the producers of silk, but also to the various peoples engaged in its distribution.
Such a silk-trading nation were the inhabitants of Sogdiana, in the lowlands of Bokhara, a race distinguished from the remotest times for their taste and aptitude for commerce. The silk was brought to them by caravans from China, and they, in their turn, conveyed it either to the markets of the north of Iran, or to those south of the Caspian Sea. Our sources of information do not, indeed, positively state this as a fact. In his chronicle, Theophanes of Byzantium
j relates that the markets and ports frequented by the silk merchants had changed masters three times at short intervals; having originally been in the possession of the Persians, they were taken from them by the so-called White Huns (the Yue-thsi or Yuechi of the Chinese), and finally were occupied by the Turks.
By whatever route the silk was conveyed, the Persians always endeavoured to receive it first, and they watched jealously that it did not reach the Romans of the East by any other route than that which traversed their country or by any other hands than theirs. Nevertheless, a certain portion of the silk was despatched from China to Ceylon by sea; there it was transhipped and reached the Persian Gulf by the west coast of India and the south coast of Carmania. It is obvious that when Chinese wares followed the sea route, they might escape the Persians, for from Ceylon it was possible to take them by the south of Arabia and Ethiopia. Herein lay a danger to the Persian monopoly which the emperor Justinian contrived to turn to his advantage. The Byzantines found it a great hardship to be reduced to having no other intermediaries for these, to them indispensable, articles than the Persians. There was no other nation with whom they were so frequently at war, and how could they see with indifference their own merchants supplying their enemies with enormous sums in payment for the silks they purchased; or how bear patiently the frequent interruptions to trade due to a state of warfare?
With a view to remedying these inconveniences, the emperor Justinian attempted in the year 532 to open a road for the silk trade through Ethiopia; the Ethiopians could, he thought, purchase the silk from the Indians, and sell it to the Byzantines. Their king, an ally of Byzantium, allured by the prospect of gain, entered into the emperor’s views. But when his subjects arrived at the ports which the vessels from India had just entered, they found the Persians masters of the situation in their double capacity of neighbours and ancient clients; they were forced to return empty-handed, and the Persians remained, for the nonce, in uncontested possession of their monopoly.
When it was proved that the Ethiopians were neither strong nor enterprising enough to wrest the silk trade from the hands of the Persians, the problem seemed, for an instant, insoluble. Happily Justinian succeeded in securing some silkworms’ eggs, brought back by missionary monks who had penetrated to the heart of the countries which produced them, probably to Khotan (about the year 552). Thus it is that the manufacture of silk was introduced into the Grecian Empire, and from the year 568 Justin II, the successor to Justinian, was able to show it in full activity to a Turkish ambassador who happened to be at his court. Many years elapsed, it is true, before sufficient raw silk was produced in Greece to satisfy the demands of the native industry. For a long time the greater part of the raw material and the better qualities of silk had to be brought from China, and the exorbitant claims of the Persian middlemen to be endured.