Beate Dignas & Engelbert Winter - Kaveh Farrokh

28 Economy and trade 207
Byzantium and the Turks in the year 568 (14) was mainly motivated by the
Roman interest in importing the precious silk from the Far East without any
Sasanian involvement. 177 In this context, Procopius describes an attempt
made by Justinian (527–65) in the year 552 to introduce the breeding of
silkworms into the Byzantine Empire.
Procopius, De Bello Gothico iv.17.1–8
(1) Some monks, who were visiting from India around this time 178 and who saw
that the emperor Justinian was keen for the Romans not to have to buy silk from
the Persians anymore, approached the emperor and promised that they would take
care of the silk issue in a way that the Romans would no longer have to purchase it
from their own enemies or any other people. (2) They claimed that they had spent
some time in a country that was situated beyond most of the Indian settlements
and that was called Serinda 179 and that they had found out exactly how it would
be possible to produce silk in the Roman Empire. (3) When the emperor enquired
persistently and tried to find out whether their story was true, the monks told him
that a type of worm produced the silk and that nature was their teacher forcing
them to work continuously. (4) That it was, however, impossible to bring the
worms here alive but that their offspring were easily transported. They explained
that the offspring of these worms were an innumerable number of eggs from each
one; (5) that men buried these eggs long after they were produced in dung and
by warming them for sufficient time they made the living animals. (6) After their
speech the emperor promised to reward the men with large gifts and he persuaded
them to put their words into practice. (7) Then they travelled once more to Serinda
and brought the eggs to Byzantium, they managed to transform them into worms
in the prescribed way and fed them on mulberry leaves; and it was to their credit
that from then on silk was produced in the Roman Empire. (8) This is, then, how
matters stood between the Romans and the Persians concerning the war and with
regard to the silk.
It is revealing that the monks from India promised Justinian they would
solve the ‘silk problem’ in a way that Byzantium would never again have
to purchase silk from the hostile Sasanians. Their own manufacture of silk
would have entailed many advantages for the Romans because this would
have lowered the drain of gold from the empire. Moreover, the state’s purple
dye-works would profit tremendously from this development because
an even and reliable provision of the raw material would henceforth be
177 Menander frg. 18; cf. also the Byzantine contacts with Aksūm and South Arabia (Proc. i.19.1–2 and
i.20.9–13); esp. 14.
178 This is the year 551.
179 Serinda is the land of the ‘silk people’ who are called Serae or Sêres and who are the same as the
Chinese; the Chinese had known silk since the third millennium bc but had kept its production a
secret into the first millennium bc; it reached the West above all via the ‘Silk Road’.