Everyday Life in Byzantium Read online

  6 - TRADERS AND ARTISANS

  The Byzantine attitude to trade and industry is perhaps easier to understand today, when state control is once again accepted as inevitable if not wholly desirable, than would have been the case during any intervening period in history. In Byzantium both were considered to be as much the state’s concern as were the country’s foreign relations. As in Rome, the state in the person of the eparch set out rigorously to regulate these two primary branches of the nation’s economy; it also assumed responsibility for the building and control of factories and workshops; it established monopolies, handled imports and exports, fixed wages, the purchase and selling prices of all goods, customs dues and other similar charges. The state also acted as overseer of private firms, verifying the quality of the wares which they produced or handled, no less than the price at which they were sold. In addition the state made itself responsible for provisioning Constantinople, ensuring that the imports did not greatly exceed the estimated needs of the inhabitants, while avoiding rationing. Supplies were kept at a fairly uniform level proportionate to the size of the population at various periods in the capital’s history. The system worked well so long as the Empire remained powerful and prosperous, and the government stable and efficient, but whenever the government’s control of the economy slackened, private enterprise became buoyant and when, with the shrinking of the Empire’s territory and resources, the nation’s economy declined, foreign—that is to say Italian—merchants appeared as contending purchasers, the system broke down.

  No one in Byzantium questioned the assumption that industry’s purpose lay in providing the emperor, Church and nobility with the luxuries they desired and the state with a surplus of such goods for export. By the ninth century, when Byzantium’s foreign trade (mainly of luxury wares) was at its most prosperous, the capital’s industries were strictly organised under corporations subdivided into guilds. The system had been adapted from the Roman collegia, and had developed over the years along different lines. There were at least 23 guilds in the capital alone and the frequent references to them in Constantine VII’s works and in the Book of the Eparch testify to their importance. Their purpose was not so much to ensure the welfare of its members or of the local inhabitants, but rather to make it easier for the state to control the city’s economy and for these reasons the guilds dealing with essential foods, such as bread, fish or meat, were organised with special care. Pork butchers belonged to a different guild from butchers dealing with other meats; shoe makers were likewise split into two, to cover cobblers making special types of footwear. Of the industries formed into single guilds that of the perfume distillers was one of the largest. In each industry the guild drew up conditions of work and fixed wages, selling prices and profits. No man could belong to more than one guild and, in contrast to Rome, none was obliged to belong even to one; admittance to a guild was based on certain conditions which included skilled craftsmanship, and payment of an entrance fee. Nor was it absolutely essential, though it remained usual, for a child to follow his father’s calling; even then his admittance to a guild was not automatic.

  Each guild selected its own president, but his election had to be approved by the local prefect. Each guild bought all the raw materials needed by its members and distributed them to each one. The finished goods were put on sale in clearly established sections of the town or, in the manner of oriental bazaars, in the section set aside for goods of that type in the local markets. Only grocers could open a shop in whatever street they wished because they sold such essential foodstuffs as cheese, oil, butter, meal, honey, meat, salt fish and vegetables. Countrymen were also sometimes allowed to sell their produce direct to customers, and pedlars carried on a lively trade in second-hand clothes. Traders handled the sale of all other goods, including dead and live cattle and poultry, selling them in the markets at the price which the prefect had fixed. There was thus no room in the country’s economy for the middle man and the prefects were able to keep prices of essential foodstuffs steady. To avoid underselling no one was allowed to buy freshly caught fish from fishermen, though the latter were permitted to set up stalls on piers and other authorised points for the sale of cooked fish. Constantinople’s butchers were not allowed to buy meat from suburban farmers, but had to go beyond Nicomedia to do so; local supplies were reserved for emergencies. Bakers could be fined for not abiding by the fixed price even when, in order to increase the country’s revenues, the set figure was so high that it led to rioting. The price of bread, like that of wine, varied with each fluctuation in the cost of the raw material, but it was always designed to furnish the state with a profit. In times of scarcity bakers were able to buy bread from special government stores.

  Wages were regulated through the guilds. They were kept extremely low. At any rate until the end of the sixth century members were only partly paid in money and, like teachers, civil servants and soldiers, received a considerable portion of what was due to them in kind. Many guildsmen worked at home where they were helped by their wives, employees and apprentices. The latter started their training when very young. They did so under contract, their masters guaranteeing, in return for a payment in kind, to train them for two years. Breach of contract by either party was punishable by a fine. If the apprentice was paid a small wage he was expected to serve his master as a servant. The average craftsman’s workshop was generally very small; excavations at Corinth have shown that a master craftsman can seldom have had more than two assistants, and this practice was doubtless generally applied.

  Any breach of a guild’s law was punishable by a fine, by mutilation or by expulsion. However, exclusion from a guild did not necessarily reduce the culprit to permanent unemployment. He was permitted to try to earn his living by practising his trade as a free-lance, working for anyone who would employ him. Many doubtless succeeded in finding work in monasteries such as that of the Studius in Constantinople, which, at any rate in the ninth century, employed metal-workers, linen-weavers and shoe-makers, and sold the wares which they produced; others were probably able to enter the workshops owned by the nobility, where, as in the imperial workshops, a high proportion of the workers were slaves. Slave labour was so widely used in Byzantium that it became an important factor in increasing the output of luxury goods and in keeping down the prices of essential commodities.

  During the opening phase of Byzantine history the rarest luxuries were imported chiefly from the East, jewels from India and Persia, silks from China. Trade with the East was so highly developed that about the year 522 Cosmas Indicopleustes was able to write a detailed account of a journey he had made to the Malabar coast. Luxury wares were treated from the start as state monopolies. The more important workshops, which made the costliest goods, especially silk and metal-work, were established in the precincts of the Great Palace in Constantinople. The guilds in charge of them ranked as imperial and took precedence over all the others. Their members were expected, like the members of the factions, in case of need to defend particular sections of the capital’s walls and were entitled to take part in ceremonial processions. It was their privilege to decorate the tribunes used by the emperors when visiting a guild with purple silk hangings and gold and silver ornaments. The guild of the Purple Dyers was the oldest of the imperial guilds. It had been established during the reign of Heraclius (610-41), when it was given workshops close to the Hippodrome, in the fashionable baths of Zeuxippus, where its members worked for the exclusive use of the sovereign and his family. Goods not needed by them were sold by the emperor for the benefit of the exchequer.

  43 Quadriga design on an eighth-century silk textile

  Until the introduction of the silk-worm to Byzantium silk was so scarce that it was coveted by westerners even more than spices or jewels. For that very reason Cleopatra had refused to wear anything other than silk, even insisting that her underclothes be made of it. In Rome, under Julius Caesar its cost was so high that only the richest people could afford to buy it. The method of making silk n
o less than the material itself had been jealously guarded by China throughout the centuries. However, in the second century AD the Han emperor Wu-ti agreed to export limited amounts of the material to the western world in return for such western specialities as glass, enamels and high-quality wool and cotton stuffs. The men bringing the coveted bales to the Byzantine capital had to undergo long, arduous and, at times, dangerous journeys. An average of 230 days’ actual travel, excluding those spent in caravanserais as a result of bad weather or other mishaps, were needed to convey the silk bales back from the re-loading point in far-distant central Asia to Constantinople.

  Till the secret of its manufacture had been learnt only members of the imperial family were entitled to import and wear silk. If they happened to have more silk than they needed they sometimes sold it, but only to certain merchants, and then chiefly for export. It was no more demeaning in Byzantium for a prince or nobleman to be involved in commercial affairs than it was in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England or Florence. Even when she became empress, Zoe (1042-55) continued to spend much of her day making perfume. According to Psellus she turned her bedroom into a factory by installing braziers in it. Each of her servants was allotted a particular task, some bottling the scent, others blending it, others distilling it. In winter these duties were pleasant enough, but in summer her room became a furnace. As both she and her sister and co-ruler Theodora disliked fresh air, ‘fine houses, meadows and gardens’, they did not mind. Many an emperor was able to add to his income by going into business; in the thirteenth century John III Vatatzes (1222-54) was able to make sufficient profit from the sale of his poultry to buy his wife a new crown. Byzantine noblemen often engaged in trade; some were highly successful at it, especially in running carpet factories. In the tenth century the most important of these were situated in Sparta and the Peloponnese, and it is tantalising that no examples of their output survive to give us an idea of what Byzantine carpets were like.

  During the early period of Byzantine silk manufacture the bulk of the silk-worms were raised near the southern shores of the Caspian and Black Seas. The cocoons were then transported to Egypt, Syria and Constantinople for spinning and weaving into lengths. At the same time, much Chinese silk continued to be imported. At first Tyre and Alexandria ranked as the foremost Byzantine centres of silk production, but as soon as looms were set up in the Great Palace’s workshops very fine silks were produced there. These workshops were run as a crown monopoly, and both men and women were employed in them. Soon smaller workshops became established in the provinces, but the growing aggressiveness of the militant Arabs and the desire of the emperors to concentrate production in the capital led them to close the provincial workshops in the seventh century. Some were then transferred to Constantinople where the eparch was in a better position to regulate and control their output. Henceforth all lengths produced in the imperial workshops had to be marked by having either the emperor’s name or monogram or else that of the eparch responsible for the country’s two main luxury trades (silk and metal-work) woven into the selvage. None of these stuffs could be exported and the silk produced was so carefully controlled that, as in Justinian’s day, the court ladies who were entitled to wear silk could do so only if they purchased it in the House of Lamps, as the Crown sale room situated in the Great Palace was called. It owed its name to the lights which were kept burning in it throughout the night, and which could be seen shining through its windows.

  Apart from being confined to the imperial workshops, the silk industry was controlled by no less than five guilds. One was reserved for the merchants who handled the imported silk in its raw state and another for those who brought it in woven into lengths or made up into robes; a third included the spinners and weavers ; a fourth was reserved for those who dyed the silk any colour other than purple; these dyers were extremely skilled and even though they were obliged to import many of their colours from the East they were also able to produce an immense variety of shades, offering by the tenth century many tones of a single colour. In exceptional cases certain weavers were, however, permitted to dye their own stuffs. The fifth guild was reserved for the men who sold the silk. As supplies increased it became easier for them to do so, for the government found that the sale of silk, which had to be paid for in gold, helped to keep the country’s valuable gold coinage within the Empire’s borders—a side effect of the industry which proved particularly valuable after Syria and Egypt had been lost to the Arabs.

  44 A weaver at work

  The first silks woven in Byzantium were probably plain, but within a very few years patterned lengths were being made in Constantinople and by the ninth century, when the textile industry was at its most productive, silks that remain remarkable for the magnificence and elaboration of their designs were being made at any rate in the imperial workshops. They included brocades and cloth of gold and silver of great splendour. Silks of so high a quality were avidly desired by western rulers and notables, but even at that late date they were never exported. Though the emperors were reluctant for foreigners to obtain even small pieces of these fabrics, they nevertheless occasionally sent a length as a present to a person whom they wished particularly to distinguish. Even the somewhat simpler silks which were released for sale were so rigorously controlled that Liutprand, Otto I’s ambassador to Byzantium, was not permitted, when leaving Constantinople at the end of his mission, to take home the lengths he had been allowed to purchase from a merchant.

  The deep-rooted Byzantine determination not to let their luxury wares leave the country is reflected in the tenth century in the dues imposed on Venetian merchants: they had to pay only two nomismata for every ship entering Constantinople, but 15 on it leaving laden. The dues were intended to encourage foreign merchants to sell their goods in Constantinople whilst discouraging exports. A 10 per cent tax was imposed on all goods entering or leaving the country, a higher duty being charged on the few silk exports which were permitted. As a further measure to retain their luxury wares at home Greek merchants who, until the eighth century, had been allowed to go to Italy to trade were no longer permitted to do so, but in the tenth century a colony of Greek traders succeeded in establishing itself in Cairo and a Muslim one had by then taken root in Athens. In the eleventh century Greek merchants obtained permission to travel in Persia. Lest they should cheapen silk, Byzantine merchants were not allowed to import it for themselves from the East, but they could buy it from the Syrian merchants who came to Constantinople to sell silk made in Sidon for church hangings or noblemen’s cloaks from Baghdad.

  45 A weaver and an embroidress

  Even during the tenth century many of the Syrian importers would stay on in Constantinople for as long as ten years to act as middlemen there. By then Constantinople had ceased to be the only centre of silk production in Byzantium and both the government and private workshops were carrying on a profitable trade in many a provincial town. Thebes was among the first of these to acquire an international reputation, but Trebizond was soon competing with it and by the twelfth century Andros and Salonica had surpassed it. At the time Salonica was at the height of its prosperity, deriving much of its wealth from exporting its own products as well as those it had imported from Constantinople, sending them westward along Rome’s Via Ignatia, through present-day Nis and Belgrade to countries beyond. Merchants from Egypt and Spain, Greeks from Monemvasia and traders from Sicily, as well as the local peasants, all made a point of attending its great annual fair. When at its peak the yearly tax levied on the shops, markets and imports is estimated to have reached the astonishing total of some £37 million.

  The production of fine woollen fabrics and linen formed an important branch of Byzantium’s textile industry. Many lengths were woven by women working at home. Much of the linen was of top quality. Sometimes its weavers made it up into garments, but generally clothes were made by tailors using stuffs purchased for the purpose. They sewed with bronze needles, using pottery cotton reels. Embroideries were also soug
ht-after exports. Originally a Syrian speciality, the art of embroidery soon became a Constantinopolitan one. In Justinian’s day work of such high artistry was being produced in the capital that he turned to local needlewomen for the curtains for the ciborium of his cathedral of Haghia Sophia. The designs they embroidered on them took the form of silver columns linked by three gold arches; in the centre one they worked a figure of Christ wearing garments of gold.

  46 Silver dish showing Meleager and Atalanta

  Important though the textile industry was, those of the metal-workers and jewellers were equally so. During early Byzantine history Antioch ranked as the centre where the finest jewels and the most exquisite and valuable metal objects were produced, but once again Constantinople quickly outpaced the older city. At first silver was in such short supply in the capital that it carried a 10 per cent tax (from which gold was exempt). Silver vessels of that date were made in the imperial workshops for the emperor’s use. Though some may have been exported, most were retained in the palace, sometimes to be used to bribe barbarian chieftains, sometimes to be exchanged or sent abroad as imperial gifts. Like the imperial silks these vessels were stamped with the name or monogram either of the reigning emperor or of the eparch concerned with their production. The craftsmen who made these magnificent pieces were also entrusted with the responsible task of testing and stamping the silver coins and iron bars which, from the year 375 onwards, were handed in to the exchequer in payment of taxes.