Routes & Cities
Constantinople and the Silk Road
Constantinople, the capital of the Roman and Byzantine empires for more than a thousand years, was the principal European terminus of the overland Silk…
Constantinople, the capital of the Roman and Byzantine empires for more than a thousand years, was the principal European terminus of the overland Silk Road. Founded by the emperor Constantine on the site of the Greek colony of Byzantium in 330 CE, the city sat at the junction of Europe and Asia and controlled the Bosphorus, the narrow strait that linked the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. From the fourth century onward, Constantinople was the destination of caravans bringing Chinese silk, Indian spices, and Central Asian horses, and the source of European goods, coins, and glassware that moved eastward. The wider context of the trade is treated in the article on Silk Road trade, goods, and economy, and the city is set in the wider urban system in the article on Silk Road cities. I have always thought that the standard framing of Constantinople as a “bridge” between East and West misses the point: it was less a bridge than a customs house, and a ferocious one at that.
The Roman and Byzantine terminus
The eastern Mediterranean had been a major terminus of the overland trade long before Constantine founded the city. Antioch had been the principal eastern market of the Roman Empire since the Hellenistic period. Constantinople’s foundation shifted the centre of gravity of the eastern Roman state north to the Bosphorus, but it did not displace Antioch’s commercial role; the two cities functioned, for several centuries, as a paired eastern and western capital of the eastern trade.
Constantinople’s commercial importance grew through the fourth and fifth centuries. The imperial workshops — the gynaecia, in particular — produced silks, metalwork, and jewellery for the court and the imperial cult, and the city’s role as a transshipment point grew as the Black Sea and the Aegean became more thoroughly integrated into the wider Mediterranean economy. Theodosius II’s land walls, begun in 413 CE and rebuilt after the earthquake of 447, are the structure that defines the modern city, and I would argue that no visitor to Istanbul has understood the place until they have walked the walls from the Golden Gate to the Edirne gate on a hot afternoon in late September.
Justinian and the silkworm revolution
The most important single moment in the Byzantine silk trade came in the sixth century, when — according to a tradition recorded by Procopius in the Wars — two Nestorian monks arrived in Constantinople in the 550s CE with silkworm eggs smuggled out of China in hollow bamboo canes, and presented them to the emperor Justinian. The long Chinese monopoly on sericulture was broken; the details of that monopoly and the story of its collapse are told in the article on the secret of Chinese silk. I have always thought the conventional narrative misses what the legend really says, which is less about exotic monks and more about how thoroughly the Sasanian intermediaries had been strangling the Byzantine supply.
Constantinople was, in the medieval European imagination, the most exotic city in the world. (Marco Polo, three centuries later, said the same thing in different words.)
The establishment of Byzantine sericulture broke the Sasanian grip on the silk trade, and the imperial silk workshops of Constantinople — by the time of the Book of the Eparch in the tenth century, organised into distinct guilds for raw-silk merchants, silk-weavers, and embroidery-workers — became one of the most important industries of the early medieval Mediterranean, and the source of the silks that, over the next several centuries, would appear on the altars of Romanesque churches from Aachen to Bari. The state factories were protected by sumptuary law that restricted the wearing of particular silk grades to particular ranks, and the export of raw silk was at times prohibited outright — a level of industrial policy that I think has no real parallel in the Latin West until the Italian city-states of the thirteenth century.
A personal note
The city now called Istanbul was, for most of the Silk Road period, called Constantinople (and earlier, Byzantium). I have used “Constantinople” throughout, because that is the name the medieval sources use. The change to “Istanbul” is post-Ottoman. The reader should know that “Istanbul” is not wrong, but it is anachronistic for the period covered by this article.
Further reading
- Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
- Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
- The relevant Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History chapter for the region or period.