Byzantine silk
[1] Byzantine silks are significant for their brilliant colours, use of gold thread, and intricate designs that approach the pictorial complexity of embroidery in loom-woven fabric.
[2] Byzantium dominated silk production in Europe throughout the Early Middle Ages, until the establishment of the Italian silk-weaving industry in the 12th century and the conquest and break-up of the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade (1204).
Imports of raw silk, silk yarn, and finished fabrics are all recorded, but the techniques of producing these textiles from the silkworm Bombyx mori remained a closely guarded secret of the Chinese until the Emperor of the East Justinian I (482–565) arranged to have silkworm eggs smuggled out of Central Asia in 553-54,[3] setting the stage for the flowering of the Byzantine silk-weaving industry.
[4] Maniah, a Sogdian diplomat, convinced Istämi to send an embassy directly to Constantinople, which arrived in 568 and offered not only silk as a gift to Byzantine ruler Justin II, but also proposed an alliance against Sassanid Persia.
[9] Contemporary Chinese sources, namely the Old and New Book of Tang, also depicted the city of Constantinople and how it was besieged by Muawiyah I (founder of the Umayyad Caliphate), who exacted tribute afterwards.
[12] Regulations governing the use of expensive Tyrian purple dyestuffs varied over the years, but cloth dyed in these colours was generally restricted to specific classes and was used in diplomatic gifts.
[14] Figured (patterned) Byzantine silks of the 6th (and possibly 5th) centuries show overall designs of small motifs such as hearts, swastikas, palmettes and leaves worked in two weft colours.
Designs of the 8th and 9th centuries show rows of roundels or medallions populated with pairs of human or animal figures reversed in mirror-image on a vertical axis.
[15] Many motifs echo Sassanian designs including the tree of life, winged horses, lions, and imaginary beasts,[2] and there are numbers of surviving pieces where specialists cannot agree between a Byzantine or Islamic origin.
Byzantium granted silk-trading concessions to the sea powers of Venice, Pisa, Genoa and Amalfi to secure naval and military aid for Byzantine territories.
The most impressive example to survive is the 10th century "Bamberger Gunthertuch", a woven tapestry[26] piece over two metres square, with a mounted emperor between two female personifications.
[27] This continued Late Antique trends, which among other evidence are known from finds in Egyptian cemeteries, and the complaint by Saint Asterius of Amasia in around 410 about his flock in northeastern Turkey, where he says the laity decorated their clothes with religious images: ... they artfully produce, both for themselves and for their wives and children, clothing beflowered and wrought with ten thousand objects....When, therefore, they dress themselves and appear in public, they look like pictured walls in the eyes of those that meet them.
On these garments are lions and leopards; bears and bulls and dogs; woods and rocks and hunters ... You may see the wedding of Galilee, and the water-pots; the paralytic carrying his bed on his shoulders; the blind man being healed with the clay; the woman with the bloody issue, taking hold of the border of the garment; the sinful woman falling at the feet of Jesus; Lazarus returning to life from the grave.
[29] In 1147, during the Second Crusade, Roger II of Sicily (1095–1154) attacked Corinth and Thebes, two important centres of Byzantine silk production, capturing the weavers and their equipment and establishing his own silkworks in Palermo and Calabria.
