The Byzantine silk industry: Lopez and beyond

The Byzantine silk industry played a major role in the history of the Byzantine Empire. Silk, a key economic asset, had strong political overtones, and the effects of its multiple influences were felt far and wide, both within Byzantium and abroad. This article highlights some of the difficulties encountered in the interpretation of important documentation surrounding the Byzantine silk industry in the period up to 1204 A.D.     

Crossing traditional boundaries: grub to glamour in Byzantine silk weaving

Abstract

Byzantine silk research evokes images of glamour but it is prudent to consider grass roots as well as exotic aspects of this enticing subject: without the grub there would be no glamour. In its fullest sense a study of Byzantine silk weaving entails research on many and varied levels, across a broad range of disciplines. An immense variety of topics require consideration: the production of the silk yarn; the various workshop practices involved in weaving the yarn into silk cloth; the relationship between technique and design; the marketing and the numerous uses of the silks both at home and abroad, and the implications of the distribution of Byzantine silks purely through diplomatic channels.     

The Macclesfield Silk Button Industry: The Probate Evidence

Abstract

Most histories of the silk industry in England begin with the arrival of French refugees to Spitalfields in London, yet silk was prepared for embroidery in Macclesfield by the Middle Ages and the silk button trade was well-established by the early modern period. Through the study of probate evidence, this article aims to redress the imbalance in the historiography of the silk industry in England away from the focus on the activities of the Huguenots in the early modern period, and away from the silk weaving in order to show that the silk button industry succeeded not through technical innovation, but through marketing a luxury item in sufficiently small packages to make it accessible to a wide portion of the population. The silk button industry can be viewed as having laid the foundations in east Cheshire for the transformation of the silk industry into weaving cloth in the mid-eighteenth century.     

16至19世纪前期中日贸易商品结构的变化——以生丝、丝绸贸易为中心

16至19世纪前期的中国对日丝、绸贸易,前后经历了由盛转衰的过程。究其原因,实不能单从输出的中国一方去找,而还应从输入一方的日本去找,其根本原因则在于随着日本蚕丝生产兴起和丝织生产的发展日方对华丝、绸需求的减少。输日华丝的由盛转衰,实质上反映了中日丝绸生产特别是生丝生产能力的前后变化,反映了日本随着生丝生产的发展逐渐减低了对华丝的依赖程度。到19、20世纪之交,中日丝绸生产的格局变化更加清晰地显示出来。     

试论五至六世纪拜占庭的丝绸贸易与丝织业

为了控制丝绸贸易和保证丝织业生产,5—6世纪的拜占庭国家垄断了生丝交易。由于拜占庭的桑树种植地主要处于容易受波斯进攻的叙利亚和小亚细亚山区,正常的种桑活动往往得不到保障,因此拜占庭所需生丝仍然依赖进口。为了获得较为廉价的生丝,拜占庭利用国家权力对丝绸贸易和丝绸价格实行了严格的控制,并建立了一支身份世袭的织工队伍。拜占庭的丝织业采取集约化的生产方式,形成了集种桑、养蚕、纺纱、染色、绘图等一系列完整流程为一体的生产体系。丝绸贸易在拜占庭经济结构中虽然不占主导地位,但紫色丝绸却是拜占庭国家中央集权和社会等级制度在经济和社会生活中的反映。     

清代的官营丝织业

官营丝织业在整个清代丝织业中占有重要和特殊的地位,它代表着清代丝织业发展的最高水平。本文着重考察其组织机构、沿革、规模、产品种类和经营方式等,力求对清代的官营丝织业有一个较全面系统的梳理和认识。     

拜占庭文明——独特的历史文明模式

本文探讨研究拜占庭文明的方法,分析拜占庭东正教和拜占庭神学的特点及其对社会发展的影响。通过对拜占庭文明与中世纪西欧文明的比较,说明拜占庭文明的独特性以及拜占庭文明在中世纪基督教世界历史发展中的地位。     

The development of the Florentine silk industry: a positive response to the crisis of the fourteenth century

The development of the silk industry in Renaissance Florence – as in other large Italian cities such as Venice, Genoa, Bologna and Milan – was a response to the profound economic changes wrought by the demographic crisis of the fourteenth century. The decrease in the available labour supply, the rise in labour costs, changes in demand and consumption, particularly among the upper classes, encouraged entrepreneurs in Florence and other urban economies of Renaissance Italy to direct their manufacturing interests towards the production of expensive high-quality goods. The Florentine silk industry was born in the last decades of the fourteenth century, and in the fifteenth century quickly developed into a dynamic industry capable of producing large quantities of luxury fabrics for export to all the principal European markets.     

Peasant Names in Fourteenth-Century Macedonia

Abstract

The historian who is engaged in the study of Byzantine social history is faced with a problem common to pre-industrial societies, or societies in which the majority of the population is both exploited and illiterate. The sources, written as they are by an upper class and largely for an upper class, give relatively abundant information about a small segment of the population, leaving us in darkness about the rest of society. In Byzantine history this is particularly true about the peasantry, which has left us only a very few sources of its own, and rather uninspiring ones at that. The Byzantine upper class wrote its own history, but the Byzantine peasants did not, thus making the task of the modern historian more difficult. Despite these problems, work has been done on both the urban and the rural population of the Empire, and more will probably be done as monastic archives become available. The study of the Byzantine peasantry is of primary importance. For if we are to understand Byzantine society, we must study and understand what happened in the countryside. After all, the Byzantine economy rested on agriculture, and the social relations which determined the fate of the state were, primarily, the social relations prevalent in the countryside.     

明定陵出土丝织品种（上）

中国是丝绸的故乡,丝织业在我国历史悠久,早在轩辕帝时“始教民以育蚕,治丝茧以供衣服”。考古发现原始社会繁荣时期就有了编织物。经过几千年的不断发展,由最开始的麻、葛织物逐步发展为棉、丝织物。到了明代,纺织业已领先其他行业率先出现了资本主义萌芽,“机户出资,机工出力”,说明纺织业发展规模很大。丝织品种越来越多,     

On Early Thimbles: A Seventh‐Century‐AD Example from Punta Secca,Sicily, in Context

A copper‐alloy thimble was found in 2010 at Punta Secca, Sicily, in a sealed context datable by coins to the first quarter of the seventh century AD. It has generally been thought that thimbles did not reach the Mediterranean area until the ninth century AD, but at least nine metal examples are in fact attested at various places from contexts datable between the late sixth century and the early ninth. It is suggested that the increasing use of silk in clothing in the Byzantine Empire during the seventh century, probably accompanied by the use for the first time of steel needles which made the use of a finger protector imperative, explains the apparent introduction of thimbles at this time. No securely dated metal thimbles are known from sites of Roman date, except for one at Ephesus of c.AD 100. It is very tentatively suggested that this last example might represent an import from China, where thimbles (and steel needles) are attested from at least the third century BC onwards.     

The early Byzantine economy in context: aristocratic property and economic growth reconsidered

This article responds to recent primitivist claims with respect to the late antique economy of the early Byzantine period. It examines the archaeological and documentary evidence for economic sophistication in early Byzantine Egypt, and addresses the issue of economic growth in late antiquity as a whole by placing the evidence for early Byzantine economic expansion in a broader medieval context. In particular, the epiphenomena of economic growth in late antiquity are compared to the epiphenomena of statistically demonstrable economic growth in Anglo‐Norman England.     

试论拜占庭的拓殖运动

7—9世纪拜占庭的农业拓殖运动,是中世纪世界引人注目的历史现象。在实行军屯和民屯的政策方面,拜占庭继承了罗马共和到帝制时代的历史传统,但与罗马时期以开疆拓土为目标的外张性拓殖相比,拜占庭拓殖的主要目的是守护边疆、强化政府管理机制。拓殖政策的实行,使得巴尔干和小亚细亚半岛上的"新来者"将其"蛮荒时代"的社会和生产结构方面的因素糅进拜占庭的社会生活当中,促进了中世纪东地中海各不同起源的民族之间的融合,促进了一个堪称为"东方基督教文化圈"的东地中海文明共同体的形成。     

Artificial cranial modification on a female skeleton from the Byzantine site of Maroneia (Thrace,Greece)

Artificial cranial modification is one of the most often documented types of intentional intervention on the human skeleton in the anthropological record. A female cranium exhibiting headshaping recently came to light at the Early Byzantine site of Maroneia, in Thrace, northern Greece. Headshaping was practiced by several different population groups during the migration period (1st–9th c. AD), but was unknown in Byzantine customs. Homogeneity in burial customs, evidenced by the skeleton's position and orientation and by cemetery topography, strongly supports the hypothesis that this burial belonged to a Christianised citizen who had the right to be buried in a common Christian cemetery. Headshaping provides strong evidence for the cultural adaptability and complexity of Early Byzantine society at Maroneia, an important provincial urban centre of the Byzantine Empire. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Memoirs,confessions and apologies: the last chapter of Byzantine autobiography

Abstract

Two issues are addressed here: the status of Byzantine autobiography and the state of Byzantine literary culture in its last years. Autobiographical information was mostly a device used at all levels of Byzantine literature for immediacy, emphasis and to suggest personal involvement. It continued to function in this way in the last years of Byzantium, but there was also a degree of experimentation, as it extended its range into satire and comedy and, in the hands of Theodore Agallianos evolved from the rhetoric of apologia into fully-fledged autobiography.     

萨珊波斯帝国在拜占廷金币传入过程中的影响

地处东西两大文明交汇点的萨珊波斯帝国,不仅本身创造出灿烂辉煌的文明,也为东西商贸文化交流做出了巨大的贡献。本文以中国出现之拜占廷金币及其仿制品为线索,考察萨珊波斯帝国在罗马帝国（及拜占廷帝国）与东方之间的联系作用,证明它在拜占廷金币向东传播、流向中国的过程中有着非常重要的影响,是古代东西经济文化交流的重要媒介之一。     

Nursing mothers and feeding bottles: reconstructing breastfeeding and weaning patterns in Greek Byzantine populations (6th–15th centuries AD) using carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios

Traditionally, documentary evidence (mainly medical works and the vitae and miracles of saints) served as the primary source of information for perinatal nutrition in the Byzantine era. In the last decade, however, stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio analysis has also been applied for the reconstruction of Byzantine breastfeeding and weaning practices. This paper reviews the documentary evidence for Byzantine weaning and compares it to isotopic data for eight Greek Byzantine skeletal samples from the sites of Eleutherna, Kastella, Messene, Sourtara, Stylos, Nemea, Petras and Servia (6th–15th centuries AD). The documentary evidence suggests that Byzantine children were weaned at a relatively late age. The age patterning of the stable isotope data is not as clear as normally seen at single sites. However, the presence of a higher proportion of elevated values in juveniles aged three years or less suggests that weaning was completed by the fourth year—a pattern consistent with the written sources. The data available from this study allow us to make some tentative suggestions about cultural and temporal differences in weaning, and to recommend directions for further research. A comparison of the Byzantine data presented here to data published for Roman-era sites from the Mediterranean and Western Europe suggests that the Byzantines maintained a Roman-era practice of relatively late weaning. In contrast, medieval data for Western Europe and the few measurements made on post-Byzantine Greek material suggest more variation, with some groups weaning late and others weaning earlier, by two years of age.     

Synônê: re-considering a problematic term of middle Byzantine fiscal administration

Abstract

The history of Byzantine fiscal administration, as is well-known, is still an area in which many problems remain to be resolved. In 1880 the Russian Byzantinist V. G. Vassilievsky, one of the first historians to address them seriously, described Byzantine fiscal structures as labyrinthine; other scholars have not disagreed. But as a result of the work of successive generations, we are in a much better position today to understand the fundamental lines of development of late Roman and Byzantine fiscal arrangements, and in particular to follow the evolution of middle and later Byzantine fiscal administrative structures out of the situation that prevailed in the later Roman period, especially from the fifth and sixth centuries. Many problems remain, of course, and in the present contribution I would like to re-examine the term synônê, which has a technical significance in late Roman and Byzantine texts. The exact meaning of the word remains disputed and this has led to conflicting opinions among those who have attempted to interpret its application in the sources. The resolution of some of these questions has important consequences for our understanding of how the state's fiscal structures operated over the period in question.     

'Political' personae: the poem from prison of Michael Glykas: Byzantine literature between fact and fiction

Abstract

Byzantine vernacular literature, much of it in verse, has long been seen as material for Quellenforschung into the historical or social conditions of its time. Following the precepts for literary history set down by such pioneers of Byzantine studies as Karl Krumbacher, the study of these texts has concentrated on authors rather than on the texts themselves as autonomous objects of historical study, whose form and content should guide our understanding of their original intention and reception by Byzantine audiences. The 'Poem from Prison' by Michael Glykas illustrates both the shortcomings of the focus on authors and the alternative potential for renewed engagement with Byzantine texts as objects of imagination and creativity.