GOLDEN BEZANTS

It took a lot of money to be able to do all these things—to pay the expenses of the emperor and his court and government, and of the army, the navy, and the church, to say nothing of bribing foreign rulers and their ambassadors. And this money did not come from conquering fabulously rich lands and then making them hand over their treasures as tribute or as booty.

This method was the way the old Roman Empire had become wealthy. In fact, the famous Roman statesman Cicero, who had a rich province to govern, boasted to his friend Atticus that the natives loved him because he did not make them give him a well-furnished palace in every city where he spent the night. They thronged from every village and hamlet to cheer him because he did not force them to borrow money and then pay him back with forty-eight per cent interest!

But in Byzantine days there were very few fabulously rich countries left to conquer, and the Byzantines had to find some other source of wealth. They had to rely on hard work and on their own skill and cleverness. They supported themselves on the little farms that nestled in every Balkan valley and the huge estates that sprawled over Thrace and Anatolia (the Asiatic part of modern Turkey). They earned a living, sometimes even amassing treasure, in the many industries that were found in every Byzantine city. They became wealthy from their world-wide foreign trade.

Nobody can say today just how wealthy they were. One historian says that the Byzantine state had an annual budget of one hundred and twenty million dollars in gold, but another says that it was only twenty million.

No matter which was right, and it was probably the first, you would still have to multiply the figure many times to find out what it is worth in modern money. Anyway, this was only the money spent by the government; it did not include the vast sums and the enormous property owned by private citizens. There may have been fifteen million people in the Byzantine Empire, and while some of them were poor as poor could be, a great many of them were very rich indeed.

Of all ways of making a living, farming probably came first. Rich or poor, almost every Byzantine had an eye for the land, that is, everyone except the city mobs who couldn’t bear to be too far away from the excitement of the Circus.

In fact, many people say that the reason the Byzantine Empire finally lost its wealth was because the average Byzantine preferred to invest his money in an estate rather than in foreign trade. The Byzantines let foreign trade fall into the hands of the Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans. Then when the Turks came and the richest provinces fell into the hands of the invaders, there was nothing to fall back on, and no money to pay soldiers to hold the Turks off.

If that is so, it was for the same reason that the Byzantines did not like the navy; foreign trade was too uncertain and there was no way to figure out your risks. Just take pirates alone. The Aegean Sea and in fact the whole eastern Mediterranean was strewn with islands behind which lurked swift ships, manned by swarthy corsairs. They were as dangerous as Captain Kidd or Henry Morgan, and they kept Byzantine traders terrified.

“What am I going to do?” jeered one of them, a Genoese, as he boarded a heavily laden Byzantine merchant vessel. “Seize you and your goods, and cut off your noses!”

But besides pirates, there was wind and weather, land robbers (if you shipped your goods by caravan), and the possibility that some prince or emir would confiscate your property and say that it was indemnity owed to him by the Byzantine Government.

And there was only the most primitive kind of insurance to take care of you in time of trouble.

Of course, farming had its difficulties and dangers too. The farmer was just as likely to have his crops ruined by drought or by heavy rains as he is today. Also just as today, prices were only high when there was little to sell. When the yield was plentiful and the farmer’s storerooms were full, prices went down and so even if you sold a lot, you didn’t get much in return. There were also wild beasts to contend with. The Balkans and Asia Minor were far more covered with waste and woodland than they are now, and you did not have to go to the steppes of Russia to find ravening wolf packs. No Byzantine herdsman dared go out without a sheepdog as savage as a wolf itself. Sheepdogs were so important that a man who killed one was given 100 lashes and had to pay double the dog’s value to its owner. Life was often hard for the Byzantine farmer. We must never think of the world in those days being like it is today. Boundary lines were not rigidly fixed with customs officials at every point, and even when the Byzantine Empire was strongest, savage bands and even nations crossed the Danube and other rivers, roving to their hearts’ content. They never captured Constantinople, and the big cities of the empire—from Thessalonica and Athens to Antioch and Berytus (modern Beirut)—were often safe. But a farmer who came back from his fields was just as likely to find his farmhouse a smoking ruin and his wife and children murdered or carried off, as a settler in our own wilderness days was to find them scalped by Indians. The conditions were about the same.

Nevertheless, at least in most periods, and in a great many parts of the empire, the Byzantine farmer did prosper and was not only able to feed the empire but to ship some of his surplus abroad as well.

This Byzantine farmer was very versatile. He grew wheat, olives, every kind of fruit, and even flax and cotton. He maintained herds of goats and sheep and cattle and horses. In his “more or less self-governing” villages, there was not only uncleared woodland, scrubby wastes, and unfenced pastures, but vineyards and garden patches protected by deep ditches and palisades of pointed stakes.

The very existence of a special farmer’s law shows how important he was. This law took care of everything from stealing or killing livestock to accidentally plowing someone else’s land. The man who did this lost his crop and also the time he had spent.

Another thing that shows how important the farmer was to the Byzantine Empire is the size of a medium-sized farm: 100 yoke of oxen, 500 grazing oxen, 80 horses or mules, 12,000 sheep. That was what could be found on a typical farm!

Indeed, the main difficulties faced by the Byzantine farmer were taxes, and the greediness of the big landowners. Taxes were high and if one man did not pay them, the whole village was responsible for his share. The greedy big landowner caused even more trouble. Some of these “robbers in silk and velvet,” as they were called, owned estates as big as provinces, but even that did not satisfy them and they spent much of their time trying to get the land of the neighboring small farmers.

They tried all sorts of tricks and schemes. For instance, if a small farmer was sick or in trouble, his rich neighbor would offer to help him out if the farmer would adopt him as his son. Then when the small farmer died, the rich farmer inherited the land, and the small farmer’s wife and his real children could beg or become farm hands or slaves. Finally, an emperor who had been a small farmer himself made a law to protect the small farmer. From then on the small farmer was not allowed to give, sell, or even lease his land to a big farmer. But this law did not last for long. The big farmer had too much influence and had it repealed.

Next to farming in importance was Byzantine industry, and in the long run this probably produced more wealth than the Byzantine farmers did.

It was, of course, necessary to feed the huge city population, and in spite of all the produce grown and raised on their farms, the Byzantines still had to import some of the things they needed. Wheat was one of them, and sometimes salt fish, wine, and of course slaves.

It was also necessary to clothe the people, make shoes for them, butcher their meat, bake their bread, cask wine for them, and build and furnish their houses. This kept many hands busy.

But it was the luxury trades that brought the Byzantines their fame and fortune. The goldsmiths made gold cups and chalices, gold inlaid silver patens and plates, gold pectoral crosses (the cross worn by a churchman upon his breast). They also made jewelry and enamel that was so beautiful that people still say that the finest and most exquisite craftsmanship of the Middle Ages was Byzantine.

The glassmakers made their famous Byzantine glass. It was noted for its rich color, and no other glass equaled it until the Venetians began making glass on the neighboring island of Murano in 1291. There was a special kind of Byzantine glass called fonde d’oro. In this, designs of pure gold were put between two layers of glass and then fused together.

The Byzantines also made and exported the finest kind of china, ivory carved with figures of saints and emperors, vases of honey-colored agate, lawn and other delicate cloth, perfumes, strange and sharp-smelling mixtures of spices and herbs, and too many other things to mention. These Byzantine goods went all over the world. Byzantine products have been found even in Scotland.

But perhaps the most important of all Byzantine industries was the silk industry. Byzantine silks and heavy gold brocade were not only needed throughout the empire for church services and imperial functions. They, too, were widely shipped abroad.

In the days of the old Roman Empire, all silk came from China, where Roman ambassadors had traveled 1,000 years before Marco Polo. The silk was carried by caravan across the desert to Samarkand, and then to the Persian border, where heavy duty had to be paid on it.

Silk still came from China—and there was still a heavy duty on it—in the early days of the Byzantine Empire. But one day while Justinian sat on his throne two Christian monks appeared before him, one of them holding in his hand a hollow bamboo. He broke it open, and inside were silkworm cocoons. They had been smuggled all the way from distant Canton or Nanking.

From then on, the Byzantines had a silk industry of their own. The silkworm was cultivated all over the empire, but especially in the Peloponnesus, the peninsula of southern Greece, which now became known as the Morea—the Latin word for mulberry leaf is morus—from the mulberry trees grown there for the silkworms to feed upon. Silk cloth was woven all over the empire, but principally in Greece and at Constantinople.

As a matter of fact, some silk was even manufactured upon the very grounds of the imperial Sacred Palace. This was a special royal silk, and it was illegal to take any of it from the empire.

Bishop Liutprand of Cremona—the same one who saw the emperor magically lifted up into the air at the Magnaura Palace—tried to smuggle some out of Constantinople, but he was caught.

He tried to bluff his way through the customs by roaring, “Your emperor Nicephorus came to his throne by lying and crime! He told me I could buy all that I wanted to. Where is the imperial promise?”

But although Liutprand was an ambassador from the German emperor, the Byzantines merely smiled at him.

“You poverty-stricken Italians and Germans are not meant to appear in such gorgeous material. Only we Byzantines, who are unique in virtue, have a right to wear them.”

They forced him to open his baggage and took five of the most splendid pieces. But they did pay him back the money he had spent.

None of this Byzantine silk, and none of the other marvelous things they made either, would have added very much to Byzantine gold and glitter if the Byzantines had kept all for themselves. Little as the average Byzantine liked to risk his money in foreign adventures, it was foreign trade that brought most of their wealth.

Byzantine foreign trade reached out all over the world. The Byzantines imported animal skins, slaves, and sometimes wheat from Russia; precious stones from India; spices from Ceylon; embroidered rugs from Spain and Morocco; ores and wrought metals from Italy and Germany; wool and woolen goods from the Low Countries and England; hemp, flax, and amber from the Balkans and the north. These were only a few things they imported. Some of these things were shipped out again; for instance, they shipped amber from the Baltic to the Far East.

The Byzantines even penetrated darkest Africa. Not only did they do business with the Ethiopian kingdom of Axum on the Red Sea where the temperature sometimes went up to 120°, but they may even have gone with the dark-skinned Axumite merchants to the mysterious city of Zambabwe. There, in the heart of the jungle, Negro tribesmen built towers, walls, and palaces so mighty that even today men look at the ruins and wonder how they did it.

Gold seemed to be as plentiful as pebbles in Zambabwe, and you traded with the natives in the following way: You built a thick thorn breastwork, and on it you placed salt, iron, and the carcasses of cattle. Then you went away, and the natives slipped out of the forest and placed beans of gold upon each object. Later on you came back and if you thought they had left enough, you took the gold and the natives carried off the meat and salt and iron. If not, you moved away and the natives were given a chance to leave more gold. Sometimes this bartering went on for four or five days. Neither side saw, or even talked to, the other.

The Byzantines were able to carry on this world business, because their principal city, Constantinople, had one of the most strategic locations in the known world of that time. It was like a spider in the center of a spider web; practically every trade route in the world passed through it.

The Byzantines also had a large number of unusually fine seaports in other parts of the empire. Besides Constantinople itself, there was Smyrna, Thessalonica, Patras, and in the early days, Alexandria. There were several others, many of which are very good seaports even today.

The Byzantines also knew how to promote business. We are apt to think of a world’s fair as something modern, but the Byzantines knew all about them. Every year, in October, they held an enormous trade fair on the Vardar plain outside Thessalonica. There they built a huge temporary wood-and-canvas city of booths and bazaars, and even amid the troubled Middle Ages, merchants and peddlers flocked to it from all over. It was only later, when the Byzantines became proud and haughty, refusing to seek business while they sat on their doorsteps waiting for business to come to them, that they got into trouble. Then the energetic Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans took over.

But nothing had more to do with making the Byzantines successful in world trade than the sound Byzantine money. Their gold coin, known to us as the bezant, was one of the four most widely accepted pieces of money the world has ever known. The other three are the Florentine florin, which made the Medici bankers so rich, the English pound sterling, and now the United States dollar. Any one of these would be accepted anywhere in the world during the time it was in use.

GOLD BEZANT

The reason the Byzantine coin was stable is that no one ever tampered with the bezant. In the old days, kings used to clip their coins (that is, use a little less gold in them), but no emperor ever clipped the bezant. It was always kept at its full value.

An old Byzantine writer tells a story which shows both how valuable the bezant was and how it traveled.

A Greek merchant was in Ceylon when he got into an argument with a Persian merchant as to whose ruler was the more powerful.

“Mine,” said the Persian. “He is King of Kings.”

“Why argue?” asked the Greek. “They are both in the room. Compare them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I have some bezants, and you have some dirhams. Put them beside each other.”

There was no need for further discussion. The portrait of the basileus of the Romans was on the bezant, and the bezant was the much more valuable coin.

I, myself, had an experience which proves the same thing. On my desk in front of me is a real Byzantine gold piece. It was coined in the reign of Basil I and his son Constantine, and cannot be a day less than 1,090 years old. But I was able to buy it at a price that I could afford. I asked the coin dealer why.

“Bezants were used all over the world, and so you find them everywhere!” he answered.

Because the Byzantine emperors made their gold coins so stable in value that everybody wanted them, I am able to own one today!

Two women