In the early 550s, a few monks came to Constantinople with an unusual offer for Emperor Justinian I. They said they could give the Byzantine Empire the secret of silk. A few years later, according to the historian Procopius, silkworms were being raised on Roman soil for the first time.
The episode has become a viral favorite online, retold as a daring mission by “monk spies” who slipped deep into China, hid stolen eggs in bamboo canes and broke a monopoly overnight. The surviving sources tell a stranger and more intresting story.
Why silk mattered to Byzantium
Silk was a luxury that signaled wealth and status in sixth-century Constantinople, the capital of the emperor who commissioned Hagia Sophia to proclaim the city’s place in the Christian world. Yet nobody in the empire knew how silk was made.
Raw silk reached Byzantium through Sassanid Persia, the empire’s great rival to the east. The Persians strictly controlled the trade through their territory and could suspend it in wartime, leaving the Byzantines dependent on an enemy for one of their most prized goods. Efforts to open other routes, one to the north through Crimea and one to the south through Ethiopia, failed.
What Procopius actually wrote
The earliest account comes from Procopius of Caesarea, the leading historian of Justinian’s reign, in Book VIII of his History of the Wars. In there, he writes that “there came from India certain monks” who said they had lived in a country called Serinda and had learned the art of silk-making there.
The monks promised Justinian that they would supply what was needed to make silk, “so that never should the Romans seek business of this kind from their enemy the Persians.” Encouraged by the emperor’s “liberal promises,” they went back and returned with silkworm eggs.
Procopius explains that the eggs were covered with dung to keep them warm until they hatched, and that the larvae were fed on mulberry leaves. He does not name the monks, say how many there were or describe how they carried the eggs.
The other version: a Persian with a walking stick
A second account comes from Theophanes of Byzantium, a late sixth-century historian whose work is lost. It survives only through a summary by Patriarch Photius in his Bibliotheca, a digest of the books he had read.
Theophanes does not mention monks. He credits a single Persian who came from “the country of the Seres,” as Greeks called the silk-producing peoples of the Far East, and brought the eggs safely to Byzantium hidden in a walking stick. He adds that the emperor later astonished visiting Turks by showing them how the worms were hatched and the silk they produced.
The popular version blends the two: Procopius’s monks carrying Theophanes’s hidden eggs.
Where was Serinda?
Procopius never says. The name appears to combine Seres and India, and the modern term Serindia describes the part of Central Asia now in China’s Xinjiang region. Serinda was most likely somewhere in Central Asia rather than in the Chinese heartland. By then sericulture, the raising of silkworms for silk, had already spread beyond China to the kingdom of Khotan and to India, and some modern accounts link the monks to contacts in Sogdiana, a trading region of Central Asia.
Direct contact between Byzantium and China remained rare. It came later, through the empire’s diplomatic missions to Tang China in the seventh century.
Myth versus fact
Much of the popular story is not in the sources. Neither Procopius nor Theophanes says the monks risked execution or were pursued. Neither describes a journey deep into China: Procopius names Serinda, and Theophanes refers only to the land of the Seres. Bamboo canes appear in neither account.
Procopius does not say how the eggs were carried, and the walking stick comes from Theophanes, whose smuggler is a Persian, not a monk. Procopius does not say which church the monks belonged to either, so calling them Nestorian Christians is a modern guess.
Nor was the monopoly broken in an instant. A few eggs did not end Byzantium’s need for imported silk overnight, and the overland silk trade lost importance only gradually.
What happened next
After Justinian’s reign, the manufacture and sale of silk became an imperial monopoly. It was processed in state workshops and sold only to authorized buyers, and in the capital the silk guilds came under the city’s prefect.
Over the following centuries the industry spread to the provinces. From the 10th century onward, Thebes in central Greece became a silk center, and by the middle of the 12th century it was the largest silk producer in the empire, surpassing Constantinople. Its women were famed for their weaving.
That reputation made the city a target. In 1147, during the Second Crusade, Roger II of Sicily attacked Thebes and Corinth, seized their weavers and equipment and set up his own silk works in Palermo and Calabria.
The mission that started it all involved a handful of unnamed monks, some eggs and a heap of dung. Its effects lasted for centuries, from the imperial workshops of Constantinople to the looms of Norman Sicily. The true story does not need any extra drama.
See all the latest news from Greece and the world at Greekreporter.com. Contact our newsroom to report an update or send your story, photos and videos. Follow GR on Google News and subscribe here to our daily email!
