THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN – A REGION IN FERMENTdocumentary evidence; the city suffered a decline when the rise of the Sasa-
nian empire made free passage diffi cult, but eight churches are now known
from late antique Palmyra, one of them a very large basilica of the sixth cen-
tury and at least one a church built in the Umayyad period.^14 To take a further
example from the north of the area, Sergiopolis (Resafa), the main Ghassanid
centre, north-east of Palmyra, was not only a major religious site, the focus
of pilgrimage to the shrine of St Sergius, but was also located on a major
caravan route which made it an important site of fairs and markets as well as
religious gatherings. Finally, it has long been supposed that it was trade that
gave Mecca its importance in the lifetime of Muhammad; this has been vigor-
ously questioned, but reasserted in recent scholarship based on archaeological
evidence (albeit limited).^15 But as far as the eastern provinces are concerned,
the caravan trade was only one contributor to regional prosperity in the sixth
century when set against the broader picture revealed by amphorae and local
archaeological evidence.
Constantinople in the sixth century was keen to build a wide sphere of
infl uence among the kingdoms on the eastern fringes of the empire, and
trade was certainly a factor in this.^16 In the early sixth century Yusuf, who had
made himself king of Himyar (south Yemen), adopted an aggressive Juda-
ism in a context of competition between Jews and Christians and of complex
relationships with Byzantium and Axum, and took the opportunity to perse-
cute Christians, including Byzantine merchants; expeditions were launched
to remove him from Ethiopia (Axum), whose interests coincided with those
of Constantinople. Byzantium was eager to maintain access to the southern
trade route to the Far East, and concern for trade with Ethiopia and Arabia
thus played a major role in Byzantine diplomatic relations with Axum and
south Yemen in the early sixth century.^17 It is not surprising, then, that the
controlled passage of merchandise was a major feature of the important treaty
between Rome and Persia of 561; the third clause reads,
Roman and Persian merchants of all kinds of goods, as well as similar
tradesmen, shall conduct their business according to the established prac-
tice through the specifi ed customs posts.
(Menander, fr. 6, Blockley, Menander the Guardsman)Silk was a particularly desirable commodity, and had been available to Byzan-
tium only through Persia. According to Procopius, the (unsuccessful) Byzan-
tine embassy to the Ethiopians in 531 offered them control of this trade as
an inducement. However, according to a probably fanciful story also told by
Procopius, Justinian later acquired some silk-worm eggs from Serinda, around
modern Bokhara and Samarkand, allegedly in 552, with a group of monks as
intermediaries.^18 Silk was become one of the most prestigious materials in elite
Byzantine and medieval culture thereafter, and this story itself is indicative of
the complex amalgam of military, diplomatic, religious and trading interests
that went to make up Byzantine–Persian relations in the sixth century.