Byzantine Empire at its greatest extent, 565
Posted on 04/01/2019 6:34:35 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Nearly 1,500 years ago, a Byzantine merchant ship swung perilously close to the Sicilian coastline, its heavy stone cargo doing little to help keep it on course. The ship's crewmen were probably still clinging to the hope that they could reach a safe harbor such as Syracuse, 25 miles to the north, when a wave lifted the vessel's 100-foot hull and dashed it on a reef, sending as much as 150 tons of stone to the seafloor. The doomed ship was carrying a large assemblage of prefabricated church decorations -- columns, capitals, bases, and even an ornate ambo, or pulpit. These stone pieces lay on the seafloor for 14 centuries until a fisherman spotted some in 1959 while hunting for cuttlefish... Based on several design details on the decorations, Kapitan concluded that not only had the ship sunk during Justinian's reign, but that it had probably taken on its cargo -- the decorative elements of a church's nave -- near Constantinople before heading west... Kapitan felt the Marzamemi marbles constituted "an almost complete set of elements for a Byzantine basilica with the certainty that all the parts are original and of the same period."
...Procopius, Justinian's court chronicler, wrote a book cataloging Justinian's extensive building projects, lavishing praise on the emperor for securing and beautifying restored Roman lands. Though Justinian is best known for building Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, he also ordered the construction of churches, fortifications, castles, baths, aqueducts, cisterns, and monasteries across the empire -- from Jerusalem in the east to Spain in the west. Marzamemi lay at an important crossroads of the newly invigorated empire, where the two halves of the Mediterranean meet, an intersection of the trade routes crisscrossing the sea separating Europe and Africa.
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
reparations! I demand reparations from the Byzantine Mutual Insurance group. They didn’t pay off leaving my ancestors holding the haversack.
The Ottoman Sharia Lending Group succeeded in a hostile takeover of the Byzantine Mutual Insurance group. You’ll have to forward your demands to them.
It is amazing with the nonstop warfare and constantly changing boundaries across all the centuries that anybody quarried stone, sculpted it, transported it and built anything. It seems like the destroyers must have outnumbered the builders.
I marvel that, before commercial paper, plans could be drawn by draftsmen, communicated to far-away quarrymen, the stones provided to sculptors, the building ornaments and decorations created, and sent by ship to their destination. Letters of credit must have been used somehow to pay the distant workers.
The history of this part of the world is so complex and so confusing, especially when you bore down to small regional and local areas in the podcasts referenced on the “Byzantine Empire” link you provided.
Sank like a rock.
Ships pilot was stoned.
What do you get?
Another day older
Deeper in debt
The specs and drafting could have weighed 10+ tons itself.
LOL...a 10 ton order form that took 6 months to carve. That’s the ticket.
SunkenCiv,
Thank you for the post. I almost always read your fascinating posts, but just don’t comment as I have nothing to contribute.
Unlike the knuckle-draggers who have been mercifully spared from the ravages of intelligence or intellectual curiosity.
Thanks for posting!
Spolia - Genoa has some fascinating example of buildings made up of parts and pieces of such remnants used is ballast in ships coming back from the eastern med.
To both: Nice chuckle. Thanks
The destroyers did outnumber the builders after Mohammed got going around 600 AD. It was not long after this shipwreck.
Mediterranean commerce virtually stopped because the Med was infested with Muslim pirates.
Re: Justinian’s court chronicler wrote a book cataloging Justinian’s extensive building projects
Is this the 565 AD version of “shovel ready” stimulus?
Historian John Romers series “Byzantium “ provides a fascinating look at this empire. You can find it on You Tube.
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