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The Question of Byzantine Mines in the Pontos: Chalybian Iron, Chaldian Silver, Koloneian Alum and the Mummy of Cheriana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

A. A. M. Bryer
A. A. M. Bryer
Affiliation:
Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham
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Extract

This article began as a Note, offering literary evidence for the working of the glittering black sands found on some Euxine beaches to relate to the analyses of two samples made by R. F. Tylecote in his “Iron sands from the Black Sea,” Anatolian Studies, 31 (1981), 137–9. But in preparing it I read Prentiss S. de Jesus's lucid study of The development of prehistoric mining and metallurgy in Anatolia(Oxford, 1980), and re-read Speros Vryonis Jr.'s pioneering article on “The question of the Byzantine mines,” in Speculum, 37 (1962), 1–17. This explains why, while the Note has grown into a modest article, its conclusions have shrunk.

For sources for Byzantine mining from the seventh to twelfth centuries, Vryonis had largely to fall back upon prospective and retrospective literary evidence: mostly legal before the seventh, and Turkish after the thirteenth century. He noted how very few direct references there are to mining in the central period and in Byzantine Anatolia thereafter, and while I can add a handful of further indications for Pontic iron, alum and mummy, I must discount his most important one for silver. Vryonis offered a choice of answers to his question: either that “Byzantium had no access to mines and therefore they did not appear in the sources;” or that Byzantines did mine, but “Byzantine sources simply do not mention this type of ordinary or common matter.” Vryonis favoured the latter solution, but the question remains largely where he left it twenty years ago, and his explanation was cited again recently.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anatolian Studies , Volume 32 , December 1982 , pp. 133 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute at Ankara 1982

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References

1 Cf. his A History of Metallurgy (London, 1976)Google Scholar. For discussion and references I am grateful to M. R. Broome, Archibald Dunn, Dr John Haldon, Bruce Lippard, Professor Victor Ménage, Dr Michael Metcalf, Susan Mossman, Professor R. E. F. Smith, David Winfield, and a meeting of the Royal Numismatic Society, London, 16 March 1982. I thank Mrs Gaye Bye for typing.

2 B. A. R. International Series 74. Cf. his “Metal resources in ancient Anatolia,” Anatolian Studies, 28 (1978), 97–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Cf. his Byzantium: its internal history and relations with the Muslim world (London, 1971)Google Scholar, Collected Studies, VI.

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5 Nicétas Magistros, Lettres d'un Exilé (928–946), ed. Westerink, L. G. (Paris, 1973), 65Google Scholar; Argonautica, II, 1002–8Google Scholar; Gordus, A. A. and Metcalf, D. M., “The alloy of the Byzantine miliaresion and the question of the reminting of Islamic silver,“ Hamburger Beiträge zur Numismatik, 24/26 (1970–1972), 17Google Scholar.

6 Vryonis's evidence for Byzantine mines has been restated by Lilie, R.-J., Die Byzantinische Reaktion auf die Ausbreitung der Araber (MunichGoogle Scholar, Miscellanea Byzantina Monacensia, 22, 1976), 258–62Google Scholar, who tabulates references to gold, silver, copper, iron and lead in the Balkans and Anatolia. The list uses secondary sources and is incomplete for late medieval mining in the Balkans, but shows that direct contemporary evidence for mines worked by Byzantines after the seventh century may be reduced to:

GOLD. Anatolia: none. Balkans: Transylvania/Bulgaria in 11th c.

SILVER. Anatolia: Amaseia (Amasya) in 12th c.; Argyropolis-Gümüşhane in 13th c. Balkans: none.

COPPER. Anatolia: Cyprus in 10th c.; Eastern Anatolia in 10th–12th c. Balkans: none.

IRON. Anatolia: none. Balkans: Chalkidike in 10th c.

LEAD. Anatolia: none. Balkans: none.

Infuriatingly, Lilie gives inadequate references; if that for Amaseian silver is to Abul Feda, it must be moved out of the Byzantine period. See Géographie d'Aboulfeda, edd. Reinaud, M. and de Slane, M. (Paris, 1840), 383Google Scholar, cf. Vryonis, , “Mines”, 7 and n. 35Google Scholar. This may refer to the galena deposit at Gümüş: de Jesus, , Anatolia, 263Google Scholar. The evidence for the silver of Argyropolis-Gümüşhane is discounted below. I have also eliminated evidence for silver mining in Armenia, the Caucasus and the Tauros under Arab domination. In his “The circulation of silver in the Moslem East down to the Mongol epoch,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2 (1937), 291–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar, R. P. Blake postulated that a cause for a Muslim silver famine from the tenth to thirteenth century was that these eastern Anatolian silver mines had been lost to the Byzantines, but there is no evidence that they actually worked them then: indeed the indications are against, for while Basil II's conquests in Armenia, the Caucasus and Taron (where mines had been attested) come largely after c. 1000, P. Grierson finds that the bulk, if not all, of his silver coinage comes before that date: “The gold and silver coinage of Basil II,” American Numismatic Society Museum Notes, 13 (1967), 167–87Google Scholar.

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8 Cf. Oikonomidès, N., “Quelques remarques sur le scellement à la cire des actes impériaux byzantins (VIIIe–IVe s.),” Zbornik of the Philosophical Faculty of Belgrade, 14 (1979), 123–28Google Scholar. There is a cluster of lead deposits in north-west Bithynia which would have been lost about 1300: see de Jesus, Anatolia, map 12; cf. Tylecote, , Metallurgy, 76Google Scholar.

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10 Cf. Beldiceanu, N., Les actes des premiers sultans conservés dans les manuscrits turcs de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. II: Règlements miniers, 1390–1512 (Paris-La Haye, Documents et Recherches VII, 1964)Google Scholar.

11 Mt. ‘Realgar’: “in addition to the painfulness of the work, they say that the air in the mines is both deadly and hard to endure on account of the grievous odour of the ore, so that the workmen are doomed to a quick death”: Strabo, , Geography, XII, iii, 40Google Scholar; tr. H. L. Jones, (London—Cambridge Mass., 1969), V, 450–1. Mt. Sandarakourgion lay in the district of Pompeiopolis (Taşköprü—but the early Byzantine site is evidently 8 km. east–north-east at Kizlar Kale, Zimballı, which would repay further investigation). Mt. Sandarakourgion appears to correspond better with Ovacık-Hasandeğin than Gümüş which de Jesus, , Anatolia, 90–7 and map 11, prefersGoogle Scholar.

12 If we were limited to documentary sources, medieval evidence for Pontic copper might be limited to an old copper cauldron worth 8 aspers which was willed in Vazelon Act 79 of 1260, in Uspenskij, F. and Beneshevich, V. V., Actes de Bazélon (Leningrad, 1927); 47Google Scholar; and to a couple of stewpots bought by Walter and Jak the cook for the English embassy which passed through Trebizond in 1292: Desimoni, C., “I conti dell' ambasciata al Chan di Persia nel 1292,” Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 13 (1884), 598–669Google Scholar. De Jesus offers copper mines “said” to have been worked by Genoese (who are locally credited with much, most improbably mining) around Kerasous (Giresun) and Rhizaion (Rize) and medieval workings at Mourgoule (where a wooden shovel is dated by C-14 to 316 B.C.±). Mourgoule lay on the Byzantine and Trapezuntine eastern borders from the tenth century until the 1390s, when it passed to the Saatabago, which took furious beatings from the Mongols and Akkoyunlular before the Ottomans reached it by 1552. See, e.g., Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, ed. Moravcsik, Gy., tr. Jenkins, R. J. H. (Washington, D.C., 1967), 220Google Scholar; Oikonomidès, N., Les listes de prèsèance Byzantines des IXe et Xe siècles (Paris, 1972), 260, 269, 362Google Scholar; Woods, J. F., The Aqquyunlu. Clan, confederation, empire. A study in 15th/9th-century Turko-Iranian politics (Minneapolis-Chicago, 1976), 48, 100–4, 151Google Scholar. In our forthcoming Dumbarton Oaks Study of The Byzantine monuments and topography of the Pontos, section XVII, David Winfield and I publish a late Byzantine church at Fol Maden, 22 km. due south of Kireşon (Kirazlık), which appears to correspond with an unnamed site no. 55 of possible prehistoric or ancient copper workings in the Pontos in de Jesus, Anatolia, map 9. At nearby Yortun (Kürtün), in the Philabonites (Harşit) valley, which has a medieval castle, Hamilton found 6,700 men slaving in a copper mine, 34 of which are reported as being worked in the sancak of Trabzon later in the century: Hamilton, W. J., Researches in Asia Minor, Pontus and Armenia (London, 1842), I, 259Google Scholar; Cuinet, V., La Turquie d'Asie (Paris, 1890), I, 56–8, 68Google Scholar. Does all this add up to more than a possibility that Byzantines mined Pontic copper?

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43 The Marseilles-Cyprus treaty in Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani ed. Röhricht, R. (Innsbruck, 1893), 280 no. 1071Google Scholar; and Mayer, H. E., Marseilles Levantehandel und ein akkonensisches Fälscheratelier des 13. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1971)Google Scholar, appendix 10. Cahen, , “L'alun,” 440–41Google Scholar writes: “A vraidire, j'ignore si'il peut se trouver aucune attestation de l'expoitation byzantine [sc. of alum] à l'époque macédonienne, ou antérieurement … il est peu vraisemblable que se soient les Gênois des Zaccharia qui l'aient découvert [alum at Phokaia], bien qu'on ne semble pas avoir de preuve d'une exploitation antérieure.”

44 Vincent of Beauvais is cited by J. H. Mordtmann, s.v. “Karahisar”, EI 1:“…aluminis minera iuxta Sebastiam quae valet unam argentariam.” Cf. Quentin, Saint, Tartares, ed. Richard, , 69Google Scholar. William of Rubriquis, ed. Dawson, C., The Mongol mission (London, 1955), 218Google Scholar: “At Iconium I came across several Frenchmen and a Genoese merchant from Acre, by name of Nicholas of Santo Siro, who, together with his partner, a Venetian called Boniface of Molendino, has the monopoly of alum from Turkey, so that the Sultan cannot sell to anyone except these two, and they have rendered it so dear that what used to be sold for fifteen besants is now sold for fifty.”

45 See Singer, C., The earliest chemical industry. An essay in the historical relations of economics and technology illustrated from the alum trade (London, 1948)Google Scholar, a magnificent book, esp. 89–95, 139–65; Heers, M.-L., “Les Génois et le commerce de l'alum à fin du Moyen Âge,” Revue d'Histoire Economique et Sociale, 32 (1954), 31–53Google Scholar; Delumeau, J., L'alun de Rome, XVe–XIXe sièles (Paris, 1962), esp. 15–17Google Scholar; Laiou, Angeliki E., Constantinople and the Latins (Cambridge Mass., 1972), 152–3Google Scholar; Bryer, A., “Ludovico da Bologna and the Georgian and Anatolian embassy of 1460–1,” Bedi Kartlisa, 19–20 (1965)Google Scholar = Collected Studies, IX, 188–89Google Scholar; Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope. The commentaries of Pius II. An abridgement, tr. Gragg, Florence A., ed. Gabel, Leona C. (New York, 1962), 233Google Scholar: Giovanni de Castro detected alum at Tolfa because “similar herbs grew on the mountains of Asia.” Then he went to Pius II and said “Today I bring you victory over the Turk. Every year they wring from the Christians more than 300,000 ducats for the alum with which we dye wool … But I have found seven mountains so rich in this material that they could supply seven worlds … and the Turk will lose all his profits.”

46 Ducas, , Historia Turcobyzantina (1341–1462), ed. Grecu, B. V. (Bucarest, 1958), 205Google Scholar; Doukas, , Decline and fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, tr. Magoulias, H. J. (Detroit, 1975), 148Google Scholar: “The alum is produced from the rocks of the mountain ridge which dissolve into sand when brought into contact with fire and then with water. Pouring this sand, derived from the rock, into a cauldron of water, it is brought to a light boil. The sand is further broken down and its dense mass remains in the solution like cheesy milk, while the hard and earthy elements are thrown out as worthless. The solution is emptied into vats to settle for four days; it solidifies around the edges of the receptacle and sparkles like crystal. The bottom of the receptacle is also covered with crystalline particles. After four days, the excess solution is drawn off and poured into the cauldron, adding more water. More sand is thrown in; the compound is brought to a boil, and once again poured into the vats in the manner described above. The alum is then removed and stored in warehouses. It is a necessary ingredient used by dyemakers. All ships sailing from the East to the West must carry a cargo of alum in their holds. Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen, Italians, Spaniards, Arabs, Egyptians and Syrians in the dyemaker's trade are all provided with alum from this mountain.”

47 Dölger, F., Regesten der Kaiserurkunden des oströmischen Reiches, III (Munich-Berlin, 1932) 65 no. 2016, 66 no. 2020Google Scholar; Heyd, , Commerce, I, 438–9Google Scholar.

48 Balard, , Actes de Caffa, nos. 574, 813Google Scholar.

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52 Bryer and Winfield, Pontos, section XVI.

53 Panaretos, ed. Lampsides, 68.

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59 Bryer and Winfield, Pontos, section XIX.

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