6

“charismatic” goods
Commerce, Diplomacy, and Cultural Contacts along
the Silk Road in Late Antiquity

Peter Brown

In 496 and again in 573, embassies from the unimaginably distant savannahs
of Africa brought giraffes to Constantinople. These exquisite beasts lingered
for a time in Gaza, as their journey took them from the Red Sea to the
Mediterranean, and thence to the imperial capital. In 496 they were observed
in Gaza by a professor of Greek literature. In 573 their arrival in
Constantinople was noted by a Visigothic monk. Each time, their arrival in
Gaza constituted a “sighting” of objects as unexpected as an UFO. On each
occasion, they left a tiny trace. As Pierre-Louis Gatier has shown, in
a deliciously learned article, within a decade of the arrival of the giraffes,
real giraffes – giraffes depicted with small horns, sloping back, majestic neck,
and spotted hide – appear in the mosaics of a synagogue (of 508/509) and of
a church (of 578) in the near vicinity of Gaza. Elsewhere, in churches that
were only a few days journey distant from Gaza, the giraffes passed unno-
ticed. In the baptistery of Mount Nebo, for instance, giraffes were shown as
creatures from a fantasy world. Led by imagined Africans, along with an
ostrich and a zebra, they looked like camels with measles.1
The giraffes then passed on further north, to Constantinople, where their
arrival was duly noted by chroniclers. They would have ended up in the
imperial menagerie. There, the emperor would have fed them with his own
hand. For in this quintessentially Byzantine zoo the animals were not kept as
specimens of ferocity – of a nature red in tooth and claw, that matched the
royal temperament of their owners, as was the case in many western medieval
menageries. Rather, they became figures in a peaceable kingdom, where all
animals, and all peoples – even those from the imagined edges of the earth –
were rendered tame by the gentle hand of a Christian emperor.2 We should
1
P.-L. Gatier, “Des girafes pour l’Empereur,” Topoi 6 (1996) 933–941.
2
N. P. Ševčenko, “Wild Animals in the Byzantine Park,” in Byzantine Garden Culture, ed.
A. R. Littlewood, H. Maguire, and J. Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, D.C., 2002) 69–86.

96
“Charismatic” Goods * 97

not undervalue the extent to which the Byzantine emperors of the sixth
century had come to exercise “soft power” in much of Africa north of the
Equator through its being ringed by what Garth Fowden has called
a “Commonwealth” of Christian kingdoms.3 The giraffes of 496 may have
come from the Christian kingdom of Axum; those of 573 announced the
conversion of the kings of Dongola in the northern Sudan.
As a recent study by Glen Bowersock has made plain, we should not
underestimate the imaginative power of the north–south dimension of the
Greco-Roman and then of the Byzantine worldview.4 To a Byzantine of the
sixth century, to scan the world in this way – from the tribes of Lapland in
the far north,5 to the Horn of Africa in the deep south – was to hold in the
mind the entire spectrum of human possibilities. It was a glimpse of
a “totality” of human kind.6 As Bowersock points out, a geographically
based view of the totality of human kind had haunted Saint Paul, when he
wrote (in his Letter to the Colossians 3:11): “Here there cannot be Greek and
Jew. . . Scythian or barbarian [of the deep south], slave and free, Christ is all
and in all.” In feeding his giraffes, the Christian emperor of Byzantium was
contributing, with every visit to the zoo, to the dream of a peaceful and
unified humanity.
In this chapter, I would like to take up the challenge of the giraffes. In their
long and infrequent journeys to the Bosphorus from the edge of Central
Africa, these shy beasts acquired layer after layer of meanings: to a Greek
professor, they further enriched the mighty store of knowledge gathered by
the ancients; to mosaic artists, they were as great a challenge as would be the
appearance in the studio of Dürer of the stuffed rhinoceros brought from
Java to Lisbon by the Portuguese; to the emperor, they were reminders of
a totality at whose center he was imagined to stand, as the representative of
Christ on earth.
Let me now turn from the north–south axis of the world map of Late
Antiquity to its better known east–west dimension. I will do this by picking
up on some ideas I canvassed, in 19 March 2011, in a lecture connected with
a spectacular exhibition on the Silk Road at the University of Pennsylvania
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.7 I want to add a few remarks

3
G. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: The Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity
(Princeton, 1993) 109–119.
4
G. W. Bowersock, “The East-West Orientation of Mediterranean Studies and the Meaning
of North and South in Antiquity,” in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. W. V. Harris
(Oxford, 2008) 167–178.
5
G. W. Bowersock, “Centrifugal Force in Late Antique Historiography: Moving to the
Periphery,” in The Past before Us: The Challenge of Historiographies of Late Antiquity, ed.
C. E. Straw and R. Lim (Turnhout, 2004) 19–23.
6
H. Inglebert, Le monde, l’histoire: Essai sur les histoires universelles (Paris, 2014) 39–73.
7
P. Brown, “The Silk Road in Late Antiquity,” in Reconfiguring the Silk Road, ed. V. H. Maier
and J. Hickman (Philadelphia, 2014) 15–22.
98 * Peter Brown

drawn from that lecture on a problem posed by our giraffes – what were the
imaginative overtones of the relocation of persons, animals, and artifacts
across large distances and between cultures that often seemed (at first sight)
vastly distant from each other? In this respect, the study of the Silk Road in
Late Antiquity offers food for thought for historians of religion and culture,
such as myself, who do not normally tread the paths to the East.
To begin with the historiography of the Silk Road. The Silk Road has
always been regarded as an example of remarkable connectivity. Largely as
a result of the spectacular unearthing of manuscripts and artifacts in the
deserts of Xinjiang, at the very beginning of the twentieth century the Silk
Road was associated with a remarkable eastward expansion of forms of art
and religion whose origins lay in the long familiar world of Greece and Rome.
In the words of Sir Aurel Stein: “To be greeted once more at these desolate
ruins far away in the heart of Asia, by tangible links with the art of Greece and
Rome seemed to efface all distance in time and space.”8 It is easy to under-
stand the almost uncanny thrill of this discovery. For those who studied it,
a large part of the appeal of Late Antiquity was the manner in which the
heritage of classical Greece and Rome changed, between 300 and 700, under
the impact of new ideas, of new religious forces and of new horizons. If that
was so, then what happened along the Silk Road was a particularly thrilling
example of such a mutation. Albert von Le Coq titled the handsome volumes
that recorded his ground-breaking discoveries in the manuscripts of Turpan,
Die buddhistische Spätantike in Mittelasien.9 Somehow, western, classical
forms of art reached Central Asia, to flower into a Late Antiquity all their
own.
For persons such as Le Coq and his advocates in Berlin, to discover the art
of the Silk Road was to discover nothing less than the missing link in the
cultural history of Eurasia. In the words of a memorandum to the Prussian
Ministry of Culture, written in 1914: “We can now recognize the threads that
run from Greece and Rome through Persia and India, running out as far as
China, Tibet and Japan. West and East are no longer cleft by the gaps that we
previously had to postulate.”10
At the time, these views were reinforced by the conviction that the Silk
Road had always been a major commercial highway. Ferdinand von
Richthofen, the first person to coin the term “Silk Road” (Seidenstrasse –
though he used the term in the plural, Seidenstrassen), was a geographer. His
concern was not with rare mutations of art and culture but with a conquest of
space that seemed to echo and predict the modern shrinking of the globe.11

8
A. Stein, On Central Asian Trails (Chicago, 1964) 85.
9
A. von Le Coq, Die buddhistische Spätantike in Mittelasien (Berlin, 1922–1923).
10
S. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship
(Cambridge, 2009) 422.
11
Ibid., 371.
“Charismatic” Goods * 99

As a result, the Silk Road quickly settled down, in the popular imagination, as
the ancient equivalent of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Goods, ideas, and
artifacts were imagined to have moved briskly along the Silk Road. But (as
on the long stretches of the Trans-Siberian Railway) little thought was given
to the sheer diversity of the regions through which it passed.
In fact, the Silk Road was neither a “missing link” – a fascinating conserva-
tory of exotic mutations of Western forms of art and religion on their long way
across Eurasia – nor was it simply a trans-Eurasian trunk road. Instead, a series
of recent publications have each (and each in its different way) folded the Silk
Road back into the living texture of the societies which produced it. Here I wish
to acknowledge a special debt to the following books: to the recent volume by
Jonathan Skaff on Chinese relations with the nomads of Inner Asia, Sui-Tang
China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors12 to Étienne de la Vaissière’s Les
marchands sogdiens (now translated as Soghdian Traders);13 to Xinru Liu’s
work on the relations between India and China and on the role of Buddhism in
the circulation and valorization of silk, now summed up in her synthesis,
The Silk Road in World History;14 to the recent book of Matthew Canepa,
The Two Eyes of the Earth. Art and Ritual Kingship between Rome and Sasanian
Iran;15 and, now, to the remarkable synthesis of Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road:
A New History.16
What have we learned from these and similar studies? First and foremost,
we have gained a greater sense of the inextricable connection between what
we might call commerce (the movement of goods), politics, and state forma-
tion throughout Eurasia in the late antique period.
Hence the importance of Étienne de la Vaissière’s study of the “internal”
history of the Sogdian merchants. He has placed these merchants back into
the structures of Sogdian society both in Sogdia itself and in Inner Asia and
China. The Sogdian merchants have often been likened to the Italian mer-
chants of the later Middle Ages. But one need only read Chris Wickham’s
recent study on the origins of the Italian communes to realize the complexity
of the social structures of the so-called mercantile cities of Italy.17 The work of
la Vaissière shows a similar awareness of the complexity of the Sogdian
world. As in medieval Italy, the merchant identity of the Sogdians was
intimately bound up with their identity as nobles, as heads of city republics,

12
J. K. Skaff, Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power and
Connections, 580–800 (Cambridge, 2012).
13
É. de la Vaissière, Histoire des marchands sogdiens (Paris, 2002), trans. as Soghdian Traders:
A History (Leiden, 2005).
14
Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History (Cambridge, 2010).
15
M. Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual Kingship between Late Rome and
Sasanian Iran (Berkeley, 2009).
16
V. Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
17
C. Wickham, Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of the Italian City Communes
in the Twelfth Century (Princeton, 2015).
100 * Peter Brown

and as leading figures in the frontier societies where nomads and Han
Chinese met. To the Chinese, the Sogdians were not only traders. They
were notorious for their political savvy. “Cruel and perspicacious,” it was
they who acted as political advisers to the Turkish qaghans and as mediators
between the world of the China and the steppes.18
Silk, also, was far more than a commodity. Silk was as central to the flow of
power and prestige in eastern Eurasia as is the movement of enriched
uranium between modern states. For Sogdians to attempt to buy bales of
silk and to redistribute them for gain simply proved, to the Chinese, that
Sogdians were low fellows, who came from a world devoid of kings and
hierarchy.19
As for the Chinese peasant, silk was about taxes, not about trade. Fifty-five
percent of the budget of the Tang was raised in bales of silk.20 Silk entered the
world of Inner Asia, not to be traded, but to add glory to the qaghans and
their dependents. What reached the West were mere pickings from the vast
stores of goods that remained in eastern Inner Asia to fill the tents and tombs
of nomadic overlords. State formation, not trade, was uppermost in the
horizons and calculations of the rulers of the steppes.21
These aspects of the development of the societies that flanked the Silk
Road have been thoroughly studied of late. But what has not received
sufficient attention is the problem posed by my giraffes. What were the
imaginative constellations that privileged the movement of certain goods
and their deployment as tokens of power and as evidence of contact with
wider worlds? Let me make a few suggestions as to how we might approach
this question.
First of all: what do we mean by a trade in “luxury goods”? Many treat-
ments of this topic do not do justice to the imaginative background of this
trade. Luxury goods were not only easy to move and expensive to buy. They
were “charismatic” goods.22 They carried a charge of life-enhancing energy,
delight, and majesty brought from the ends of the earth. To the mid-sixth
century Byzantine Cosmas Indicopleustes, to go in search of silk was a fitting
metaphor for the Christian’s yearning for paradise.23 It was a search for the
ultimate Out There. For the Chinese, by contrast, what we call the Silk Road
could equally well be called the Road of Glass. Glass was not produced (or
eventually produced only in poor quality) in China. Imported glass carried
with it magical associations of purity and transparency, brought from the
18
La Vaissière, Marchands sogdiens, 163 and 200.
19
Ibid., 33–37.
20
Ibid., 172.
21
C. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Asia from the Bronze Age to the
Present (Princeton, 2009) 197–199.
22
Xinru Liu, Silk and Religion (Delhi, 1996) 2–3.
23
Cosmas Indicopleustes, Christian Topography 2.4, ed. W. Wolska, Topographie chrétienne,
Sources chrétiennes 141 (Paris, 1968) 353.
“Charismatic” Goods * 101

unimaginably distant west. Not surprisingly, the most exquisite examples of

Syrian glass to be discovered in China were found in a box of relics placed at
the base of the great Famen pagoda in the Tang period. Taken from the
unseen, western end of the earth, they were quickly returned to the unseen
along with relics of the Buddha. They only emerged, a thousand years later,
when the great pagoda was excavated in 1987.24
Speaking of an analogous phenomenon – the dependence of the medie-
val West on spices – Paul Freedman, in his delightful book Out of the East:
Spices and the Medieval Imagination, points to the literal “craving” which
was engendered in the upper classes of the medieval West by fantasies of
spices taken from the very foothills of Paradise. Spices did more than tickle
your food buds. They brought with them, from the distant Indian Ocean,
nothing less than the death defying taste of substances soaked in the winds
of Eden.25
It is important to recover the imaginative weight of such substances to
contemporaries. But what kept them on the move to such an extent and over
such long periods of time? In answering this question, I have derived much
profit from the work of the late Chris Bayly. In his sketch of the commerce of
Asia and Africa between 1750 and 1850, Bayly speaks of a moment of “archaic
globalization.” He insists that, in order to understand this premodern form of
globalization, we must begin with the drive of great men and their women to
set themselves off against the all-pervasive drabness of ordinary life (whether
in the village or on the steppes). They did this by prizing difference: “differ-
ence in goods, learned servants, women, animals.”26 Difference in animals
did not only mean majestic and mysterious creatures – such as giraffes. One
thinks of the pair of male and female little “dogs of Rome” – probably
miniature Maltese terriers, whose plump forms appear, duly mourned, on
gravestones in the Italy of Augustus – that were offered as tribute by the king
of Turpan to the Chinese emperor in 624.27
Those who reached out to touch sources of difference (Bayly adds) “were
collectors rather than consumers. What they did was more than merely
collect . . . the people, objects, food, garments and styles of deportment
thus assembled changed the substance of the collector.”28 They sought to
“capture the qualities” of these rare goods. They stood out in their own
society as rare persons, because touched by the rareness of exotic goods.

24
An Jiayao, “When Glass Was Treasured in China,” in Nomads, Traders, and Holy Men, Silk
Road Studies 7, ed. A. L. Juliano and J. A. Lerner (Turnhout, 2002) 79–94.
25
P. Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, 2008).
26
C. Bayly, “‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization in the Eurasian-African Arena,” in
Globalization in World History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (London, 2002) 47–93.
27
E. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of Tʻang Exotics (Berkeley, 1963) 77.
28
Bayly, “‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization,” 51–52.
102 * Peter Brown

It is not sufficient to concentrate only on movements of goods that were

provoked by the major demands of international politics. Such movements
were impressive. Thousands of bales of silk made their way across the
northern frontier of China.29 Mule loads of silver coins converged on the
Central Asian marches of Iran, to spill over the Tianshan into the oasis cities
of the Taklamakan desert.30 Byzantine prestige goods, such as knock-off
“barbarian” belts and swords (complete with garnets from Afghanistan)
were manufactured at Constantinople for the use of clients across the
Danube and as far away as the mouth of the Rhine and the Baltic coasts of
Scandinavia.31
But there was always more to it than that. The substances and practices
that passed up and down the Silk Road were put to use to create a magical
“Non-Place” (at once local and international) in which rulers and aristocrats
met in an environment carefully constructed to be a world out of this world.
Thus, Jonathan Skaff has shown the remarkable degree of conscious
juxtaposition between the local and the exotic which occurred when Han
Chinese, Sogdians, and nomads met. The strict Confucian view was that only
the Han were capable of observing ritual and that the outer barbarians were,
to put it mildly, ritually challenged. But this was not always the case. It was
agreed that barbarians could learn. The leaders of the great Turkic hegemo-
nies of the late sixth and seventh centuries were as punctilious as any
Chinese. In 568, Zemarchus, the Byzantine ambassador to Qaghan Istemi
(Sizabul) at the foothills of the Altai mountains, was treated “according to all
the rites of friendship.” Over the days, he was moved solemnly from one tent
to another, in order to approach the qaghan in due form.32 In 631, the
Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang professed to be surprised at what he saw at the
camp of Tong Yabghu (across the Tianshan near the Issyk Köl): “Even
though he ruled over felt tents, his court had a noble beauty.”33
Indeed, not to hold court with such solemnity was a danger signal.
The lack of mutually intelligible ceremonials was both disorienting and
frightening. The account of the embassy of the Katholikos Viroy to the

29
La Vaissière, Marchands sogdiens, 197.
30
J. Banaji, “Precious Metal Coinage and Monetary Expansion in Late Antiquity,” in Dal
“Denarius” al “Dinar”: L’Oriente e la moneta romana, ed. F. De Romanis and S. Sordo
(Rome, 2006) 265–303; R. Payne, “The Reinvention of Iran: The Sasanian Empire and the
Huns,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Attila, ed. M. Maas (Cambridge, 2015)
282–299
31
B. Arrhenius, Merovingian Garnet Jewelry: Emergence and Social Implications (Stockholm,
1985); J. Drauschke, “Zur Herkunft und Vermittlung “byzantinischer Importe” der
Merowingerzeit in Nordwesteuropa,” in Zwischen Spätantike und Frühmittelalter
(Berlin, 2008) 367–423.
32
Menander Protector, The History of Menander the Guardsman, trans. R. C. Blockley
(Liverpool, 1985) 115; É. de la Vaissière, “Maurice et le Qaghan: À propos de la digression
de Theóphylacte Simocatta sur les Turcs,” Revue des études byzantines 60 (2010) 219–224.
33
The Life of Hieuen-Tsiang by Shaman Hwui-li, trans. S. Beal (London, 1911) 42–43.
“Charismatic” Goods * 103

camp of the Khazars, in 626, after they had descended unexpectedly from the
northern steppes into the rich plain of Caucasian Albania, catches a moment
of terror in the face of an unreadable enemy: “There we observed them
kneeling on their couches like rows of heavily laden camels . . . with their
bellies like bloated goatskins. There were none of our customary cup bearers
before them and no servants behind them, not even in the case of the king’s
son; soldiers armed with shields and spears, however, kept a careful watch.”34
Such scenes of naked power were rare on the steppes and in the relations
between the great empires. Most encounters took place in a carefully con-
structed world in which motifs from the nomad and the settled world were
combined. But this bricolage was not limited to the conduct of diplomacy.
From China to Byzantium, an entire upper-class way of life was characterized
by a constant search for difference. So let me suggest a few ways in which we
can view the theme of culture contact along the Silk Road in the light of such
moments of deliberate juxtaposition of the known with the exotic.
This would be particularly the case when the principal loci of culture
contact were situations (such as courts and diplomatic interchanges) where
the juxtaposition of the familiar and the unfamiliar played an important role.
In these privileged environments the skillful collage of elements from differ-
ent cultures was brought together to create a world of its own. The palaces,
tents, and governmental centers at which diplomatic interchanges took place
were never simply condensations of the central values of the host society. Far
from it. They were carefully constructed “non-places.” Those who moved
against this backdrop were somehow made to seem a little “out of this world.”
They were as distant from the average members of their own society as they
were from the foreign world represented by their diplomatic interlocutors.
Indeed, to be touched by the foreign – often by the deeply foreign from
the edges of the world – added a touch of the uncanny to distinguished
persons. How else can we account for the presence, in distant northern
Britain of the seventh century, of a cowrie shell from the coasts of the Indian
Ocean, placed in the coffin of Saint Cuthbert at Lindisfarne,35 or a package
of pepper in the cupboard of the Venerable Bede, carefully handed over to
others, at the time of his death, to remind them to pray for his soul.36
Coming – as it were – “horizontally” from the end of the world, cowries and
pepper (by their very strangeness) also reached “vertically” upward. They
were things of the Other World.37

34
The History of the Caucasian Albanians by Movses Dasxuranc’i, trans. C. J. F. Dowsett
(London, 1961) 99.
35
K. Banghard, “Kaurischnecke,” In Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 16
(Berlin, 2000) 344–347; Drauschke, “Herkunft und Vermittlung,” 411 and fig. 13.
36
Cuthbert, Epistula de obitu Bedae, in Bede’s Eccesiastical History of the English Nation, ed.
B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969) 584.
37
M. W. Helms, Craft and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power (Austin, Tex., 1993) 46–51.
104 * Peter Brown

This impression of strangeness deliberately sought out so as to destabilize

the familiar is confirmed by the study of Matt Canepa on the artistic and
ceremonial relations between Byzantium and Persia. Canepa challenges us to
measure the psychological effect of deliberate transgressions of the normal
environment brought about through the display of exotic motifs, substances
or spaces. We have to ask ourselves what did it mean for a Byzantine to meet,
in the church of Saint Polyeuktos in Constantinople, surfaces of marble
carved in such a way as to make them look like Sasanian stucco work; to
know that there was a polo field in the imperial palace; to sense the Hagia
Sophia, through the motifs placed on the mosaic ceilings of its side aisles, as
a building swathed in robes of eastern silk?38
Last but not least, the notion of the pursuit of differences may throw some
light on the fate of the religions of the Silk Road – Buddhism, Nestorian
Christianity, and Manichaeism. Take the example of Manichaeism. Here
indeed is a classic example of the interconnectivity which we tend to associate
with the Silk Road. If ever a religion “traveled” – as if on some trans-Eurasian
express – it was Manichaeism. It is, indeed, remarkable that the lavishly
illuminated manuscripts of a religion that once claimed Saint Augustine of
Hippo as a youthful adherent were among the first artifacts to be discovered
in the oasis of Turpan. As one walks the empty adobe streets of Jiaohe and
Qočo, one realizes, with something of a shudder, that – at the time when the
most Catholic Charlemagne ruled in western Europe – Manichaeism, known
to most of us as the most bleak, the most furtive, and the most fiercely
persecuted Christian sect in the later Roman empire, was, for some centuries,
the established religion of the Uyghur kingdom.
But how, in reality, did this Manichaeism fit in? Was its expansion simply
a product of zealous missionaries following the trade routes to China? Or are
we looking at a major example of the search for difference that characterized
societies joined together by a form of archaic globalization. Here the work of
Xavier Tremblay offers a way into the strange world of the Manichaeism of
the Uyghur Empire.39
Tremblay’s study of the manuscripts leads him to conclude that
Manichaeism was there because (like many other luxuries) it was different.
Like the Judaism patronized, at roughly the same time, by the Khazars in the
western steppes, Manichaeism distinguished the Uyghur kingdom from its
Chinese neighbors. It also distinguished the court of the qaghan from his
largely Buddhist subjects. Frozen into liturgical texts in a long dead Parthian,
the Manichaeism of eighth-century Turpan was a baroque religion. It was
a religion of great ceremonies and opulent prayer books, perched on top of
a Buddhist population, much as, in the eighteenth century, the Catholic court
38
Canepa, Two Eyes of the Earth, 210, 220.
39
X. Tremblay, Pour une histoire de la Sérinde: Le manichéisme parmi les peuples et les
religions de l’Asie Centrale d’après les sources primaires (Vienna, 2001).
“Charismatic” Goods * 105

of Dresden stood out (with brittle splendor) above the overwhelmingly

Lutheran population of Saxony.40 Manichaeism was a mark of difference,
quite as striking, in its way, as was the great golden tent of the Uyghur
qaghan, which perched on top of the citadel of his new city of Ordu Balik,
surrounded by an impeccably Chinese rectilinear wall.41
What does this all add up to? Let me end by suggesting that these elements
of an archaic globalization were brought to the fore by constant diplomacy
and warfare, and not by the invisible hand of the market that pulled goods
along a Silk Road as if it were a modern commercial highway. In the sixth and
early seventh centuries, extensive warfare and wide-reaching diplomacy
created a rare moment of intervisibility between the kingdoms that lay
along and around the Silk Road.
We must be careful about how we define this intervisibility. We are not
dealing with a sixth-century equivalent of the nineteenth-century Great
Game between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. I am skeptical of views
that posit the direct involvement of the great powers of the Middle East
(Byzantium and Persia) in wide-reaching trade wars along the western end of
the Silk Road. If anything, these great powers were drawn into preexisting
conflicts among protagonists whose political horizons were less wide-
ranging than their own. For example, Glen Bowersock has now presented
us with a riveting account of how the conflict between the Himyarite Jewish
kings of Yemen and the Christian kings of Axum (Ethiopia) was rooted in an
intensely local conflict over rival claims to dominance in Yemen. But, within
two generations, this local conflict had escalated into a genuine proxy war
between the emperor Justinian and his Byzantine successors and the Persian
Empire. As further developments made plain, this proxy war was no side-
show. Driven by religious passions, the war soon came to embrace all of
Arabia. In the well-chosen words of Glen Bowersock, “The tumultuous
events in sixth-century Arabia may reasonably be called the crucible of
Islam.”42
As a result of the intervisibility created by war and diplomacy, the game of
the day was the game of the competing glory of the kings. Byzantine and
Persian ambassadors at the court of Ceylon would pull coins out of their
pockets to display, in the alloy and quality of their respective coinages, the
glory of their respective empires.43 It is interesting to note that dreams of
universal empire (such as had circulated in the Italy of Augustus) were
quietly abandoned.44 As has been shown by Mark Graham in his book

40
Tremblay, Pour une histoire de la Sérinde, 121–122.
41
Skaff, Sui-Tang China, 150–151.
42
G. W. Bowersock, Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity (Waltham, Mass., 2012) 19.
43
Cosm. Ind. Top. 11.18, ed. Wolska-Conus, SC 197 (Paris, 1971) 349–351.
44
G. Parker, The Making of Roman India: Greek Culture in the Roman World (Cambridge,
2008) 203–221.
106 * Peter Brown

News and Frontier Consciousness in the Late Roman Empire one the most
significant developments of this period was the manner in which the Roman
Empire came to think of itself as a clearly bounded territorial unit – a true
state of Romania. It was no longer an empire without frontiers and, so, an
empire without peers.45 Now, even Rome had peers.
Altogether, by the end of the sixth century, Byzantines, Iranians, and even
Chinese accepted a world of many kingdoms. These kingdoms came to be
ranked in complex hierarchies. For the Christian Byzantine Cosmas
Indicopleustes, the Roman Empire was numero uno: its association with
the birth of Christ ensured that (though often battered by its many enemies)
the Roman Empire would survive until the end of time. Persia, by contrast,
was placed an honorable second: for the Three Kings of the East who had
worshiped Christ had come from Iran.46 In Axum at the foot of the Red Sea
(if we are to accept an early dating for the Ethiopic Kebra Nagast), Byzantium
was placed second after the orthodox, Monophysite Negus of Abyssinia, the
descendent of King Solomon.47 At the great palace ascribed to Khusro
I Anoshirwan, at Ctesiphon (south of Baghdad), three thrones were said to
have stood beneath the great Arch of the Taq-i Khusro. These were prepared
for three vassals of the king of kings (the king of Rum – of Byzantium, the
king of the Turks, and the king of China) should they ever wish to pay court
to their overlord.48 In China, gazetteers of the Western Lands reached out,
kingdom by kingdom, up to Constantinople. The arrival of embassies from
those distant western lands (Maltese terriers and all) were duly noted in the
Chinese official annals.49
It was the westernmost rulers of these kingdoms – the qaysar of
Byzantium, the kisra of Iran and the negus of Axum – who were the
“significant others” to whom the Prophet Muhammad was believed to have
addressed (around 630) a famous set of letters. They were urged to submit to
Islam or to face the consequences. The game had changed. In the course of
the seventh century, a universal religion impatient of the hierarchies of an
ancient world order replaced the jockeying of courts that had driven a system
of “archaic globalization” along the Silk Road. The kingdom of Persia fell.

45
M. W. Graham, News and Frontier Consciousness in the Later Roman Empire (Ann Arbor,
2006).
46
Cosm. Ind. Top. 2.75–77, ed. Wolska, SC 141 (Paris, 1968) 349–361.
47
M. Debié, “Le Kebra Nagast: Une réponse apocryphe aux évènements de Najran?,” in Juifs
et chrétiens en Arabie au ve et vie siècles: Regards croisés sur les sources, ed. J. Beaucamp,
F. Briquel-Chatonnat, and C. J. Robin (Paris, 2010) 255–278.
48
R. Payne, “Cosmology and the Expansion of the Iranian Empire in Late Antiquity, 507–628
CE,” Past and Present 220 (2013) 3–33.
49
M. Miyakawa and A. Kollautz, “Ein Dokument zum Fernhandel zwischen Byzanz und
China,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 17 (1984) 6–19.
“Charismatic” Goods * 107

Byzantium was pinned to the wall for centuries. By the mid-eighth century
Muslim armies had chased the Tang back across the Pamirs and had
absorbed the merchant cities of Sogdia. The life of the Silk Road continued.
But it was no longer the distinctive cultural, religious, and diplomatic life of
a Late Antiquity all of its own, that had been lived with such vividness along
the Silk Road between 300 and 700 CE.
empires and exchanges in
eurasian late antiquity
Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750

Edited by

nicola di cosmo
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

michael maas
Rice University