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

Abstract

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.