A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (15 page)

Nowhere is the scale of this industry better seen than in two other late Roman stone cargoes off south-east Sicily that I have dived on, both also first surveyed by Gerhard Kapitän – one including the largest column ever recorded underwater, some 6.4 metres long and weighing almost 50 tons, and the other off the very south-eastern tip of the island with columns and blocks estimated at 350 tons, making it the largest cargo from classical antiquity ever discovered. The stone in that wreck was from Proconnesus, the same source as the columns and chancel screen on the Church Wreck and the marble that is associated in particular with Justinian. The quarries of Proconnesus on the Sea of Marmara – literally the ‘Sea of Marble' – were supremely well situated for Constantinople, only 100 kilometres away by sea, and were on the route taken by ships leaving the capital for Greece and the newly conquered lands of the west Mediterranean, providing a ready conduit for the stone that was to be such an important part of the religious and Imperial message that Justinian wished to convey.

A fascinating account of the transport of liturgical stone survives in the
Miracula Sancti Demetrii
, a collection of homilies about the miracles of St Demetrios recorded in the early seventh century by a bishop of Thessaloniki in northern Greece. At a time when the Slavs were threatening the northern frontiers of the Empire – by the mid-seventh century they had occupied much of the Balkans – a bishop from North Africa called Cyprian made a trip to Constantinople, only to be captured by Slavs on the way. A vision of St Demetrios led him to safety in Thessaloniki where he gave thanks in the martyrium of the saint, and on returning to Africa ‘he wanted to build a ciborium and ambo similar to that which he had seen, with marble columns'. The vision came again and told him that a ship would put in ‘carrying all the things which you seem to need' that had been ordered from a quarry by the bishop of Marseille, but for which that bishop had no
need because – with saintly intervention – he had found ‘wonderfully coloured porphyry columns and slabs' lying on the ground outside the city. Cyprian persuaded the ship's captain to sell him the items – ‘you have in your ship an ambo which is tightly packed in and other marble pieces which have been hidden away' – and he proceeded to build a church to St Demetrios. This story is of great interest for showing how bishops in the west might order church fittings directly from the quarry or workshop – in this case, only a few decades before the Muslim conquests of the seventh century saw churches in North Africa become quarries themselves for a whole new type of building for a new religion.

A sense of the relative values of different type of marble can be gleaned from the Edict on Maximum Prices of the emperor Diocletian, issued in
AD
301 in an attempt to curb inflation, and the only such record to survive from antiquity. The 19 types of marble listed averaged 107 denarii per cubic foot, with ‘green marble from Thessaly' – the marble of the Church Wreck ambo – at 150 denarii. It was not the most expensive stone – that was Egyptian purple porphyry, favoured for Imperial sarcophagi in the fourth to fifth centuries
AD
, at 250 denarii – but it was more costly for example than the grey and red granites of Egypt, which were 100 denarii. The value of the stone and the workmanship needed to carve it means that the ambo on the Church Wreck was an expensive item, prefabricated according to a set pattern, but perhaps one of only a small number for large churches, in contrast to the numerous columns and panels in Proconnesian marble used for screens and other furniture in smaller churches. The relatively manageable size of the Church Wreck components, by contrast with the huge columns and blocks seen in some other wrecks, is itself evidence for the wide reach of Justinian's building programme, as even columns of 1.8 tons could be taken by wagon far inland to churches on the very borders of the Empire and beyond.

Where was the marble in the Church Wreck destined? Newly conquered Sicily – including Syracuse itself, the scene of Belisarius' triumph in 535 – is a possibility, but the greatest likelihood is North Africa. For more than a century before Belisarius' campaign, the area of modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya had been ruled by the Vandals, a Germanic people who had swept through the Iberian Peninsula, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and taken Carthage from the
Romans in
AD
439. Their belief in Arian Christianity gave Justinian and his church leaders a strong impetus to establish their own version of Christianity in the region; as we have seen, Procopius lists church projects in North Africa as part of Justinian's achievement. One possibility suggested soon after the discovery of the Church Wreck was the central church of Apollonia in present-day Libya. The columns of that church still stand, with ten of Proconnesian marble but a further eight of local limestone, suggesting that a shipment of marble required to complete the colonnade may never have arrived. On the other hand, the large number of columns, capitals and plinths in the wreck, allowing a nave colonnade fourteen columns long, as well as the elaborate ambo and chancel screen, may suggest that they were destined for an even more lavish building – one of the ‘magnificent' churches noted by Procopius – that was never built as a result of the wreck, perhaps in another North African city such as Leptis Magna, Sabratha or even Carthage itself.

In the early 1990s when I led a diving team as part of the UNESCO ‘Save Carthage' project much of our focus was on the Vandal and Byzantine periods, including a study of destruction debris swept into the sea at the time of Belisarius' conquest. Having dived on the Church Wreck at Marzamemi not long before, I became very interested in the ruins of Byzantine churches in Tunisia – none of which survived the next great change in North Africa that saw Arab forces take Carthage in 698. Only two years later the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi established the Great Mosque of Kairouan, which was to become a centre for scholarship and Qu'ran learning as well as one of the architectural masterpieces of the Islamic world. Among more than 500 reused Roman and Byzantine columns in the mosque, 414 of them in the prayer hall, many of the famous stones from antiquity can be identified – including red and grey granite from Egypt, white marbles from Italy and Greece, honey-coloured marble from Chemtou and Proconnesian and Thessalian marble like that of the Church Wreck. With many of the Byzantine Church ruins denuded of their marble over the centuries, the best way of seeing evidence of the other shipments for Justinian's church-building programme – those that made it successfully to their destinations – may be in the buildings of another religion and another phase in the history of North Africa that began in the seventh century and lasts to this day.

The story of the Church Wreck and its wider context involves one of the most extraordinary British military expeditions of the Victorian period, and one of the first archaeological excavations to take place in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1867 a force of some 13,000 British and Indian troops, 23,000 camp followers and 26,000 animals – including elephants – set out by sea from Bombay for Zula, a town in present-day Eritrea near the head of Annesley Bay on the Red Sea. Their purpose was to free European hostages taken by Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia and imprisoned in his remote mountain stronghold of Magdala. Tewodros, a Christian, had asked Queen Victoria for support in his wars against the Muslim powers to the north, but the British had refused – the Ottoman Empire was strategically important as a buffer against Russia, and the decline in cotton import for the British textile industry as a result of the American Civil War had led to greater dependence on cotton produced in Egypt and Sudan. Over three months in early 1868 the force marched on Magdala, where Tewodros killed himself and the hostages were freed. Looting of the fortress by the British resulted in many Ethiopian treasures ending up in British museums and private collections, with several items eventually being returned including Tewodros's royal cap and seal – given by Queen Elizabeth II to the Emperor Haile Selassie on her state visit to Ethiopia in 1965.

One of the civilians accompanying the expedition was Richard Holmes, Assistant in the Department of Manuscripts, British Museum, who was able to buy many of the looted items when they were auctioned off by the force commander. As the museum's representative on the expedition he was also nominally in charge of excavations taking place at Zula, ‘with a view to discovering some remains of ruins of the ancient Adulis'. The port of Adulis was mentioned by Pliny the Elder in the first century
BC
and in the
Periplus Maris Erythraei
, a merchant's guide of the same period which also provides the earliest reference to the fabled kingdom of Aksum: from Adulis it was a journey of eight days ‘to the metropolis itself, which is called Axômitês; into it is brought all the ivory from beyond the Nile'. Best-known today for the huge stone stelae erected as grave markers, Aksum was the first kingdom outside the Roman Empire to become Christian and the only one to exist in sub-Saharan Africa in antiquity – a result, it was said, of the king of Aksum in the early fourth century being converted by a shipwrecked Syrian Greek named Frumentius, but more generally
reflecting the arrival of Christian merchants at ports such as Adulis in the years after the Emperor Constantine gave Christianity legal status in
AD
313 and it could be openly practised.

While Holmes was at Magdala, the excavations at Zula were carried out by a Royal Engineers captain, William West Goodfellow, with 25 men of the Bombay and Madras Sappers and Miners. On his return to Zula in the early summer of 1868 Holmes:

… at once saw Capt. Goodfellow who told me all he had been doing with a limited number of men, great scarcity of water, and under intense heat. Next morning I rode over to the ruins and examined the building the plan of which he had laid bare. This I at once saw to be an early Byzantine church …

Among the finds were a marble capital with acanthus leaves, part of an octagonal column with a slot for a barrier, and fragments of slabs decorated with crosses. Isotope analysis of fragments of these stones in the British Museum has confirmed that they are Proconnesian marble, and a reconstruction shows that they were part of a prefabricated decorative screen similar to that from the Church Wreck. In 1907 an Italian archaeologist, Roberto Paribeni, excavated another church at Adulis with imported marble from Proconnesus, including slabs decorated with the IX monogram – a superimposition of the Greek letters I and X for Jesus Christ, just as seen on the Church Wreck – and small pilasters almost identical to ones found in the church at Apollonia in Libya.

At almost 3,000 kilometres distant, Adulis is almost twice as far from the quarries of Proconnesus as the Church Wreck, involving a journey that would have included the route overland by camel caravan from the Nile to the northern Red Sea from which the marble would have been shipped south. These finds show that prefabricated church furniture was destined not just for new churches in the Mediterranean region but beyond the boundaries of the Empire as well. Involvement by the emperor may have been possible – Procopius in the
Persian Wars
recounts that Justinian sent an ambassador to Aksum urging that ‘on account of their community of religion' they make common cause with the Romans against the Persians, and it is conceivable that church furniture was given as a gift by the emperor as part of this diplomatic exchange.

Aksum exported gold, slaves, ivory, aromatic resin, and exotic animals to Mesopotamia and beyond, and imported luxury goods for the king and his court. Aksum and Adulis were the main points of contact between the Christian world and sub-Saharan Africa, with trade routes that extended far south and west of the Nile. The wealth of Aksum declined with the Persian conquest of Arabia in the late sixth century and the rise of Islam in the following century – taking trade away from the Red Sea and to the Arabian Gulf, as we shall see in the next chapter. Despite this, the Ethiopian Church survived as a unique foothold for Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa until the Jesuit missions that followed Portuguese exploration in the fifteenth century brought Christianity more widely to the continent. Ethiopian Christians first went to Jerusalem as pilgrims and established a monastic community there in the thirteenth century, when western Christians – in the Holy Land for the Crusades – first came into contact with them, and where they continue to exist to this day in their roof-top monastery on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with a history that stretches back to the early Byzantine period and the establishment of churches such as the one excavated in 1868 at Adulis on the Red Sea.

In
AD
536, only three years after Belisarius had taken Carthage – and about the year that the Marzamemi ship is likely to have sailed – a terrifying natural disaster befell the world, the so-called ‘volcanic winter'. Procopius described it in his account of the war against the Vandals:

And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed. And from the time when this thing happened men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.

The ‘pestilence' was the Plague of Justinian, the earliest recorded pandemic in history and probably caused by the same bacterium that resulted in the Black Death in the fourteenth century. About a fifth of the population of Constantinople are thought to have died in 541–9, and Justinian himself contracted it. The event described by Procopius
was the first in a series of volcanic eruptions in North America that dropped global temperature for several years, resulting in widespread crop failure, famine and severe winters in the north. The arrival of the plague may have been a coincidence, but it is easy to imagine how the two might have been causally linked by those experiencing them – perhaps including the sailors whose ship sank off Marzamemi, being attuned as sailors are to the weather and the cosmos for navigation, imagining divine retribution being inflicted on the world as it was taught in churches such as the one they were transporting: ‘For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men' (Romans 1:18).