🔗 Smuggling of silkworm eggs into the Byzantine Empire

🔗 Greece 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Greece/Byzantine world 🔗 Textile Arts

In the mid-6th century CE, two monks, with the support of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, acquired and smuggled living silkworms into the Byzantine Empire, which led to the establishment of an indigenous Byzantine silk industry that long held a silk monopoly in Europe.