1. The silk industry in the Byzantine period

Silk industries had already developed at Constantinople and the Byzantine provinces before the arrival of the Crusaders in 1204. Important silk-producing centres were located in Thebes, Corinth, Patras, Euboea, and the island of Andros, all of which produced samite, a strong and glossy silk cloth in twill weave composed of six threads. The town of Thebes in eastern Boeotia was considered as the main centre of production, in twelfth-century western Byzantium, of high quality silk textiles dyed with murex purple from marine mollusks. The large number of mollusks needed for the production of a small amount of dye (the purple colorant), the highly sophisticated procedure for preparing the colorant, and the actual dyeing of silk in Thebes, rendered silk cloth as a product of high cost, the production of which was subsidized by the emperor.

Byzantine textual sources (such as the poet John Tzetzes, 1110-1180) refer to the skilful female weavers of low as well as high social rank of the Theban silk industry. It is noteworthy that after the Norman king Roger II of Sicily conquered Thebes in 1147, he deported to Palermo a number of the most skilful silk workers, amongst them many Jews. According to the account of the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela (who visited Thebes around 1160), the Theban silk industry quickly recovered after this event and thrived even further. The Frankish conquest of 1204 did not have devastating effects on Theban silk industry; it survived and prospered well into the first half of the fourteenth century, producing silk cloth of good quality and exporting it to Western Europe and Egypt.

2. Silk production and trade in the Late Middle Ages

Although it seems that it was gradually becoming difficult for Thebes to compete with the growing silk industries of Lucca and Venice in quantity and probably quality by the late fourteenth century, the Theban silk industry continued to comprise the most vital Boeotian economic resource of the thirteenth century. The agriculturally rich plains of Boeotia and the increasing population of the early Late Middle Ages produced goods beyond subsistence, such as wheat, probably exported along with ceramics and silk cloth from the ports of Livadostra and Stiris. Meanwhile, Negroponte (today Chalkida) in neighbouring Euboea comprised the largest and most active port for the export of Theban silk and other products. The area around the port of Negroponte functioned also as a fishing area for fishermen of marine molluscs, for the well-known purple dye of the Theban silk industry. The fact that purple fishers were operating also off the Aegean island of Gyaros (between Andros and Kea) sometime after 1208, as suggested by Michael Choniates, indicates that silk threads may still have been dyed with murex purple in Thebes shortly after 1204. However, the high cost for the production of silk fabrics dyed with murex purple and the inability to of the Latin Emperors of Constantinople to support the extensive use of this colorant (as was done by the Byzantine Emperors before 1204) gradually resulted in the partial implementation of cheaper dyes as a substitute for murex purple.

Recently, the field work of Archibald Dunn has shown that Thisvi (Kastorion) might be one of the Boeotian centres connected with silk production in Medieval Boeotia. Thisvi's particular industrial-archaeological remains and its location with its natural harbour suggest that the medieval city prospered partly on the basis of imperial and commercial silk production and participated in a wider efflorescence of silk-dyeing and silk trade around the western coast of Boeotia.

Although there is no written evidence for the existence of mulberry trees in Boeotia throughout the Late Medieval period, it is very possible that they existed and were owned by peasants and feudal lords in villages, obviously for rearing cocoons and reeling the silk. Evidence for the existence of the so-called rural longhouse type in Boeotia, as early as the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, should also imply its use for the household production of silk fibre (using the longest half of the house, sizable enough for silkworm farming).

2.1. The role of Italian traders

It is widely known that the long historical processes and the trading concessions granted to the Venetians throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries resulted in a new economic reality by the early thirteenth century, with a clear dominance of the Latins and Latin trade in the Aegean. Venetian merchants had resided and had been active in Thebes already since the eleventh century, and were still attested in the city in the thirteenth century, expanding their involvement in silk industry and trade. According to David Jacoby, “the successful operation of the Theban silk industry prompted western investors to promote its activity after 1204”. The presence of the Genoese in Thebes, on the other hand, is attested only after the Latin conquest, when around 1240 they were acting as entrepreneurs in the city, financing the activity of silk workshops. The 1204 treaty between Genoa and the lord of Athens Guy I de La Roche, for the free export of Theban silk textiles, reveals that Genoese merchants financed a number of local silk workshops producing cloth for them, and probably ordered silk fabrics from other manufacturers. Furthermore, it has been argued that those Genoese merchants, having been able to observe Theban artisans at work, as well as their mechanisms and their products, may have been responsible for the transfer of silk technology from Thebes to other centers of silk production, such as Lucca in Italy.

The intensity of cooperation between the Theban Greco-Byzantine archons with the Venetian and Genoese merchants remains unidentified in the published literature, although it seems that the involvement of the first in silk entrepreneurship and marketing after 1204 was sharply reduced. Meanwhile, there is lack of textual sources that could potentially refer in detail to local silk workshops, on both a domestic and industrial level, or to the existence of guilds of silk workers. The Byzantine tradition of local fairs may have continued into the Late Middle Ages and must have played an important role in the promotion of Theban silk cloth in the regional and international market, as it has also been the case with regional fairs in the Peloponnese, where in 1296 a Greek from Great Arachova sold silk at the fair of Vervena.

It is true that Theban silk cloth was particularly popular in Late Medieval Italy. David Jacoby, in his study on the production of silk textiles in Latin Greece, lists a number of references to Theban silks acquired by important people in Late Medieval Greece and the West: for the knighting ceremony of Guy II de La Roche, Duke of Athens (which took place at Thebes in 1294), all the high officials purchased precious garments, mainly of silk, most possibly acquired from Thebes; in an inventory of 1369 from Avignon, four pieces of red and two pieces of white Theban samite were recorded; another fourteenth-century inventory of the French King Charles V (1364-1380) records a red samite from Thebes; an inventory compiled in 1387 mentions red satin (also produced in Thebes) used for upholstery and hangings in the chambers of the French King Charles VI.

3. Silk production in the Ottoman period

In the Ottoman period, from the fifteenth century onwards, the production of silk cloth continued, without, however, the same intensity of the preceding Late Medieval times. According to the Ottoman tahrir defterleri (tax and census registers), the economy of the towns of Thebes and Levadeia in Boeotia, both with a predominantly Greek population, thrived. The large kaza (district) of Thebes, for instance, produced enough wheat, olive oil, wine, cotton, and silk. Greek villages in Boeotia were clustered around Mount Helicon in western Boeotia and were left very little land or good land for the cultivation of wheat. As a result, and according to the Ottoman census lists, Greek villages were mainly engaged in olive oil, wine, honey, and textile (also silk) production; it is noteworthy that the olive-oil and textile producing Greek towns of Athens and Thebes developed soap and dye industries. It is also interesting that the early period of Ottoman domination in Boeotia is characterised by a remarkable development of urban and rural economy.

The period that intervened between the census registers of 1506 and 1570 saw a tremendous increase (which doubled) of cotton, wine and silk production. Several Greek villages (such as Panaya in the Valley of the Muses) in the first half of the sixteenth century gave emphasis to wine and silk production. From the late sixteenth century onwards, the production of silk in Boeotia seems to have gradually declined with the rise of the çiftlik estate. The estate was being used mainly for the production of cash crops in the international economic environment.