During the reign of Justinian two monks brought the eggs of the silkworm to Byzantium from Serinda in India, and the manufacture of silk became a royal monopoly of the Roman Empire.

The latter, when Flaccus had crossed from Byzantium to Chalcedon, induced the troops, who hated their general, to mutiny.

The Greek commercial cities, with Rhodes, Pergamus, and Byzantium at their head, were in a position similar, but of still greater perplexity.

CONSTANTINE, the name of 13 emperors who reigned at Rome or Byzantium between 306 and 1453.

(First, perhaps, at the sieges of Perinthus and Byzantium by Philip of Macedon, 340 B.C.)

The Turks adopted the sign of the Crescent from Byzantium after the Conquest: the Cross above the Crescent is found on many ruins of the Grecian cityamong others, on the Genoese castle on the Bosphorus.

Of the several theories which have been advanced to account for their disappearance, the most plausible seems to be that which represents them as having been burned at Byzantium in the year 380 Anno Domini, by command of Gregory Nazianzen, in order that his own poems might be studied in their stead and the morals of the people thereby improved.

An event of far-reaching importance in the following century was the elevation by Constantine the Great of the Greek colony of Byzantium into the imperial city of Constantinople in 325.

The Greek city-state of Byzantium on the Black Sea Straits had been transformed into the Roman administrative centre of Constantinople, and from this capital the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century A.D. still governed and defended the whole Greek-speaking world.

[Footnote 2: The compilation of rural lore, known as the Geoponica, which exists in Greek, was made at Byzantium for the Emperor Constantine VII about the middle of the tenth century A.D.

He also introduced the double-headed black eagle of Byzantium as the national symbol.