ABSTRACT
Early in the tenth century, Patriarch Nicholas wrote: “Those who sail the seas expose themselves to death in its crudest forms, but in the hope of gain, they forget the perils of the deep”1. The Byzantine Empire was almost surrounded by the sea: the Black Sea to the north, the Adriatic to the west, the Aegean in the middle, and the Mediterranean to the south. Merchant ships put in regularly at Constantinople, Thessaloniki, and other ports. Travel by sea was often more convenient than by land. From the sea came fish for daily sustenance as well as the luxury purple dye. All this has been studied in detail, but what has not attracted much scholarly attention is how the Byzantines regarded the sea2. We can reconstruct, to some extent, how they sailed upon the sea, how they fought upon it, and how they benefitted from it. But, when they stood on the dock about to board a ship or on the shore watching the waves roll in, what did they think of?
