Then Ellatzbaas launched his invasion from Ethiopia, beginning with a solemn Mass in Axum cathedral, followed by the blessing of a fleet of seventy ships from Adoulis, and ending by establishing a puppet regime in Himyar that he controlled.
Ellatzbaas didn’t act entirely on his own. Behind him lay the support and ambitions of the emperor Justin I, the monarch of Constantinople far to the north. Axum controlled Himyar for about ten years, until a Christian regime acceptable to Justin replaced it, one that lasted until 575. Then Persian forces detached Yemen from Rome once for all. Now, in the 520s, Justin saw a larger map and knew that Persian trading posts had spread from the Persian Gulf around the Omani coast and then stretched toward Yemen. To him, securing the Red Sea as a Roman lake felt like necessary strategic resistance to Persian expansionism. But when we read of Roman and Persian conflict in this period, there were always good businessmen like Cosmas who paid only as much attention to geopolitics as necessary to keep their ships moving profitably.
Their interest was piqued when they learned that every two years King Ellatzbaas sent merchants farther inland, on a six-month trek to a land of gold called Sasou, near the Blue Nile. There they traded beef, salt, and iron for gold in a cumbersome ritual of barter with customers with whom they had no language in common Monastic metropolis west of Constantinople.
Merchant was from Alexandria
Cosmas the merchant was from Alexandria; he was a man who most likely owned his ships and directed their courses while profiting from their cargoes. His city was Greek and so was his tongue, though he may also have known some of the native Egyptian language that we now call Coptic; a merchant who ranged so far in the ancient world would surely have made himself understood in many languages and dialects.
Businessmen like Cosmas did not concern themselves with the unglamorous bulk cargoes of their world. Behind and beneath them, farmers tilled the land for grain where possible, hoping for a tenfold return on what they planted, yet often settling for fivefold or less and driven to the brink of starvation in years when the seed grain barely reproduced itself. The regular grain shipments north from Africa, whether from Carthage to Rome or from Alexandria to Constantinople, were state-managed and burdensome, risky for all.
Whenever the harvest was late or shipping was disrupted by weather, fear of famine led to riots in the big cities. Instead of being subject to state-controlled prices—paltry rewards for such risk— Cosmas and others like him became cunning arbitrageurs, matching the lightest and least bulky cargoes with the greatest opportunities for increasing value over distance. Luxury goods—gems, spices, and silks—were the best business. Merchants delivered amber from the Baltic seacoast south to the Mediterranean, across many borders, for centuries. Spices were always profitable wherever they could be gotten. The wise men of the gospels may have been powerful, but their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh were just the sort of thing you expected to arrive on camelback across the desert, most likely from Yemen. Elegant fabrics from the very Far East already making their way along the many paths of the silk route (and by other routes west) were another profitable line.
