The Silk Conspirators: Murder, Faith and the Trade Routes That Shook Constantinople

Constantinople, January 532 AD. The city is burning.

The Nika Riots have turned the Hippodrome into a furnace and the streets into battlefields. Thirty thousand people will be dead before it ends. The Emperor Justinian is planning to flee. His empress Theodora is not.

In the harbour district of the Neorion, while the city destroys itself, a body surfaces in the mooring ropes of a grain barge. The dead man is Demetrios of Antioch, Imperial Silk Inspector, eleven years at his post, strangled wi...