In our modern age, we enter a room, flick a switch, and instantly have light as if we have conjured it. Not too many think of what those before us used before the advent of electricity. Most of us might automatically assume candles. But not everyone could afford candles for every day. In any case, there were no paraffin candles as we have today. Most would have used beeswax candles, but beeswax was expensive to come by, even if it has a longer burn time. Some may have used tallow candles, though in Constantinople, the Book of the Eparch (an economic manual addressed for the use of the eparch or prefect of Constantinople) forbids the use of tallow candles within the city. Perhaps tallow candles were more of a fire hazard. They were certainly smelly and not the choice of lighting for those who could afford more suitable methods. In The Bone Goddess, they are used in the halls of Skadarska Krajina, though not by Theodora, but the soldiers she shelters there:
Every brazier and candelabra were lit in the great hall. The men seemed to have no objection to the malodorous tallow candles, cheaply made with a wick fashioned from a pith of rushes. In addition to bringing their own candles, they had brought much of their own food as Daphnomeles had said to have “no wish to be a trouble to the lady who has had so many of her own troubles”. Yet they seemed pleased that she brought them hot wine to take off the chill that the late winter rains brought to the damp, smoky halls.
According to Daily Life in the Byzantine Empire by Marcus Rautman, candlemakers were required to sell their wares out of shops and not in the streets. Professional chandlers were known as keroularioi. Monasteries and churches used so many candles; they were known to have employed men in their own workshops just to keep up with their demand.
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In the Byzantine era, oil lamps were frequently used, employing the fuel that could be so readily found in the Mediterranean – olive oil. They were frequently slipper shaped and often highly ornamented, though common folk were more likely to use simple clay lamps. Oil lamps were perhaps used less frequently than candles starting around the seventh century, but there can be little doubt, there were plenty who continued to use oil filled lamps, perhaps even because of the parable of the ten virgins from Christian literature that referenced the one woman who kept her oil lamp lit on a long vigil. Oil lamps are still used today by Orthodox Christians to illuminate the icon corner in the home, so it is unlikely they would have completely fallen from favor.
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In an earlier chapter of The Bone Goddess, both forms of lighting are shown in this passage:
“One nomismata,” the Promitheftís Mystikón told Ulf tersely in a high voice. The man in the room seemed scarcely a man. He wore a veil over his face, spoke in a high, reedy voice and he kept to the shadows. A eunuch then. Of course. What did he expect from a man whose whole stock and trade was the secrets swept into the shadows of the city? He had been escorted by a pale wisp of a woman carrying a thin, flickering beeswax candle through a warren of rooms, each darkened by shutters over the windows. The floorboards creaked ominously under his boots. Even in the dark, he could see where bits of the floor had broken away, revealing the light from the rooms below. One wrong step could send him crashing to the ground floor. And yet this creaking, miserable creature who remained veiled and shuttered, exacted one nomismata from him for a single question? What did he do with all his money? Ulf glanced around, but the single guttering flame from an oil lamp, long past overdue to be cleaned and filled with fresh oil, barely illuminated his surroundings.
Light is integral for us when the sun goes down. We take it for granted. A flick of a switch is so much easier, not to mention safer now. Yet few could deny the warm, glowing ambiance of an oil lamp or beeswax candle, a fortification against the dark of an earlier time.