How life was "outside the Moscow ring road" of Constantinople during the Byzantine Empire: Rules of life of the ancient province

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Byzantine Empire is often associated with wars, conquests and various kinds of intrigues surrounding the dweller of the throne. But what was it like to live there for an ordinary person, especially when outside Constantinople, when practically every step was signed by the adoption of various laws, which had to be obeyed unconditionally?

1. Themes of the Byzantine Empire

Like Roman times, every citizen outside the walls of Constantinople lived in a province. In the longest-lived administrative system, the Byzantine Empire consisted of several topics, with one general (strategist) at the head of each. The state allowed soldiers to cultivate the land in exchange for their services and the obligation that their descendants would serve as well. The strategist was not only a military leader, but also oversaw all civilian authorities in his domain.

Themes significantly reduced the cost of maintaining standing armies, since the payment for the use of state land was removed from the soldiers' salary. It also allowed emperors to avoid the wildly unpopular conscription, as many were born into the army, although the military classes dwindled over time. This unique characteristic of the themes helped to maintain control in provinces far from the center of the Byzantine Empire, and also proved to be an excellent means of consolidating and settling newly conquered lands.

Most of the people worked on ever-growing farms owned by the elites (the powerful, as their contemporaries called them), or owned very small tracts of land. Those who worked on large estates were often wigs (pariki - settler, alien). They were tied to the land they were cultivating because they were not allowed to leave it. The defense against expulsion was not easy, as it only came after forty years in one place. Financially, however, the wigs were probably in better shape than the smallholders, whose numbers were dwindling under the influence of the predatory practices of the powerful. To everyone's surprise, one of the largest landowners was the Byzantine church. As this power grew, the donations received by monasteries and metropolises, both emperors and commoners, became more and more numerous.

There were emperors who tried to protect the impoverished rural class by giving it special rights. Most notably, Roman I Lacapenus in 922 forbade the powerful to buy land in territories where they did not yet own it. Basil II the Bolgar Slayer (Wulgarocton) praised this extremely effective measure in 996, instructing the poor to reserve the right to redeem their lands from the powerful indefinitely.

2. Personal status of men, women and children

While the world was still far from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the Byzantine Empire maintained a fundamental division of the ancient world into free people and slaves. However, under the influence of Christianity, the Byzantines were more humane than their predecessors. The abandonment of slaves and cruel forms of violence against them (such as castration and compulsory circumcision) led to their release. In the event of any dispute over personal freedom, the ecclesiastical courts of the Byzantine Church enjoyed exclusive jurisdiction. To her credit, the Byzantine Church also provided for a special order of exit from slavery since the time of Constantine the Great (manumissio in ecclesia).

It should be clarified that the wigs, although limited to the land on which they worked, were free citizens. They could own property and marry legally, but slaves could not. Moreover, geographic confinement was ultimately combined with the aforementioned protection against expulsion. A job security was not something that could have been carelessly given up in ancient times.

Women were still not allowed to hold public office, but they could be the legal guardians of their children and grandchildren. The dowry was the epicenter of their financial life. Although the dowry was in the possession of their husbands, various restrictions were gradually imposed by law on its use to protect women, in particular the need for their informed consent to the transactions in question. Any property that they received during marriage (gifts, inheritance) was also controlled by the husband, but provided in the same way as the dowry.

Women spent most of their time at home doing household chores, but there were exceptions. Especially when the family was in financial difficulties, women supported her, leaving home and working as servants, saleswomen (in cities), actresses and even girls of easy virtue. However, in the Byzantine Empire, there were cases where women had power and could influence many situations. Empress Theodora is just such an example. Starting as an actress (and possibly confused), she was proclaimed Augusta and had her own imperial seal after her husband Justinian I ascended the throne.

As a rule, children lived under the authority of their father. The end of paternal power (patria potestas) came either with the death of the father, or with the ascent of the child to public office, or with his emancipation (from the Latin e-man-cipio, leaving the hands of the manus), a legal procedure dating back to the republic. The Byzantine Church lobbied for an additional reason for the law: to become a monk. Oddly enough, marriage was not an event that in itself put an end to paternal rule for both sexes, but it often became the reason for the emancipation procedure.

3. Love and marriage

As in any society, marriage was at the center of Byzantine life. This marked the creation of a new social and financial unit - the family. While the social aspect is obvious, marriage retained a particular economic importance in the Byzantine Empire. The bride's dowry was at the center of the negotiations. Usually in those days people did not marry for love, at least for the first time.

The families of the future couple went to great lengths to secure the future of their children in a well-thought-out marriage contract. Since the time of Justinian I, the father's ancient moral obligation to provide the bride-to-be with a dowry has become legal. The size of the dowry was the most important criterion when choosing a wife, since it was supposed to finance the newly acquired farm and determine the socio-economic status of the new family. Unsurprisingly, this issue has been fiercely debated.

The marriage contract also contained other financial agreements. More often than not, an amount that would increase the dowry by a whole half, called a hypobolon (dowry), was agreed upon as a contingency plan. This was to ensure the fate of the wife and future children in a statistically significant case of the husband's premature death. Another common agreement was called theoron (gifts) and obliged the groom, in case of virginity, to reward the bride with a twelfth part of the dowry. A special case was esogamvria (grooming), in which the groom moved to the mother-in-law's house, and the couple cohabited with the bride's parents in order to inherit their property afterwards.

This is the only time that a dowry was not required, however, if a young couple for some not so inconceivable reason left the house, they could demand it. In the Byzantine Empire, caring for a child's family life down to the smallest detail was considered the fundamental responsibility of a caring father, which is less strange given that the legal minimum age for marriage was twelve for girls and fourteen for boys.

These numbers were reduced in 692, when the Queen's Ecumenical Council of the Church (the question of whether the Catholic Church was officially represented is being discussed, but Pope Sergius I did not ratify his decision) equated the engagement to the clergy, that is, almost all engagement to marriage. This quickly became a problem, as the legal limit for engagement was seven years from the time of Justinian I. The situation was not corrected until Leo VI, rightly called the Sage, raised the minimum age for engagement to twelve years for girls and fourteen years for boys. In doing so, he achieved the same result as in the old way, without interfering in the decision of the Byzantine Church.

4. Endless Kinship: Limitations of the Byzantine Church

Unsurprisingly, marriage between blood relatives was banned from the earliest stages of the Roman state. The Quinisext Ecumenical Council expanded the ban to include close relatives (two brothers could not marry two sisters). He also forbade marriage between those who were spiritually connected, that is, the godfather, who was no longer allowed to marry his godson, now could not marry the biological parents or children of the godson.

A few years later, Leo III the Isaurian, with his legal reforms in the Eclogue, repeated the aforementioned prohibitions and took another step forward, preventing marriage between relatives of the sixth degree of consanguinity (second cousins). The prohibitions managed to survive the reforms of the Macedonian emperors.

In 997, the Patriarch of Constantinople Sisinius II issued his famous "tomos", which brought all the above restrictions to a completely new level. Sisinius stated that marriage should be respected not only by law, but also by a public sense of decency. This further untied the hands of the Byzantine Church in expanding the prohibitions: the Act of the Holy Synod in 1166, which prohibited the marriage of relatives of the seventh degree (child of a second cousin).

5. Influence on the inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire

What is the norm for modern man, at that time for the rural population scattered throughout the Byzantine Empire, caused extreme social problems. Imagine a modern village with a few hundred people somewhere on a mountain with no internet and no cars. Many young people simply had no one to marry.

Manuel I Comnenus understood this and tried to solve the problem in 1175, establishing that the punishment for a marriage that contradicts the "tomos" and the corresponding texts would be exclusively ecclesiastical. However, his decree was not carried out, and the "tomos" continued to exist and even survived the fall of the Byzantine Empire.

Continuing the topic of Byzantium, read also about how Vasily II ruled all his life and what did his power lead to.