The Book of the Eparch and the Rus’-Byzantine Treaties as a Model
How then did the Byzantines interpret the legal status of Muslims living within the empire? Since the official legal secular collections did not address this question, we are forced to look for promising leads in other sources.
Already several decades after the promulgation of the Basilika (on Christmas Day, 888) there are some interesting indications of how the Muslim presence in ByzanÂtium was regulated. One possible reference to Muslim trading activity is found in the so-called Book of the Eparch. This text stems from the first part of the tenth century, probably during the reign of Leo vi, and is a compilation of regulations concerning the guilds of Constantinople for the eparch, the capital city's chief administrator.[394] [395] [396] It is an enigmatic text, whose validity and actual implementation are still hotly disputed by historians?5 Be that as it may, in the absence of other information it appears to provide valuable insights into comÂmerce, state regulation of trade and the functioning of guilds in this Eastern Mediterranean metropole.One oft-discussed passage in the Book of the Eparch concerns the activities of â€?Syrian' merchants?6 These traders were required to conduct their business (both buying and selling wares) while residing in trade inns (mitata) within three months. Unsold imports were to be surrendered to the eparch. Syrian merchants refusing to follow these regulations were to be beaten, shorn and have their goods confiscated. What is not specified in the passage is who preÂcisely these Syrian entrepreneurs might have been. A Christian identity - either Syrian Orthodox or Church of the East - seems likely, especially given the prominence later in the later tenth and early eleventh centuries of Syrian Orthodox merchants in Byzantium. That said, the possibility that these merÂchants were Muslim cannot be discounted either.
â€?Syrian' might indeed in this case have denoted both Syrian Christians and Muslims.A model as to how a Muslim merchant community might have been reguÂlated is offered by a series of treaties negotiated between the Rus' and the ByzÂantines at the start of the tenth century. The Rus' were a Viking elite that coloÂnised, raided, and traded along the waterways of Eastern Europe. By the ninth century they had expanded so far to the south that they had come into contact with Byzantium, and raided Byzantine territory, including Constantinople, several times over the course of the ninth and tenth centuries. Despite these occasionally bellicose interactions, peace treaties were negotiated which inter alia regulated dealings between Byzantines and Rus' in Constantinople. The text of four tenth-century treaties, stemming from the years 907, 911, 944 and 971, have been transmitted via the Russian Primary Chronicle.21
Though these agreements were subject to some later interpolations, scholÂars are in agreement that the authenticity of their contents is, as a rule, genuÂine.[397] [398] Commercial concessions to pagan peoples are known in this period from brief mentions of other treaties, for instance the Byzantine-Bulgar treaty of 715-718 related in Theophanes the Confessor?[399] These treaties demonstrate that, at least for foreigners trading or working in the Byzantine Empire, ad hoc capitulations like the Russo-Byzantine treaties could supersede provisions of Byzantine law. Provisions of the 911 treaty provide several examples of this mechanism.[400] Particularly interesting is Section 13 of the agreement which reads: About Rus' men who serve the Christian Emperor in Greece. If someone of them die, not having created a testament for his property, and if there be none of his [kinsman] with him in Greece, then let them return his property to his closest kinsmen in Rus'. If, on the other hand, he does compose a testament, then let him to whom he willed property take what was willed to him, and he who inherits it[401] The language of the treaty, which distinguishes between â€?Christians' (ByzÂantines) and Rus', strongly suggests that these Rus' would have been nonÂChristians. The assumption that all Rus' were pagan proved quickly obsolete, as the text of the 944 treaty makes emphatically clear that many of the Rus' had by that point converted to Orthodox Christianity[404] Nonetheless, this conversion seems to have affected their legal status only a little, mainly in that these ChrisÂtian Rus', when taking an oath, could swear by the cross while their pagan countrymen still worshipped Perun and swore by their weapons. The converÂsion of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in 989 to Orthodox Christianity, at which time he also forced his whole people to be baptised along with him, meant thereafÂter that the Rus' and the Byzantines were coreligionists. Although no similar such provisions survive for the Muslim community that resided in the empire in the ninth and tenth century, it seems plausible that treaties of this sort would have been negotiated. The regulations of the Russo- Byzantine treaties dealing with Rus' traders in the capital bear a great deal of similarity to those found for â€?Syrians' in the Book of the Eparch: both communiÂties were lodged in specific districts of the city (for the Rus' by the Church of St. Mamas, for the Syrians in merchant quarters); their business was to be conÂducted within a specific time window (the Russians were not to winter in the district of St. Such mercantile agreements would have been well-suited to the relatively small non-Orthodox merchant communities in the capital. As a whole, until the middle of the tenth century there were not significant non-Orthodox miÂnorities on imperial territory, except for Jews, whose legal status had already been thoroughly established in Roman and Late Roman law. Latin Christians, in particular merchants from the Italian merchant cities, were becoming inÂcreasingly prominent in the capital at this time, and imperial ordinances reÂgarding their legal status have survived from 992 onwards, but it was not until some centuries later, indeed well after the oft-cited schism of 1054, that they were viewed as heretical.[405] This state of affairs changed dramatically as a result of Byzantine reconquests of former imperial territory in eastern Asia Minor, northern Syria, the Caucasus, and the islands (Crete and Cyprus). For the first time in centuries significant non-Orthodox populations were now under imÂperial rule, and their status under Byzantine law had to be ascertained. 4
More on the topic The Book of the Eparch and the Rus’-Byzantine Treaties as a Model:
- The Book of the Eparch and the Rus’-Byzantine Treaties as a Model
- Cavanagh Edward (ed.). Empire and Legal Thought: Ideas and Institutions from Antiquity to Modernity. Brill,2020. — 634 p., 2020