Byzantine law during the period 1204-1453

In the course of the thirteenth century legal culture in the East took a sharp downward trend, which was precipitated by the confusion caused by the political disintegration of the Byzantine world in the years following the Latin conquest of Constantinople.

The History of Roman Law after Justinian 409 through a reform of the court system.^[1328] But no serious effort was made to improve the quality of legal education which, after the dissolution of the law-school of Constantinople, was at a low ebb - legal instruction was now given in private, largely by practitioners, and was haphazard, unsystematic and based on fragmentary legal sources. The lawyers of this period paid little attention to the codification of Justinian, whose texts had become extremely difficult to find, using instead contemporary Greek summaries and adaptations. The most notable amongst these was the Hexabiblos, a manual of the whole law in six books compiled in about 1345 by Constantine Harmenopoulos, a judge at Thessalonica, and intended for the use of judges and court officials. It contains materials drawn from the Prochiron, the Basilica, the Peira and other sources, arranged into titles and paragraphs.^[1329] color=black face="Times New Roman">[1330] The text is accompanied by a large number of annotations, mostly of Harmenopoulos himself. After the fall of Byzantium the Hexabiblos continued to be used, especially by the ecclesiastical courts, throughout the Ottoman period and contributed significantly to the preservation of the Roman law tradition in the Balkans.

During the later Byzantine epoch the Church played an increasingly important part in the administration of justice. We saw earlier that since the fourth century the ecclesiastical courts had rights of jurisdiction in cases involving clerics as well as in civil disputes submitted to them by the parties concerned. By the end of the twelfth century the competence of these courts had been extended to a variety of civil cases, including all

matrimonial cases and cases concerning charitable bequests. The tendency towards widening the jurisdiction of the Church courts grew considerably after the interlude of the Latin conquest (1204-1261). As the ecclesiastical law became closely allied with the civil law, the distinction between civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions became more and more blurred. This development is not unrelated to the general weakening of the Byzantine state, following the political disintegration of the empire in the thirteenth century, and the parallel enlargement of the role of the Church in civil administration (for it was upon the Church organisation that the emperors now increasingly relied in their effort to maintain imperial unity). As the importance of canon law increased, there appeared during this period, along with the various condensations of Roman law, a number of compilations combining both canon and civil law, known as Nomoccmons or Syntagmata.^[1332] Works of this kind were produced by Theodoras Bestos (11th century), Theodoras Balsamon (12th century), John Zonaras (12th century), Mathaeus Blastaris (14th century), Constantine Harmenopulos (14th century) and other jurists. They continued to be produced and to be relied upon by the ecclesiastical courts throughout the Ottoman period and played an important part in the preservation of the Greco-Roman legal tradition in countries formerly within the orbit of Byzantine civilisation.