Legal Development in the Late Byzantine Age

In the thirteenth century, legal culture in the East encountered a sharp downward trend precipitated by the confusion ensuing from the political disintegration of the Byzantine world after the Latin conquest of Constantinople.

After the recapture of Constantinople by the Byzantines in 1261, the emperors of the Palaeologan dynasty set themselves the task of reorganizing the administration of justice with an emphasis on reforming the court system.^{^[672]} However, no serious effort was directed towards improving the quality of legal education that existed at a low ebb after the dissolution of the law school of Constantinople—legal instruction was presented mainly by practitioners in private 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 were extremely difficult to locate) and instead utilized contemporary Greek summaries and adaptations.^{^[673]} The most notable amongst these materials was the Hexabiblos, a manual of the entire law in six books that was compiled around 1345 by Constantine Harmenopoulos, a judge at Thessalonica, and designed for the use of judges and court officials. It contains materials drawn from the Procheiron, the Basilica, the Peira and other sources that are all arranged into titles and paragraphs. Private law is addressed in Books 1-5 and divided into five parts: general principles, law of property, law of obligations, family law and law of succession whilst Book 6 is concerned with criminal law. The text is accompanied by a large number of annotations that were mainly created by Harmenopoulos.^{^[674]} After the fall of Byzantium, the Hexabiblos was still utilized throughout the Ottoman period (with prominence in the ecclesiastical courts) and it contributed significantly to the preservation of the Roman law tradition in the Balkans.^{^[675]}

During the later Byzantine epoch, the Church played an increasingly important part in the administration of justice. We observed earlier that since the fourth century the ecclesiastical courts had rights of jurisdiction in cases involving clerics and in civil disputes submitted by the relevant parties.

By the end of the twelfth century, the competence of these courts had been extended to a variety of civil cases so that it encompassed all matrimonial cases and cases concerning charitable bequests. The tendency towards widening the jurisdiction of the Church courts accelerated considerably after the interlude of the Latin conquest (1204-1261).^{^[676]}As the ecclesiastical law became closely allied with the civil law, the distinction between civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions was evermore blurred. This development is related to the general weakening of the Byzantine state prompted by the political disintegration of the empire in the thirteenth century, and the parallel enlargement of Church’s role in civil administration (the emperors now increasingly relied upon the Church organization in their effort to maintain imperial unity). As the importance of canon law increased during this period, there appeared alongside the various condensations of Roman law several compilations that combined both canon and civil law, known as nomocanons (or Syntagmata).^{^[677]}Works of this kind were produced by Theodorus Bestos (eleventh century); Theodorus Balsamon (twelfth century)^{^[678]}; John Zonaras (twelfth century)^{^[679]}; Alexios Aristenos (twelfth century)^{^[680]}; Mathaeus Blastares (fourteenth century)^{^[681]}; Constantine Harmenopoulos (fourteenth century)^{^[682]} and other jurists. Throughout the Ottoman period, these materials were still produced and utilized by the ecclesiastical courts. They also significantly contributed to the preservation of the Greco-Roman legal tradition in countries formerly within the orbit of Byzantine civilization.

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Source: Mousourakis G.. Roman Law and the Origins of the Civil Law Tradition. Springer,2015. — 339 p.. 2015

Legal Development in the Late Byzantine Age

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