The Historical Context of Byzantine Law

As observed in Chap. 1, the end of the fourth century featured a virtual split of the Roman Empire into two states (even though contemporaries did not regard this as a formal division).

After a long period marked by economic and cultural decay, foreign invasions and internal strife, the Western Empire finally collapsed in ad 476 when the last emperor of the West was overthrown by his German mercenaries. The loss of the western provinces transferred the centre of gravity in the empire from the Latin to the Greek element and accelerated the transformation of the Eastern Empire into the medieval Byzantine Empire. Byzantium inherited from Rome a great deal of her political, social and cultural institutions. Roman law remained in force as a living system and the concept of imperium Romanum (now in the form of imperium Christianum) furnished the basis of all Byzantine political theory. Though the elements of continuity between the Byzantine world and the world of antiquity are clear and undeniable, so too are the differences. Byzantine civilization was a new cultural synthesis based on the classical traditions of antiquity infused with important new elements introduced by the upheavals of the later imperial era and by the rise of Christianity. Justinian surpassed other rulers as he proactively established the finished forms and set the tone of the Byzantine society. The distinctive features of the emerging Byzantine culture are clearly manifest in his political, religious and artistic programs. Although his legislation displays classical leanings, it also naturally shows traces of Greek and Eastern influences.

As already noted, Justinian executed his schemes to reconquer the provinces lost to invaders. His reconquest of the West was a fleeting achievement that shattered the empire economically and militarily, contributing further to the weakness arising from sectarian and cultural diversity.

After his death, the empire quickly lost its briefly regained strength and the very existence of the Byzantine state was threatened by internal disruptions, economic decay and foreign invasions. As the empire’s defences crumbled, the Visigoths regained control of Spain and another Germanic

New Roman">G. Mousourakis, Roman Law and the Origins of the Civil Law Tradition,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-12268-7_6 tribe, the Lombards, invaded Italy from the North conquering most of the peninsula. At the same time, Persian armies advanced through the eastern provinces while the Slavs and Avars besieged the Balkans. In 627, the capable Emperor Heraclius launched a campaign that finally succeeded in stemming the Persian tide and expelling the Slavic assaults. The Moslem conquests then ensued around 630 that entailed the Arab capture of Egypt, Syria and a large part of Asia Minor. But as the imperial boundaries receded, retrenchment produced a comparative strengthening of the state and the Byzantine Empire acquired the homogeneity that the policies of Justinian had failed to produce. This occurred due to the new borders corresponding more closely with ethnic and religious lines, as the inhabitants of the empire were now largely Greek-speaking and Orthodox Christian. During these years, the empire fully entered its Byzantine period embracing the Greek language and displaying a deep orientalisation with Christianity engrained in its thought and ethos.

The Arab threat was held in check and the empire entered a period of recovery in the early eighth century during the reign of Leo III the Isaurian (717-740). Leo strengthened imperial authority, reorganized the government and the law, and introduced measures aimed at stimulating commerce and industry. However, the considerable benefits the empire derived from his rule were to some extent negated by the great iconoclastic controversy—the quarrel over the admissibility of images in religious art—that he initiated and had consumed Byzantine society for more than a century. The recovery from the crisis of the seventh century and the resultant consolidation in the eighth century produced a strengthened empire that attained new heights during the Macedonian dynasty (867-1057).

During this period, the internal organization of the Byzantine state was strong enough for the emperors to embark upon a program of territorial expansion. By the early eleventh century, the empire had been cleared of foreign enemies and its boundaries stretched from the Danube to Crete and from Southern Italy to Syria. The peace and prosperity that followed served as a powerful stimulus to art, literature and educational activity in the capital and the provinces.

However, both the Macedonian dynasty and the ensuing prosperity disappeared within merely half a century after the death of Basil II (976-1025), the last great Macedonian emperor. The cause of the decline was a remarkable confluence of internal ills that exhausted the body of the empire as it endured external attacks from powerful new foes (such as the Seljuk Turks and the Normans). Probably the most virulent of these illnesses was the strife between the military establishment and the imperial bureaucracy. The successes of the Byzantine military machine in the tenth and eleventh centuries bred a great arrogance in the military class and an ambition to overthrow the hegemony of the bureaucrats within the government. Basil II restrained these ambitions through military action and persecution^{^[635]}; but he was succeeded by weak rulers who were unable to control the army, and the prolonged struggle between the generals and civil officials undermined the empire’s strength at a critical period. At the same time, a growing economic crisis provoked by a decline in state revenues (largely due to the abandonment of arable land in the provinces) compounded the empire’s difficulties. In spite of a limited recovery under Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118), the ills of Byzantium so weakened the empire that its disintegration was virtually inevitable at the end of the twelfth century and thereupon Constantinople fell to the forces of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Although the capital was recaptured by the Byzantines and the empire was restored about half a century later (1261), the political splintering of the Byzantine world prompted by the Latin conquest hastened the final collapse.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries featured the reign of the Palaeologan emperors (1261-1453) and an empire ravaged by dynastic competition, social struggles and religious strife.

These adverse events played into the hands of the Ottoman Turks who pursued the expansion of their territory. In spite of the civil wars and military disasters, the Palaeologan period witnessed a last great flowering of literary and artistic activity accompanied by a revival of interest in classical studies. The end of this phase transpired in the spring of 1453. After a heroic but hopeless defence, Constantinople was captured by the Ottoman Turks who had already overrun most of the empire’s narrow footholds in the Balkans and Asia Minor. During this period, a large number of Byzantine scholars migrated to Western Europe (especially to Italy) conveying important records of the Greco- Roman inheritance in art, philosophy, literature and law. A great deal of the classical knowledge preserved by Byzantium was thus transmitted to the West and it imparted a fresh impetus to the progress of the so-called Italian Renaissance.

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

The Historical Context of Byzantine Law

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