The historical framework of Byzantine law

We saw in chapter 9 that by the end of the fourth century the Roman empire had in effect been split into two independent states (even though contemporaries did not regard this as a formal division).

As has been noted earlier, Justinian's reconquest of the West proved ephemeral and exhausted the empire economically and militarily contributing further to the weakness arising from sectarian and cultural diversity.

defences crumbled, Spain fell again to the Visigoths and another Germanic tribe, the Lombards, moved into Italy from the North conquering most of the peninsula. At the same time Persian armies were advancing through the eastern provinces and the Slavs and Avars were overrunning the Balkans. Only in 627 had Heraclius, a capable emperor, succeeded in stemming the Persian tide and in expelling the Slavic assaults. Then came the Moslem conquests, beginning about 630 AD, in which Egypt, Syria and a large part of Asia Minor fell to the Arabs. But as the imperial boundaries receded, retrenchment produced a comparative strengthening of the state and the Byzantine empire acquired the homogeneity which the policies of Justinian had failed to produce. This was due to the fact that the new borders corresponded more nearly with ethnic and religious lines, for the inhabitants of the empire were now largely Greek-speaking and Orthodox Christian. It was during these years that the empire fully entered its Byzantine period, Greek in speech, deeply orientalised 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, reorganised the government and the law and introduced measures aimed at stimulating commerce and industry. However, the considerable benefits which the empire derived from his rule were, to some extent, cancelled out by the great iconoclastic controversy - the quarrel over the admissibility of images in religious art - which was initiated by him and which consumed Byzantine society for more than a century. The recoveiy from the crisis of the seventh century and the resultant consolidation in the eighth century produced a strengthened empire which was to attain new heights during the Macedonian dynasty (867-1057).

Yet, within half a century after the death of Basil II (976-1025), the last of the great Macedonian emperors, both the Macedonian dynasty and the prosperity which it had created had disappeared. The cause of the decline was a remarkable confluence of internal ills which exhausted the body of the empire as it was being attacked from the outside by 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 was able to hold these ambitions in check through military action and persecution; 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 caused 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 by the end of the twelfth century the end was virtually inevitable and, in 1204, Constantinople fell to the forces of the Fourth Crusade.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the age of the Palaeologan emperors (1261-1453), dynastic competition, social struggles and religious strife ravaged the empire and played into the hands of the Ottoman Turks who continued to expand their territory at the expense of Byzantium. 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 came in the spring of 1453. After a heroic but hopeless defence, Constantinople fell into the hands of the 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, carrying with them important records of the Greco-Roman inheritance in art, philosophy, literature and law. A great deal of the classical knowledge, which had been preserved by Byzantium, was thus transmitted to the West and gave a fresh impetus to the progress of the so- called Italian Renaissance.