The Influence of Byzantine Law
Byzantine law, whether transplanted in its original form or adjusted to local conditions, exercised a strong influence in the Christian East, especially on those peoples who had inherited from Byzantium their political, ecclesiastical and social structure.
Thus, Byzantine law, derived largely from the Ecloga, was introduced in the Slavic world through the legislative work of the missionaries Methodius and Cyril and through the ninth century Zakon Sudnyj Ljudem (‘Law for Judging the People’), a Bulgarian law book corresponding closely to the above-mentioned Byzantine code. Particularly influential in the Balkans was the Procheiron, which was translated into Slavic in Bulgaria in the eleventh century. In Serbia the reception of Byzantine law commenced with the so-called ‘Nomocanon of St. Sava’ (early thirteenth century), a compilation of ecclesiastical law containing also the entire Procheiron.4,8 The reception culminated with the codification of Tsar Stefan Dusan (1349), the greatest work of the Serbian legal tradition. This work was largely an abridgment of the Syntagma, a compendium of Byzantine law composed by Mathaeus Blastares in 1335. The Russian canon law code (Kormcaja kniga) contains materials from a variety of both canonical and secular Byzantine sources, including the Ecloga, the Procheiron and the above-mentioned Zakon Sudnyj Ljudem. Reference may also be made here to the island of Cyprus where Byzantine law was widely applied both during the period of the Latin kingdom (1192-1489) and during the rule of Venice (1489-1571), particularly by means of the so-called Constitutio Cypria or Bulla Cypria of Pope Alexander IV.After the fall of the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century, Byzantine law remained the law of the orthodox Christians within the Ottoman Empire, which were under the spiritual and political leadership of the patriarchate of Constantinople.
In exercising their administrative and judicial functions, the patriarchate and the ecclesiastic authorities under it applied Byzantine law derived from various manuscript sources in their original form or in the form of abridgments and collections composed by the patriarchate for official or unofficial use and, in later times, from printed works produced in the West (such as the Ius Graeco-romanum of Leunclavius and the Synodikon of Beveregius).[683] [684] Of much wider use were the various nomocanons of the Ottoman period, which mostly drew, directly or indirectly, on the last two systematic manuals of Byzantine law: the Hexabiblos of Harmenopoulos and the Syntagma of Blastares.50 Even outside the Ottoman Empire, in countries tracing their cultural origins to Byzantium, the Hexabiblos was often used to address gaps in the law, being regarded as the law that was ‘naturally’ in force when no other rule could be found. In Russian Bessarabia this work was officially recognized as the local civil code in the early half of the nineteenth century and remained in force even after the annexation of Bessarabia to Romania (1918) until Romanian legislation was extended to this region. A Serbian translation of the Hexabiblos was also produced for use by the Serb population of the archdiocese of Karlowitz under Austrian rule, as their own native law. In Greece, the Hexabiblos was recognized as an official source of law after its liberation in the early nineteenth century and remained in force until a modern civil code was enacted in 1946.Byzantine legal science and its products in the fields of both secular and canon law were regarded by humanist jurists in the West as integral parts of the Roman legal inheritance and as important sources for its reconstruction. It is thus unsurprising that the editions of the Corpus Iuris Civilis from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century included Novels of Byzantine emperors (especially those of Leo VI).
It was only with the fragmentation of historical studies and the subsequent adjustment of Roman law to local legal traditions, especially in Germany after the period of the Reception, that Byzantine law would be marginalized and confined to the fringes of Roman law. The general disregard for Byzantium in the Age of the Enlightenment precipitated this outcome. However, since the mid-nineteenth century there has been a renewed interest in the study of Byzantine law as a distinct branch of legal history, even though still outside the general history of Roman law.the boundaries of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, to the territories of the East ruled by Venice, to the orthodox Christians of Poland and Ukraine and to the orthodox Christians of the diaspora in the West.
50 The most widely used work of this kind during the Ottoman age was the Nomocanon of Manuel Malaxos (late sixteenth century). Reference may also be made here to the Staff of the Bishops of archimandrite James of Ioannina (1645).
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