Book contents
1 - The early medieval period
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2010
Summary
The tension between the bureaucratic state and the provincial magnates did not come to the fore until the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the early Middle Ages (the seventh to the ninth century) the power of these magnates was developing. This period was a transitional one which saw the decline of the old senatorial aristocracy, based in the major cities of Antiquity, and the gradual rise of the military aristocracy. The origins of Byzantine feudalism can be traced to these centuries when the magnates exploited the authority which they derived from their role in the provincial administration to consolidate their economic power. During this transitional period the Byzantine social structure was marked by the relatively greater importance of independent peasant producers who owned their own land and paid the tax on it directly to the state.
The main evidence for the changes which occurred in the seventh century is contained in the Farmer's Law. Although communities of independent peasant farmers were known in the late Roman period, they did not have the same importance in the social structure of late Antiquity as they did in the early medieval centuries. By the end of the seventh century the Roman colonate had disappeared as a result of the political, social and military upheavals of the time. When the paroikos appears in the later Byzantine sources there are important differences from the colonus adscripticius. The latter was bound to the soil by law and his pekoulion was legally the property of the landowner. Neither of these conditions applied to the status of the Byzantine paroikos.
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- Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900–1200 , pp. 14 - 34Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990