Book contents
2 - Demographic growth and social relations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2010
Summary
A major theme of Byzantine history is the gradual reduction in importance of independent peasant producers, as dependent peasants belonging to both the state and private landowners increased in numbers and the tension between the state and its provincial magnates intensified in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This was reflected in attempts by tenth-century emperors to protect the territorial integrity of peasant villages by legislation. The state's main concern in taking this course was, naturally, to safeguard its own fiscal revenues. It is significant that the term chorion was used in official documents to denote a fiscal unit as well as its more general meaning of village. The tenth-century legislation was intended to prevent landowners, who did not already have land in any chorion, from buying their way into it and gradually coming to dominate the other smaller landowners in the chorion. This was one feature of the development of feudal social relations; another was the intensification of differences in wealth within peasant communities. A variety of forms of agricultural exploitation is revealed in the Fiscal Treatise, a tenth-century document which outlines the basic workings of the land-tax. The pattern of land tenure became more complex with the extension of the area which the villagers were cultivating. The establishment of agridia (separate fields away from the main settlement but inside the boundaries of the fiscal unit) was a response to increased crowding around the main settlement. Some villagers, who did not possess as large an extent of the gardens around the settlement as other villagers, might move away from the settlement and bring land into cultivation elsewhere in the fiscal unit.
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- Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900–1200 , pp. 35 - 79Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990