Rural Landscapes, Rural Communities, and Village Life in the Byzantine Empire
- LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396584-0340
- LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396584-0340
Introduction
Villages were essentially the same all over the world in the medieval era: rural locations whose inhabitants’ survival was dependent on food production through cultivation and animal husbandry. Food production could be geared toward subsistence or for creating a surplus to feed people elsewhere. The basic elements of life would have been similar across cultures, varying according to different geographic and climactic locations. But what distinguishes life in a Byzantine village from the rest of the world? The status of the people who live there; the amount, if any, of tax they pay; the physical appearance of its structures; and their hierarchy within the great diversity of environment that the Byzantine Empire encompassed. Most of the population of the Byzantine Empire were peasants working as farmers and pastoralists. Despite their overwhelming presence and importance, peasants feature only in a secondary way in written texts and so details of rural societies remain obscure to modern historians. However archaeology, in particular the development of survey archaeology over the last fifty years, has greatly expanded understanding of rural and village life, especially in the practical aspects of size and materials. The concept of the ‘Byzantine village’ is broad both geographically and chronologically, extending throughout countries bordering the Black and Mediterranean Seas for over a thousand years. Obviously rural life varied across such a wide climatic zone; of lesser impact was the control exerted by political systems. The classical ancient Greek word kome (village) was replaced in the Byzantine system by three words: chorion, which could include rivers, forests, lakes, as well as the agricultural land in the vicinity of the built village; agridion (hamlet); and proasteion (estate). Metrokomia and komopoleis, colloquial terms not used in official documents, indicate that villages could be very large. Villages could encompass estates, both secular and ecclesiastical, as well as settlements of independent peasants. Although rural populations depended on animal husbandry and cultivation for their livelihoods, this was underpinned by engaging in crafts such as woodwork, basketry, weaving, or pottery making. Diversity was necessary to cushion unfavorable situations over which there was no control, such as drought or infestations, and created some level of economic stability. Rural communities could specialize in cash crops such as olive oil or wine, but this required an established infrastructure to connect with consumers, such as containers for exporting the produce which could be skins, wooden barrels, or ceramic amphoras, and political conditions that allowed uninterrupted transport of the goods. The disposal of surplus produce on a smaller scale was often carried out at rural fairs which were held regularly on appointed days.
General Overviews
Lemerle 1979 is in book form a substantially revised series of his earlier articles forming a seminally important diachronic study of the village and its inhabitants. Banaji 2007 challenges the prevailing pessimism about the late Roman economy and its rural underpinning. Grey 2011 concentrates on the fourth and fifth centuries with an emphasis on the powers of the peasantry, examining strategies adopted to manage their risks. Decker 2009 is a synthesis of an enormous corpus of archaeological scholarship on the late antique East. For the middle to late period, Laiou-Thomadakis 1977 was innovative for its time in that the Archives of Mount Athos were just becoming available in a form accessible to the wider public and the author drew upon them for data about villages and villagers. Kaplan 1992 considers documentary evidence to conclude that there was a demographic decline in the Byzantine countryside from the sixth through eleventh centuries. Harvey 1995 interpreted the same evidence to reach the opposite conclusion—that there was significant economic and rural expansion. Lefort 2006 covers the periods following those dealt with in Kaplan 1992 and provides comprehensive coverage of the nature of rural Byzantine life in Macedonia. Lefort, et al. 2005 is a collection of papers from a large international congress covering France and Italy, the Black Sea and Egypt via Greece and the Balkans, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Syria, and Palestine from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. The Byzantine village is considered from a multidisciplinary perspective based on archival documents, archaeological investigations, and numismatics.
Banaji, Jairus. Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic Dominance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Important work which deconstructs both the available evidence (mainly coins) and modern scholarship on the subject to conclude that the Byzantine world became heavily monetized from the fourth century on, which had a detrimental effect on some rural communities but not all.
Grey, Cam. Constructing Communities in the Late Roman Countryside. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Interesting examination of ways rural households protected themselves against crop failure and social disorder. Although the evidence drawn upon relates to the fourth and fifth centuries, the strategies for survival are valid throughout the medieval Byzantine period.
Harvey, Alan. Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900–1200. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Although decades old, this work is still relevant through its forensic analysis of the documentary evidence and introduction of archaeology into rural studies.
Harvey, Alan. “The Middle Byzantine Economy: Growth or Stagnation?” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 19 (1995): 243–262.
DOI: 10.1179/030701395790836667
Important exegesis of the most significant problems affecting study of the Byzantine rural economy with critical responses to major scholarship on the subject.
Kaplan, Michel. Les hommes et la terre à Byzance du VIe au XIe siècle: Propriété et exploitation du sol. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1992.
DOI: 10.4000/books.psorbonne.3874
A detailed study of a model for the exploitation of the Byzantine peasant in the early to middle Byzantine era. Not widely accepted.
Laiou-Thomadakis, Angeliki. Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Based on detailed analysis of the monastic archives of Mount Athos, although challenged by questions of whether church records are representative of the society as a whole.
Lefort, Jacques. Société rurale et histoire du paysage à Byzance. Paris: Association Des Amis du Centre D’histoire Civilisation de Byzance. 2006.
Twenty articles by an eminent scholar of the Athos archives, from 1974 to 2005 which provide information about villages and villagers in Macedonia from the seventh to fourteenth centuries. Of particular interest are the two articles utilizing five documents from the Athos archives about the privately owned villages in the district of Radolibos. In French
Lefort, Jacques, Cécile Morrisson, Jean-Pierre Sodini, and Pierre-Louis Gatier, eds. Les villages dans l’empire byzantine, IVe–XVe siècles. Paris: Lethielleux Editions, 2005.
Thirty-eight useful and important studies by experts in different aspects of Byzantine rural studies from early to late Byzantium, each focusing on individual places at specific times. Of particular note are Dunn on Macedonia with Sodini and Eddé on Syria as they present contrasting pictures of the rural fortunes of these different regions of the Byzantine empire up to the tenth century. Gerstel’s examination of the spatial significance of religious shrines and of the choice of saints to decorate the walls of village churches is an innovative approach to delving into the rationale of the late Byzantine peasant. In English, French, and German.
Lemerle, Paul. The Agrarian History of Byzantium from the Origins to the Twelfth Century. Galway, ROI: University of Galway Press, 1979.
Detailed and technical, this work pulls together the documentary evidence that forms the basis of most discussions of the Byzantine peasant.
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