The Economic History of Byzantium From

tant role in the way the Byzantine economy has been analyzed; it has even been suggested that Byzantium’s fate was determined by the low production levels that farmers achieved. According to this view, farming techniques were characterized by long fallow periods, the absence of catch crops and spring cereals, the total lack of any seed selection, the shortage of manure, and the absence of any notable form of progress.200 This picture ought to be revised. In any case, the farming system described above was inherently capable of becoming more productive and of adapting to stronger demand. Furthermore, that production took place within a smallholding context suggests that the “care of plants” was both customary and necessary even before the aristocracy took an interest in it.

The Exploitation of Uncultivated Zones Some regions were sparsely populated, particularly inland, where the environment was unfavorable, and in places close to frontiers mainly because of the lack of security or because the state had sometimes set up a sort of no-man’s-land there for strategic reasons.201 Uncultivated areas were often wooded (except on the Anatolian plateau); they were very extensive everywhere and constituted a potential source of wealth. Brushwood and scrubland, those intermediate forms of vegetation between forest and grassland, on plains or high ground, already covered significant areas in some regions; they, too, were valuable in economic terms.

The demand for timber, for both the navy and construction in general, and for fuel wood, charcoal, and pitch, together with stock raising and the peasants’ own needs, built up links between town, cultivated countryside, and incultum. Forests and grassland belonged to the state, to the owners of estates, and, at the beginning of the period under consideration at least, to the villagers.

Forests A. Dunn has recently studied forests and their various degraded arboreal forms, the produce derived from them, and their use; most of the following comments are derived from this study.202 Although the many trees and bushes that were used for a variety of ends, from medicine to dyeing, should not be neglected, it is clear that the oak played a predominant role, principally as timber, though some supplied edible acorns203 and others oak apples. Its economic importance is emphasized by the fact that some inventories carefully enter the number of trees in oak plantations.204 Attention should also be drawn to the holly oak or holm oak ( prinos, prinarion), which was present everywhere in zones of degraded vegetation and was particularly prized on account of the parasite it harbors, which was used for dyeing, and to the lentisk pistachio tree (schinos), which occurred only in strictly Mediterranean environments and was the source of mastic, used by pastry cooks and perfumers. The resin from conifers

200Cf. in the last instance Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 24, 56, 57, 61, 66, 86, 87.

201Hendy, Studies, 39.

202Dunn, “Woodland”; see also idem, “The Control of the Arboreal Resources of the Late Byzantine and Frankish Aegean Region,” in L’uomo e la foresta secc. XIII–XVIII, ed. S. Cavaciocchi (Prato, 1996), 479–97.

203Iviron, 2:187.

204For instance Patmos, 2: no. 50.

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was used to make pitch, crucial for shipbuilding, as well as for preparing amphoras and barrels.

All trees were a source of wood for fuel, and poorer specimens were presumably used to make charcoal. In those days, forests were very well developed everywhere apart from central Anatolia (on account of the climate) and in southern Greece, where the vegetation was already degraded in antiquity, especially on mountain slopes and, in some parts of the Balkans, on the plains as well.205 Forests were used only partially, although they seem to have been more heavily exploited toward the end of the period under consideration. Some regions, especially near the sea, were exploited more intensively, especially for timber: Crete, Cyprus, Levantine Syria and the Taurus, Macedonia, and possibly the northeastern part of Asia Minor and the Albanian coastline.206 Mastic was a speciality of Chios, but was also produced in Crete and Cyprus.207

At the beginning of our period, although village and domanial forests were in principle exploited by their owners, they were in fact subject to the demands of the state, which could requisition labor, possibly in return for payment, and require obligatory felling and transport of wood, boat-building, and supplies of pitch or charcoal. The state could also purchase forest produce at fixed prices.208 From the tenth or eleventh century, the exploitation of state forests and those belonging to the great landowners was in part direct, in which case it would have been effected partly by obligatory labor services exacted from the peasantry.209 However, rights of usage in state woods were sometimes free.210 In other cases, their exploitation was subjected to charges, albeit indirectly, through the medium of entrepreneurs or woodcutters who were obliged to render dues, referred to as orike in some documents.211 That the state was well aware of the strategic nature of its interest in timber is proven by the prohibition on all export of wood in the ninth and tenth centuries and probably until the end of the twelfth.212 Generally speaking, the importance attributed to forests and their various products and revenues is underlined by the presence of forest guards on imperial estates;213 the existence of forestarii in the eleventh and twelfth centuries has also been noted in Apulia.214 Presumably a part of forest produce, such as timber, fuel, and charcoal, was traded everywhere, as were derived industrial products.215

Hunting and Fishing The state and other estate owners who had inherited its fiscal prerogatives levied dues in kind over hunting and fishing, often a third of the bag or

205Hendy, Studies, 38; Iviron, 1:159.

206Dunn, “Woodland,” 258–61.

207Malamut, Les ˆıles, 2:388–89.

208Farmer’s Law, § 39–40: the villagers cut down oak trees in the forest; Dunn, “Woodland,” 266, 267, 268, 269, 272.

209Dunn, “Woodland,” 267.

210Lavra, 1: nos. 2 and 3; Dunn, “Woodland,” 273 n. 153.

211Dunn, “Woodland,” 273; Iviron, 3: no. 54.

212Dunn, “Woodland,” 263, 264.

213Patmos, 2: no. 50; Dunn, “Woodland,” 264, 273–74.

214Martin, La Pouille, 374–76.

215Dunn, “Woodland,” 261, 268, 279.

the catch.216 In Norman Italy, as in the Byzantine Empire, more is known about royal and aristocratic hunts than about peasants’ hunts.217 In addition, we are well informed about the predilection shown by bishops in the tenth century and by hegoumenoi in the twelfth for unusual fish, though it is clear that fish, which was inexpensive wherever the catch was abundant, could play an important role in the food supply, particularly in towns. G. Dagron has described fishing techniques and the structures (bibaria) that had long been associated with them, the dues, either taxes or possibly leases to do with fishing, and the means by which the produce was marketed in Constantinople.218

The case of the capital was not special in every aspect; there was, for instance, a fish market at Serres, close to Lake Achinos, at the beginning of the fourteenth century.219 At the end of the tenth century on the territory of the village of Siderokausia in Chalkidike, fishing rights on the river were shared between the villagers and a monastic estate, with the monastery probably benefiting from a tax exemption in this respect.220 River, lake, and sea fishing thus constituted a source of income for peasant fishermen and for the state and its claimants.221

Pasturage The livestock situation on smallholdings has been discussed above. It was clearly not sufficient; the cavalry, the army’s supply trains, meat and milk products, parchment, and leather and wool artifacts all represented a considerable demand that could only be met by large-scale stock raising on the grazing lands of the state, then of villages and estates.

Little is known about the way stock raising was organized in Asia Minor, where it played a determining role. It often involved huge estates, many of which had been granted by the emperor to or secured some other way by the greatest Byzantine families, whose ownership went back to the ninth century.222 The state bred its own horses and draft animals for the army on its Anatolian estates,223 though the army also requisitioned supplies locally in the course of an expedition. However, the single soldier and horse that peasant families were required to supply probably did not play as significant a role as did contributions from private and ecclesiastical estates, which must have been the principal purveyors of the horses and mules employed in the wars against the Arabs.224 Paphlagonia is also known as a major stock raising area, an important

216Theodori Studitae Epistulae, ed. G. Fatouros, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1992), 1:25–26, ep. 7; G. Dagron, “Poissons, peˆcheurs et poissonniers de Constantinople,” in Mango and Dagron, Constantinople and Its Hinterland (as above, note 125), 67–68; Dunn, “Woodland,” 276; Iviron, 1: no. 9.

217Martin, La Pouille, 377 n. 314; Malamut, Les ˆıles, 2:433; Daphnopates, Correspondance, 211–13; Dunn, “Woodland,” 276–77.

218Dagron, “Poissons.” On hunting and fishing in southern Italy and Macedonia, see the comments in Lefort and Martin, “Organisation,” 24.

219Actes d’Esphigme´nou, ed. J. Lefort, Archives de l’Athos (Paris, 1973), no. 9.

220Iviron, 1: no. 9.

221Cf. Harvey, Economic Expansion, 158; “Anthroponymie,” 237; Malamut, Les ˆıles, 2:433–34; ODB, s.v. “Fishing.”

222Hendy, Studies, 55, 100–108; Haldon, Seventh Century, 156.

223N. Oikonomides, Les listes de pre´se´ance byzantines des IXe et Xe sie`cles (Paris, 1972), 338; Hendy, Studies, 611.

224Cf. Lemerle, Agrarian History, 131–56; Hendy, Studies, 311.

264 JACQUES LEFORT

source of provision in meat for the capital in the tenth century: cattle, pigs, sheep, donkeys, cows, and horses were driven to Nikomedeia and Pylai, whence they were sent by boat to Constantinople.225

Many of the uncultivated parts of the Balkans were also dedicated to stock raising, especially in the north, as well as the Peloponnese, which was required to supply a thousand horses for the Longobardia campaign at the beginning of the tenth century.226 This was also the case with some parts of Chalkidike, especially Mount Athos. When monks were installed there at the end of the ninth century, they came into conflict with the local herd owners, shepherds, and herdsmen who were accustomed to pasturing their animals on Mount Athos.227 The Kolobou monastery at Hierissos had fraudulently acquired ownership of almost the whole of Mount Athos by the end of the ninth century and turned it temporarily into a pastoral estate (nomadikon proasteion), part of which was used for its own herds and part rented out to the local owners of herds and flocks. Leo VI put an end to this situation in 908, but in 943 the inhabitants of the kastron of Hierissos, and in 972 the Kolobou monastery, maintained the right to shelter their animals on Mount Athos in the event of a hostile incursion. Indeed, the monastery of Lavra kept sheep there until the mid-eleventh century and was subsequently allowed to graze a herd of cows there.228 Away from Athos, the huge estate of Perigardikeia, more than 20,000 modioi in size, was also involved in stock raising in 1037; the owner was also entitled to graze his herds on neighboring lands.229

Once the Anatolian plateau had been lost, the Balkans played a major part in stock raising. In some cases at least, it is clear that there was a speculative side to aristocratic stock raising in the Balkans: it was not, in fact, limited to riding-horses, and the numbers of stock animals were in excess of private requirements, great though these must have been.230 In the region of Rhodope in 1083, the estates of Gregory Pakourianos included grazing lands (nomadiaia ge) and summer pasturages, on which were found: 110 horses, mares and foals; 15 donkeys, jennies and foals; 4 milch buffalo; 2 calves; the 47 pair of oxen referred to above, which were used by the estate farmers; 72 cows and bulls; 238 ewes; 94 rams; and 52 goats.231 In 1089, the Xenophon monastery, or rather its second founder, a former great droungarios tes viglas, owned 14 yoke of oxen, 100 draft horses or donkeys, 130 buffalo, 150 cows, 2,000 goats and sheep on its estates in Chalkidike.232 Around 1090–98, estates in Thrace and Macedonia belonging successively to Symbatios Pakourianos and his widow, Kale, also included grasslands, part of

225Koder, Eparchenbuch, 15.3; J. Darrouze`s, Epistoliers byzantins du Xe sie`cle (Paris, 1960), 209; Hendy,

Studies, 55.

226De Administrando Imperio, ed. G. Moravcsik, trans. R. Jenkins, 2 vols. (London–Washington, D.C., 1962–67), 52.

227Proˆtaton, no. 1 (883).

228Proˆtaton, nos. 2, 4, 7 and 8.

229Docheiariou, no. 1; see Harvey, Economic Expansion, 154–55; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 77–79.

230Harvey, Economic Expansion, 153.

231Gautier, “Typikon de Gre´goire Pakourianos,” 125.

232Xe´nophon, no. 1.

which was managed directly; an unknown number of oxen, cows, mares “in the mountain,” foals, horses, mules, sheep, and pigs were raised there.233 Other examples could be provided.234 In southern Italy, too, some monasteries kept large herds, the details of which have been preserved.235

Not much is known, however, about the way these grasslands were farmed and exploited. Summer pasturage ( planinai), on the one hand, and winter grazing (cheimadion) in the hollows of the lowlands, on the other, had long been practiced, but the impression gained is that a regular system, involving transhumance and pastoral nomadism, was developed only in the eleventh century.236 This was the case in Asia Minor, where the Turkomans who spent their summers on the plateau, are known to have rented winter grazing within the land of the empire in the twelfth century.237 In the Balkans, since the eleventh century, transhumance was particularly associated with a seminomadic population of Vlachs, who were sometimes rather unruly and who specialized in stock raising. Ethnological descriptions of these people made at the beginning of the twentieth century correspond fairly well to information provided in Byzantine texts; in particular, they stress the role of women in food-processing work.238 There is evidence, too, for long-distance movement of herds, which the Byzantine reconquest made possible; at the end of the eleventh century, Kekaumenos refers to Vlachs in the region of Larissa in Thessaly, whose wives (who were on their own because their husbands had revolted) had left with their cattle to spend the summer, from April to September, in the mountains of “Bulgaria.”239 In other cases, the movement was mostly vertical: at the end of the twelfth century, near Moglena in western Macedonia, the Vlach shepherds who spent the summer on a planina experienced some trouble obtaining their winter grazing lands on the plain below, much of which was probably under intensive cultivation. Vlachs generally owned their flocks, but some of them may possibly have been employees of estate owners, who may also have owned herds. Maybe the mention of “Vlachs of Lavra,” for whom Lavra secured the free use of an imperial summer pasturage, refers to this sort of arrangement.240 Vlachs were primarily sheep breeders.

One etiological account, intended to explain why women and female animals are prohibited on Mount Athos, tells of Vlachs, especially shepherdesses dressed as shepherds,241 who lived for a while in perfect symbiosis with the monks of the holy mountain, supplying them with cheese, milk, and wool,242 and other things as well. The story

233Iviron, 2:174.

234Harvey, Economic Expansion, 151–57.

235Martin, La Pouille, 384 and n. 344.

236Harvey, Economic Expansion, 156–57 and n. 179; for a reference to pasturage rights “for the six months of winter” in a fiscal instruction dating from the 10th–11th centuries, see Ge´ome´tries, § 54.

237Magdalino, Manuel, 126.

238M. Gyoni, “La transhumance des Vlaques balkaniques au Moyen Age,” BSl 12 (1951): 29–42.

239Kekaumenos, Strategikon, sec. 185.

240Lavra, 1: no. 66.

241Cf. Gyoni, “Transhumance,” 31: young girls wore trousers during the migrations.

242On Cretan and Vlach cheeses consumed in Constantinople during the 12th century and woolen coats woven by Vlach women, cf. Poe`mes prodromiques, III, 52, 56; IV, 75, 83 ( Eideneier, III, 117–36).

266 JACQUES LEFORT

goes that the emperor was keen to impose a tithe on them (as users of the grazing lands), but that he feared lest the regional fisc officials would take advantage of this to exact their customary levies from the monks. Following a moralizing intervention on the part of the patriarch, they ended by deciding to remove the Vlach women and their flocks definitively from Athos.243

In southern Italy there is evidence for limited displacement, sometimes toward summer pasturage; in the case of long-distance transhumance, there seems to be no continuity between the end of antiquity and the late Middle Ages,244 nor is there any evidence for such continuity in the Balkans and Asia Minor.

In the tenth century the state sometimes allowed villagers free disposal of uncultivated lands.245 Generally speaking, estate owners levied duties on shepherding (mandriatikon)246 and pasturage (ennomion) when they rented out their grasslands, the latter dues being in proportion to the size of the flock and higher for larger animals.247 Ennomion was paid in currency, though a tithe on the stock could be substituted, according to references from the tenth to the end of the twelfth century.248 The same applied to southern Italy, where herbaticum could constitute the seizure of a proportion of the stock, sometimes one animal in twenty.249

Some of the products derived from stockbreeding have already been mentioned. Ptochoprodromos asserts that clothes made of goats’ hair and silk were much appreciated in town. In villages, the surnames of cobbler and weaver demonstrate the existence of rural craftsmanship in leather and textiles from the twelfth century on. By this time, however, a large proportion of the production was certainly sold to merchants; we know of the trade in cowhides and sheepskins in Crete during the thirteenth century.250

These seem to have been the most consistent features of agricultural and pastoral production. It could well be argued that the relative separation of agriculture and stock raising, as illustrated in the Balkans by the specialized role of the Vlachs,251 constituted a weakness of the Byzantine rural economy. However, this is not proven. As we have seen, the peasants owned some head of cattle, and some peasants were engaged in large-scale stock raising on domanial grasslands. Indeed, by the end of our period and in the central regions of the empire, it is quite remarkable how all the economic activities of the countryside were integrated within the context of village and estate, which were often unified.

243P. Meyer, Die Haupturkunden fu¨r die Geschichte der Athosklo¨ster (Leipzig, 1874), 163–67. See M. Gyoni, “Les Vlaques du Mont Athos au de´but du XIIe sie`cle,” Etudes slaves et roumaines 1 (1948): 30–42.

244Martin, La Pouille, 377–80.

245Lavra, 1: nos. 2 and 3.

246Lavra, 1: no. 66; Iviron, 3: no. 54.

247Ge´ome´tries, § 54; Iviron, 2: no. 54; on ennomion, cf. ODB, s.v.

248Iviron, 1: no. 9; Peira, 37; Iviron, 2: no. 47; Lavra, 1: no. 66.

249Martin, La Pouille, 374.

250Poe`mes prodromiques, III, 52; ODB, s.v. “Goats,” “Leather”; for Crete: data communicated by J.-C. Cheynet.

251The letter (mentioned above), sent by Gregory Antiochos to Eustathios of Thessalonike, stresses the importance of stock raising and the mediocre nature of agriculture in the region of Sardica: Darrouze`s, “Deux lettres.”

Matters had probably not always been thus. The rural economy of the seventh century was clearly quite different in many regions, more segmented and less prosperous than in the twelfth century. As we have seen, however, polyculture (mixed farming) and the overall range of agrarian techniques, which were adapted to both local conditions and smallholdings, enabled the development of production.

Developmental Factors

Demographic Growth and the Rise in Demand

Population Increase from the Ninth Century On It was long thought that the empire was never so densely populated as during the seventh and eighth centuries, as a result of the Slavic invasions, and that it fell victim to a demographic decline that started in the tenth or eleventh century, at the time of the empire’s “feudalization.”252 More specifically, the incidence of “deserted” lands and habitats was seen as proof of this decline, although the explanation often lies in the precarious nature of peasant life and in the provisional nature of these desertions. The many abandoned lands redesignated klasma by the fisc, to which I shall return, and the many exaleimmata listed in fourteenthcentury praktika, which point to the same reality, have long been interpreted as indicators of a permanent or steadily growing shortage of people. What they actually reveal, in some cases at least, are practices aimed at the best management of land occupancy.253 As in the case of lands with no heirs, which, according to the Farmer’s Law,254 were redistributed by the commune, or of the “despotic fields” of Radolibos, referred to above, these deserted lands bear witness above all to individual misfortune. Peasants sometimes died without leaving heirs or moved away for whatever reason, giving rise to situations that obviously required legislation, registration, and decisions about reallocating the land. Cases of this kind feature largely in the legal and fiscal documents of the period, but it would not make sense to use them systematically as demographic indicators. As for the definitive desertion of habitats prior to the mid-fourteenth century, evidence for its occurrence in Macedonia has been culled from insufficient documentation; in western Chalkidike, at least, it was uncommon.255

W. Treadgold and, later, A. Harvey have stressed that the population grew during the period under discussion.256 This rise appears certain, thus profoundly modifying our picture of the Byzantine economy. While we have no secure data that would permit the population of the empire at any given time to be evaluated, we do know that it was always unevenly distributed. Research by M. Hendy into the distribution of cities during the Roman period and of bishoprics during the Byzantine period emphasizes the aforementioned contrast between coastal zones and lands in the interior, where there

252Cf. J. Lefort, “Population et peuplement en Mace´doine Orientale, IXe–XVe sie`cle,” in Hommes et richesses (as above, note 1), 2:64 and nn. 4 and 5.

253Cf. M. Bartusis, “ Exaj´ leimmaÚ Escheat in Byzantium,” DOP 40 (1986): 55–81.

254Cf. Lemerle, Agrarian History, 42–45.

255Lefort, “Population et peuplement,” 79, table 3.

256Treadgold, Revival, 360–62; Harvey, Economic Expansion, 35–79.

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were fewer bishoprics. Cultivated sectors were naturally more densely populated than stock-raising regions.257

Numerous clues suggest that the population was dense in the sixth century258 and that it diminished in the seventh and eighth centuries, possibly at different rates in different regions and in unknown, though apparently considerable, proportions. The plague of 541/542 and its recurrences until 747 were certainly the principal cause of population decline, and the effects of the epidemics were aggravated by the insecurity that prevailed for long periods or frequently, and almost everywhere. The role of the plague is scarcely disputed, although it is not certain that it reduced the population by half, as has been claimed.259 Epidemics seem at any rate, to have had greater effect on population volume than wars, the negative effects of which were primarily to propagate the epidemics. Similarly, invasions did not lead to any considerable population increase, given their generally destructive impact and the low numbers of immigrants compared with the native population.260 Immigrants were used most efficiently by the emperors, who resorted to deportation in order to populate empty spaces on the frontiers or elsewhere. In the Balkans, Avar and Slav raids, followed by Slav invasions, and in Asia Minor, Persian attacks, followed by Arab incursions over two centuries, had in many places the effect not only of dispersing the population, discrediting the administration and notables, and weakening the urban network, but also of disorganizing the domanial and village framework within which the rural economy operated. Agriculture was maintained only with difficulty in times of war, even when war merely loomed, discouraging all investment in the land.

We are not well informed by the texts; they present a catastrophic vision of raids and invasions and their effects on the population, which must be treated with caution. However, as J. Haldon has emphasized, the importance accorded to the hereditarylease contract (emphyteusis) in the Ecloga, a legal compilation dating from the mid-eighth century, suggests that labor was scarce in this period, because the contract favored the farmer.261 We know, too, that the emperors settled Slavs in Asia Minor on several occasions, especially in Bithynia in 689 and 763, in order to levy soldiers from them for their wars against the Arabs, which shows that the countryside was, at that time, underpopulated, even near the capital.262 As we have seen, the peninsula of Kassandra was

257Hendy, Studies, 69–77.

258Cf. A. E. Laiou, “The Human Resources,” EHB 46ff.

259For information about the role of the plague and about depopulation until the 9th century, see P. Charanis, Studies on the Demography of the Byzantine Empire (London, 1972), 1:10–13; P. Allen, “The ‘Justinianic Plague,’” Byzantion 49 (1979): 1–20; J. Durliat, “La peste du VIe sie`cle,” in Hommes et richesses (as above, note 1), 1:107–19, with comments by J. N. Biraben, ibid., 121–25; ODB, s.v. “Plague”; on the West, see J. N. Biraben and J. Le Goff, “La peste dans le Moyen Age,” AnnalesESC 24 (1969): 1484–510; cf. J.-P. Sodini and C. Morrisson, “The Sixth Century Economy,” EHB 187ff.

260Cf. Charanis, “Observations,” 14–15; J.-M. Martin, “Rapport,” in Hommes et richesses (as above, note 1), 2:84–85.

261Ecloga, ed. L. Burgmann (Frankfurt, 1983), no. 12; on emphyteusis, evidence for which occurs well beforehand, see the analyses by Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 163–69; for the 8th century, see Haldon, Seventh Century, 134.

262H. Ditten, Ethnische Verschiebungen zwischen der Balkanhalbinsel und Kleinasien vom Ende des 6. bis zur zweiten Ha¨lfte des 9. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1993), 220, 337.

depopulated in the middle of the tenth century, although much of it is good farmland. Other documents from Athos show that the region of Hierissos in eastern Chalkidike was also nearly deserted by the end of the ninth century.263 These are all important clues, but their overall value has yet to be demonstrated.

In any case, these clues are confirmed, in many places, by other data. For instance, that the ancient cities on the southern coast of present-day Turkey were abandoned prematurely is strikingly evident today.264 Palynological research and archaeological surveys have produced partial but coherent evidence to show that in Macedonia, Argolis, and Lycia a reduction in land use (cultivation or habitat) and a progression of the forest occurred during the Dark Ages. In addition, in Macedonia and Bithynia particularly, some terraces or entails of terraces, datable to this period, point to abandoned cultivation and a reversion to natural vegetation, and may be interpreted as evidence of a reduction in population pressure.265

This trend may have been reversed when the plague ended around the middle of the eighth century.266 Later on, enhanced security, the omnipresence of the army, and the restoration of a network of strongholds and small towns in the ninth and tenth centuries in Asia Minor and the Balkans favored a population growth that seems to have persisted until the beginning of the fourteenth century. This increase was certainly slow, due to the persistent lack of security in some regions, resulting, for instance, from piracy along the coasts, and due to the fragility of many peasant holdings everywhere. Weather hazards and other catastrophes sufficed to produce famine, which, though most frequently of a local nature, had serious consequences. The cold winter of 927/8, referred to both by chroniclers and in a novel of Romanos I in 934, played a major part in the history of Byzantine “feudalism.” It brought about a famine that was followed by a “plague” and provided the “powerful” with the opportunity to buy land from the “weak” at low prices or for a little wheat.267 N. Svoronos has stressed other cases of famine in the first half of the eleventh century in Asia Minor and in Europe; they were often initiated by drought or hail and were accompanied by epidemics and population movements.268 It may have been the result of milder meteorological conditions or, more probably, the effect of improved security, a progressively less fragile economy, and a wider circulation of grain, but there appears to have been no famine in the twelfth century.269 At any rate, once security was reestablished, the short-term crises that periodically slowed demographic growth were never able to reverse this trend.

Although the signs pointing to population growth are often indirect, they are clear

263Iviron, 1:29.

264On Lycia, see C. Foss, “The Lycian Coast in the Byzantine Age,” DOP 48 (1994): 1–52.

265Paysages de Mace´doine, 103–4; Dunn, “Woodland,” 245–46; see B. Geyer, “Physical Factors in the Evolution of the Landscape and Land Use,” EHB 41–42.

266Treadgold, Revival, 36.

267Lemerle, Agrarian History, 94–97; Svoronos, Novelles, 85–86.

268N. Svoronos, “Socie´te´ et organization inte´rieure dans l’empire byzantin au XIe sie`cle: Les principaux proble`mes,” in Etudes (as above, note 1), art. 9, pp. 12–13.

269Kazhdan, “Two Notes,” 120, Magdalino, Manuel, 142.

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enough. Towns reappeared, the number of bishoprics grew between the seventh and ninth centuries,270 and, as we shall see, hamlets were constantly established, often by large proprietors, between the tenth and mid-fourteenth centuries, all of which suggests a more abundant population. In Macedonia the fiscal documents that enable us to compare the number of hearths in nine villages or hamlets between the beginning of the twelfth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries indicate that the population had grown considerably, on average by 82%.271 Once the additional resources obtained by implementing the best agricultural techniques in this geographical environment had been exhausted, a growing population would imply an increase in the area under cultivation. Indeed, it would had to have almost doubled over two centuries, if the data relating to Macedonia are significant; over time, the extension of crops might have effected a shift in the location of grazing lands and pushed back the woodlands.

In Macedonia, indeed, there is evidence that all this did happen on a scale significant enough to be traced in the sequence of documents dating to between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. In some places, the multiplication of fields prior to the fourteenth century led to the formation of cereal-growing land units that spread beyond the bounds of the estates to eliminate the last remnants of natural vegetation.272 In western Chalkidike, texts, ceramic finds, and geographical data all suggest that here, too, the area under cultivation was extended further in the fourteenth century than at the beginning of the twelfth or even during the proto-Byzantine period.273 The increase in the cultivated area reduced the spaces at the base of slopes that had been given over to pasturage and woodland, and apparently resulted in the systematic practice of summer pasturage, referred to above, from the eleventh century on. During the twelfth century, at Radolibos and in neighboring villages, the uncultivated area leading into the hills became insufficient, and the peasants of eight villages, not including those of Radolibos, then took to using the slopes of Pangaion for cutting wood and pasturing their cattle in summer, evidence for which is found in the dues they paid Iveron for usage of the planina: ennomion, mandriatikon, and orike.274 Finally, in Macedonia, evidence that farming the slopes had pushed back the forest between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries is suggested by documents for the areas east of Amphipolis and, in the twelfth century, north of Lake Langadas.275

This evidence from the Athonite archives is confirmed by palynological and archaeological research, as itemized by Dunn, showing that the forest in western Macedonia started to recede in 850, or ca. 1000 on another site, in Thessaly ca. 900, in Lycia before the millennium, in eastern Macedonia near Lake Bolbe, in Thrace, and in Argolis at dates prior to the fourteenth century.276 This set of facts points to a rise in population as marked as the drop in population had been in the seventh and eighth centuries.

270Hendy, Studies, 77.

271Lefort, “Population et peuplement,” 74.

272Paysages de Mace´doine, 109, 112 and n. 50.

273Ibid., 111–12.

274Iviron, 3: no. 54.

275Paysages de Mace´doine, 110–11, 114.

276Dunn, “Woodland,” 244–46.