The Economic History of Byzantium From

Some clues, linked to information about the spread of cultivation and the forest cover in the region of Thessalonike, tend to confirm that at the beginning of the fourteenth century the population was at least as dense in Macedonia as it may have been in the sixth century.277 These demographic phenomena were probably more extensive in the coastal regions than in the northern Balkans or on the Anatolian plateau, which were more remote and less populous.

The Rise in Demand from the Tenth Century On Of course, the demographic increase was the main factor in the development of the rural economy, which had to provide the peasants with a subsistence in good years and bad. However, the automatic effect of a larger population was amplified by the demand from a growing number of people who did not produce much or at all. The army had eventually been shown to be more efficient when making better use of the cavalry, and its needs had increased. The monasteries were developing, as were the towns and administration; the ever more numerous aristocracy was imitating the luxurious ways of the court, which in turn was increasing in size—all these developments put pressure on agriculture to produce enough to feed all these nonpeasants, some of whom at least required very superior homes, food, and clothes.278 Indeed, without exploring these questions further, it must be stressed that these changes had a very significant effect on the rural economy. I noted earlier how agricultural practices permitted a degree of progress that was implemented and resulted in what was probably the greatest possible increase in yields. I also suggested that the response to growing demand was to increase still further the area under cultivation, a development that was, at any rate, inevitable.

Increasing the Area under Cultivation The texts seldom refer explicitly to land clearance. For instance, the Farmer’s Law refers to it twice within the context of village life.279 Studying the cadaster of Radolibos also shows how, prior to the twelfth century, clearance work had begun on some of the less advantageous parts of the territory, which were possibly still partly wooded, and had opened up some small fields.280 Given the very small size and dispersed location of these fields, it is likely that they were created on the initiative and at the expense, not of the estate master, but of the peasants. An old delineation of property for Radolibos, dating from the time before the village became an estate, refers to a field on the plain that was cleared (hylokopethen) by a peasant called Pantoleon, son-in-law of Dobrobetes.281 Another allusion, not to cleared land, but to the development of an estate in The Life of Michael Maleinos, is instructive: Manuel Maleinos (Michael was his name as a monk), uncle of Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas, had purchased ca. 925 some land close to Mount Kyminas in Paphlagonia, in order to build a monastery. He developed the land so well that he “turned the desert into a

277See above, 264; also Lefort, “Radolibos,” 215.

278Harvey, Economic Expansion, 163–97.

279Farmer’s Law, § 17 and 20.

280Lefort, “Radolibos,” 215.

281Iviron, 2: no. 48.

272 JACQUES LEFORT

town.”282 A more specific account is provided by Eustathios Boilas in his will of 1059, which states that he had cleared an estate in eastern Anatolia that had been covered in impenetrable forest, creating meadows, orchards, vineyards, and gardens,283 using his slaves or paroikoi to carry out the work.

Despite the documents’ silence on the subject, there are many clues suggesting that clearings were significant, both in villages and on estates. Though work on the estates was probably carried out with the authorization of the master of the place, it could be initiated by him or by the peasants, as we have seen. The work must generally have been carried out by the latter in order to enlarge their holdings or to create new farms; not much information is available, however. Similarly, we can only suppose that more land was cleared after the tenth century than before, for the reasons given above.

The area under cultivation was extended either around existing habitation sites or, alternatively, in isolated spots, in which case it involved creating a new hamlet. In the first case, the work scarcely features in the sources and is hard to date; its existence can only be deduced from the increased number of farms. We have seen how in Radolibos the parts of the estate that were hardest to work were cleared before the twelfth century. When clearance work was linked to the foundation of a hamlet or an isolated farm, it is more likely to appear in the texts, often under the term agridion, which refers to a small estate. The author of the Fiscal Treatise provides a commentary on this term, revealing some of the reasons why habitats could multiply, in a context that clearly points to demographic rise. In this respect, he refers to the “development” and the resulting “improvements,” implying clearance work in particular:

. . . agridia are formed, either because some villagers did not wish to remain in the village, or because they did not own as many interior enclosures (enthyria peribolia) as the others, for which reason they removed their homes to a part of the village territory, developed it (kalliergo), and set themselves up there. Perhaps the fathers of some of these people had died leaving many children, and had left some of them lands within (esothyra), which they held in the village, and to others their lands outside (exothyra); thus those who had received their share of the inheritance outside the village (exochoria), since they could not reside and dwell far from their share, have removed their homes and improved (beltio) the terrain, turning it into an agridion. Still others, because of either the quantity of their cattle and the number of their slaves, or the ill-will of their neighbors and their inability to remain in the same village, have moved to a part of the village territory and have made improvements in the same way, constituting an agridion. One could, by searching, find many reasons for establishing agridia.284

Noteworthy are those peasants who did not own enough farmland near the village and found some further off that they cultivated (free of dues, though they might eventually be taxed): those who belonged to large families that could not house all their

282Vie et office de Michel Male´inos, ed. L. Petit (Paris, 1903), chap. 15; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre,

302.

283Lemerle, Cinq ´etudes, 22.

284Fiscal Treatise, 115.

children, obliging some of them to exploit a land that they had inherited but was too remote; and those who were landowners (and wealthier?) with cattle and slaves, who were also interested in the margins of the village territory. According to this text, the development of the boundary lands was carried out within the social framework of a grouped village, which features as the original habitation site.

Thanks to the Athonite archives, we are fairly well informed about the foundation of small estates on the margins of village territories in Macedonia. These were founded by monks or lay persons and are recorded as early as the ninth century. In 866 a powerful man, John Kolobos, erected a small monastic establishment on the territory of Siderokausia in Chalkidike, close to which paroikoi were installed toward the middle of the tenth century.285 The foundation of new estates was probably made easier following the state’s decision at the beginning of the tenth century to sell village land that had fallen into escheat (klasma), in certain cases. We know that the origins of several estates that were obviously developed for farming lie here; for instance, the estate of Lavra at Kassandra was purchased from the fisc in 941.286

The foundation of a hamlet can sometimes be given an approximate date, as in the case of the huge territory of Polygyros in Chalkidike, which at that time had domanial status; the hamlets of Alopochorion and St. George were established there prior to 1047, and that of St. Lazaros or Lazarochorion between 1047 and 1079.287 Generally, however, we can only record the date when these new habitation sites appear in the documentation. Research, as yet incomplete, into the Athonite archives has produced a dozen such created before the year 1000, fifteen before 1100, though only a few in the twelfth century on account of the scanty documentation, fifteen again in the thirteenth century, and a dozen between 1300 and 1350 (within an economic context that had become unfavorable). We are thus dealing with a continuous phenomenon that modified soil occupancy to a considerable extent. These estates were not very extensive and may have averaged 1,000 modioi; they generally had no forest or pasturage reserves and were dedicated primarily to growing cereals. They comprised, apart from the master’s house, a hamlet inhabited by paroikoi that was generally small, at between ten and twenty hearths at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

In the tenth to twelfth centuries, these estates tended to be sited downhill from the villages, toward the middle of low-lying land that had hitherto been too exposed and could now be farmed thanks to the improved security. This trend also shows that the more fertile lands were initially exploited, although the soil was often heavy and hard to plow. In this case, the gain in area and the fertility of the land combined to increase production. The choice of uphill sites, generally on poorer soil, often appears to date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and to be due to an increase in the pressure of population.288 When account is taken of the regional differences in the type of habitat associated with newly cultivated zones, the same situation occurred in southern

285Proˆtaton, 36; Iviron, 1: no. 9.

286Lavra, 1: no. 2.

287Iviron, 1: no. 29, and 2: no. 41.

288Lefort, “Population et peuplement,” 69–72.

The reconquest of northern Syria during the second half of the tenth century was followed by a policy of repopulating the countryside and of building up the rural economy, organized by the state. This helps explain why the region was so prosperous during the first half of the eleventh century.290 B. Martin-Hisard concludes her analysis of the archives of the St. Shio monastery with the observation that in Georgia, in a different institutional context from that of the Byzantine Empire, it may be possible to identify “some signs of a transformation in the life and rural economy of the countryside, between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, such as reorganized habitation sites, the exploitation of new lands, technical advances, and openings for trade.”291 The signs are that the trend to extend the area under cultivation constituted a general phenomenon, in both the eastern Mediterranean and elsewhere.

The Role of the Village Structure

Until the tenth century, the village, both as habitation site and as social structure, appears to have played a predominant role in a rural economy that was characterized by low levels of demand and monetization. Admittedly, the documents only reported on the village social structure when it fell to pieces, and it is difficult to assess its importance and reconstruct its features in an earlier period on the basis of legal and literary texts.

The Village as Habitation Site The Fiscal Treatise presents a dispersed rural habitation site, called ktesis, in the following terms: the houses are “very isolated from each other, each on its own little property (ktesidion).” We have few examples of such a dispersed form of habitation site, which the text contrasts with chorion, defined as a group: “the houses are in the same place, next door to each other.”292 It is generally supposed that grouped habitation sites (where the houses stood more or less close together, possibly depending on the nature of the topography) and open ones were the rule in the countryside, as was the case in northern Syria in the seventh century, in Macedonia in the tenth, and in Byzantine Apulia.293 In fact, regional diversity must have been important, and peasants may have formed new groups in some places during the period under consideration.

290For information, principally about the demographic aspects of this reconstruction, see G. Dagron, “Minorite´s ethniques et religieuses dans l’Orient byzantin `a la fin du Xe et au XIe sie`cle: L’immigration syrienne,” TM 6 (1976): 177–216. For southern Italy, see A. Guillou, “Production and Profits in the Byzantine Province of Italy (Tenth to Eleventh Centuries): An Expanding Society,” DOP 28 (1974): 91–109.

291B. Martin-Hisard, “Les biens d’un monaste`re ge´orgien (IXe–XIIIe sie`cle),” in Hommes et richesses (as above, note 1), 2:137.

292Fiscal Treatise, 115. In the 6th century, however, John of Ephesos alluded to a mountain village in the region of Melitene that consisted of dispersed hamlets and isolated houses, but this seems to have been an exceptional case; cf. Patlagean, Pauvrete´ ´economique, 241; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 111.

293Tate, “Les campagnes,” 67; Lefort, “Habitat rural,” 254–56; Martin, La Pouille, 269; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 115–17.

276 JACQUES LEFORT

In any case, during the ninth and tenth centuries, the village as a grouped habitation site with its territory seems in general to have constituted the predominant form of habitation site and of soil occupancy. In Bithynia, saints’ lives and other texts show that, by the ninth century, the village was the usual form of rural habitation site, and there are reasons for thinking that the tight network formed by the villages in the fifteenth century was already in place by the thirteenth, if not earlier.294 The same structure can be deduced for tenth-century Taurus, from the Treatise on Guerrilla Warfare by Nikephoros Phokas.295 In Apulia, villages formed a dense network around Bari, and some sites were very populous by the beginning of the eleventh century.296

The same applied to Macedonia, where fiscal documents contain delineations of property that allow the village territories to be mapped. In western Chalkidike, a village could be found every 4 or 5 km, often with a territory of 20 km2. These villages were generally situated at the foot of mountains, in which case their territory would combine mountain and lowland parts. Of course, village networks were not everywhere as dense. We have no information about village populations, which must have varied greatly. In fourteenth-century Macedonia, they comprised perhaps seventy hearths on average, but previously were less well populated. It is possible that the heads of fourteen hearths in Radochosta, who “all, from the smallest to the greatest,” placed their signon at the head of a document, represented all the hearths in the village at the beginning of the eleventh century.297

In places where the existence of a village network has been ascertained for the protoByzantine period, one may assume, following J. Haldon, a continuity of habitat, the troubled seventh and eighth centuries notwithstanding.298 This was, for instance, the case in Galatia, insofar as can be discerned via the Life of Theodore of Sykeon; here the rural space was made up, at the beginning of the seventh century, of former village territories, between which were inserted ecclesiastical estates. The same applied to Thrace, in the Taurus region, and in northern Syria where G. Dagron has emphasized the existence, between village and city, of towns that were all the more important when the cities were either in decline or remote, and when the towns were sited along the main roads.299 The existence of these towns is also attested at a later period;300 Radolibos was one such town, situated on the Via Egnatia.

In Macedonia, during the Roman and early Byzantine periods, apart from the cities, important rural agglomerations (vici?) can be identified as well as smaller settlements that are clearly distinguished by the area over which pottery can be found in the fields.

294J. Lefort, “Tableau de la Bithynie au XIIIe sie`cle,” in The Ottoman Emirate (1300–1389), ed. E. Zachariadou (Rethymnon, 1993), 105–9.

295G. Dagron, Le traite´ sur la gue´rilla de l’empereur Nice´phore Phocas (Paris, 1986), 228.

296Martin, La Pouille, 268–69.

297Lavra, 1: no. 14.

298Haldon, Seventh Century, 136, insists on the continuity of “basic structure and social organisation.”

299G. Dagron, “Entre village et cite´: La bourgade rurale des IVe–VIIe sie`cles en Orient,” Koinonia 3 (1979): 29–52; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 90–93.

300Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 102.

Both here and in other regions, this framework of rural life was disrupted when Slavs settled in at the beginning of the seventh century. In the Thessalonike region, however, the most insecure period lasted only thirty-four years (586–620), and agrarian structures were sometimes maintained, as is suggested by the permanence of some city names in western Chalkidike that were transferred to Byzantine villages;301 the transformation of an ancient city into a medieval village has also been observed in other regions.302 Once they had arrived in Macedonia, the Slavs, who had long been used to living grouped in small villages, began by keeping to their traditional form of habitation site, its internal organization, and favored locations.303 However, they went on to join agricultural territories that had already been developed, whether abandoned or resettled, and by the beginning of the tenth century one may observe the existence of mixed Greco-Slav villages near Thessalonike.304 While the end result is clear enough, the modalities of the passage from ancient agrarian structures to the tenth-century village are unknown, and not solely for Macedonia.

Over the whole Mediterranean world, southern Italy, Greece, the Aegean, and the southeastern part of Asia Minor in particular, both textual and archaeological sources reveal the existence of surrounding walls that often seem to have been associated with villages.305 The tenth-century Treatise on Guerrilla Warfare reveals a possible function; in the event of a threat from the Arabs, the army would help the villagers (choritai) to fall back onto a naturally defensible site or into a fortified place of refuge (kataphygion) with their families, livestock, movables, and supplies for four months.306 Similarly, in Chalkidike at the end of the tenth century, a document tells of peasants who had fled their villages after they had been destroyed by Bulgars and took refuge on a neighboring estate because the place was defended. In response to questions posed by the judge in the course of a lawsuit in which they were only witnesses, they declared as follows (for once, peasants had their say):

“[We come from] villages that lie beyond the mountains, Resetinikeia, Batoneia, Mousdolokou, and other villages; because our villages were destroyed by Bulgars, we took refuge on the land of the Polygyros monastery, also known as ton Chabounion, since the place is protected (dia ten ochyroteta tou topou), but we are paying the dues (epereiai) that were imposed on us long ago and the taxes (tele), according to what each one owes, for our hereditary villages.”307

301Cf. Lefort, Chalcidique occidentale, s.vv. “Aineia,” “Antigonia,” “Bolbos.”

302Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 93. This phenomenon recurred later on, when some 11th-century kastra became choria in the 14th century.

303Cf. Popovic´, “Habitat pale´oslave.”

304Kameniates, De expugnatione Thessalonicae, ed. G. Bo¨hling (Berlin–New York, 1973), 8; F. Brunet, “Sur l’helle´nisation des toponymes slaves en Mace´doine,” TM 9 (1985): 257.

305Calabria, work in progress by G. Noye´; Macedonia, Lefort, “Population et peuplement,” 68 and n. 25; Chios, M. Ballance et al., Excavations in Chios, Byzantine Emporion (Oxford, 1989); Samos, K. Tsakos, “Sumbolh` sth`n palaiocristianikh` kai` prw´ i¨mh buzantinh` mnhmeiografi´a th'" Sa´ mou,” Arcj. Efj. (1979): 11–25; Thasos, S. Dadake and C. Giros, “ Arcaiologikoj`" ca´ rth" Qa´ sou, Buzantinoi` cro´noi,” Arcaiologikoj` “Ergo sth` Makedoni´a kai` Qra´ kh 5 (1991): 385–86; on Asia Minor, cf. note 306.

306Dagron, Gue´rilla, 228–29.

307Iviron, 1: no. 10.

278 JACQUES LEFORT

The rest of the text tells how the villagers who had been settled on the Polygyros estate were farming the land, supplying the monastery with the harvest share (geiomora) and pasturage rights (nomistra) that had been agreed on. The important point here is that they continued to pay the taxes for their hereditary villages, to which they clearly meant to return once it was safe to do so.

The dual nature of peasant habitation sites illustrated above, involving a permanent village habitat in times of peace and a place of refuge in times of war, was surely not the rule, but does seem to have been common. The effect must have been to strengthen the social structure of the village. In Calabria and Macedonia, the surrounding walls that have been identified during surveys are large and always on elevated sites, often invisible from the plain, and they frequently dominate medieval villages. Most of these places of refuge seem to have been built or at least occupied in the sixth and seventh centuries. They are always roughly constructed, whether or not masonry was involved. At Radolibos, the surrounding wall, known as Kales, towers 400 m above the present, formerly Byzantine, village. It is a dry-stone construction with a tower. Shards and bronze coins have been found there, dating from the early Byzantine period (fourth century). Houses had been built within the walls and graves laid below; for a while at least, this had been a permanent habitation site.308 By the fourth century, we know that local military leaders were fortifying villages in threatened regions, under guise of their patronage function. The army under Theodosios I and then Justinian did likewise, and these fortifications often remained distinct from regular habitation sites.309 They may also have been erected by local lords in zones that were not under state control. In either case, such places of refuge, whether temporary or not, must have helped strengthen or create Byzantine village networks in times of obvious social discontinuity. In southern Italy, where village structures seem to have been unobtrusive in the sixth century, and more generally wherever habitation sites were dispersed, peasants would have assembled periodically in these fortified places of refuge and thus may have fostered new groupings of habitats.

Peasants who were threatened by enemies, forced to move on by famine, or simply pursued by the fisc were very mobile during the earliest periods, as has been noted above. This mobility was increased by deportations ordered by the emperor. In some cases, it muddled legal situations or reduced their significance. In troubled times, numerous peasants could at any given time be held to own the property they were farming, irrespective of the land’s previous status, and this may have helped crystallize village structures. What is more, the provincial army’s soldiers often came from villages in which their families were living. This point is too important to be developed here, but the ties between army and village, emphasized by the tax status of military families (oikoi stratiotikoi) and military lands (stratiotika ktemata),310 also contributed toward pro-

308N. Zekos, “Proanaskafike`" e“reune" sto` Rodoli´bo" kai` sth`n perioch` tou,” Orfej´a" 8/9 (1983): cf. 8–11.

309Dagron, “Entre village et cite´,” 43–44.

310On the question of the stratiwtika` kth´mata, see in the last instance J. Haldon, “Military Service, Military Lands, and the Status of Soldiers: Current Problems and Interpretations,” DOP 47 (1993): 1–67.

tecting and strengthening the structure of the village, sometimes creating or reestablishing it when populations were moved.

The Economic Function of the Village, Considered as Social Structure The village as an institution was adapted to a period when land was not much farmed on account of the general insecurity and the low pressure of population. It provided the rural population with a means of self-defense, on which the state relied for both winning back its territory and raising taxes, as well as a structure aimed at the production of goods. From the seventh to the tenth centuries, it helped maintain the continuity of both farmlands and the rural economy.

The Village Commune Although our information is not very reliable, by the seventh century, probably the greater part of agricultural production was undertaken by villagers, the village being the context in which the rural economy gradually picked up. There was more to a village than the sum of its holdings; it was also a community or commune (koinotes tou choriou), which administered a territory that could often be vast. Indeed, while the community aspect of the village has previously been exaggerated, it is now probably underestimated. It is likely true that the village, if not the world of “ill-will” propounded by the Fiscal Treatise, was nevertheless an inegalitarian environment that sometimes evinced individualistic tendencies instead of solidarity. Contrasted with a fourteenth-century peasant, who would have been caught up in a whole set of relations with his kin as well as engaging in commercial exchanges, his tenthcentury counterpart seems to have had no ties apart from his father, from whom he inherited his land rights.311

In spite of this, the village was a social environment in which common interests existed. The limits of the village territory were marked by boundary stones and were described in the delineations of property ( periorismoi) that were established by the fisc, as in Roman times.312 The oldest preserved boundary record is for Siderokausia in Chalkidike and dates from the beginning of the tenth century.313 The boundary line, or rather, the farming of lands close to it, was a cause of conflict between neighboring villages, as in Galatia at the beginning of the seventh century and, later on, between villages and great landowners in Macedonia.314 The uncultivated part of the territory that had not been appropriated was owned collectively by the villagers. “Common land” and common usage of uncultivated land are mentioned in the Farmer’s Law and in some documents.315 Users of communal grasslands and forests, whether the villagers themselves, or the powerful, or strangers to the village, all had to pay dues to the state, in this case taxes, as they also did on the estates.316

Defending the rights of the village against initiatives by neighbors made the village

311“Anthroponymie,” 231.

312Ge´ome´tries, 16–19.

313Iviron, 1: no. 9.

314Vie de The´odore de Syke´ˆon, § 150; Farmer’s Law, § 7; Proˆtaton, no. 5.

315Farmer’s Law, § 81 (to´po" koino´"); Iviron, 1: no. 5 (koinoto´pion).

316Iviron, 1: no. 9 (bala´ nistron and other ejnno´mia).

280 JACQUES LEFORT

into a legal entity, de facto if not de jure. Furthermore, the need to manage its territory implied a minimum of organization. We find, if not a council, a representative elite, the “first” of the village,317 in the villages of Galatia and Paphlagonia in the seventh to ninth centuries that turns up again in twelfth-century Macedonia in a domanial context.318 A document from the beginning of the twelfth century also refers to the head (proestos) of a village that had become domanial, as the person who negotiated with the administration.319 It is true that the few tenth-century documents that refer to the rural commune emphasize the collective nature of decision making.320

As a commune, the village owned land, often plots that had fallen into escheat and would eventually be reattributed to a villager in order to meet the requirements of the fisc, as mentioned above. However, the commune could also sell or acquire land. It would also institute proceedings;321 a crowd (plethos) of petitioners would come before the judge, screaming too vociferously for his taste, or they would send a delegation.322 Again, it was presumably the commune that allotted shares in the use of irrigation water.323 In the seventh century, the inhabitants of a village in Galatia apparently paid workmen to build a bridge across the torrent that flowed through their village.324 According to the Farmer’s Law, the commune might also be responsible for mills, and in fact there was a mill on the Dobrokibeia territory toward the beginning of the eleventh century, the taxes for which were owed by the village commune.325 All these facts imply concerted effort and an organization, but one cannot specify the forms of a communal power that must have existed. It was only in the little towns, such as Hierissos, that the commune attained a perceptible level of development;326 its organization was surely more rudimentary in the countryside.

The villages also included certain forms of association; I alluded above to the mutual help arrangements that probably existed between boidatoi for plowing. In addition to this, villagers would sometimes entrust their herds and swine to salaried herdsmen.327 In economic terms, communal and associative practices of this type may have had only limited significance, but they were nevertheless important in a very insecure age. In this respect, the village later functioned as a managerial entity in the rural economy, although to a lesser extent than the estate. Although this management must have been minimal and partly inspired by the demands of the fisc, comprising only a few forms of mutual help and exchange and not designed to foster initiatives, the very existence of the village and rural commune made peasant holdings less precarious. In much the

317Vie de The´odore de Syke´ˆon, § 114 (oiJ . . . ta` prw´ ta telou'nte") and 115 (oiJ prw'toiVie); de Philare`te, 137.

318Iviron, 3: no. 55 b (ge´ronte").

319Iviron, 2: no. 51.

320Iviron, 1: no. 9; Lavra, 1: no. 14.

321Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 187–88, 193.

322Iviron, 1: no. 9; Proˆtaton, nos. 2 and 4.

323Iviron, 1: no. 9.

324Vie de The´odore de Syke´ˆon, § 43.

325Farmer’s Law, § 81; Iviron, 1: no. 30. See also below, note 456.

326Cf. Iviron, 1:131.

327Cf. above, 229 and n. 11; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 195–97.