The Economic History of Byzantium From

same way as the places of refuge, these practices help us understand the beginnings of economic growth.

The Commune and the State From the state’s point of view, the commune was primarily a fiscal jurisdiction, on which the administration relied for collecting taxes when the city framework failed. Furthermore, since the state adhered to the principle, inherited from the late Roman Empire, of the village’s collective responsibility for paying taxes, the commune may have been granted some powers of a fiscal nature. Thus when taxpayers disappeared, their tax liability was distributed among the remaining contributors, which increased the tax burden on them. This collective responsibility is alluded to in the Farmer’s Law328 and, much more precisely, in the Fiscal Treatise.

However, the Fiscal Treatise, like the documents, refers primarily to the measures adopted by the fisc, such as tax exemptions (sympatheiai) and relief (kouphismoi), precisely to avoid the perverse effects of a system that could induce overtaxed peasants to run away when the tax collectors were passing.

Exemptions . . . are granted in cases of great poverty on the part of the taxpayer or the whole region . . . taxes are remitted following a petition by these same taxpayers and in virtue of imperial philanthropy. . . . in fact, in order that those who have fallen into extreme poverty should not depart on account of this poverty, they are exempted by the assessor as far as is required. . . . It is said that relief is granted when the heirs [to holdings] have left, although it is not unknown that they are living somewhere in the neighborhood and where they are established. . . . The assessor, in order to prevent those inhabitants who have remained in the village from leaving on account of their collective tax liability . . . decrees provisional relief on the fiscal units for which those who left owe tax.329

Dispensations and tax relief strengthened the commune.

It is true that, by the beginning of the tenth century, the state was adopting fiscal measures that had the opposite effect and that, during the eleventh century, enabled domanial organizations to replace communal organizations in many cases. Thus they announce an important turning point in the history of the rural economy, although the effect was not immediate. The decision to alienate in the state’s favor all land that had paid no tax for the last thirty years (klasma, the detached part) did in fact result in a retrenchment of the commune’s territory. The first reference to klasmatic land occurs in 908.330 Indeed, plans to adopt this type of measure may have been considered at the end of the ninth century under Basil I.331 As a fiscal policy, it could perhaps also pass as an expression of compassion for the village community, by definitively removing the taxes that bore on unproductive land, though its main effect was to destroy the commune’s territorial unity. In fact, the emperor was entitled, in principle after thirty

328Lemerle, Agrarian History, 41; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 211–12.

329Fiscal Treatise, 119; cf. Iviron, 1: no. 30; 2: no. 48 (sumpaqei'ai).

330Proˆtaton, no. 2.

331Lemerle, Agrarian History, 71.

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years, to decide whether to sell village property that had passed to the fisc (as we have seen, the purchasers were peasants or monasteries), to rent it out, or to give it away, often to the powerful. Here is another extract from the Fiscal Treatise.

Isolated farms and separately constituted estates (idiostata) have been formed thus: a region was abandoned, possibly following an attack by barbarians, or on account of another disaster; the remaining neighbors are likely to leave too because they are forced to pay the tax on the abandoned land; when an assessor arrives, sent by the emperor, he will, after making an inquiry, exempt the tax owed on the abandoned fiscal units, either in totality or in part. If the heirs return within a delay of thirty years, the exemption will be cancelled. If they do not return and the thirty years have expired, a second assessor is sent, who alters the previous exemption and records it as klasma. Once effected, the assessor, whether he be the one who established the klasma or another after him, separates the land that pertains to these fiscal units that have become klasmatic and forms a whole, establishes its boundaries, and records it in the office register. He also constitutes a separate entity from what remains in the village territory and also registers its boundaries. After which, the separated land that has become klasmatic may be sold, given away, rented on a short-term basis or with a lease, or allotted to an office and thus become repopulated and improved. . . . After thirty years have passed, if the heirs have not turned up, the exemption is turned into klasma by another assessor, for the heirs can no longer be expected to return. . . . Indeed, it is after thirty years that the exemption is changed into a klasma, when the fisc is entitled to do what it wants with the klasmatic land. Indeed, if it is said that the emperor gives someone or other land taken from land that has been found to be klasmatic or exempted, it is understood to be in the years that follow the thirty years.332

There were indeed many sales of klasmatic land in the tenth century.333 Nevertheless, the state did support the structure of the village for fiscal and military

reasons between the seventh and ninth centuries. In the tenth century, when the emperors were threatened on many occasions by powerful Anatolian landowners, they probably had political motives for trying to defend villages against initiatives by the powerful. Their legislation was based on the right of preemption for neighbors334 and was aimed at defending small landed property and the institution of the village commune against encroachment by large landowners, whether ecclesiastical or lay. A much-quoted passage in the novel issued by Romanos I Lekapenos in 934, which tried to prevent the powerful from “introducing” themselves into communes (by acquiring their lands), stresses the ultimately political importance of these small village landholders to the state: “The number of holdings (katoikeseis) is shown to be linked to the

332Fiscal Treatise, 116, 119.

333N. Oikonomides, “Das Verfalland im 10.–11. Jahrhundert: Verkauf und Besteuerung,” FM 7 (1986): 161–68.

334Cf. Lemerle, Agrarian History, 85–108; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 375–444. On the right of preemption, see E. Papagianni, “Protimesis (Preemption) in Byzantium,” EHB 1048–59.

abundance of food, to the payment of taxes, and to the fulfillment of military obligations, all of which would be lacking if this great number absconded.”335

Moreover, by stipulating that taxes should be paid in coin, the state was encouraging peasants to participate in the monetary economy and its circuits of exchange, a point that need not be elaborated as it is treated more fully elsewhere.336 When it was able to raise the taxes, as was the case from the beginning of the ninth century on,337 this was probably due to an increase in peasant productivity and land revenues, the result of improved security in some places.

Estates within Village Territory In the tenth century, the village territory was the theater of transformations, the result of which was to make the estate dominate the framework of agricultural production and to assist the growth of the rural economy. A possible reduction in the size of peasant holdings, together with poor harvests and insecurity, may sometimes have made villagers more vulnerable, resulting in more frequent cases of indebtedness and sales of land to larger landowners. Furthermore, village territories were farmed more comprehensively when estates were set up on them, supporting the peasants in a way that neither the village community nor the fisc could match, in spite of tax exemptions and relief. Finally, from yet another point of view, an efficiently managed estate would have allowed higher levels of dues to be collected than was possible within the context of the communal tax system. This set of facts may help us understand what happened.

As noted above, village society was not egalitarian.338 Some of the landowners had acquired vast holdings that in fact constituted small estates. In a novel of 996, Basil II instanced a layman called Philokales, a simple villager who rose to be protovestarios, and who gradually took over all his village and turned it into his estate.339 The same novel provides another instance of the way communal land was being transformed, this time to the church’s advantage: in nearly every province, it tells us, a large number of communes were suffering from encroachment by the monasteries, sometimes to the point of disappearing, or nearly so. The origins of these little monasteries often lay in a villager’s decision to found a church on his holding and become a monk. Two or three other villagers would soon join him, and when they died the local bishop would confiscate the church and self-servingly designate it a monastery, since monasteries came under his jurisdiction. He would appropriate the property or give it away, harming the villages in every instance.340 On other occasions, alluded to above, powerful men who had no connection with the village would introduce themselves onto its lands.

A significant example of the high stakes set on land in the tenth century is provided

335Svoronos, Novelles, 85; Lemerle, Agrarian History, 97.

336Treadgold, Revival, 38; cf. N. Oikonomides, “The Role of the Byzantine State in the Economy,” EHB 956–57.

337Cf. Theophanes, 486–87.

338About village society, see Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 219–31.

339Svoronos, Novelles, 203; Lemerle, Agrarian History, 104–5.

340Svoronos, Novelles, 209; Lemerle, Agrarian History, 112–14.

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by Siderokausia, as described in a judge’s act, dated 995. As we have seen, the small monastic establishment founded there in 866 had grown into an estate that belonged, first to Kolobou monastery, and then to Iveron, whereby the monastery initially contributed to the commune on the same basis as the peasants. The monastery, which disposed of considerable financial means, farmed this estate and extended it somewhat into a hitherto uncultivated area, the little coastal plain of Arsenikeia. Here it set up mills and gardens, planted orchards, and created meadows, establishing many paroikoi and raising great numbers of livestock, especially pigs. Some of these pursuits suggest that the “material needs” of monastic life, to which the judge alluded (ironically?) in the preamble to his act, were not the sole object of all this dynamic activity. The village inhabitants, too, were improving the territory, though they really were driven by necessity; indeed, they cleared fields at Arsenikeia, which involved them in a lengthy dispute with the monastery, as the latter’s livestock trampled the villagers’ sown land. This dispute was arbitrated on several occasions by judges, beginning in the middle of the century. In 995 a judge hoped to put an end to it by deciding to separate their respective properties, including both cultivated and uncultivated land. Thus he caused the paroikoi camp that had been set up on land belonging to the village to be destroyed by fire. At the demand of both parties, however, the judge had to include in his decision many special clauses aimed at preserving their respective interests. He ended by dividing the tax liability and the grassland rights between the monastery and village in proportion to the property owned by the two parties.341 This judgment was favorable to villagers to the extent that he curtailed the monastery’s pretensions and even made it retreat. However, though it did not formally destroy the commune’s fiscal framework, it clearly altered its unity. It also shows how the monastery and the peasants disposed of unequal means when it came to engaging in land improvement.

The problems had long been insecurity, defense, and subsistence, and the village had met the needs of an undeveloped economy by adjusting to a very partial and sometimes extensive exploitation of the available space. We have just seen how this was no longer the case in the tenth century. We will now see how the village commune disappeared in many cases during the eleventh century.

The Role of the Estate Framework

Estates were endowed with personnel to manage them, and their task was to increase land revenues. From the tenth century on, they assumed the leading role that had been held until then by the villages, albeit in an economy that was henceforth orientated toward demand, with monetary exchanges taking a larger share, as Ce´cile Morrisson has shown.342

341Iviron, 1: no. 9.

342C. Morrisson, “Monnaie et finances dans l’empire byzantin, Xe–XIVe sie`cle,” in Hommes et richesses (as above, note 1), 2:299–301. With regard to the role of money in the economy, see eadem, “Byzantine Money: Its Production and Circulation,” EHB 924ff, 937–38.

The Growing Role of the Large Estate in the Rural Economy Although there is evidence for the existence of estates in the seventh century, their importance seems, at that time, to have been limited. J. Haldon has suggested that there was some continuity in the domanial economy after the sixth century, irrespective of whether the property belonged to state, church or the social elite. This theory must be considered, although there are no precise indications to corroborate it. As he points out, the lack of security was not general, and the ancient domanial structures may well have continued to operate in various localities. In addition, the central part of Asia Minor seems to have long been divided into large estates on which stock raising was practiced, enabling a provincial aristocracy to survive or to be reconstituted fairly early on; this aristocracy can be seen in connection with this sort of economy from the ninth century on. It may be imagined that the former senatorial, or at least curial, elite, or local chiefs, as well as army officers, had managed to keep or acquire land both legally and illegally, taking advantage of war or simply unrest. The success of these “ranch” owners may be explained by the fact that herds are easier to protect in times of danger than crops or other forms of agricultural investment.343 Whatever the case, it seems that estates in the seventh century were often small and probably few in number, compared at least with what they had been and what they were to be. This seems to have been true of the state’s domains as well.344

In the eighth and ninth centuries, only a few examples can be offered, which suggests that the domanial economy was developing, albeit slowly. The wealth of the secular church and the monasteries was augmented by donations, given that foundations were financed by income from lay property.345 Even before the end of the first iconoclastic movement, many monasteries were founded, sometimes on property belonging to families grown wealthy in the service of the state,346 as was the case in Bithynia with the monasteries of Theophanes in Polichnion, Kalonymos, and Agros, or the monastery of Plato and Theodore of Stoudios at Sakkoudion. Some continued prosperous, as in the case of the Agauroi monastery near Prousa, which owned five dependencies in the region in the ninth century; however, it is impossible to assess the extent of these monasteries’ landed assets.347 Several canons of the Second Council of Nicaea (787) are devoted to the management of the church’s landed wealth; they recall that church lands are inalienable and that bishoprics and monasteries must retain a steward; they prohibit clerical involvement in the management of lay estates and lay management of church estates, which is evidence for the existence, at least, of a domanial economy in some regions.348

There were various reasons, including the fiscal exemptions for church lands that

343Haldon, Seventh Century, 153–72.

344Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 324.

345Lemerle, Agrarian History, 54–56; Thomas, Private Foundations, 117.

346Thomas, Private Foundations, 123–24.

347Cf. R. Janin, Les ´eglises et les monaste`res des grands centres byzantins (Paris, 1975), 195–99; 177–81; 132–34.

348Thomas, Private Foundations, 126.

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were probably implemented during the time of Empress Irene, why lay people were encouraged to turn their landed property into monasteries and to use paroikoi to farm them.349 Although neither the social elite nor the state was unaware of the importance of land revenues, this did not mean that the domanial economy was already playing a significant role. It was, however, no longer negligible. With regard to the fifth “vexation” of Nikephoros I (810), Theophanes evokes the pious foundations, orphanages, hostelries, hospices, churches, and imperial monasteries, whose property was cultivated by paroikoi, and he tells us that some lands belonging to these establishments were confiscated to benefit the administration of imperial estates (basilike kouratoria), whose rise seems to date from this period. The number of pious foundations was great enough for the exemptions they enjoyed to cause a perceptible reduction in the state’s income, and the fifth “vexation” was precisely that of reestablishing the payment of the hearth tax (kapnikon) by paroikoi on church estates, who had previously been exempted.350

At this time, the aristocracy in the capital and provinces owned estates in Bithynia, where the landowners sometimes sojourned, as in the case of a certain lady of senatorial rank who, around 820–830, normally lived in Nicaea but sometimes resided on an estate (chorion) that she owned.351

The slightly later correspondence of Ignatios of Nicaea (cf. note 23) provides a concrete picture of the church as a great landowner. It suggests that the metropolis of Nicaea had considerable revenues from land, although the tax burden was said to be unbearable. The metropolis owned olive groves that produced oil (letter 4) and arable land that was farmed indirectly, as “the church does not own a single ox.” The management was entrusted by the steward to a curator, who divided the land up among the paroikoi that he had settled on it. These owed the metropolis dues in kind, apparently a fixed share of the harvest (thus a pakton). That the wheat reserves stored in the steward’s office were considerable is suggested by the size of the claims made by the authorities of the Opsikion: on two occasions in the same year, 6 modioi (of wheat) for each member of each family of clerics (letters 1–3, 7–8).

The progress of monastic foundations was scarcely impeded by the second iconoclastic movement. What subsequently emerges is the growing role of the estates in the economy and the “circulation” of properties or their revenues: between the state and the lay people to whom the emperor presented gifts: between lay people and monasteries, with the former turning their estates into pious foundations in order to guarantee their status; and also between church and state, when Basil I tried to recover the management and revenues of ecclesiastic property.352

One example illustrates the circumstances in which monastic estates were developed between the end of the ninth and the end of the tenth century. We saw how John Kolobos founded a hermitage in Siderokausia in 866; he had received significant quan-

349Ibid., 129.

350Theophanes, 486–87; Thomas, Private Foundations, 128–29.

351La vie merveilleuse de saint Pierre d’Atroa, ed. V. Laurent (Brussels, 1956), chap. 51.

352Thomas, Private Foundations, 130–39.

tities of deserted land at Hierissos from Basil I that had probably been recently fortified, and he founded a monastery there, dedicated to John Prodromos, shortly after 833. The imperial monastery of Kolobou secured by fraudulent means an act of Leo VI that granted it ownership not only of almost all Athos, but also of property belonging to the communes of Siderokausia, Chlomoutza, “and others,” as well as of four (small?) religious houses. Although this act was annulled in 908 at the request of the monks of Athos,353 the monastery continued rich and powerful. It improved its lands, as we have seen, and was set above three big monasteries which, with their frequently considerable wealth and their paroikoi, became its metochia. Probably the oldest of these was the monastery of Abbakoum in Kassandra; the monastery of Leontia in Thessalonike had been founded by relatives of Constantine VII and, during the same period, that of Polygyros by the protospatharios Demetrios Pteleotes. Kolobou acquired further property of monastic origin. In 979/980, when, in exchange for two (imperial?) monasteries, one in Constantinople and the other in Trebizond, Kolobou was given by Basil II to the Georgian general and monk Tornikios, its property amounted to more than 10,000 ha (80,000 modioi). The monastery that Tornikios founded at Athos, soon known as “of the Iberians” or Iveron, was entitled to install at least 200 paroikoi on its estates (formerly those of Kolobou).354 It should be noted that Basil II gave Tornikios no lands that were not already monastic, no doubt because he did not want to distribute fisc property.

As the novels of the Macedonian emperors testify, the tenth century was the period when the number of large landed properties increased decisively. Once security had returned to a province, now protected by the army and administered on the basis of a reconstituted network of kastra, the powerful were incited by hopes of more regular and higher agricultural revenues to take action against the interests of the village communes and their members. These initiatives often did succeed, in spite of the laws against them. Indeed, it was not only the lay and monastic estates that grew in size and number. Metropolitans, archbishops, and bishops, as well as those responsible for pious or imperial foundations, number among the powerful who are denounced in the novel of Romanos I for introducing themselves within villages and increasing their possessions by means of purchases, donations, wills, or any other way.355

The state itself would exploit estates, a process that is easier to detect from the ninth century on, due especially to the precedence lists that reveal the organization of central services responsible for the management of these estates, and to the many seals that belonged to local persons in charge. Some of these estates have been discussed above in relation to their role as stockbreeders supplying the army. The income from other estates was attributed to the post (dromos) and to a variety of public establishments of a charitable nature (euageis oikoi). A number of these were administered by curators and by episkeptitai. It will be noted that the state in the tenth century retained lands reconquered from the Arabs for its own profit and use. Thus, after 934, land that had

353Proˆtaton, nos. 1 and 2. Cf. above, 258.

354Iviron, 1:25–32; (for the equivalence between the modios and the hectare, see note 51).

355Svoronos, Novelles, 84.

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been deserted by the Arabs of Melitene formed a curatorium that brought the fisc important revenues. Other curatoria were subsequently instituted at Tarsos, Artach, and in Antioch itself.356

In the eleventh century the state played a determining role in speeding up a process that it had not initiated and had tried to stop during the tenth century. The effect of this policy was to substitute large estates for village property almost everywhere, albeit without affecting the primacy of the smallholding. In this respect, the reader is referred to N. Oikonomides’ study of the evolution of the state’s fiscal policy in this volume; here I stress only those points that pertain to the present topic. The level of security had never been as high as in Basil II’s vast empire. The power of the state, the strengthened concept of dynasty, and the changes in the recruitment methods of the army all meant that from then on it made less sense to defend the rural commune. Furthermore, the fiscal value of the commune had also diminished, since the state drew greater revenues from estate lands than from its taxes. The experience of the palace services had made them aware of this since the ninth century. Oikonomides emphasizes that, from the beginning of the eleventh century on, the state no longer sought to sell deserted land but to keep it and organize it into estates cultivated by paroikoi.357 Furthermore, the state attempted to extend fisc property in the eleventh century; although deserted land could in principle be made into klasma only after thirty years, in fact this rule was not observed, and arranged desertions can be detected that allowed the law to be bypassed and the whole of a commune to be turned more quickly into an estate.358

The state’s interest in land was made explicit by Alexios I Komnenos’ fiscal policy at the end of the eleventh century. The fisc was well aware of the concept whereby the sum of a landowner’s land tax revenues made it possible to check whether he had usurped any land;359 once made a rule and combined with an increase in tax rates, this concept allowed the fisc to proceed to considerable expropriations of land in favor of the state. Indeed, these practices may have been very old.360 From 1089, however, they were applied on a grand scale by Alexios I, clearly with the purpose of increasing the quantity of fisc land, meaning the state’s wealth. In this way, the Iveron monastery had to cede more than 75,000 modioi of land to the fisc, and many other examples could be cited.361

Thus the land tax had become less important to the state than its revenues from land farmed by paroikoi on its own estates. Though emperors were still specifying, even

356Skylitzes, 224–225; Oikonomides, Listes, 356; Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 316–17.

357N. Oikonomides, “L’e´volution de l’organisation administrative de l’Empire byzantin au XIe sie`cle (1025–1118),” TM 6 (1976): 136–37.

358Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, 402–3; N. Oikonomides, “La fiscalite´ byzantine et la communaute´ villageoise au XIe sie`cle,” in Septie`me Congre`s international d’e´tudes du sud-est europe´en: Rapports (Athens, 1994), 89–102.

359This idea underlies several passages in the Fiscal Treatise.

360N. Oikonomides, “De l’impoˆt de distribution `a l’impoˆt de quotite´, `a propos du premier cadastre byzantin (7e–9e sie`cle),” ZRVI 26 (1987): 17.

361Iviron, 2:28–31; A. Harvey, “The Land and Taxation in the Reign of Alexios I Komnenos: The Evidence of Theophylakt of Ochrid’, REB 51 (1993): 139–53.

in the twelfth century, the number of paroikoi that a large landowner was entitled to install on his properties, this disposition did not necessarily signal a shortage of people. It could also reveal the state’s desire to scotch all competition on the labor market and to retain a rural population on its own estates, at a time when people were still very mobile. Though our information about the transformation of villages into estates is derived from normative texts and a few fiscal documents that reflect administrative concerns, the underlying logic was mainly economic. While the question of ownership was still important, the state was primarily concerned about the management of the land and the allocation of its revenues.

In the Athos archives, references to imperial estates (basilika proasteia) appear in the mid-eleventh century.362 Villages that are known to have possessed commune status in the tenth century became estates of the fisc, after which they might be ceded to a monastery or lay person, as was the case with Obelos, Dobrobikeia, Radolibos, Semalton, and Zidomista in the region of Pangaion alone.363 Further examples could be cited, but the total number of surviving documents is not sufficient to prove that this transformation of the structure of land ownership was general. This does, however, seem to have been the case. In Macedonia, the last reference to a rural commune dates from the mid-eleventh century.364 Twelfth-century documents are particularly rare in the Athonite archives, and it is difficult to reconstruct the situation at the time. In any case, it is certain that, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Macedonian countryside was made up of an almost unbroken network of estates that had replaced the former network of communes.

The boundaries of these estates sometimes corresponded to those of village territories, but this was not the rule. More often than not, the estates were not as extensive, showing that the process of turning village territories into estates was probably achieved in stages, according to the procedures described in the Fiscal Treatise or in the Vademecum edited by J. Karayannopoulos.365 This is also suggested by some documents.366 The soil appropriation maps that can be drawn from the delineations of property at this time in western Chalkidike show that large landowners, the monasteries at any rate, had sought to acquire neighboring estates, no doubt to make it easier to manage their lands, thus almost constituting principalities.367 Given that the Latin occupation after 1204 and the period of the first Palaeologan emperors do not seem to have introduced any great changes in the rules of landownership, it is likely that estates already prevailed over smallholdings by the end of the twelfth century. When Niketas

362For instance, Iviron, 1: no. 29, in 1047 (Choudina, Eunouchou, Melintziani, Rousiou, at the limits of the estates of Iveron).

363Iviron, 1: no. 30; 2: nos. 48 and 51.

364Oikonomides, “Fiscalite´,” 101.

365J. Karayannopulos, “Fragmente aus dem Vademecum eines byzantinischen Finanzbeamten,”

Polychronion: Festschrift Franz Do¨lger zum 75. Geburtstag (Heidelberg, 1966), 318–34.

366For instance, at the beginning of the 11th century, the village of Obelos in the Pangaion was divided into two estates, one of which belonged to the son-in-law of a protospatharios; cf. Iviron, 1: no. 30.

367Cf. Lefort, Chalcidique occidentale, maps in fine.

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Choniates discussed the pronoia system for financing the army under Manuel I Komnenos, he presented the situation of peasants, prior to the time when they had to pay fisc revenues to pronoia soldiers, in the following terms: “formerly their only master (despotes) was the fisc.” He appears to have been alluding to paroikoi on the estates of the fisc rather than to the members of a commune, which suggests that the domanial structure was already predominant at that time.368

This evolution is clear enough not to require further illustration. P. Magdalino stresses that there is little information about smallholdings in the twelfth century and that the legislation defending them remained viable under Manuel I Komnenos.369 At the same time, he presents an impressive picture of large landed property in this period: almost the whole littoral, from Constantinople to central Greece and the islands, belonged, in the twelfth century, to big landowners, often from Constantinople, the greatest of whom was the state.370 The geographical distribution of these large estates was unequal. Hendy has sought to establish the geographical entrenchment of the big landowners; in the eleventh-century Balkans, three-quarters of them owned property in Macedonia, the Peloponnese, Thrace, and Thessaly; in Asia Minor prior to the Seljuk conquest, three-fifths of them were originally from the central plateau or from Paphlagonia.371 These details provide important clues about the regions in which the process outlined above first began. However, from the eleventh century on, its most striking aspect is the omnipresence of the domanial structure.

Great Landowners Landowners and holders of estates formed a world radically different from that of the peasants, but that contained its own contrasts. Many of the great landowners belonged to the lower ranks of the provincial aristocracy, and their possessions were modest. The same applied to many monasteries and bishoprics. At the other extreme were the very great landowners, both institutions and private persons, who were masters of numerous estates, either situated in a single region or dispersed throughout the empire. Every kind of intermediate situation also existed. Furthermore, some of the powerful drew revenues from properties they did not own, as in the case of the charistikarioi (prebendaries) who were put in charge of monasteries. In the same way, pronoia soldiers in the twelfth century received dues or taxes owed to the state by paroikoi on estates of the fisc. It is only seldom that information about the composition and extent of a person’s landed wealth is known, so this is generally estimated from the number of estates that made it up. The cases of Kolobou/Iveron, referred to above, and of Lavra, which held ca. 50,000 modioi in Macedonia at the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth century, are exceptionally well documented.372 Each of these estates formed an oikos, a term that, like domus, dated from

368Nicetae Choniatae Historia, ed. J. L. van Dieten (Berlin–New York, 1975), 208 (hereafter Choniates).

369Magdalino, Manuel, 160–61.

370Ibid., 160–71.

371Hendy, Studies, 85, 100.

372Cf. Lavra, 1:74.