The Economic History of Byzantium From

worked under their orders, and they themselves depended upon proprietors, financial backers, or patrons. One example reveals how a vertical chain of dependency supplemented the horizontal solidarity of the guild. Jacob, the hero of an embroidered but by no means imaginary account written around 640, is a young Jew from Ptolemais, who has come up to Constantinople.136 Having led the life of a wastrel for several years, he settles down, entering into the service of a wealthy man, plausibly a merchant. Jacob initially lodges with him, and subsequently rents quarters and acts as his agent. A bit later, this rich “patron” entrusts him with a small sum of money on which he is expected to generate a return, undoubtedly by opening a shop. Finally, certain of his honesty, the benefactor entrusts Jacob with garments valued at 2 pounds of gold (silk garments, one would suppose) to sell illicitly in Carthage by going door to door, with a salary of 15 nomismata per year, which roughly corresponds to 10% of the sum invested in this shady operation, from which a high profit is expected. Jacob is discovered to be an unbaptized Jew and imprisoned. To extricate him from these difficulties, Jacob’s Constantinopolitan patron (prosta´ th") calls on his own “protector,” a koubikoularios of the imperial palace, who sends a ship to repatriate Jacob, and the money, on 13 July 634. The three players in this story occupy three different social levels: Jacob is an employee entrusted with increasing responsibility; his “boss” and patron is, if not a merchant, then at least an individual who engages in commerce and who, in order to enrich himself more quickly, seems somewhat prone to avoid corporative and legal constraints; however, in this three-level society, wealth is not enough, and the patron himself needs a powerful “protector,” who in this context is undoubtedly not a financial backer, but rather a man of power, who capitalizes on his influence.

Free and Unfree Employees The ergasteriakoi employed, under contract, individuals with differing levels of skill. Male and female workers were numerous in the textile trades, as suggested by Psellos’ description of a eleventh-century panegyris, not strictly speaking a guild celebration, but rather a kind of kermess—semiprofane, semireligious— that brought together the women who worked at carding, weaving, and the manufacture of garments.137 Goldsmiths, by contrast, employed only one or two apprentices, who would help them for the time that it took to learn the trade; St. Anastasios, in the seventh century, having deserted the Persian army, enlists as apprentice with a goldsmith of Hierapolis in Syria/Mabbug, and then with another in Jerusalem.138 In the Life of Theodore the Martyr, we come across a shop in which two goldsmiths work, one with the rank of “master” (dida´ skalo"), the other with that of “apprentice” or “employee”(maqhth´", mi´sqio").139 The apprenticeship function, moreover, appears clearly in the Book of the Eparch,140 which alludes to it while seeking at the same time to limit the

136Doctrina Jacobi, 5.20 (pp. 214–19, 237–40).

137Sathas, MB, 5:532–43; see the interpretation of Laiou, “The Festival.”

138Flusin, Saint Anastase le Perse, 1:48–51 (Actes anciens, 8, 10); 310–13 (Passion me´taphrase´e, 3).

139AASS, Nov. 4:62–63 (chap. 13).

140EB, 11.1; 12.1.

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number and the role of assistants or specialized workers onto whom the members of the guilds might pass their obligations and whom they might use as itinerant sellers. Notaries were allowed only one scribe, whom they would present to the eparch and who would have been compensated in proportion to the fees of his master; scribes did not have the right to draft the legal formulas of the acts that they recorded.141 Money changers were entitled to two employees, bonded by them, to tally the coins on the counter, but they could neither send “their own people” into the street, nor entrust them with the accounting books, nor take leave and delegate the responsibility for the “bank” to them.142 The same regulation limits the duration of a contract between a worker and his employer to one month, with advance payment, a provision that undoubtedly reflects less a certain precariousness of employment and more a scrappy competition among the managers of the ergasteria for able workers.143

It may have been to avoid an excessive mobility that the ergasteriakoi employed personnel or workers who were not freemen and were thus completely dependent, whom they could train and keep. A number of studies have examined the persistence of slavery and even its renewed importance in the ninth and tenth centuries,144 coinciding with the urban revival and the military successes of Byzantium. It is essential to note that the East did not follow the western model of cities whose “air” made men “free” and of craftsmen who were skilled, competitive, and organized into western-type “guilds” that would not sustain the poor profit-earning capacity of dependent labor.145 Slavery is essentially an urban phenomenon, but it may not (or may no longer) be seen as the driving element of a “slave system of production.”

A number of different cases should be noted. Most of the slaves of wealthy artisans, like those of wealthy aristocrats, belonged to the household and were not involved directly in production or sale. The Life of St. John the Almsgiver, at the beginning of the seventh century, recounts the story of the customs official Peter of Alexandria, who had himself sold at a low price as a kitchen slave to a goldsmith from Jerusalem with many servants.146 Basil the Younger busies himself in healing a good number of domestic slaves, among them one Theodore, styled “head slave” (prwteu´wn), envied by his “companions in slavery” (su´ndouloi) because he has gained the trust of his master, a rich, blind ergasteriakos who resides in the quarter of Sophianai.147 There is another

141EB, 1.17, 18, 24.

142EB, 3.4, 6; see also 11.1; 12.4.

143EB, 6.2, 3; 8.10, 12: workers were under contract for a period of time corresponding to the salary received.

144Kazhdan, “Tsekhi”; R. Browning, “Rabstvo v vizantiiskoi imperii (600–1200),” VizVrem 14 (1958): 38–55; A. Hadjinicolaou-Marava, Recherches sur la vie des esclaves dans le monde byzantin (Athens, 1950), 46–47 (concerning the slaves in the Book of the Prefect); H. Ko¨pstein, Zur Sklaverei im ausgehenden Byzanz (Berlin, 1966), esp. 103ff; eadem, “Sklaven in der Peira,” in L. Burgmann ed., FM 9 (1993): 1–33, which notes that approximately 10% of the cases adjudicated by the judge Eustathios Rhomaios (ca. 970–1045) concern slaves, but that no mention is made of whether their work is artisanal or commercial.

145See in particular, Weber, General Economic History, 145ff.

146Vie de Jean de Chypre, chap. 21 (pp. 369–72).

147Life of St. Basil the Younger, ed. A. N. Veselovskii, “Razyskaniia v oblasti russkogo duchovnogo stikha,” Sbornik Otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk 46 (1889–90) suppl.:

category as well: slaves forced by their masters to work in their shop or workshop on the same terms as free employees. Their price varied according to their intellectual and technical skills: skilled slaves (physicians, secretaries or “notaries,” bookkeepers, specialists in goldwork, weaving, or manufacture) sold at approximately ten times the price of unskilled slaves; in the twelfth century, according to Balsamon, the price might reach, but never exceed, 72 nomismata, or 1 pound of gold.148 But the Book of the Eparch discloses yet another category: slaves enrolled in a trade through a corporation, that is, those who, with the authorization and guarantee of their masters, held official responsibility for an ergasterion and were enrolled in this capacity in the corresponding corporation. This was, as we have seen, explicitly allowed in certain trades,149 and prohibited only with respect to the dressing of raw silk, but for economic rather than social reasons.150 The prohibition on money changers putting their slaves in their place at their benches sought to prevent the dispersion of responsibility and not, perhaps, the slaves’ access to the profession.151

To judge by these texts, there was thus a fundamental difference between the slaves employed by the ergasteriakoi in an economic capacity and those of the rich or “powerful” who were set up as ergasteriakoi by their masters and entrusted with capital on which they were expected to generate a return. In the Life of St. John the Almsgiver, the customs official Peter gives 10 pounds of gold to one of his slaves, described as a “notary”—that is, a secretary—to purchase a business in Jerusalem.152 In this case, the gesture is charitable, but it was most often motivated by self-interest, consisting of a financial investment made all the more secure in that the individual to whom the sum was entrusted was completely dependent. The provisions of the Book of the Eparch find an unexpected parallel in a commentary of Zonaras, a twelfth-century canonist, who observes that a slave can be the majordomo of his master’s home (that is, the head of his household), or that he can be appointed by his master to head an ergasterion, or even have a sum of money entrusted to him by his master to engage in commerce.153 It is worth noting that these are the same three circumstances in which the Jacob of the Doctrina successively finds himself: first a servant, then associated with a trade, and finally given a sum of money that he is expected to make grow; the difference is that Jacob is free, while the slave is not. Jacob’s patron necessarily has to place trust in him, whereas the master holds the reins of the slave whom he commands.

51–54; see also 54–55: a slave (oijke´th") belonging to another ergasteriakos is healed of dropsy; cf. C. Angelidi, “Dou'loi sth`n Kwnstantinou´polh to`n 10o Aij. HJ marturi´a tou' oJsi´ou Basilei´ou tou' Ne´ou,” Su´m- meikta 6 (1985): 33–51.

148Commentary on Canon 85 of the Council in Trullo: Rhalles and Potles, Su´ntagma 2:500; for the price of slaves, see the statistics gathered in Hommes et richesses, 1:351–53.

149EB, 2.8–9; 4.2; 6.7; 8.3.

150EB, 7.5 (for fear of an excessive segmentation of purchases).

151EB, 3.1.

152Vie de Jean de Chypre, chap. 21 (p. 370).

153Commentary on Canon 82 of the Holy Apostles, which prohibits conferring orders on a slave without the consent of his master: Rhalles and Potles, Su´ntagma, 2:106, cited in E. Papagianni, “To`

pro´blhma tw'n dou´lwn sto` e“rgo tw'n kanonolo´gwn tou'12ou aijw'na,” in To` Buza´ ntio kata` to`n 12o aijw'naÚ Kanoniko` di´kaio, kra´ to" kai` koinwni´a, ed. N. Oikonomides (Athens, 1991), 411–12.

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The “Archontes” The artisan-merchant was rarely his own master. Most often, he depended more or less closely on a richer or more powerful individual, who might simply be the proprietor, his financial backer, or even his “protector” in a society that remained quite Roman and in which influence ( patrocinium, prostasi´a) counted as much as money. It appears that an ergasteriakos in Constantinople rarely owned his own business. The Book of the Eparch never alludes to this possibility (with one possible exception),154 whereas it makes frequent reference to rents paid by operators and to a practice, condemned as abusive and severely punished, that consisted in an ergasteriakos causing the rent of a competitor to be raised in order to take over the other’s premises.155 The fisc itself gained profit from the public locations that it leased for commercial purposes (covered markets, hostelries, simple stalls situated between the columns of covered porticoes, sites in the marketplace); Benjamin of Tudela claims knowledge that the state derived a significant portion of its revenues from such practices.156 The church was not idle either, and we see the church of Alexandria in the seventh century assigning a special “supervisor” with the task of making the rounds of the taverns (or possibly the grocers’ shops) that it owns in order to collect the rents.157 The landed property of pious or charitable institutions, as well as that of dignitaries or leading citizens, often included retail shops or workshops, sometimes interspersed among buildings or the “courtyards” (aujlai´) of which they formed part;158 the revenues from these may have served special purposes. Attaleiates owned several buildings together with their commercial “courtyards” at Constantinople, Rhaidestos, and Selymbria; in his will, he deeds to the hospice and the monastery that he founded the revenues of a bakery in the capital (leased at 24 nomismata), of a perfumery (leased at 14 nomismata), and of premises rented out to a physician at 5 nomismata.159 A novel of Manuel I (1148), repeated by Isaac II Angelos (1187), makes mention of one Chrysobasileios, proprietor of the skala of St. Marcian “cum universa ejus comprehensione et conti-

154In EB, 4.6, the term oijko´kuro"/oijkoku´rio" probably designates the operator, rather than the proprietor, of an ejrgasth´rion bestiopratiko´n.

155EB, 4.9; 9.4; 10.3; 11.7; 13.6; 18.5; 19.2.

156Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, ed. Adler, 13.

157Vie de Jean de Chypre, chap. 14 (p. 363).

158An aujlh´ was an interior courtyard bordered on all sides with buildings, generally including some shops. Regarding the topography of these aulai, see in particular Actes de Docheiariou, ed. N. Oikonomides, Archives de l’Athos (Paris, 1984), no. 4 (pp. 73ff), and Actes d’Iviron, ed. J. Lefort, N. Oikonomides, and D. Papachryssanthou, Archives de l’Athos, 4 vols. (Paris, 1985), 2: no. 52 (commentary by J.-P. Gre´lois, “A propos du monaste`re du Prodrome `a Thessalonique,” Byzantion 59 [1989]: 78–87). The ownership of an aujlh´ includes that of its shops; such was the case for the majority of the large Athonite monasteries in Thessalonike, Hierissos, and elsewhere: Lavra, 1: nos. 18, 59; Iviron and Docheiariou, as above; such was also true for the Constantinopolitan monastery of Pantokrator at Panion near Rhaidestos, for the Jewish quarter of Koila near Abydos and the emporia of Madytos and Smyrna (“Le Typikon du Christ Sauveur Pantocrator,” ed. P. Gautier, REB 32 [1974]: 115, 117, 119, 121), and for Pakourianos at Peritheorion (“Le Typikon du Se´baste Gre´goire Pakourianos,” ed. P. Gautier, REB 42 [1984]: 37).

159“La Diataxis de Michel Attaliate,” ed. P. Gautier, REB 39 (1981): 42–45, 98–101; cf. Lemerle,

Cinq ´etudes, 109–11; Harvey, Economic Expansion, 227.

nentia et quae in ea sunt domibus et ergasteriis.”160 Demetrios Chomatianos (12th–13th century) cites the testament of an individual named George Euripiotes, whose patrimony included a butcher shop near the Forum of Constantine.161 The dues collected by the owners of fair stalls also warrant passing mention.162

Nonetheless, deeming insufficient the revenues gained from sites rented out to artisans, the rich or the “powerful” may have sought to engage more directly in commercial speculation by means of loans or investments, or even by placing at the head of the ergasterion a dependent financed by them, and thus enrolling him in the guild; such situations seem to have been permitted under tenth-century prefectural rules. What was not permitted, however, was the creation of a parallel economic sector. The concern of the legislators was not to bar the aristocracy from all commercial activity,163 but rather to preserve the existence of guilds to the extent possible—a difficult task in a system that was tending increasingly toward economic freedom.

Taxes, Duties, and Parallel Networks

Taxes, Tax Grants, and Tax Devolutions We are less well informed about the taxes and various dues that were levied on artisans and merchants than we are about the taxation of land and the peasantry. We may nonetheless distinguish, in addition to ground rents for shops or market stalls, the following:

1.a base tax (te´lo"), undoubtedly comparable to an urban land tax, attached to buildings and, it would seem, paid by the proprietor if levied by the fisc, or by the shop’s operator, if, as commonly occurred, it was payable to an individual or a religious institution;

2.in certain cases, a tax proportional to the value or quantity of commercial products, but assuredly distinct from the kommerkion;164

3.various payments to agents of the eparch or, possibly, to the leaders of the guild; and

4.finally, various obligations or corve´es, assumed either in labor or in cash.

This general catalogue varied, of course, by trade and by city. Artisanal activity and commerce being more prosperous in Constantinople, they were also, it appears, more heavily taxed.

The documentation, which is exceedingly fragmentary, does not allow us to trace

160Zepos, Jus, 1:446–47. See Magdalino, Constantinople me´die´vale, 80.

161J. B. Pitra, Analecta sacra et classica Spicilegio Solesmensi parata (Paris-Rome, 1891), 6:107 (no. 25).

162See Laiou, “Exchange and Trade,” 730–32, as well as Papagianni, “Byzantine Legislation,” 1088ff.

163See the production and sale of silk textiles or garments, below, 435–35.

164See below, 450, with respect to fishermen, a somewhat exceptional situation to the extent that fishing was allied with agriculture. According to Ep. 7 (1:31) of Theodore of Stoudios, the empress Irene reduced the rate of this tax. For commentary on other fiscal aspects of the letter of 801, see N. Oikonomides, Fiscalite´ et exemption fiscale `a Byzance, IXe–XIe s. (Athens, 1996), 30–31, 33, 39. Regarding the kommerkion, see N. Oikonomides, “The Role of the Byzantine State in the Economy,” EHB 986–88.

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the evolution of fiscal policy, but does permit us to gauge its transformations and its effects at intervals. One may begin with two novels of Justinian, which cast light on certain dysfunctions about which representatives of corporations had come to complain to the emperor.165 We learn that each corporation formed a “community” (koino´n), responsible for allocating among its members a tax (te´lo"), assigned once and for all by the fisc: in the event of tax evasion by certain individuals, a drop in the number of ergasteria, or a fiscal exemption granted by imperial fiat, individual payments became intolerable as the aggregate was apportioned among a smaller number of payers. This system of fiscal solidarity, which posed difficulties for the rural world, raised even more serious problems in an urban economy that was much less stable, in which business could easily sour or specializations readily alter. Moreover (and such was the gravamen of the complaint), legislative measures dating back to Constantine and to Anastasios had “granted” Hagia Sophia fiscal revenues from 1,100 shops, exempt from any other tax or duty from that point forward, so that the Great Church might ensure the transport of the dead to their resting place outside the city. This measure, the guild masters added, would have been sustainable had not a large number of other ergasteria belonging to churches, hospices, or monasteries, to imperial estates, and to functionaries and dignitaries also been exempted from any and all taxes and duties for the greater profit of their owners (upon whom this tax devolved, exemption representing nothing more than a tax transfer), and to the detriment of the guild members, who had seen their own portions of the balance due increase two-, three-, and even tenfold. The emperor decided to restore the “endowment” of Hagia Sophia, but to limit the exemption to 1,100 shops; in addition, he affirmed the fiscal status of all the other ergasteria and threatened to confiscate those whose proprietors had sought illegally to change “fiscal duties into personal income,” or those who sought to escape the collective tax through the “patronage” (prostasi´a) of a dignitary, a functionary, or an ecclesiastical establishment.

One may suppose that the decisions of 537 had little effect, given that the emperor himself multiplied the grants of taxes in favor of dignitaries, churches, or religious institutions. In seventh-century Alexandria, the official who made the rounds of the shops that belonged to the patriarchate collected not only the rents but also the “public taxes” (dhmo´sia te´lh) and the sportulae (sunh´qeiai), as would a genuine functionary.166 Again in this case the tax grants were rationalized by the social role of the church. But when the service rendered disappeared, as was the case with pauper burials in Constantinople, which were subsequently carried out by lay brotherhoods, the tax exemption became a privilege.167 One may trace this evolution to its last stage thanks to

165CIC, 3:269–73, 316–24, Nov. 43 and 59; G. Dagron, “Ainsi rien n’e´chappera `a la re´glementation: Etat, Eglise, corporations, confre´ries. A propos des inhumations `a Constantinople,” in Hommes et richesses (as above, note 37), 2:155–82.

166Vie de Jean de Chypre, chap. 14 (p. 363) (the interpretation, contained in a note, is erroneous).

167Novelles de Le´on VI, 12 (pp. 50–51). Leo VI in examining Novels 43 and 59 of Justinian, noted that the Great Church no longer performed the services that justified its receipt of the tax revenues of 1,100 shops; he nonetheless maintained the tax grant, deeming that these sums, which for centuries had been commingled with normal revenues, would in any event be used for philanthropic purposes.

the discovery, on the last page of Codex Patmiacus 171, of notices drafted or recopied in 959 (the circumstances of their composition are uncertain) concerning the sale of five Constantinopolitan ergasteria during the two years preceding.168

1.The type of business is specified with respect to four of the five: linen cloth or apparel, goatskin cloaks or headgear, articles of silk imported from Syria, all of which confirms the importance of textiles in the Constantinopolitan economy. It also bears mentioning that one of the shops includes a street stall rented out to a different business.

2.The text mentions nine proprietors, only one of whom, a metaxoprates, appears to run his own shop. The other ergasteria are leased to ergasteriakoi by proprietors who are not corporation members; five of them are functionaries or dignitaries in Constantinople.

3.The sale price of the shops—in other words, the capital invested by their propri- etors—ranges from 6 to 10 pounds of gold (between 432 and 720 nomismata) for a rental income that ranges from 25 to 38 nomismata—higher than, but comparable to, the rents sought by Attaleiates a century later; they correspond to a return on investment of a little more than 5%.

4.The base tax on the buildings (te´lo"), the base of which remains unknown, constituted between 0.17 and 0.81% of the sum invested, and was only in one case paid by the owner to the fisc. In the four other cases, the shop’s operatorrenter himself paid the tax directly to a pious institution: the bursar of Hagia Sophia in two cases,169 the confraternities of the Baths of Germanos and of Xylinites, and the hospice of Euboulos.

Trends already discernible in the Justinianic legislation are here corroborated. Artisans and merchants were rarely the owners of their shops, a fact that does not mean that they were in a position of dependence. In addition to commercial taxes, strictly speaking, and rents, they were often subject to a tax that evidently continued to be widely ceded to pious institutions by the state. This tax was considered to be another form of revenue, thus encumbering a property whose “ownership” is unclear: it might attach to its user, to the proprietor of the premises, or to the beneficiary of the fiscal transfer. These roles did not blend into one another, but the distinctions among them were decidedly less fixed than they would be in the contemporary world, and the vocabulary sometimes leads to ambiguity. From the sixth to the tenth century, official policy with respect to artisanal industry was not dissimilar to the more clearly articulated policy that the emperors strove to apply to the rural world by defending the small proprietors of the chorion, who were characterized by solidarity in their obligations toward the fisc against the “patronage” of the powerful and the rapacity of large landowners. The policy remained contradictory, however, in cities as in the countryside.

168N. Oikonomides, “Quelques boutiques de Constantinople au Xe sie`cle: Prix, loyers, imposition (cod. Patmiaticus 171),” DOP 26 (1972): 345–56.

169This may be a reference, in 959, to two of the 1,100 shops ceded to Hagia Sophia in the 4th– 6th centuries.

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Parallel Systems: The Church and the Oikoi

The greatest danger to the equilibrium of the “guild” economy was clearly the existence of parallel networks that were not subject to the same encumbrances, nor to the same constraints. The quasi-autonomous systems of production and sale that were organized by the church represented the first competing system. As evidenced by papyrological and epigraphic documentation from the early period, clerics and monks had access to a variety of occupations from the outset. With the exception of private “economies,” church canons felt it sufficient to bar the exercise of public functions— fiscal functions in particular—that would have put clerics in service to the state; employment as a steward or bursar for aristocratic families, which would have removed them from ecclesiastical supervision and placed them in a relationship of dependence; professions viewed as suspect or morally dangerous (innkeepers, physicians) or those that procured “shameful profit” (money-handling, lending at interest, working rented land; defense, against payment, of the interests of others). At the same time, these relatively simple criteria were applied with great flexibility and fared poorly against two opposing phenomena whose effects were nonetheless complementary: the integration on an individual basis of many clerics into civil society, and the development of the church’s wealth in land and property, which gave birth to a powerful ecclesiastical economy managed by numerous clerics or by members of the laity acting as intermediaries.170

The problem of forbidden occupations crops up again in the canonical commentaries of the twelfth century under a new jurisprudence that was supported by several synodical acts of patriarchs such as John IX Agapetos, Loukas Chrysoberges, and Michael of Anchialos. One particular question arose—and was answered in the nega- tive—of whether “readers” were subject to the same restrictions as “clerics of the sanctuary.” Rigorists stressed the incompatibility of the eparch’s “seal” required for entry into a guild with the episcopal seal given to clerics of all orders;171 they noted also the processions or festivals organized by tradesmen, in which clerics could not participate without being false to their calling. Do these repeated cautions denounce a common practice? It is difficult to answer in the affirmative with respect to clerics,172 but not so with respect to monks, whose status was somewhat hazier and who could more easily exempt themselves from the canonical rules. Eustathios of Thessalonike, in the twelfth

170Cf. E. Herman, “Le professioni vietate al clero bizantino,” OCP 10 (1944): 23–44; E. Papagianni,

“Epitrepoj´mene" kai` ajpagoreume´ne" kosmike´" ejnascolh´sei" tou' buzantinou' klh´rou,” in Praktika` tou'

D Panellhni´ou Istorikou'J Sunedri´ou (Thessalonike, 1983), 145–66; G. Dagron, “Remarques sur le

¨

statut des clercs,” JOB 44 (1994): 44–47.

171If, after some hesitation, the patriarchal tribunal authorized a deacon to pursue his activities in the practice of law, it was because it accepted the idea that he was exercising a “liberal” profession (ejleu e´rio´n ti spou´dasma) and that he did not belong to a su´sthma… see the commentary of Balsamon on Nomocanon 8.17, Rhalles and Potles, Su´ntagma, 1:157–60.

172At the two extremes of the period under discussion, we find two clerics (readers) who are shoemakers in Alexandria in Vie de Jean de Chypre, chap. 51, pp. 401–2, 514–15, and a priest/boatman in The Life of Leontios, Patriarch of Jerusalem, ed. D. Tsougarakis (Leiden, 1993), 46–47 (§ 12).

century, accused them of engaging in all trades imaginable, both in the city and in the countryside.173

Such attitudes had only limited effect so long as they reflected individual positions. They corresponded, moreover, to an ancient monastic tradition that counseled solitary hermits to earn money through manual labor so that they would be a burden to no one and so that they could afford to give alms. The problem was different, however, when whole communities organized themselves as an economic network, a development evident in the reforms of Theodore of Stoudios. The rule that Theodore established at the very start of the ninth century placed a high value on nonagricultural and artisanal activities with the dual intent of extolling the penitential value of labor and of ensuring the autonomy of a community whose population might number a good thousand. As a result, products circulated between the Constantinopolitan monastery and its Bithynian dependencies and were, no doubt, partly commercialized in urban markets. The same would have held true for all monasteries of some importance. In the wake of Stoudios and the initiatives of St. Athanasios of Lavra,174 the Athonite monasteries engaged in production, owned ships that traded their products at least as far as Thessalonike and Ainos—possibly even to Constantinople—and owned aulai in both those cities; it remains uncertain whether the aulai were leased to independent ergasteriakoi or whether they were intended for the sale of the monastery’s surplus production.175

No text better evokes this expansion of a monastic economy than the regulation issued, subsequent to an investigation, by Constantine IX Monomachos in 1045.176 It seeks once more to limit the number and the tonnage of ships and notes that the lavra ton Kareon had become a commercial station (ejmpo´rion), in which the monks could sell and buy merchandise that they themselves were forbidden to use. The maritime export of surplus to the nearest markets was allowed but not the wholesale purchase of goods for retail resale at a higher price. It is likely that this commercial activity extended over a good number of urban markets and escaped most of the administrative rules and fiscal levies. A letter of John Tzetzes confirms it, contrasting the freedom that Constantinopolitan monks enjoyed to sell the fish that they had caught with the nitpicking supervision by the eparch’s agents of fishermen or fishmongers who were members of the laity.177

However, churches, monasteries, and “pious houses” were only individual cases in a more general system, that of the imperial, aristocratic, monastic, or charitable “houses” (oikoi) or foundations that placed into direct contact the income or products of landed

173De emendanda vita monastica, in Eustathii metropolitae Thessalonicensis opuscula, ed. T. L. F. Tafel (Frankfurt am Main, 1832), §§ 60, 62, 122–23, pp. 229, 243–44.

174Vitae duae antiquae Sancti Athanasii Athonitae, ed. J. Noret (Turnhout, 1982), vita A, 33–38 (§§ 71–81), 51 (§ 108); what the hagiographer praises, the monks of Athos condemn; cf. Actes du Proˆtaton ed. D. Papachryssanthou, Archives de l’Athos (Paris, 1985), 95 ff.

175See Lavra, Iviron, and Docheiariou, cited above, note 158.

176Proˆtaton, no. 8 (lines 53–77, 133–36).

177See below, note 384.