Everyday Life in Byzantium

by Tamara Talbot Rice

  Apart from the soldier-farmer or theme-holders working the land in the border areas, and those of their sons who kept themselves by cultivating land which they had come to own by making it productive, there were singularly few peasants in the Byzantine world (using the word ‘peasant’ in the sense of a self-employed smallholder). Most people engaged in food production were either labourers, with scarcely more liberty than serfs, or slaves. Though villages were numerous many formed part of a large estate and their inhabitants came under the landlord’s jurisdiction instead of the state’s. Until the seventh century (and possibly even later) life in the eastern districts revolved round the large estates. These belonged either to members of the old Roman aristocracy or the new Byzantine nobility and had grown up at the end of the third century when the economic crisis led people to invest their money in land.

  Because of the survival of documents (written on papyrus) relating to one such family, the Apions, we possess more information about landowners in Egypt prior to the Arab conquests of the seventh century than about those living at other periods in other parts of the Empire. The Apion records cover the years 488 to 625. The founder of the estates, Theodore John, was almost certainly a Greek, not an Egyptian. He was a distinguished Byzantine official, a member of the Sacred Consistorium, who was appointed governor of the Egyptian province of Arcadia. His son Strategius also became a distinguished civil servant and was rewarded by Justinian with the title of gloriosissimus patricius. Those who succeeded him as head of the family spent their lives in Egypt, often serving as senior administrators in the district in which they lived. The family was at its most prosperous during Justinian’s reign. Its estates were administered on lines very similar to those followed by Justinian in governing Byzantium. Strategius employed some 20 men, each with power of attorney, for the purpose. Each was expected to send Strategius detailed reports at regular intervals. Some of these agents acted as accountants, others as legal advisers, others as estate managers. The Apions had what amounted to a private bank where money and goods due to them were paid in, loans to peasants handled and charity dispensed. They had their own fleet of boats, their own service of mounted messengers and couriers, even their private soldiers to protect the accountants transporting the taxes due by the Apions to the government tax inspector in Alexandria. Though Justinian attempted to ban private armies such as this one, a number survived on the larger estates both in Egypt and in Cappadocia. It is, however, even more astonishing to find that (from about the end of the fourth century) some landowners such as the Apions maintained their own private prisons. They contained runaway slaves who had been recaptured, and villagers whom they decided to punish, who served sentences which the landlords themselves imposed. A record for the year 538 reveals that 139 men imprisoned in one such institution were allowed the same issue of wine on Easter Day, Epiphany and St Michael’s Day as were the men serving sentences in the state prisons.

  Wine and oil were very important products. On the Apions’ estate deliveries of both were made direct to the head cellarer, who decided how much was to be stored in his masters’ cellars and how much sold. However, cereals formed the main crop, with animal husbandry filling an equally essential role. When the Arabs conquered Syria and Egypt these estates were destroyed and many Christian landowners were forced to abandon their homelands and migrate into Byzantine-held territory. Many settled there on land which had never been cultivated, to eke out a living as small, independent farmers. However, others were able to acquire large estates in a relatively short period of time. Though many landowners had come to consider life in the country the equivalent of exile and to cling to the capital and its court, others delighted in living far removed from governmental supervision. Some became very powerful. Like the turbulent barons of medieval Europe they were bold and strong-willed; many conducted themselves in the manner of petty chieftains. Certain of them even minted their own coins, and they built villas which were often superb. In these the rooms were placed round a central courtyard which was often adorned with a mosaic floor. Their interiors were divided into two by a corridor, the reception rooms being on one side and the private apartments on the other. Others preferred to live in old houses of architectural merit.

  72 Ground-plan of the Romano-Byzantine palace at Stobi in Yugoslavia

  The family of the future Patriarch Philaretus, whose daughter was to marry Emperor Constantine VI, were among those who preferred old architecture to new. In the eighth century, when Philaretus was still a youth, they were living on their estates in the district of Sinop in a magnificent old house. Its sumptuous furniture included a round ivory table inlaid with gold, large enough to hold 36 diners, and chests filled with precious gold and silver articles and fine clothes. The family numbered 30 people, for, in addition to Philaretus and his parents, his two married sisters, their husbands and children, were all living in the house. They employed numerous slaves and servants to attend to their needs. Their estate included 48 villages each so well supplied with springs that an elaborate system of irrigation was developed. Their stock numbered 100 oxen, 600 head of cattle, 800 mares, 80 mules and riding horses, 12,000 sheep and numerous hives—at that time an essential on every farm.

  It was during the fifth century that two categories of farm workers, in addition to that of the smallholders, had become established. One consisted of men who, though technically freemen and as such obliged to pay taxes were in fact tied to a particular piece of land and were thus virtually serfs; when the land they worked was sold they were automatically transferred with it to its new owner. The other, rather larger group, was made up of slaves. Some landowners owned so many of them that when they were called upon to provide soldiers for the army they did not hesitate to send their slave agricultural workers. Numerous though the slaves were there were never sufficient people to cultivate all the available land. By the seventh century the shortage of farm labourers was so acute that the emperor sent the Slays he had taken prisoner in western Europe to Asia Minor to provide sorely needed peasant labour.

  The shortage eventually induced the government to afford a measure of protection to the peasants. Regulations were drawn up during the seventh century and embodied in a code known as the ‘Farmer’s Law’. It set out to ensure that the men who were lucky enough to be independent smallholders should become the owners of the land they worked. Nevertheless, many of these seemingly fortunate people were in fact often deprived of this advantage by the system of taxation in force in the rural areas. Known as the annona, it stipulated that a village, with its orchards, fields and common grazing lands, was to be assessed as a single unit instead of individually. Since slaves were not taxed even though many helped to swell the population of a village, yet since the total number of inhabitants were taken into account in the assessment, it fell to the smallholders and serfs, even though they often constituted a minority of the inhabitants, to raise the taxes for which the village as a whole was liable. Taxable land was re-assessed every 15 years, and so were the farm animals; these were treated as a similar source of revenue as harbours, markets and saleable goods. When an assessor had completed his calculations he informed the village elders of the result; the latter had to notify each taxpayer of the amount he was expected to contribute. It was customary for this tax to be paid largely in kind and to be handed to the government’s tax collector, but in later times the villagers frequently found themselves obliged to deliver it to the local landowner who, as often as not, kept it for himself.

  When it was first introduced the annona took the form, as we have already seen, of a combined land and poll tax. As such it had the effect of making the neighbour of a defaulter responsible for the fugitive’s share, and this in turn tied the taxpayer to the land. By depriving him of the liberty to move from the village the annona gradually reduced the taxpayer to the status of a serf. The ‘Farmer’s Law’ attempted to avert this by separating the poll tax from the land tax. With their liberty of movement restored, the freemen among the peasant
ry quickly realised that there was no longer anything to prevent them from leaving the village in search of better land or easier working conditions. Until the eleventh century, when the Seljukid advance into Anatolia made farming there both dangerous and often unprofitable, there was always a good deal of uncultivated though productive land to be found in Asia Minor. Indeed, to begin with there was so much of it and the country’s need for food was so great that the emperors attempted to solve their economic difficulties by giving large tracts of land to private individuals who then had to cultivate it and, as property owners, pay taxes on it.

  Though many small freemen farmers generally owned a couple of slaves or employed a servant to assist them in the house and on the land, they were so poor that few who did so owned more than a single horse, a donkey, a cow with its calf and a couple of oxen; yet, in the eighth century, the great landowner who owned 100 yokes of oxen, 500 head of grazing cattle, 80 horses and 12,000 sheep was equally typical. In addition to working their own plots of land the small farmers often therefore had to hire themselves out to a neighbouring rich landowner. Even then many fell into debt and built up tax arrears. If it came to the worst they were left with no alternative but to sell their fields to their rich employers and to continue working them in the capacity of serfs, helping thereby to increase the possessions, wealth and powers of the large landowners. By the tenth century estates comparable in size to the earlier ones in the east had grown up in the Empire’s western regions such as Boeotia. One very rich landowner in the Patras region, the widow Danielis, owned 80 estates and a number of towns where women working together in workshops wove considerable quantities of linen and silk. Her treasure chests were reputed to be filled with valuables and sumptuous clothes. Whenever she set out in a litter she was accompanied by 300 slaves. At her death she bequeathed her possessions to the emperor, who promptly freed 3,000 slaves and sent them to Italy as colonists.

  73 Goatherd From a silver dish, sixth century

  74 Harvesting An ivory plaque showing Adam and Eve, tenth century

  75 Shepherd loosing his dog in pursuit of game

  76 Ploughing with oxen

  Both from illuminations in on eleventh-century ms of the Homilies of St Gregory Nazianzus

  Romanus Lecapenus was particularly anxious to protect the small agriculturalist and in 934 he passed a law which aimed at limiting the size of large estates by forbidding their owners to purchase agricultural land. Since most peasants had by then become so poor that the taxes were a burden they could no longer endure, they did their utmost to evade the regulation in order to dispose of the land on which they were taxed. Their anxiety to get rid of it was such that they were even ready to exchange their status of freemen for that of serfs. Furthermore, since land was then the only existing form of investment, its sale and purchase continued to take place as often as in earlier times, even though the law contained a loophole which enabled a dishonest purchaser to avoid paying the seller. Ill-feeling between rich and poor was further aggravated by the failure of many wealthy landowners to make good the damage they might have done to the property of a smallholder.

  Throughout the years it was always the poorer countrymen who bore the brunt of the rural system of taxation. Both the rich landowners and the monasteries continually benefited from special privileges and exemptions. Yet it was precisely when they had secured so many advantages that the pronoia was re-introduced: it had been in existence during the opening phase of Byzantine history, but had since lapsed in so far as civilians were concerned, though not the Church. It was designed in its revived form as a reward for those who had rendered signal service to the state. The beneficiary was to receive an estate for use during his lifetime. In return for cultivating and developing it he could retain all its revenue without paying any taxes on it. Many pronoia holders used the wealth they obtained in this manner to buy up land owned by tax-paying peasants or smallholders; by adding these fields to the pronoia estates the once taxable strips ceased to be so. As a result, from the eleventh century, government revenue from the countryside steadily decreased whilst the exemptions accorded to privately and Church-owned lands increased, even though the pronoia estates were not at the time heritable. The Comnenes made pronoia holders serve in the army if needed, but by removing them from their estates the output obtained from the latter diminished. The state’s supply of food was accordingly reduced at the very time when more funds and supplies were needed by the army fighting the Turks. Whilst the emperor’s coffers remained unfilled, private families benefiting from the pronoia increased their wealth, and monasteries owning vast estates grew steadily richer. To control the growing economic crisis Constantine IX Monomachus had to take a step which all his predecessors had so far avoided: he was forced to debase the value of the nomisma, a step which deprived it of the position it had enjoyed for centuries as an internationally recognised currency.

  Many landowners who made fortunes between the years 1025 and 1071, when the Seljukid victory at Manzikert ended their prosperity, had to abandon their estates to live in the capital. There their aggressive temperament enabled them to oust the military from their privileged position at court and in the administration. In the countryside the small farmers and agricultural workers became more dependent on the remaining landowners. Many peasants were drafted into the army; the land suffered as a result, nor did the army benefit from the intake. Following the defeat at Manzikert, fighting against the Seljuks continued intermittently throughout the next century and a half, and wherever either army passed the peasantry suffered; crops were ravaged, fields laid waste and cattle and poultry slaughtered. Yet following his return to his capital in 1261 Michael VIII thought it essential to propitiate the landed gentry. To do so he decided to let sons of pronoia holders inherit their fathers’ estates, thus perpetuating the family’s right to the property, and the latter’s continued exemption from taxation. It was a high price to pay for their loyalty, for the change inevitably worsened the country’s already acute economic crisis.

  77 A smith and his wife at work

  Until the Seljukid conquest of Anatolia disrupted the region’s agriculture, Asia Minor was an important cattle-breeding area and a granary. The cattle breeders were not nomads in the true sense of the word; like many present-day Turkish shepherds, they spent the winter months in their villages, and at the approach of summer moved to pasture their beasts in the fertile uplands. In this way they reared large numbers of horses, donkeys, mules, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. This was assuredly a freer, happier form of life, and perhaps also an easier one, than that which fell to the lot of labourers employed in cultivating the soil. Though both ran the risk of being robbed by brigands or attacked by wolves, the shepherd had his dog to defend him and could seek refuge in the surrounding hills.

  The villagers were always in danger of being despoiled by their own soldiery or being stripped bare by foreign troops, whether coming as invaders or, as in the case of the Crusaders, as supposed friends. To work the soil they had tools as primitive as those that had been used in early Christian times. These consisted mainly of a simple wooden plough pulled by oxen or mules, a double-pointed hoe, two-pronged forks, spades, sickles, scythes, mattocks, double-headed mallets, a planting stick and sometimes also a sharp, heavy, pointed stone or prod fitted into a handle. Mules were used to transport loads, oxen to drag all heavily loaded carts since, in the fifth century, even post-horses could not pull a load exceeding 492 kilos in weight, for if they did so their collars choked them. Oxen were also used for pumping water and for threshing; as in many countries in the Middle East today, they were lashed to a pole and walked round and round the hard threshing-floor, trampling the grain with their unshod feet. Even riding horses were not shod with iron shoes till the ninth century and were ridden with no more than a saddle cloth, halter or snaffle. However, from the ninth century a saddle and stirrups were widely used as well as iron shoes, and the village blacksmith, who had until then been employed in making and mending the
simple tools and implements needed by the villagers, now shod horses as well. A woman or small boy kept his fire going by working the bellows. Land was measured by means of ropes of prescribed length, being dragged by oxen in the presence of an official called an apographeus.

  The peasants wore long tunics which were sometimes sleeveless but always worn pulled in at the waist, with the fullness gathered in the front. Their breeches reached to their ankles and they either went barefoot or wore heel-less shoes. Often they tied a cape round their shoulders, but they seldom appear to have worn hats. Their houses were generally little better than square cabins, at best divided into two rooms and roofed with tiles, but the more successful farmers lived in two-storied houses. In these the ground floors served as hen houses, stables and store rooms, and the upper ones, with access by an external staircase, contained the family’s rooms. In mountainous areas these cottages were built of stone; elsewhere they were constructed of brick. The village potter and brick-maker was often one and the same person, but in the larger villages these occupations were distinct. In either case these craftsmen were fully employed providing both the local landowners and the peasants with building materials, storage vessels and table utensils. They were as essential to the rural inhabitants as the carpenters who, with the blacksmith, were the only other artisans to be found in the villages.