Download PDF | Angeliki E. Laiou - Peasant Society in the late Byzantine Empire_ A social and demographic study-Princeton University Press (1977).
347 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS book and its author owe a great deal to the kind cooperation of a number of colleagues. A significant proportion of the research material is contained in documents which form part of the archives of the monasteries of Mount Athos, and which are still unpublished, or just being published. When I began work on this project I asked Professor Paul Lemerle of the College de France to allow me to use documents which his colleagues had photographed in Mount Athos, and which are being published in the exemplary series Archives de r Athas. Professor Lemerle generously opened the collection of the College de France to me, and I had the privilege of working there for some months. He and his colleagues showed me the utmost courtesy, and were always available for help in matters of palaeography or substance; lowe a special debt of gratitude to Miss Denise Papachryssanthou and Professor Nicolas Svoronos for their help.
I cannot adequately express my thanks to Professor Lemerle and the other scholars whose advice was so generously given; I can only express the hope that they will find in this book a certain justification for their kindness. The history of the Byzantine peasantry is replete with problems, and I have much benefited from discussing some of them with other colleagues who work in Byzantine social history.
I would like to thank particularly Professors Peter Charanis, Nicholas Oikonomides, and Speros Vryonis for helping me clarify my thinking on several important matters. The early stages of my research were subsidized by a generous grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. This allowed me to spend the year 1971-1972 in Europe, to collect materials and to start formulating some of the questions I have dealt with in this volume.
I am most grateful to the Foundation for its help. A summer fellowship from the John Canaday Fund of Harvard University gave me the opportunity of concentrating for a few months on learning Russian, which was essential for my research. The bulk of the quantitative analysis of the sources discussed in this book was processed in the Brandeis University computer. To these institutions I would like to express my profound thanks. My husband, Stavros Thomadakis, has been a constant source of encouragement and support.
He helped me formulate my ideas, and gave me invaluable advice in my struggle with the intricacies of economics and statistics. Any elegance of analysis that this book may contain is to be attributed to his help. Finally, a special word of thanks is due to my mother, without whose love, kindness and help this book could not have been written. Angeliki E. Laiou-Thomadakis Rutgers University
CHAPTER I
The Problem and the Method
IN the last two centuries of its formal existence, the Byzantine state underwent a significant transformation, reflecting fundamental changes in the structure of society. What had been a strong, centralized state became progressively weak and decentralized under the double pressure of external enemies-the Ottoman Turks and the various Italian maritime cities-and internal developments. The fiscal, administrative, political, and judicial functions of the state were, to a large degree, abandoned, and were assumed instead by other institutions or individuals: the church, the towns, and the lay and ecclesiastic landlords. Economically, the Byzantine state was weakened by the fact that foreign trade, and even to some degree domestic trade, passed into the hands of the Italians. In the realm of finances, we find that various taxes which had belonged to the state were now either abandoned or collected by others: the Italian traders, privileged towns, and privileged laymen or ecclesiastic institutions.
Administratively, one can witness the progressive weakening of the central authority as individuals or groups of individuals received or seized the power to govern specific areas. Long before the Turkish conquest, the Byzantine state had diSintegrated, as great magnates, or aristocrats of moderate wealth, or towns acquired virtual self-government. Indeed, the state itself often behaved as just another individual great magnate, and the only realm in which it still functioned as a central power was the realm of foreign policy.
The most interesting developments in Byzantine society of the Palaeologan period took place in the countryside. It is, perhaps, a truism to say that in the majority of preindustrial societies agriculture or animal husbandry forms the primary economic activity and the source of the economic surplus, and that therefore the fundamental social relations are those which prevail in the countryside. While some exceptions exist, notably, in the European Middle Ages, the case of Venice until the fifteenth century, when it acqUired a substantial hinterland, the Byzantine Empire throughout its history was a society in which the countryside and social relations in the countryside were of fundamental importance.
In the Palaeologan period, the role of the countrySide was even further increased by the fact that the economic system, under the pressure of the Italian maritime cities which controlled much of the trade and notably the trade in foodstuffs, was thrown· more than ever toward agriculture. It has been recognized by several historians that during the last two centuries of its existence Byzantine society became heavily feudalized. 2 Land being the primary source of wealth, revenues from land were distributed by the Palaeologan Emperors among their followers and among civil and military officials in the form of pronoia. While originally such grants carried the obligation of servicemilitary or other-eventually, and given the fact that many pronoiai soon became hereditary, the pronoia-holders did not necessarily fulfill their service obligations. By the end of the period, furthermore, what had been primarily a grant of revenues often became a grant of territorial rights as well.
The countryside was parceled out among landlords great and small; their revenues consisted of the taxes which the peasants had originally paid to the state, plus a part of the surplus, paid as rent and collected in the form of part of the yield. The peasant became a paroikos, a dependent peasant, as groups of families or entire villages were granted to the landlords. For land without men was, of course, unproductive, and the landlords were interested not merely in the possession of land but also in the control over the productive forces. Lay landlords varied greatly in wealth and power. There were "soldiers" who held small estates with a few families of paroikoi and with annual revenues which varied, but were lower than forty or fifty gold coins.
The "soldiers" who formed the bulk of the army probably had annual revenues of about seventy or eighty hyperpyra (gold coins).3 The great magnates had much larger properties, extending over entire areas and yielding immense revenues: the Palaiologoi, the Kantakouzenoi, the Synadenoi, and others formed part of this group of magnates. 4 The most wealthy landlord, however, was the church.
The Palaeologan Emperors, especially Andronikos II (1282-1329) and his successors, gave the church massive donations of land and peasants, making the church the greatest landlord in what remained of the Empire. There were, of course, gradations of wealth within the church itself: small monastic foundations or small churches might only control a few parcels of land, while the great monasteries of Mount Athos, especially Lavra, Iveron, and Chilandar, had vast possessions. In the course of the Palaeologan period, the power and influence of the great landlords increased at the expense of that of people of more moderate wealth; there was a certain consolidation of power which can be seen in the fact that small pronoia-holders seem to be under constant pressure, and in the fact that great landlords incorporated land belonging to smaller landlords. 5 In this system of progressive feudalization, the peasant found himself linked with ties of dependence to lay or ecclesiastical landlords.
The dependence was both economic, since part of the products of the paroikos' labor was appropriated by the landlord, and juridical, since the paroikos was expected to stay on the land of his landlord. While the paroikos was not a man without rights and was certainly not a slave, his subjection was nonetheless real. 6 Equally real was his opposition to this subjection, an opposition which sometimes assumed the form of active struggle against the landlord, and more frequently was expressed passively, through flight from the landlord's estates. 7
The survival of a number of important sources, covering primarily the period from the late thirteenth to the middle of the fourteenth century, allows us to study the structure of peasant society and the effects of feudalization upon the productive capacity of the peasant and upon the demographic development of rural society. Narrative sources and the few documents surviving from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century give a very gloomy picture of the Byzantine countryside, by then limited to parts of Thrace and Macedonia, a few islands, and the Morea-the latter having a development of some peculiarity. In this period, the countryside was devastated and depopulated; men were scarce and land plentiful but uncultivated.
Productivity was very low; even the economic resources of the church had declined precipitously. At first glance, this state of devastation and depopulation may be ascribed to external and catastrophic factors. The incursions of Serbs and Ottoman Turks disrupted the countryside both in demographic terms and in terms of productivity. The Black Death may have had an effect on the demographic development of the countryside, although the extent of its ravages has yet to be precisely determined. 8 The general political instability, the constant civil wars, the intervention of the Italian city-states had catastrophic economic results.
Yet it is a recognized fact that the effect of external catastrophies depends to a significant extent upon the structure of the society which they strike. 9 Even the Black Death, which was unquestionably catastrophic in western Europe, had differential effects, striking mostly the poor urban populations and less the richer urban classes and the countryside.10 Thus, although catastrophic factors do play an important role, the historian can only understand and evaluate their impact when he understands the forces operating in the society he is studying.
In the particular case of the Byzantine countryside, it is important to look not only at the catastrophic events but also and primarily at the structure of peasant society. The present study tries to determine the condition of the productive forces and the social relations which predominated in the Byzantine countryside in the fourteenth century. In particular, it is concerned with the structure of the village, with the family and kinship groups, and with the social and demographic trends which were present in the rural society in the course of that century.
It will be shown that already in the first half of that century, that is, at a time of political instability but before the catastrophic collapse of the state, the peasant was becoming poorer, and his society was experiencing a demographic decline, whether cyclical or secular. This conclusion emerges quite clearly from the documentation. Furthermore, an effort will be made in this study to interpret and explain the reasons for this decline. The late thirteenth century and the fourteenth century down to approximately 1340 are especially rich in terms of documentation.
This is due, on the one hand, to the process of feudalization of society. A great number of laymen and monasteries received imperial grants of lands, peasants, revenues, and privileges, and some of the documents of donation have survived. These documents were periodically reissued and carefully preserved by the persons who benefited from the donation. Apart from imperial acts of donation, there are private acts of donation, acts of sale of land, documents relating to disputes between various landlords,· and acts guaranteeing the possessions of individuals or institutions.
There are also periorismoi, or delineations of property, which were carried out by imperial officials. There are, most important for our purposes, praktika, or inventories of the possessions of laymen and ecclesiastics. The surviving praktika are of various kinds, the most useful among them being those inventories which list all of the elements making up the possessions of a landlord: the land, its revenues, the peasant families with their possessions and the taxes they pay to the landlord, and all other seigneurial rents. 11
In these documents, the peasant household is carefully described; the head of the family or household appears first, followed by the name of the wife-if the head of the household is a man-the names of their children, inlaws, and other co-resident relatives. The list of possessions of the peasants is more or less complete, depending on the document and on the assessor; but usually, land possessions, animals, vineyards, gardens, fruit trees, beehives, sometimes houses, boats, and mills are listed. Undoubtedly there are errors in these lists, and indeed it is possible to document some of them. It is also possible that the information gathered by the assessors was not entirely accurate, and that its transcription was subject to errors. Furthermore, the praktika were primarily fiscal documents, drawn up so that the landlord and the state would have an accurate record of the landlord's revenues; the researcher should be careful in using them for other than fiscal purposes.
Despite these strictures, it is evident that these sources give unique and precious documentation, allowing us to study the structure of peasant society at given moments and to discern the social, economic, and demographic trends over time. The bulk of the documentation is limited by chronological, geographic, and social factors. There are some praktika describing monastic possessions in Asia Minor in the first half of the thirteenth century.12 But most of Asia Minor was lost to the Byzantines in the late thirteenth and early four teenth centuries, and in the European possessions of the Byzantine Empire the documentation begins in the late thirteenth century.
The first major apographe or assessment took place in the years 1300-1301; thereafter, there were major apographai in the years 1316-1318, 1320-1321, 1338- 1341, and sporadic assessments in the intervening years. After the middle of the fourteenth century, the assessments stop, probably because of the instability and the political decline of the state; they reappear briefly in the early fifteenth century. Thus, the bulk of the documentation for the European possessions of the Byzantine Empire covers the period from the late thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century. Geographically, the documentation is limited to Macedonia, specifically the area between the rivers Axios (Vardar) and Strymon (Struma), and extending north to include Strumitsa and its environs. There are some fourteenthcentury praktika from Lemnos, but they are of limited number and usefulness. The Lemnos praktika, on the contrary, become very important in the fifteenth century.
Finally, the documentation is biased in social terms also. The vast majority of surviving praktika concerns the property of monasteries or of foundations which later became monastic, and most of them have been preserved in the archives of the monasteris of Mount Athos. Only a very small number of praktika refer to the possessions of laymen, and these have only survived because the possessions in question later were incorporated into monastic estates.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق