Rural population and production remained the most important sector of the economy and its share was probably greater than in the sixth century, at least in the eighth and ninth centuries, before slowly returning in the tenth–eleventh centuries to a ratio between primary and secondary production roughly similar to that of the sixth century. The main tools, techniques of tilling, and crops were by and large the same as previously, sericulture excepted, and the most important change lay in the distribution of land, as will be seen below. The Farmer’s Law, probably “a practical guide for the benefit of the country judge” dating to the early eighth century,47 records the normal tools of a peasant: spade, mattock, pruning-knife, sickle and axe; this list is indirectly confirmed by the chronicles which mention the use of such tools as weapons by peasants to defend themselves, and the tools are directly attested in the growing material from rural excavations.48
Production techniques are mainly known from indications in the Geoponika, compiled in the tenth century, combined with scattered later mentions in monastic and other documents. A two-year rotation cycle was partly applied and fields were given over to grazing (and consequently manuring) after harvest and before ploughing. Sowing legumes on part of the fallow land increased its fertility. The same result was also obtained by the well-known practice of selecting seeds. Yields, of course, varied greatly according to the quality of land and climate. In modern Greece, yields per hectare varied from c.5 quintals in Chios to 9.8 in Macedonia and 11.5 in Arcadia. In the early twelfth century, in the Macedonian village of Radolibos, documents suggest a minimum cereal yield of 5.1:1, that is around 5.3 quintals per hectare.49 Better climatic conditions from the ninth century onward may have fostered agricultural production; it benefited also from increased security and new settlement. Cereals were cultivated in Thessaly, Thrace, Macedonia, Bithynia and the Pontus,50 which accounts for the emperors’ constant interest in the repopulation of these areas. These areas hold a dominant position in the distribution of preserved seals of “annonarioi” or “horreiarioi,” officials in charge of imperial granaries.51 No information is available on the relative ratio of wheat to barley; rye and oats were apparently introduced or reintroduced later. The cultivation of legumes acquired great importance owing to their efficacy in restoring the soil and their role in everyday diet, especially that of the poor in the cities. Dry vegetables (ospria: lentils, peas, vetches, etc.) were cultivated in all peasant gardens according to saints’ lives of the period and later monastic documents. In the suburbs, and even in urban gardens, they coexisted with a great variety of fresh vegetables.52 The olive tree was cultivated in most coastal areas from southern Italy to the Peloponnese, the islands and Bithynia or Lydia.53
Vines must have remained ubiquitous wherever mild winters and altitude permitted their cultivation. But the quality of the wines certainly declined and only in the tenth century do the names of a few vintages reappear, which implies wider distribution than the local trade of ordinary wines. The variety of other fruit – species adapted to temperate Continental or Mediterranean climates: apple, pear, plum, quince, cherry, peach, walnut, chestnut, pomegranate, almond, pistachio etc. – was a specificity of Byzantine (and Islamic) agriculture compared to the West. Not only did fruit play a part in the peasant’s diet; it was also a source of profit for farmers near great or smaller cities or for areas that could export them as dry fruits.54 In Macedonian and southern Italian forests, the chestnut was cultivated or simply collected in the ninth century.55 Industrial textile plants like hemp and flax, essential for the rigging and sails of ships, are documented in Thessaly, Macedonia, Thrace, and Anatolia.56 Red dyes could be extracted from the kermes and cochineal, parasites on oak trees, madder could be mixed with indigo to fake expensive murex purple, sumach (rhus) was a source of yellow, while various leaves, bark, acorn-cups and roots would serve for tanning and dyeing leather.57
The mulberry, whose leaves feed silkworms, could grow in many regions and must have spread in this period: N. Oikonomides plotted the diffusion of sericulture by connecting it to the distribution of seals of kommerkiarioi into Anatolia in the seventh and eighth centuries.58 From the ninth century onward reference to the Peloponnese as ‘Morea’ (the land of mulberries) and the wellknown report on the sidonia (silk cloth) and other precious textiles given to Basil I in 880 by the widow Danelis, a great landowner with possessions near Patras,59 point to mulberry cultivation being widespread in the region. The importance of a well- and apparently long-established silk industry in tenth-century Constantinople speaks for the availability of indigenous, Byzantine raw silk. When the transformation of the cocoon into silk yarn was undertaken in the producing regions it constituted a labor-intensive and profit-yielding activity. But the presence of Syrian merchants selling raw silk in Constantinople in the tenth century points to a shortage of material in Byzantium.60
On untilled waste land as well as on fertile meadows cattle raising was widely practiced on a varying scale. Every village needed to raise a few oxen for ploughing or transport, as well as donkeys, sheep for wool and meat, and other animals, such as cows, goats, pigs, and poultry for provisioning and trading. Bithynia is known to have provided Constantinople with animals for slaughter in the tenth century.61 On great domains such as those in Cappadocia, the imperial stud farms raised horses of all types, from expensive war or riding horses to packhorses and other pack animals (mules and the like) for the imperial baggage train which was described in the treatises on imperial expeditions.62 But the organization of these stud farms is not known. In spite of its exaggerations, the Life of Philaretos hints at the importance of herds on a big private estate of the late eighth century; the saint is supposed to have owned 600 cows, 200 oxen, 800 horses, 80 mules and packhorses and 12,000 sheep.63 Philaretos’ domain, a possible forerunner of many other aristocratic estates in tenth-century Anatolia, leads us to consider the relationship between villages and estates in the rural economy of this period.
Landlords and Peasants: Village (chorion) versus Estate (proasteion)
The eighth and ninth centuries and part of the tenth are generally described as dominated by village communities consisting of peasant landowners, who were collectively responsible for paying taxes to the state.64 It is the fiscal role that primarily defines the Byzantine rural community. In terms of settlement, these were grouped habitations, characteristic of Mediterranean landscapes to the twentieth century, and certainly constituted the dominant form of both settlement and land use. Only from the late tenth century onward did the creation of many hamlets on their outskirts modify this pattern. The functioning of the early medieval village community (chorion) is described in the Farmer’s Law.65
The status of the peasant (georgos) had improved over that of the colonus, certainly because of the scarcity of manpower: he could move and sell his products freely, and owned or possessed land which he could alienate or exchange with no restrictions. The availability of land explains the fact that uncultivated land, whether long deserted or recently abandoned, could be either put to common use, or divided among the members of the village community. The law alludes specifically to land clearance. However, social relations between the members of the village were less pacific and egalitarian than some scholars want them to be. A few slaves (douloi) were employed as shepherds and are mentioned later on estates, but the sources do not reveal any more of their role.66 Peasants would also leave the village and its fiscal obligations and go elsewhere.67 Some are mentioned as working a lessor’s (chorodotes) land on a share-cropping (morte) basis of 1/10.68 This ratio apparently implies that the lessee met the fiscal obligations. But it is not certain that this 1/10 rate always applied and later contracts show a higher figure of 1/4 in the eleventh century.69 One may ask whether this could be due to the demographic increase and to a less favourable situation of rural manpower in the later period.70
The estate does not feature in the Farmer’s Law but had by no means disappeared. In the eighth and ninth centuries the state and the Church were already maintaining or developing their property: Nikephoros I restored to the imperial kouratoreia the management of lands he had confiscated from religious institutions richly endowed by Irene.71 The correspondance of Ignatios the Deacon shows the economic power of the metropolitan see of Nicaea in the 820s, its dependent peasants (paroikoi), its harvests that had to be protected from the claims of the authorities of the Opsikion, and the relationship of the nearby metropolitan see of Nicomedia with the imperial domains (kouratoreia). At the same time, in the ninth century, the romanced life of Saint Philaretos can be taken as offering an example of extended private property and exploitation on the Anatolian plateau.
Even if it is exaggerated, the mention of his original wealth in Paphlagonia (48 estates, large and irrigated, numerous slaves, and immense herds)72 must have conveyed some impression of reality to the contemporary audience. Progressively, provincial military commanders were able to accumulate land, specially in frontier or insecure zones. Great military families already held large estates in the East: the Male¨ınoi, Argyroi and Phokades in Cappadocia, the Skleroi near Melitene, the Doukai in Paphlagonia, the Melissenoi near Dorylaion.73 That the trend was a general one is confirmed by the tenth-century imperial legislation limiting the acquisition of land by the “powerful.”74 This accelerated in the next century as will be seen in Chapter IV, where we discuss the economic implications of the shift to estates from the landowning, tax-paying peasant who was prevalent till some time in the tenth century.
Notes
46 Lefort, “The Rural Economy,” EHB, pp. 231–310 provides the best account.
47 W. Ashburner, “The Farmer’s Law,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 30 (1910), pp. 85–108 (Greek text) and 32 (1912), 68–95 (English translation and commentary, to be used with caution); P. Lemerle, The Agrarian History of Byzantium (Galway, 1979), pp. 27–67.
48 A. Harvey, Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900–1200 (Cambridge, 1989), 123–5;M. Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre `a Byzance du VIe au XIe si`ecle (Paris, 1992), pp. 46–52; B. Pitarakis, “T´emoignage des objets m´etalliques dans le village m´edi´eval,” in Lefort et al., Villages, pp. 247–65.
49 See the accounts in Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, pp. 80–4; Harvey, Economic Expansion, p. 139 and Lefort in EHB 1, p. 259.
50 J. Teall, “The Grain Supply of the Byzantine Empire, 330–1025,” DOP 13 (1959), pp. 89–139, at pp. 117–28; Hendy, Studies, pp. 46, 49–50.
51 J.-C.Cheynet, “Un aspect du ravitaillement de Constantinople aux Xe/XIe si`ecles d’apr`es quelques sceaux d’hˆorreairioi,” Studies in Byzantine Sigillography 6 (1999), pp. 1–26, map, p. 10.
52 J. Koder, “Fresh Vegetables for the Capital,” in Dagron and Mango, Constantinople and its Hinterland, pp. 49–56.
53 Hendy, Studies, pp. 49–57; Harvey, Economic Expansion, pp. 145–7.
54 Kaplan; Les hommes et la terre, p. 36.
55 G. Noy´e, “Byzance et Italie m´eridionale,” in L. Brubaker (ed.), Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive? (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 229–43; Eadem, “Economie et societe dans la Calabre byzantine,” Journal des Savants (juillet–decembre 2000), pp. 209–80.
56 Teall, “Grain Supply,” pp. 117–28; Hendy, Studies, pp. 46, 49–50.
57 Dunn (as above, n. 9), pp. 256, 279–95. There is no general study of Byzantine dyes. On natural dyes and medieval pigments, see now B. Guineau, Glossaire des mat´eriaux de la couleur et des termes employ´es dans les recettes de couleurs anciennes (Turnhout, 2005); for a short introduction, B. Guineau and F. Delamare, Colors: The Story of Dyes and Pigments (New York, 2000).
58 N. Oikonomides, “Silk Trade and Production in Byzantium from the Sixth to the Ninth Century: the Seals of Kommerkiarioi,” DOP 40 (1986), pp. 33–53, reprinted in his Social and Economic Life, art. VIII.
59 Vita Basilii, V.74.
60 D. Jacoby, “Silk inWestern Byzantium before the Fourth Crusade,” BZ (1991/2), pp. 452–500 (= idem, Trade, Commodities and Shipping in the Medieval Mediterranean (Aldershot, 1997), art. VII), p. 454. On the process and its complex operations, see Muthesius, EHB 1, p. 150. Possible shortage: J. Shepard, ‘Silks, Skills and Opportunities in Byzantium: Some Reflexions,’ BMGS 21 (1997), pp. 246–57 (stimulating review article of Muthesius’ studies).
61 EB, chs. 15, 16 and other texts assembled in Geyer and Lefort, La Bithynie, pp. 75 f.
62 Haldon, Three Treatises, pp. 118–19; idem,Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World 565–1204 (London, 1999).
63 M. H. Fourmy andM. Leroy (eds.), “La vie de saint Philar`ete,” Byzantion 9 (1934), pp. 113–15.
64 See p. 51.
65 Ashburner, “The Farmer’s Law”; Lemerle, Agrarian History, pp. 2
66 Lefort, EHB 1, pp. 241–2. 67 Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre, pp. 383–6.
68 Ibid., p. 262 and cf. idem, “Quelques remarques sur la vie rurale `a Byzance d’apres la correspondance d’Ignace le Diacre,” in Kontoura-Galake (ed.), Dark Centuries, pp. 365–76.
69 Lefort, “Rural Economy,” in EHB 1, pp. 306–7.
70 See Chapter IV.
71 Theophanes, ed. De Boor, I, pp. 486–7; C. Mango and R. Scott, The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor (Oxford, 1997), pp. 668–70.
72 Above, n. 63.
73 See J.-C. Cheynet, Pouvoir et contestations `a Byzance (Paris, 1990), pp. 207–37.
74 Lefort, EHB 1, pp. 286–7. However, Cheynet (“L’aristocratic byzantine (VIIIe–XIIIe si`ecle),” Journal des Savants [July–Dec. 2000], 281–322), referring to the novel of 996 (E. McGeer, The Land Legislation of the Macedonian Emperors: Translation and Commentary (Toronto, 2000), pp. 112, 117), considers this legislation to have been partly inspired by the need to check the increasing power of the Anatolian aristocracy and their menacing rebellions.
By ANGELIKI E. LAIOU (Harvard University) and CECILE MORRISSON (National Center of Scientific Research, Paris) in the book 'THE BYZANTINE ECONOMY', Cambridge University Press, UK, 2007, p.64-70. Digitized, edited and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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