Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian

Abstract

The reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian (527–65) stands out in late Roman and medieval history. Justinian re-conquered far-flung territories from the barbarians, overhauled the Empire's administrative framework and codified for posterity the inherited tradition of Roman law. This work represents a modern study in English of the social and economic history of the Eastern Roman Empire in the reign of the Emperor Justinian. Drawing upon papyrological, numismatic, legal, literary and archaeological evidence, the study seeks to reconstruct the emergent nature of relations between landowners and peasants, and aristocrats and emperors in the late antique Eastern Empire. It provides a social and economic context in which to situate the Emperor Justinian's mid-sixth-century reform programme, and questions the implications of the Eastern Empire's pattern of social and economic development under Justinian for its subsequent, post-Justinianic history.

The early Byzantine economy in context: aristocratic property and economic growth reconsidered

“…In the papyri from Egypt, the types of documentation most commonly associated with directly managed large estates, such as estate accounts, become proportionately more significant as we enter the fifth century, whilst leases can be seen to decline in incidence. 108 This conforms very closely to the pattern of the English evidence. The world of estates described by Dyer, for example, is highly reminiscent of the world that was created by the Apiones around Oxyrhynchus: 'throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries', Dyer notes, 'lords relied on a group of farm servants (famuli) as the core of their labour force.…”

Building women's social capital in Late Antique Egypt: business owners and civic administrators

“…Egypt's size, agricultural conditions, and depth of natural resources made it a disproportionate contributor to the empire's coffers, 76 and the complex tax system was facilitated by the regular census of the population. 77 It was not, however, static.…”

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“…Kétségtelen, hogy ez az időszak vízválasztó volt a virágzó Római Birodalom időszaka és a középkor között. A járvány a nagy mortalitás miatt a gazdaságtól a kultúrán át a vallásig sok mindent megváltoztatott (Harper, K. 2017;Meier, M. 2016;Sarris, P. 2006), de a Kelet-Római Birodalom a sok haláleset ellenére fenntartotta adminisztrációját, hadseregét és hosszú távú politikai céljait. A kornak megfelelő szinten, elsősorban a betegek izolációjával igyekeztek a járványt megfékezni.…”