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Byzantine feudalism
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Page 4
In the epoch of the pagan Roman Empire, military landownership existed, the distinctive feature of which was that the land on the borders of the Empire was granted as hereditary property, but on specific condition that the possessors should defend the frontiers and hand down this obligation to their children. The beginning of this measure is usually referred to the period of Emperor Severus Alexander, i.e. to the first half of the third century, when he granted the frontier lands taken from the enemy to the frontier soldiers (limitanei) and their chiefs upon condition that they should maintain hereditary military service and not alienate the lands to civilians.
Although some scholars categorically state that these frontier lands (agri limitanei) have no connection with the later beneficium or fief (feodum), none the less many eminent historians, not without reason, discover the roots of the beneficia of the Middle Ages in the system of the distribution of lands in the pagan Roman Empire. A novel of Theodosius II issued in the first half of the fifth century and included in the Code of Justinian in the sixth century, which was proclaimed binding upon both parts of the Empire, western and eastern, confirms the military service of the frontier soldiers or frontier militia (limitanei milites) as a necessary condition for possessing land, and refers the custom to ancient statutes (sicut antiquitus statutum est).
Beginning with the seventh century, under the menace of the Persian, Arab, Avar, Slavonic, and Bulgarian invasions which often successfully wrested from the Empire important and prosperous frontier provinces, the government strengthened military organization all over the territory of the Empire; so to speak, it applied the former frontier organization to the inland provinces. But many severe military failures which Byzantium suffered from the seventh to the ninth centuries, in addition to the internal troubles of the iconoclastic period and the struggle for the throne, evidently shook the well arranged system of military land holding; the large landowners, the so-called powerful men or magnates, took advantage of this new situation and against the law began to buy up military holdings. Therefore when in the tenth century the emperors of the Macedonian dynasty issued their famous novels to defend peasant interests against the encroaching tendencies of the powerful men, they were at the same time acting to defend military holdings.
The novels of Romanus Lecapenus, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Romanus II, and Nicephorus Phocas aimed at restoring the firmness and inviolability of military holdings and mainly at securing that such holdings should not be alienated to men who gave no military service; in other words, fundamentally these novels reproduced the provision of the novel of Theodosius II quoted above which passed into the Justinian Code. Th. Uspensky, who regarded the Slavonic influence in Byzantium as one of the most important elements of its internal life, wrote as regards military holdings: If in the tenth century some traces of community are noted in the organization of military holdings, this of course indicates not Roman origin of the institution but Slavonic, and its first manifestations must be referred to the epoch of the Slavonic settlements in Asia Minor. But this hypothesis of the noted Russian historian cannot be proved. The system of military holdings survived to some extent down to the fall of Byzantium; at least in legislative texts from the eleventh century to the fourteenth the arrangements of the emperors of the tenth century are treated as still in force, although in reality they were not always so.
A History of the Byzantine Empire - Table of Contents
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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/vasilief/feudalism.asp?pg=4
