Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The Empire of Nicaea (1204-1261)

Byzantine feudalism 

Page 6

In connection with the Crusades and the penetration of western European influence into Byzantium, especially under the latinophile Emperor Manuel I (1143-1180), actual western European feudal terms, though in Greek form, make their appearance in Byzantium, for example lizios, which corresponds to the medieval Latin word ligius, i.e. a vassal or holder of a fief. It is interesting to note that when the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade, i.e. western European landlords, began to establish themselves on the occupied territories of the Eastern Empire, they found the local land conditions very similar to those of the West and easily adaptable to their own feudal forms. In a document of the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Byzantine emperors grants are called fiefs (de toto feudo, quod et Manuel quondam defunctus Imperator dedit patri meo). Another document of the same period testifies that the western conquerors continued to maintain the conquered population as formerly, exacting from them nothing more than they had been used to under the Greek emperors (debemus in suo statu tenere, nihil ab aliquo amplius exigentes, quam quod facere consueverant temporibus graecorum imperatorum). Much material for the study of feudal relations on the territory of Byzantium is contained in the so-called Chronicle of Morea, a rich mine of information on this subject. The institution of pronoia survived through the Middle Ages till the fall of the Empire.

The study of the problem of pronoia in Byzantium, in connection with kharistikion and military lots, deserves great attention and may lead to most interesting results, not only for a better and more correct understanding of land conditions and of the internal life of the Empire in general but also for instructive and illuminating analogies with other countries, Western, Slavonic, and Muhammedan, including the later Ottoman Empire.

The term pronoia is in common use in Serbian documents. In the history of Russia, pronoia is sometimes compared with the Russian kormlenie (feeding). This was a custom in Old Russia; the Russian nobles were granted towns or provinces as kormlenie, often as reward for service in the field; these nobles were given the opportunity to enrich themselves by korm (food), gifts, and fees, legal and administrative, from the local population. But the Russian kormlenie was not connected with the possession of a territory and meant only the administration of a town or province with the right to collect revenues for the profit of the administrator. Therefore the Byzantine pronoia corresponds rather to the pomestye of the State of Moscow, i.e. an estate held temporarily on condition of discharging military service, which speedily assumed an hereditary character.

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/vasilief/feudalism.asp?pg=6