Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The Empire of Nicaea (1204-1261)

Byzantine feudalism 

Page 9

The edict of the Emperor Justinian II, which was issued in September, 688, and which exists in an inscription, may be regarded as an example of immumty-exkuseia of an earlier period. By this edict Justinian II granted a salina in Thessalonica to the Church of St. Demetrius for all following and everlasting years as its exclusive property which was exempted from any previous obligations. In his edict Justinian plainly expressed the purpose of his grant: the entire profit from the salina was to provide for the expenses of the illumination of the church, the daily substance of its clergy, necessary upkeep of the building, and all other needs of the clergy.

The privileged monasteries which are sometimes called monastery-princedoms were developing from the period of Justinian the Great (527-565), and these monasterial immunities may be connected with the various privileges established in the fourth century for the Christian clergy by Constantine the Great and his successors. It is true all these fragmentary observations on immunity in Byzantium deal exclusively with monasterial life. But many early charters (chrysobulls) have disappeared, and moreover the question of Byzantine immunity has been very little studied in general, especially in its history before the eleventh century. Even various published Byzantine sources, such as histories, chronicles, and lives of saints, have not been adequately estimated from this point of view. When this preparatory work is done, new and important material almost certainly will be available on the problem of lay exkuseia-immunity in Byzantium. And it may be inferred that Byzantine exkuseia in its origin goes back to the time of Roman immunity and is a part of the complicated social inheritance which the Christian Empire received from the pagan Empire.

Further study of Byzantine prostasia-patronnge and exkuseia-immunity will be exceedingly important both for the better understanding of the internal life of Byzantium itself and for the internal history of the neighboring countries, Muhammedan and Slavonic, Old Russian in particular. The valuable studies on feudalism in Old Russia by N. Pavlov-Silvansky, who compared western patronage with Russian zakladnichestvo and western immunity with bayar samosud (right of jurisdiction among the Russian nobility), would have been still more valuable had the author not limited himself to western analogies but had also made use of Byzantine evidence.

Large landownership, the famous Roman latifundia, is also one of the characteristic features of the social structure of the Byzantine Empire. The powerful provincial magnates were at times so dangerous to the central power that the latter was compelled to undertake a stubborn struggle against them, often unsuccessfully.

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