Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The Iconoclastic epoch (717-867)

The internal activities of the emperors of the Isaurian dynasty 

Page 5

The Rural Code (νόμος γεωργικὸς) has attracted the greatest attention among the three works. The greatest authority on Byzantine law, the German scholar Zacharia von Lingenthal, changed his mind about this. He began by thinking it the work of a private hand and he assigned it to the eighth or ninth century. It was compiled, he thought, partly from the legislation of Justinian and partly from local custom. Later he was inclined to believe that the Rural Code was a product of the legislative activity of the Emperors Leo and Constantine, and that it was published either simultaneously with the Ecloga or soon after its appearance. He agreed with the Russian scholars V. G. Vasilievsky and Th. I. Uspensky who characterized this document as a collection of rural police regulations dealing with common offenses among people engaged in agriculture. It is concerned primarily with various kinds of thefts of lumber, field and orchard fruit, trespasses and oversights of herdsmen, harm done to animals, and harm done by cattle. The Russian scholar B. A. Pancenko, who made a special study of this document, called the Rural Code a supplementary record to the customary law practiced among the peasants; it is dedicated to that law, so necessary for the peasants, which did not find its expression in legislation.

The work is not dated. Some scholars refer it to the epoch of Leo III. But it must be admitted that the problem is far from being definitely solved. According to Pancenko, the need for such a law might have been felt even in the seventh century; the nature of the lawbook, barbarian and naively empirical, is closer in spirit to the time of the greatest decline of civilization than to the period of the compilation of the Ecloga. It has not yet been proved that the Rural Code was issued in the eighth century, and it is possible that its publication will be found to have taken place at an earlier period. Vernadsky and Ostrogorsky stated that the Rural Code was elaborated under Justinian II, at the end of the seventh century. The last word on the subject was said by the Russian historian E. Lipshitz in 1945. After reconsidering all previous opinions, she was inclined to accept the second half of the eighth century as the most probable date of the Rural Code; in other words she confirmed the old opinion of Zacharia von Lingenthal and Vasilievsky.

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