The Studies of Byzantine Law in China since 1949

As an important part of Byzantine studies, the research on Byzantine law has made great progress in European and American academic circles. However, the start of the study in this field in China is very late, and almost no one paid attention to it before the founding of the PRC. After the founding of PRC in 1949, it has experienced a development process from small to large, which has probably gone through three stages: from 1949 to 1978, due to the establishment of the discipline of World History and the comprehensive introduction of Byzantine concept, some scholars introduced or extracted some Byzantine legal documents, such as the extracts of the preamble of Ecloga and the translation of Nomos Stratiotikos in the Medieval Historical Materials Collection, which compiled by scholars in 1957. From 1979 to 2010, due to the development of Byzantine discipline and the need for the study of Roman law, Byzantine law was studied in the form of "young sub-field", such as the comprehensive introduction and analysis of Byzantine legislation by Chen Zhiqiang in the History of the Byzantine Empire and Xu Jialing in Byzantine Civilization, and also a discussion on the relationship between law and Eco-social development in Li Yining's Roman-Byzantine Economic History. Since 2010, Byzantine law has developed rapidly due to the support of the Byzantine legal programs and the growth of the research team. On the one hand, many important legal documents have been or are being translated into Chinese from Greek (Ecloga, Nomos Georgikos, Nomos Stratiotikos, etc.), On the other hand, some monographs of interdisciplinary studies on the legal texts have also been published (Yin Zhonghai, Wang Xiaobo Mao Xinxin, etc.). Therefore, the study on the Byzantine law has gradually become one of the key research objects of Chinese Byzantinists.