It is often said that Roman law remained the backbone of Byzantine law. But which Roman law are we talking about? How Roman was Byzantine law? Was Byzantine law a bad echo of Roman law? How was the Roman past and Roman law depicted in Byzantine legal texts? How self-sufficient was Byzantine law and what were the influences of Byzantine law even beyond Byzantium? The participants in this Thematic Session will discuss these questions by examining a wide range of Byzantine material including, for example, imperial legislation, court decisions, legal compilations and other sources. The aim of the session is to trace down the reception of Roman law and Roman past into Byzantine law, the development and autonomy of Byzantine law and finally, the influence of Byzantine legal tradition even beyond Byzantium.
The so-called ‘action catalogues’ form a subgenre within Byzantine legal literature, which has been transmitted both independently as well as inserted within other legal works. This makes them an ideal case study for examining the factors that enable certain Roman legal concepts (or even entire legal works) to survive in later Byzantine law, even when…
The attribution of the private dispute judgment to elected arbiters received extensive application in the years after the collapse of the Byzantine Empire among Greeks who were subjects of the Ottoman Empire or under the Venetian dominance. By choosing this alternative form of private dispute settlement, the litigant parties saved a considerable amount of time…
The answer to this question appears to be: very. The term Byzantine was never in use by the people who lived in what remained of the Roman Empire. They considered themselves to be Romans. So their law appears to be Roman, albeit in a later phase of development. Or was it not?
The scholarship on Roman law in the Middle Ages has focused to a large degree on the ius commune, the shared wellspring of the Roman legal tradition that served as the basis for the flowering of jurisprudence in Central and Western Europe from the eleventh century onwards. As such, this common Roman legal heritage, according…
The legal procedures in force in Byzantium are, in theory, essentially based on Roman law. However, over the course of its thousand-year history, it seems difficult to believe that the Roman written laws compiled in the 6th century were applied perpetually without any form of adaptation. This paper intends to examine the evolution and mutation…