More than a century ago, the Italian jurist and historian Giannino Ferrari dalle Spade published I documenti greci medioevali di diritto privato dell’Italia meridionale e le loro attinenze con quelli bizantini d’Oriente e coi papiri greco-egizii (1910), a study that remains central for studying Italo-Greek documentary sources. This comparative approach, however, remains historiographically isolated and has not touched the field outside Italy. Although diplomatics has traditionally been a core element of the discipline of Byzantine Studies, and has benefited in recent decades from the potential for innovation offered by digital projects, the barriers between the sub-disciplines of Byzantine diplomatics have not properly fallen. We believe that bringing together the various existing documentary corpora from different times and spaces of the Byzantine world can help us make progress in understanding the social and legal implications of this documentary culture, and that is what this Round Table will attempt. As a starting point we intend to study private legal documents related to disputes, as they open a number of avenues to understand the social, legal, political, and economic implications of the Byzantine documentary culture, not to mention the logistics of document production and use. Such documents have been studied in terms of typology (sales, wills, disputes, donations, other contracts), of their writing material (papyrus, parchment, paper, etc.), of their palaeography, or to understand individual disputes. However, they have rarely been used comparatively within the broader Byzantine koinè. Yet the principles underlying them are often the same ones, even when they respond and adapt to local legal and political contingencies – and this includes the very structure of societies with a culture of recording. It is this aspect of a documentary lingua franca that the Round Table aims to both highlight and critique.
The monastery of Saint John the Theologian was founded in 1088 by Saint Christodoulos, the former abbot of the monastery of the Theotokos of Stylos on Mount Latros. The Byzantine archive of Patmos is one of the most extensive and well-preserved monastic archives from this era. It provides invaluable material for the study of diplomatics,…
La création du tribunal des Juges généraux des Romains par l’empereur Andronic III Paléologue en 1328 a introduit des changements profonds dans le fonctionnement de la justice dans l’Empire byzantin, non seulement dans la composition des tribunaux et de leurs compétences, mais aussi dans le déroulement des litiges entre particuliers. Ces changements se reflètent dans…
In 646 or 647 AD, shortly after the final battle for Alexandria, a deacon named John and a farmer named Philemon became embroiled in a legal dispute over a small house in Apollonos Ano (modern Edfu). Twenty-four years earlier, during the period of Sasanian Persian rule, this property had been mortgaged by Thekla, a woman…
Around 1142, Roger II, King of Sicily and Calabria, settled a dispute that had arisen between the inhabitants of San Marco, Naso, and the surrounding areas—located in the Val Demone, in northeastern Sicily—and Alkerios of Ficarra, who had been accused of unlawfully appropriating land belonging to the local population. Summoned by the king, Alkerios claimed…