4.16 RT – Documentary lingua franca in the Byzantine World “and Beyond”: Private Disputes from the 6th to the 15th Century

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.