From an Urban to a Rural Way of Life

From an Urban to a Rural Way of Life

As Byzantium shrank, the conquered regions had to adjust to new rulers. Byzantine subjects in Syria and Egypt who came under Arab rule adapted to the new conditions, paying a special tax to their conquerors and practicing their Christian and Jewish religions in peace. Cities remained centers of government, scholarship, and business, and peasants were permitted to keep and farm their lands. In the Balkans, as Slavs and Bulgars came to dominate the peninsula, some cities disappeared when people fled to hilltop settlements. Nevertheless, the newcomers recognized the Byzantine emperor’s authority and soon began to flirt with Christianity.

Some of the most radical transformations for seventh- and eighth-century Byzantines occurred not in the territories lost but in the shrunken empire itself. Under the ceaseless barrage of invaders, many towns, formerly bustling centers of trade and the imperial bureaucracy, vanished or became unrecognizable. The public activity of open marketplaces, theaters, and town squares largely ended. City baths, once places where people gossiped, made deals, and talked politics and philosophy, disappeared in most Byzantine towns—with the significant exception of Constantinople. Warfare reduced some cities to rubble, and the limited resources available for rebuilding went to construct thick city walls and solid churches instead of spacious marketplaces and baths.

Despite the general urban decay, Constantinople and a few other urban centers retained some of their old vitality. The manufacture and trade of fine silk textiles continued. Even though Byzantium’s economic life became increasingly rural and barter-based in the seventh and eighth centuries, the skills, knowledge, and institutions of urban workers remained.

As urban life declined, agriculture, always the basis of the Byzantine economy, became the center of its social life as well. Unlike Europe, where peasants often depended on aristocratic landlords, the Byzantine Empire had many free peasants; they grew food, herded cattle, and tended vineyards on their own small plots of land. As Byzantine cities declined, the curials (town councilors), the elite who for centuries had mediated between the emperor and the people, disappeared. Now on those occasions when farmers came into contact with the state—to pay taxes, for example—they felt the impact of the emperor or his representatives directly.

Byzantine emperors, drawing on the still-vigorous Roman legal tradition, promoted domestic life with new imperial legislation, strengthening the nuclear family by narrowing the grounds for divorce and setting new punishments for marital infidelity. Abortion was prohibited, and new protections were set in place against incest. Mothers were given equal power with fathers over their offspring; if widowed, they became the legal guardians of their minor children and controlled the household property.