INTRODUCTION

As seen in the previous chapter, the laws concerning coloni adscripticii record the widespread existence by the early sixth century of great estates throughout the Eastern Empire, many of which were apparently bipartite in character. But the law-codes reveal more than the mere existence of these estates. Rather, the legal sources, especially the constitutions contained in the Codex Theodosianus and the Codex Iustinianus, attest a process of estate emergence and expansion over the course of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. This phenomenon is at its most evident in those constitutions which detail the illicit patronage or patrocinium engaged in by landowners and their managers. Much of this legislation is primarily concerned with tax evasion, and the related issue of estate autopragia or ‘self-collection’ of taxes, but amongst the other issues touched upon are the maintenance of private estate prisons, and the illegal deployment of private armed retainers or buccellarii.

This legislation, and what it tells us of early Byzantine social conditions, will be the main focus of the two chapters that follow. But it is worth pausing at this point to consider how this legislation has been interpreted, and how the great estates have come to be understood, by recent generations of historians. For the question of how we situate the great estates socially and juridically has been hotly, at times fiercely, contested since the 1940s, and any clarification of the issues concerned necessarily requires something by way of historiographical analysis.