Jurisprudence in Byzantium in the Middle Ages

The article is devoted to the study of the Byzantine-Eastern line of succession with the jurisprudential tradition of the late Roman period in the Middle Ages. The death of the famous emperor-lawyer Justinian (527–565) and the prolonged crisis of the imperial state system marked the end of the organic development of historical Roman law and the beginning of a new stage in the development of jurisprudence. It is noted that after Justinian’s legal renaissance, the emperors for a certain time (between the beginning of the 7th century and the middle of the 9th century) no longer took the initiative of new codifications or the publication of official collections of law and only introduced individual laws (‘novellas’), according to the needs of the moment. It can be argued that the legislative activity of this period was aimed at translating Roman laws into Greek, revising and modernizing their content. It has been stated that the tendency to restore and update the ‘ancient’ Justinian law led to the emergence of a new and flourishing legal literature in Byzantium in the 10th and 11th centuries. It is noted that after the new imperial codification of law during the Macedonian dynasty, a compilation literature emerged that focused either on simplifying the material from imperial laws (‘Basílicos’) or on clarifying it with the help of scholia. The authors believe that the last stage of Byzantine medieval history (late 12th – late 15th centuries), during the Angeli, Lascari, and Paleolog dynasties, is a period of crisis and collapse of the state, and therefore the decline of jurisprudence. Codification tendencies disappeared, imperial legislation became partial and specialized, secular law was overwhelmed by church norms, and the clergy began to play a central role in the development of law. It is concluded that the spiritual power and developed system of Roman law continued to influence the legal evolution of Europe, both in the East and in the West, throughout the Middle Ages; the entire scientific development of law and the revival of jurisprudence were undoubtedly associated with the knowledge and use of Roman law.