If Byzantine towns created opportunities for a range of social classes to occupy houses from small dwellings, comparable to rural homes, to palatial multi-story mansions, it seems likely that villages and hamlets remained simple in their layout and the variety of their housing. It is suggested that Greek peasants in general occupied houses of limited size and internal complexity till the late nineteenth century, often on the Mainland just single-story (except in steep terrain where a basement was both necessary and easier to construct). The Mainland Agricultural Style (Sigalos 2004b) of rural settlement, consisting of a loose dispersal of longhouses with a broad fayade, allowing much space between homes for open-air activities, appears already in MB times, and seems typical for a mixed-farming economy right up to living memory in many regions. One to two rooms, and animals under the same roof as the extended family, can reasonably be inferred from more recent use of such houses (see Color Plate 21.1b).
As for rural estate-centers of the rich, we are very poorly informed both from texts and archaeology. Some sources suggest that rural towers are not merely a Crusader introduction but were in use in Byzantine areas both to mark status and as protection for estate staff. A rare excavated example of an isolated complex estate-center from Pylos (in the province of Elis) dates from the twelfth century and has a square, two-story plan a little reminiscent of a tower house from later centuries, but is on a much smaller scale (Coleman 1969, 1986). Perhaps we can use the description provided by the fourteenth-century statesman Michael Choniates of his semi-rural palace in the outermost suburb of Constantinople as a guide to rural villas of the elite (Magdalino 2002): set within farmland the estate-center was vast, including domestic structures with upper galleries surrounding a paved courtyard, a church, gardens, cisterns, and aqueducts.
World History
