Imperial laws were systematised by Justinian. His Institutes and Digest are
available in translation, as are several important later legal texts or decrees,
including the Book of the eparch issued under Leo VI’s auspices and the
novellae of tenth-century emperors on peasant landholdings.20 The concept
of legislation informed works of administrative regulation such as the
Book of the eparch, and these in turn shade into detailed administrative
prescriptions or treatises, such as two texts for tax-collectors.21 Regulations
governing church life were issued by church councils and patriarchs as
well as by individual emperors, and the acts of the ecumenical councils are
available in translation.22
Collections of the rules and regulations issued in the medieval period
by Byzantine churchmen and specialists in church law – canonists – have
not received English translations.23 However, the regulations for monasteries’
administration and liturgical observances, typika, are well served by
translators. Together with the surviving order for the liturgy prescribed for
the monastery of Theotokos Evergetis in Constantinople, they set out in
varying degrees of detail what founders envisaged for their monasteries.24
Considering the broad cross-section of laypersons concerned with monks
and monasteries during the middle Byzantine empire and beyond,25 the
typika are of great historical importance. They present a spectrum of spiritual
aspirations that were widely respected, if seldom fully attained, among
the Byzantines.
So, in their way, do the Lives of saints, with due allowance made for
their authorial agendas, literary genres, frequent aversion to specifics of
place and time, and conceptions of truth other than the literal or earthly.
The Lives were widely appreciated for their transcendent spiritual examples
and instruction, and were intended to convey a higher reality than life as
actually lived. But one should note that some give details of persons and
events verifiable from other sources, and the very desire of the hagiographer
to make the case for his (or her) subject could entail reference to their actual
situations and the problems they faced. For example, in his Life of Lazaros, a
stylite for forty years onMountGalesion, the contemporary authorGregory
the Cellarer gives evidence of hostility towards his hero among members of
the church hierarchy, ‘and even within his own monastic community’. The
Life also makes ‘important allusions to historical events and personages in
the world outside the monastery’, and offers an at least plausible portrayal
of men, women and everyday country matters in eleventh-century Asia
Minor.
World History
