Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

Learning, literature, science, and art

Page 16

In jurisprudence there belongs to the epoch of the Palaeologi the last important juridical work which has preserved its vital significance to the present. It is a great compilation written by a jurist and Judge of Thessalonica in the fourteenth century, Constantine Harmenopulus, known by the title of Hexabiblos (ἑξάβιβλος), for it is divided into six books, or Promptuarium (πρόχειρον νόμων, manuale legum). This compilation contains civil and criminal law with some supplements, for example, the very well-known Rural Code. The author used the earlier legislative works, the Prochiron, the Basilics, the Novels, as well as the Ecloga, Epanagoge, and some others. In connection with the question of the sources of the Hexabiblos, there has been pointed out a very important problem which has not yet been satisfactorily elucidated. It was shown that Harmenopulus used several sources in very old versions, without the additions and alterations that were made by the legislative commission of Justinian the Great; in other words, the Hexabiblos offers valuable material for critical study on the sources of the Justinian Code, the original form of altered texts, and the traces of the so-called classical Roman Law in the juridical works of Byzantium. After 1453 the Hexabiblos of Harmenopulus became widespread in the West, and the humanists studied attentively and carefully that juridical work of fallen Byzantium. The compilation of Harmenopulus is still in use in judicial practice in present-day Greece and Bessarabia.

Several medical treatises showing Arabic influence belong to the period of the Palaeologi. A medical manual of the end of the thirteenth century had considerable influence even on western medicine and was used as a textbook by the faculty of medicine in Paris until the seventeenth century. The complete lack of originality in Byzantine medicine, however, has been repeatedly pointed out. A French professor of medicine who was particularly interested in Byzantine times remarked: If one wished to deal with original works (on medicine), he would have nothing to record, and the page devoted to this more than millenarian period would remain blank. The study of mathematics and astronomy also flourished under the Palaeologi, and many of the versatile and encyclopaedic men already mentioned devoted part of their time to the exact sciences, drawing their material from the ancient works of Euclides and Ptolemy as well as from Persian and Arabic writings, the greater part of which, in their turn, were based upon Greek sources.

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/vasilief/literature-learning-science-art.asp?pg=16