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Social and political developments. Church affairs
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Page 19
The famous Novel of 996 abolished the forty years prescription which protected the rights of the powerful who had illegally seized peasant estates and who tried to extend this term either by means of gifts, or by means of power, in order to acquire final ownership of that which they had acquired from the poor by wicked means. The estates acquired by the powerful from village communities previous to the issue of Romanus first law were to remain in the hands of the powerful only if the latter could prove their rights of ownership by written evidence or by a sufficient number of witnesses. The Novel stated that the demands of the treasury could not consider any prescription; hence the state may claim its rights by going back to the time of Caesar Augustus. The problem of military fiefs also compelled the Macedonian rulers to issue several novels.
In addition to the Novel of 996, Basil II issued a decree concerning the tax called allelengyon, meaning mutual warrant (ἀλληλέγγυον). As far back as the early part of the ninth century (in so far as the brief statement on this point in one of the sources shows) Emperor Nicephorus I issued orders which placed upon their richer neighbors the responsibility for the full payment of taxes of the poor. The allelengyon as a tax was nothing new. It represented a continuation, and at the same time a variation, of the late Roman system of the epibole (see in discussion of Anastasius): The allelengyon system of payment imposed excessively heavy charges on the peasantry, and this sufficiently explains why membership of a village community was considered burdensome, and why a peasant usually preferred to own a detached property. The orders of Nicephorus I aroused so much hatred toward the Emperor that his successors were apparently compelled to forsake this tax. When the need of money for the upkeep of the Bulgarian war became very great and the desire to deal the powerful a heavy blow had grown very strong in Basil II, he revived the law which made the wealthy landowners responsible for the taxes of the poor, if the latter were unable to pay them. If this measure, so strongly defended by Basil II, had remained in force for a long time, it might have gone far to ruin the powerful owners of both ecclesiastical and temporal estates. But the allelengyon was enforced only for a brief period of time. In the first half of the eleventh century Romanus III Argyrus, who acquired the throne through his marriage to Zoe, the daughter of Constantine VIII, urged by his interest in the welfare of the powerful and by his desire to find a way for reconciliation with the higher clergy and landed nobility, repealed the hated allelengyon.
On the whole, the decrees of the Macedonian emperors of the tenth century, though limiting to some extent the encroachments of the powerful, accomplished very few definite results. In the eleventh century the famous Novels were gradually forgotten and abandoned. The same century witnessed a material change in the internal policy of the Byzantine emperors, who began to favor and openly protect large landownership, hastening the wide development of serfdom. Still, the free peasant commune and the free small landowners did not disappear entirely from the Empire. These institutions continued to exist and will be discussed in connection with later periods.
A History of the Byzantine Empire - Table of Contents
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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/vasilief/social-political-developments.asp?pg=19
