Byzantine Economy - Agriculture

Agriculture

Development in the rural economy, though certainly slow, was continuous from the eighth to the beginning of the fourteenth century. Areas close to the sea featuring cereal crops, vines, and olive groves (the interior of the Balkans, and Asia Minor concentrated on stock raising) were relatively well-favored, and appear to have played an important role in the development of the Byzantine economy. The peasantry's tools changed little through the ages, and remained rudimentary, which resulted in a low ratio of productivity to labor. Nevertheless, according to certain scholars, the permanence of techniques, and tools are evidence of their successful adaptation to the environment.

From the seventh to the twelfth century the social organization of production was arranged round two poles: estate and village (a collection of free smallholders). The village social structure was the organizational form best adapted to insecure conditions, with the estate fulfilling this role once conditions were safe again. There was in principle a clear distinction between tenants who lived on the estates (and owed dues to the master of the place), and the village inhabitants, many of whom owned land, and consequently paid taxes to the state. Nevertheless, not all the cultivators on the estate lived there, and not all enjoyed a special status. Some of them, whether slaves or wage laborers; references to wage laborers occur continuously from the seventh century to the end of the Byzantine period. In the same way, the inhabitants of a village would not all be landholders, and of these, not all would be farmers; some village proprietors held the lowest rank of aristocrat status, and were wealthier that tenant farmers. The distinction between landholder and tenant farmer (paroikos) was weakened once tenures held by paroikoi were considered hereditary, and once some paroikoi achieved owner status. From the tenth century on, large estates assumed the leading role that had been held until then by villages, albeit in an economy that was henceforth orientated toward demand, with monetary exchanges taking a larger share. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Macedonian countryside was made up of an almost unbroken network of estates that had replaced the former network of communes. Villages that are known to have possessed commune status in the tenth century became estates of the fisc, after which they might be ceded to a monastery or lay person.

The population was dense in the sixth century, but it diminished in the seventh, and eight centuries. Epidemics (such as the plague of 541/542 and its recurrences until 747) seem to have had greater effects on population volume than wars. From the ninth century on the population of the empire increased, but it was unevenly distributed. A growing population would imply an increase in the area under cultivation. The automatic effect of a larger population was also amplified by the demand from a growing number of people who did not produce much or at all. Indeed, it is estimated that areas under cultivation must have almost doubled, and that the extension of crops might have affected a shift in the location of grazing lands, and pushed back the woodlands.

After the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, most of the interior of Anatolia was lost to the Turks, and the remaining territories of the Empire were dominated by the cities the Byzantines were able to hold on to.

The conquest of the empire by the Crusades in 1204, and the subsequent division of the Byzantine territories affected the agrarian economy as it did other aspects of economic organization, and economic life. These territories split among small Greek and Latin states, lost much of the cohesion they may have had: the Byzantine state could not function as a unifying force, and, in the thirteenth century, there was very little to replace it. The thirteenth century is the last period, during which one may speak of significant land clearance, that is, the act of bringing previously uncultivated land into cultivation. But the progressive impoverishment of the peasantry, entailed the decline of a certain aggregate demand, and resulted in a concentration of resources in the hands of large landowners, who must have had considerable surpluses.

The demographic expansion came to an end in the course of the fourteenth century, during which a deterioration of the status of paroikoi, an erosion of the economic function of village by the role of the large estates, and a precipitous demographic decline in Macedonia is established by modern research. The upper levels of the aristocracy lost their fortunes, and eventually there was a concentration of property on the hands of the larger, and more privileged monasteries, at least in Macedonia. The monasteries did not show great versatility or innovative spirit, and the rural economy had to wait, for its recovery, until the effects of epidemics had been reversed, security had been established, and communications restored: that is, until the firm establishment of the Ottomans in the Balkans.