In 565 AD, Justinian I, one of the greatest emperors of the Byzantine Empire, died with his reluctance and ambition. The glorious empire he created by him also weakened with his death, the Slavs living in the Balkans frequently rebelled in the Byzantine Empire in pursuit of national independence, and the Sassanid Persia in the east was eyeing Asia Minor, and the Byzantine Empire fell into the embarrassing situation of two-front war.
At this critical moment of life and death, Heraclius, the son of the former governor of Afrikaners, stepped onto the stage of history, and in 610 AD, Heraclius led his troops to Constantinople, and The Then Byzantine Emperor Focass was beheaded by Heraclius, and then the senate of the nobility was crowned emperor for Heraclius I. Heraclius, who had just ascended to the throne, was to resist the invasion of Sassanid Persia and the rebellion of the Slavs, for the Byzantine Empire at that time, the situation was not optimistic, a long period of two-front warfare made the economy within the empire on the verge of collapse, in order to avoid the collapse of the empire's economy, Heraclius decided to reform the domestic land relations, opening the prelude to the Byzantine feudal reform.
From the subordination to the village organization
Subordination was the first form of the agricultural system of the Byzantine Empire. The early Byzantine Empire was mainly engaged in agricultural labor, which can be understood as wage-workers on modern agricultural estates, but unlike the wage-workers, most of the sub-peasants were semi-free people, most of whom were free people and small landlords who had been bankrupt in wars and rebellions, and they had to rely on the Byzantine secular nobles and Orthodox popes in order to survive, and signed extremely strict dependency contracts to become the exclusive vassals of the nobility.
However, with the rise of the small peasant economy and the military district system, the original subordination system was gradually declining, and a grass-roots social organization - villages - appeared within the Byzantine Empire. Unlike the serf villages in Western Europe, where feudalism was attached to castles, the villages of the Byzantine Empire were an independent social organization.
The freedmen and small landlords in the villages who have fiscal and tax obligations form rural communes, which are responsible for coordinating all agricultural activities in the village, and the local government appoints the chief executive to manage them and collect taxes.
II. Reform of the Military Region and the System of Granting Land
The long war placed a great burden on the Byzantine Empire, and the Financial Situation of the Byzantine Empire was no longer able to accommodate the defeated army. In order to save money, Heraclius I promulgated a land reform bill, allowing active soldiers to purchase land and hand over uncultivated wasteland to the army for use, ordering the army to be self-sufficient, leaving it free from the state finances, forming a special group , soldiers and peasants. And these lands controlled by the army were naturally connected to become a new administrative unit, the military district.
With the development of time, the military district and the tuntian system became more and more important in the Byzantine Empire. The military district gradually became the highest local administrative unit within the Byzantine Empire, the military region implemented the administrative system of military and government integration, soldiers and peasants and their descendants as long as they served in the army, they can use land for life, while the soldiers and peasants under the jurisdiction of the military region only need to bear small taxes, for the above reasons, the implementation of the land grant system and the military district system greatly improved the production enthusiasm of soldiers and peasants, and flexible land transactions also promoted the recovery and rise of the small peasant economy, and the byzantine Empire's tax revenue increased significantly, coming back from the edge of economic collapse.
On the other hand, the land under the jurisdiction of the military district system was mostly in the border areas of the Byzantine Empire, and the soldiers and peasants, in order to protect their property, naturally devoted themselves to the war against the Persians, after all, compared with the war slogan of "Constantinople behind us" to protect the nobility, the war creed of "behind us is our homeland" can arouse the soldiers' determination to defend their homeland. This also laid a solid foundation for the Byzantine Empire to repel Persia.
Although the military district and the land grant system greatly enhanced the economic and military strength of the Byzantine Empire, the free trade of land also laid the foundation for future land annexation. The original basic system of self-sufficiency and integration of soldiers and farmers disappeared with the emergence of large landlords. The commanders of the military districts used their special powers of military and political integration to turn the military districts that were originally under the direct jurisdiction of the Empire into hereditary semi-autonomous fiefs, and the soldiers and peasants originally directly recruited by the imperial government became the private troops of the local governors.
For their own benefit, the commanders of the military region transferred a large number of soldiers and peasants originally recorded in the imperial household registration to the military district's own household registration, which caused the demographic and tax system of the Byzantine Empire to fall into chaos, laying the groundwork for the future division of the military region's power and the division of the Byzantine Empire.
3. Land annexation and corresponding policies
As we mentioned above, the free buying and selling of the military district system led to the emergence of land annexation, which is an inevitable phenomenon. The emergence of large landowners weakened the control of the central government of the empire over the localities, so the rulers of the four Byzantine dynasties of Heraclius, Issulia, Amoli, and Macedonia were in an awkward position.
For the rulers, these large landowners with heavy armies and local administrative power were the mainstay of the empire and a potential thief who threatened the empire's high monarchy. In order to maintain the stability of the country and ensure the revenue of the central government, the empire and the local nobles launched a war without smoke. In 920, the Macedonian emperor Constantine VII promulgated the Land Law, which protected to some extent the small peasant class oppressed by the large landowners, who in the Senate denounced the large landlords as "descending like a plague on unfortunate villages, devouring the land of the people, turning the villages into their vassals".
The promulgation of the Land Law guaranteed the priority of small peasants and the free class over land use, and in addition to guaranteeing the land use rights of the small peasant class, the Land Law also covered a new tax policy for the large nobles, greatly increased the tax payment amount of the nobles, and could not carry out tax exemption operations through teaching, and reduced the taxes and labor of bankrupt small farmers and free people.
In order to eradicate the problem of land annexation at its root, the Byzantine Government promulgated the Regulations on the Sale and Purchase of Land, which greatly restricted the transaction of land between lands, and strictly prohibited large landowners from obtaining land from the hands of the small peasant class in any way, including inheritance, donation, purchase and lease. Although these decrees have shaken the foundation of the local aristocracy on the surface, after several generations of development, the local aristocracy and the military region's power have long been indispensable, which can be said to have touched the whole body.
The great nobles and local powers began to exert pressure on the imperial government for their own benefit, and the voices within the Senate about the repeal of these decrees also rose and fell. As for the central government, too harsh anti-annexation policies may provoke rebellions of local nobles, according to relevant historical records, during the rule of the Macedonian Dynasty alone, the rebellions of military regions and local nobles have reached more than 50 times, and the Byzantine Empire itself has weakened in a long period of internal friction.
IV The Pronian system
In 1057, Komunin, a great nobleman of Asia Minor, was proclaimed emperor in a coup d'état in Constantinople, the founding monarch of the Komunin dynasty. At this time, the Byzantine Empire had long lost its former glory, and the long years of internal friction made the Byzantine Empire either counterinsurgency or on the way to counterinsurgency.
In 1071 AD, the Seljuks, who had been expelled by the Central Plains Dynasty for many years, suddenly declared war on the Byzantine Empire, and the two armies fought a key battle at Manzikert that would determine the future of Christendom, the Byzantine army was defeated, and the then Emperor Romanus IV was captured, and the defeat of this battle meant that the Byzantine Empire lost the dominion of the Peninsula of Asia Minor and Armenia.
The loss of land and population marked the complete collapse of the original economic system, the byzantines' proud system of military districts disappeared after the war, and the remaining class of soldiers and peasants was completely wiped out. In order to save the empire on the verge of collapse, the New Emperor Alexius I had to promote the System of Plonia throughout the country.
The Pronian system can be seen as a variant of the feudal system in Western Europe, and the imperial government unified the state-owned land as well as the subordinate land of the rural organizations and freedmen to the nobles for life. Freedmen in the prison territory were under the jurisdiction of the prison lords, and although they still enjoyed the so-called free people status, they lost the right to move to other prison territories and reclaim themselves.
In the early days of the Pronian system, the prison territories were still distributed by the empire, and the overseers could not enjoy only the right to use rather than ownership. However, after a period of promotion and implementation, the superintendent territory changed from the original aristocratic use right to ownership, the Pronnia system also formally degenerated into a feudal system, and the superintendent territory gradually transformed into a ducal domain or principality with a high degree of autonomy.
V. Conclusion
In 1453, the Ottoman Turks blasted open the walls of Constantinople with large-caliber artillery, and the last Emperor, Constantine XI, rushed into the enemy position when the city was broken, and eventually died under the walls. The Thousand-Year-Old Byzantine Empire left the stage of history. When we open the history of Byzantium, we can find that the history of Byzantium is a history of the evolution of land relations in the feudal era.
From the subordination system to the military district land grant system, from the military district land grant system to the Pronian system, the rulers of the Byzantine Empire constantly changed the land relations system according to the actual situation, which included both innovative reforms that were forge ahead and helpless compromises under the situation.