Byzantine Countryside

In the last few decades, a lot of attention has been devoted to the development of the city in late antique and early Byzantine times. Changes in the late antique and Byzantine countryside have been receiving more attention too; surveys in cities’ hinterlands and territories have multiplied and new approaches to evaluate the productivity of the land have been introduced. Although the interdependence of city and countryside is widely acknowledged, when urban and rural physical evolutions are compared, the spotlight generally is on the city, which is said to have undergone a ‘ruralisation.’
In this article, I revisit urban-rural relations, but I move the focus to rural settlements. In many regions of the eastern Mediterranean they were doing well. Between the fourth and seventh/eighth century, villages grew in size and number and played an important part in the economy as producers but possibly also consumers. I refrain from making general statements on rural versus urban ‘prosperity’ in late antique centuries – something that is exceptionally hard to determine – but instead focus on three noticeable developments in urban-rural relations. After a quick look at the villages of the Aezanitis, where investments in rural architectural decoration match or even outdo those in the urban centre of Aizanoi, I discuss rural settlements in Cilicia that built late antique tetrapyla and arches, and then move on to the villages of Jordan where one of the most remarkable collections of seventh-century mosaics and epigraphy can be found. Finally, I raise some questions concerning the initiators of building works in villages.

During the late Byzantine period the extended landed property of the Mount Athos monasteries and Saint John's of Patmos dominates on Lemnos. The property of each one is organized in productive units (estates) of agricultural and animal husbandry product, that are named metochia, and constitute the main source of supply for monastic foundations on Mount Athos and Patmos; first with the essential for the service of daily needs, while additionally contribute to their wider economic expansion via the sale, mainly, of the production surplus in the empire's commercial centres, but also with other ways. The above information is provided by the documents kept in the extensive monastic archives of the late Byzantine period.
The monastic landed property on Lemnos was exploited by depended farmers of two categories, proskathemenoi, who did not usually own any assets and did not possibly come from the region, and paroikoi, who had the essential ad vantage of holding cultivable land and paid tax for their lot.

Main cereal products were the wheat (Triticum dururn) and less the barley. In the same time, viticulture for wine production was very common and profitable. Great parts of metochia, mainly unsuitable for cultivation, were used for sheep and goat husbandry. Information on the produced quantities is not provided by the monastic documents, while the lack of evidence is successfully covered by the early ottoman Tapu-Tahrir Defter #25 for Lemnos dated 1490, very close to the period we study.
Finally, the income of monasteries was supplemented with extensive tax exemption and other permissions or benefits granted by the state for each metochion.