122 Chapter 7The same conditions that promoted social equality
may have discouraged the growth of extended families.
A few great clans attached themselves to the imperial
court, often for several generations, but the western
development of lineages—extended families who took
their names and social identities from their estates—
had no parallel in the east until the tenth or eleventh
century. Instead, the Byzantines lived overwhelmingly
in tight-knit nuclear families, often maintaining a cer-
tain distance in their dealings with others. Some writ-
ers warned against friendship because it might arouse
the suspicions of the state. Most people, encouraged
perhaps by the epiboli,acknowledged the obligation to
help one’s neighbors. However, Byzantine society, for
all its outward regimentation, remained on the per-
sonal level individualistic, self-seeking, and often cyni-
cal in its relationships.
Roman law reinforced these tendencies to some ex-
tent by ensuring the equal division of property among
heirs and by favoring the preservation of freehold
tenures. Most Byzantines were small farmers who
owned their own land. Some were serfs or tenants on
the estates of the emperor or his more important ser-
vants, and some were slaves, though the incidence of
slavery declined throughout the Byzantine era and by
the eleventh century had attracted the opposition of
the church on moral grounds. Commerce centered in
the great city of Constantinople, which, until the Cru-
sades, dominated the trade between Asia and the west.
With its population of more than 400,000 it dwarfed
the other towns of the empire. Provincial cities de-
clined steadily in importance throughout the Byzantine
centuries as bureaucracy and centralization strangled
the ancient Greek municipal tradition.
Christianity, not civic ideals, formed the moral and
intellectual center of Byzantine life. Even the Byzan-
tines sometimes complained that buying a piece of fruit
in the market was impossible without becoming im-
mersed in a discussion of the Trinity, but religion to
them was more than a mental exercise; it was the con-
ceptual framework of their lives. Religious disputes thus
played an important role in Byzantine politics. The
struggle between the orthodox and the Monophysites,
who held that Christ’s nature was fully human but thatIllustration 7.1
Empress Theodora and Her Attendants.This mosaic
from the church of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy, is one of a pair;the other shows Theodora’s husband, Justinian, with his own
entourage in a similar pose.