Social Stratification in Late Byzantium

ISBN-13: 9781474460897 / Angielski

Christos Malatras

Spis treści

Contents
Abbreviations
Preface
Note to the reader

Introduction

1. Byzantium after 1261: State, Society and Culture

2. The subject of the study and the sources

3. Recent scholarship on (late) Byzantine society

4. Byzantine society before the Palaiologan period: structure and characteristics

5. Outline

Part I: The Earthly Order

Chapter 1: The Social System

1. The order (taxis) of the empire

2. The dialectics of deference and the social contract

3. Social tension and the challenges to the established order

Chapter 2: Social Status

1. Social values and prestige

2. Status incongruence and social ascent

Chapter 3: Social Stratification

1. Estates and orders in Byzantium

2. The rich and the poor, the archontes and the d?mos

3. The anatomy of the archontes

4. The middle classes and their urban economic activities

5. The peasant world

6. Concluding remarks

Chapter 4: Social Associations

1. Communities and vertical social groups

2. A society of circles and social networks

3. The aristocratic oikos and its following

4. A fragmented society

Chapter 5: Social Power

1. The basis of economic power

2. Political power

3. State, Church, and society … and the breakdown

Part II: Case Studies

Chapter 6: Late Byzantine Provincial Society: The Example of Serres

1. The higher elite in Serres and non-local forces of economic and social influence

2. The local military elite of Serres

3. The civil (ecclesiastical) elite of Serres

4. The monasteries and local society

5. Urban economic activities and the middle class

6. Social relations in the countryside of the lower Strymon

7. Late Byzantine provincial society

Chapter 7: The Late Palaiologan Urban Society: Constantinople at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century

1. Byzantine society on the eve of demise: developments in the late fourteenth century

2. Economic and social life in Constantinople during the siege of B?yez?d I (1394–1402)

3. The fortunes of the higher and of the ‘military’ elite

4. The elite of service

5. The middle class of Constantinople

6. The aftermath

7. Conclusions

Appendices
Glossary
Bibliography
Primary sources
Secondary works