Legal Texts and Juridical Practice in Byzantine Italy

Abstract

Italy was reannexed into the Byzantine empire precisely at the time when, in Constantinople, Justinian’s monumental corpus codified Roman juridical production and opened those regulations to a Byzantine interpretation, thereby paving the way for a legal system that would serve as the basis of Byzantine jurisprudence. While legal texts concerning Italy are limited in number, the manuscript tradition of legal books is copious. Furthermore, with respect to other areas of the empire, Italy, together with Egypt, is the best documented “peripheral” region, as far as juridical practice is concerned. This duality is due both to fortuitous archival circumstances and to the real feature of the Byzantine juridical culture. Introduced by a review on sources, this paper deal with private and public documents from Byzantine Southern Italy as historical examples of norms and customs presupposing the reception and tradition of byzantine legal texts over the time.