10 IV: Zachary Chitwood (München), Eastern Roman Law, Islam and the First Millennium: Prolegomena to a ius commune orientale

The scholarship on Roman law in the Middle Ages has focused to a large degree on the ius commune, the shared wellspring of the Roman legal tradition that served as the basis for the flowering of jurisprudence in Central and Western Europe from the eleventh century onwards. As such, this common Roman legal heritage, according to the traditional narrative, supplemented by the canon law of the Catholic Church, in turn later provided the framework for the development of independent, national legal traditions, fostered by the rise of powerful, centralized monarchies and incipient nation-states.

By contrast, research on the legal traditions of Byzantium and the Christian communities of the Near East have studied normative regimes along disciplinary and confessional lines. This talk will attempt to make the case that the legal traditions of East Rome (Byzantium), the Syriac world, Armenia and Egypt can profitably studied together as an eastern pendant to the Western ius commune. While the ius commune of the Medieval West was based on both Roman law (in the form of the so-called Corpus iuris civilis) and the canon law of the Catholic Church, which achieved its authoritative form through the Decretum Gratiani, its eastern counterpart had rather different parameters. It flourished from the fourth to the end of the eleventh century, and the encounter with Islam constituted the most significant factor in the late antique development of each of its legal normative orders during this period. Possible ways of defining this ius commune orientale will be explored in the talk.