CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Rockwell, David Bryan |
|---|---|
| Title | Justinian's Conniving Bankers: Lobbying and the Imperial Bureaucracy in Sixth-Century Byzantium |
| Summary | Petitioning—whether for favours, for justice, or for new law-making—was no epiphenomenon to the governance of the sixth-century emperor Justinian but fundamental to its design and operation. The evidence of that emperor’s legislation suggests that few constituencies were as adept at petitioning as the bankers and other financiers of the city of Constantinople. In a series of constitutions&# x2014;Novels&#x 2014;issued over the period from 535 to 542 CE, Justinian responded to their various petitions with new legislation responsive to their interests. The terms of this legislation describe the petitions in terms that allow us to reconstruct their contents in large part, even if the petitions themselves do not survive. In the financiers of Constantinople as portrayed in the Novels we have sophisticated actors, as well-versed in the laws applicable to their business as they were well-organised to lobby for changes to them. This dissertation examines finance-related Novels of the 530s and 540s in light of the system of imperial petition-and-response as it operated in Justinian’s reign. It then applies the knowledge of petitioning so gained to the interpretation of the substantive legal provisions, challenging existing interpretations thereof. Chapter 1 examines the practice of petitioning the emperor as portrayed in Justinian’s Novels generally, supplemented by information from papyri, epigraphy, and hagiography. Among other contributions, this chapter classifies each reference to petitions and petitioning in the Novels by function and context. This chapter demonstrates that many individuals and groups throughout the empire were by no means passive recipients of new law-making but rather sophisticated users—and sometimes abusers—of it. Chapter 2 then applies those findings to the interpretation of Novel 136—issued in response to a petition by Constantinople’s bankers—examining each of its requests for relief and Justinian’s response to them. Among other things, it finds that the bureaucratic practice of lifting wording from petition to legislative text makes the manuscript dating of that law to April 535—which many scholars have doubted—entirely plausible. Chapter 3 then applies that same methodology to Edict 7 of March 542. It establishes that many of the Edict’s provisions do not, as is often assumed, provide evidence for the effects of the so-called Plague of Justinian. Even those provisions that do plausibly relate to plague are better explained as responses to its expected effects than to its actual ones as at the Edict’s promulgation. Edict 7 therefore cannot serve as evidence for the date of the plague’s arrival at Constantinople. Chapter 4 then turns attention away from bankers to maritime lenders. Together, Novel 106 of September 540 and its reversal just eight months later in Novel 110 reveal the iterative nature of petition-and-response and how it handled conflicts between the interests of different constituencies. This chapter argues that Novel 106 was the result a lobbying gambit by the maritime lenders to bamboozle the shippers and merchants that were their customers by a lobbying subterfuge that left the headline rate intact but increased effective interest charges by changing the basis of calculation. The success of the maritime lenders was, however, short-lived. Justinian repealed the change with retroactive effect just eight months later. The Conclusion then summarises the findings of earlier chapters, highlighting how each one shows that Justinian’s subjects, at least sophisticated ones such as the bankers and maritime lenders of the capital, were no mere passive recipients of his successive waves of new legislation. They were instead sophisticated consumers of it, possessed of agency in its interpretation, ready to exploit its silences, ambiguities, and contradictions in application, and prepared where need to be to lobby for its amendment. |
| Supervisor | Menze, Volker L. |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/rockwell_david.pdf |
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