Law Power And Imperial Ideology In The Iconoclast Era C680850 M T G Humphreys by M. T. G. Humphreys 0198701578 instant download after payment.

This work examines the legal texts and the role of law in Byzantium during the Iconoclast era, c.680–850. Law had been central to the Roman conception of themselves and their empire. Yet what happened to Roman law and the position it occupied in the ideological landscape during the turbulent years 680–850, normally studied through the prism of iconoclasm, is seldom explored and little understood. The numerous legal texts of the period, long ignored or misused by scholars, shed new light on this murky but crucial era, when, from the rump of the Roman Empire, emerged the Byzantine world. Both Roman law and canon law are used to chart the various responses to the trails of the times, especially the rise of Islam, from Justinian II’s Christocentric monarchy to the Old Testament-inspired Isaurian dynasty. Furthermore, a refocusing within Roman law towards crime, delict, and marriage is discerned, as is a deliberate campaign under the Isaurians to improve and apply the law through the creation of concise, utilitarian texts, and the payment and exhortation of those in the legal order. Indeed, the Isaurian dynasty had an indelible impact on Roman law, so much so that their successors perforce had to respond, and eventually attempt to excise them from the record. These legal reforms were just one part (if a central one) in a reformulation of ideology and state structures that underpinned the transformation from the late antique Roman Empire to medieval Byzantium.