In time, the autocratic and intrusive character of the Byzantine state produced a social structure that had few parallels in the medieval world. Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula formed the heartland of the Byzantine Empire even before the Muslims took Syria, Egypt, and North Africa in the seventh century. Both are rugged lands whose narrow valleys and small plateaus are cut off from one another because of geography and because their inhabitants come from different ethnic groups with long histories of mutual conflict. It would be hard to imagine a site less likely to encourage social equality and weak kinship ties, but that is what happened.

In the face of overwhelming imperial power, social distinctions receded. Below the throne, everyone was equal. Variations were seen in wealth, but Byzantine society had absorbed Christian teachings so that it did not regard money as a measure of virtue. Prestige depended primarily upon bureaucratic rank, and rank depended upon merit or on the bureaucrat's usefulness to the emperor. The widespread employment of eunuchs and the principle that all wealth could be appropriated to the service of the state inhibited the growth of those elaborate social hierarchies characteristic of the medieval west. As a result, social distinctions were fluid and relatively minor. The empress Theodora was not the only great personage to come from the lowest levels of society.

Even ethnic distinctions became largely irrelevant. The Byzantines were remarkably free of prejudice, though they sometimes persecuted Jews on religious grounds and may, in the early years, have looked down upon the Germans who were found in disproportionate numbers among their slaves and household servants. The imperial court embraced Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars, Armenians, Cappadocians, and a score of other ethnic groups without distinction; the ordinary citizen could do no less.

The same conditions that promoted social equality may have discouraged the growth of extended families. A few great clans attached themselves to the imperial court, often for several generations, but the western development of lineages--extended families who took their names and social identities from their estates--had no parallel in the east until the tenth or eleventh century. Instead, the Byzantines lived overwhelmingly in tight-knit nuclear families, often maintaining a certain distance in their dealings with others. Some writers warned against friendship because it might arouse the suspicions of the state. Most people, encouraged perhaps by the epiboli, acknowledged the obligation to help one's neighbors. However, Byzantine society, for all its outward regimentation, remained on the personal level individualistic, self-seeking, and often cynical in its relationships.

Roman law reinforced these tendencies to some extent by ensuring the equal division of property among heirs and by favoring the preservation of freehold tenures. Most Byzantines were small farmers who owned their own land. Some were serfs or tenants on the estates of the emperor or his more important servants, and some were slaves, though the incidence of slavery declined throughout the Byzantine era and by the eleventh century had attracted the opposition of the church on moral grounds. Commerce centered in the great city of Constantinople, which, until the Crusades, dominated the trade between Asia and the west. With its population of more than 400,000 it dwarfed the other towns of the empire. Provincial cities declined steadily in importance throughout the Byzantine centuries as bureaucracy and centralization strangled the ancient Greek municipal tradition. . . .

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