The land legislation issued by the
emperors of the Macedonian dynasty is the most important source for the
internal history of tenth-century Byzantium. In his edict of 934, the
emperor Romanos Lekapenos declared that the prosperity and stability of
the rural populace were essential to the empire's fiscal and
military well-being. He stated this at a time when imperial control
over the mainstay of the fiscal system - the village communes and the
peasant smallholders who inhabited them - was threatened by powerful
magnates, members of an emerging aristocracy, who were entering the
rural communities to acquire peasant lands and labour. The challenge to
imperial authority in the countryside had become even more serious
after the terrible famine of 927-928, which had forced many peasants to
sell or give up their lands to 'the powerful', as Lekapenos
called the magnates in his legislation. For the next sixty years,
Lekapenos and his successors used the law to defend 'the poor'
from the depredations of the 'powerful' and to preserve the
fiscal and military system on which imperial authority rested.