Understanding the development of ecclesiastical law in the Eastern empire prior to the Council of Nicaea (325) involves several assumptions.¹ First is the conviction that eastern canon law can be profitably differentiated from its counterpart in the West. Especially for this early period, however, there is little material to prevent one from doing precisely that, because nearly all of the extant sources are of an eastern provenance, and even those that were written in the West were composed originally in Greek (the most obvious exception being the early western councils, which shall be omitted from this account). Second, few would...

Organization of Materials. It is usual to organize the canonical material of Byzantine canon law into four groups: (1) Canons of the Apostles; (2) Canons of ecumenical synods; (3) Canons of local synods; (4) Canons of the Fathers. This organization is found in most of the editions available today.¹ It was first found in canon 1 of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787), and it has been generally followed in the Orthodox Church in the second millennium. Its characteristic is a systematic organization of the material under dogmatic rubrics, which is demonstrated with the placing of the Canons of the Apostles,...

During the fourth century, many councils, most of them local, convened and enacted provisions for the organization and the functioning the legal life of the Church. In connection with these provisions (the ‘canons’, as they were called), there soon appeared collections that came about solely through private initiative. These collections initially served local purposes and were not unrelated to dogmatic definitions that prevailed in the specific localities.

The basic collection, which passed through several phases of revision, is known as the corpus canonum. It has not survived in its original form, however, and the efforts to reconstruct its contents are...

From the twelfth to the fifteenth century, the activity of the patriarchal synod of Constantinople, as the highest organ of the Eastern Church, continued, mainly in the form of the ‘Endemousa Synod’ (see the previous chapter for details). This gathering, however, gradually shed its character as an ‘accidental’ meeting of bishops and became rather a formal and legal entity.¹ Just as during the previous period, the synod in its legislative capacity mainly addressed two areas: legislation with regard to marriage and the organization and administration of the Church. During the period in question, legislation with regard to marriage developed on...

In the Christian East the ecclesiastical landscape was patterned after geographical units that followed the territorial lines of the Roman Empire, namely the boundaries of the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Christian communities also extended outside the boundaries of the empire into Persia, Armenia, Georgia, and Ethiopia. The Christian East and its communities were also defined by dogmatic considerations. The Christological conflicts of the fifth and sixth centuries created several churches that still exist and that coexisted historically within the same political territories. The first group of these churches included the adherents to the Council of Chalcedon (A.D....