The Confraternities of Byzantium

Abstract

‘THE medieval drive to association’. That phrase comes from a monograph by Susan Reynolds. It is to be found in a chapter on guilds and confraternities. And it is representative of the quasi-biological vocabulary to which historians of those institutions seem especially prone. 1 How appropriate is this talk of drives? What, in this context, is the force of ‘medieval’? My ultimate purpose is to address those questions from a Byzantine perspective; to ask in effect whether evidence of confraternities from the eastern Roman empire between approximately 400 and the Ottoman conquest will sustain talk of a Byzantine ‘drive to association’. The enquiry is, however, worth a preliminary approach on a broader front. This is partly because the historiography of European confraternities shapes the questions that must be put to the Byzantine sources. It is also because, unusually, a Byzantine perspective may illuminate problems arising from the western material. Finally it is because the comparative history of confraternities may, by implication, have a modest contribution to make to the larger question of the differences between eastern and western Christianity. Much energy has been expended on accounting for the ‘parting of the ways’ – less, perhaps, on measuring the distance between them. 2

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