BIZANTINO, DIRITTO CANONICO. – Originally, this is the proper law of the Church of Byzantium, or Constantinople, which became the common law of all the Eastern Churches of the Byzantine rite, both Catholic and dissident.
I. EXTENT. – All the pagan peoples whose evangelization Constantinople furthered, such as the Russians and Serbs, or who, for one reason or another, definitively turned toward Constantinople, acknowledging its supremacy, simultaneously received the liturgy and ecclesiastical discipline of Byzantium, with the result that, subsequently, Byzantine canon law effectively became the common foundation of the legislation of all the Churches that had recognized, at some point and to varying degrees, the authority of the patriarchate of Constantinople: in other words, of all the Orthodox Churches, in the sense of the Council of Chalcedon—that is, practically, of all the Churches of the Byzantine rite.
Thus, today the following observe Byzantine discipline as the common foundation of their legislation, supplemented by the particular law of the individual communities: the Greeks in the strict sense, or Hellenes; the Melkites of the three patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem; the Romans; the Ukrainians, or Ruthenians; the Russians; the Georgians; the Serbs; and various small groups of Albanians, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Chinese, and Japanese. It should be noted that in almost all the groups mentioned above there exists a united Catholic community that bases its discipline on Byzantine canon law, just as the dissidents of the respective group do.
II. DURATION. – The history of strictly Byzantine canon law covers a period of approximately thirteen centuries, extending more precisely from the Council in Trullo of 691, at which Byzantine discipline asserted itself with its most characteristic features, to the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Indeed, before 691 the Byzantine patriarchate was governed almost exclusively by conciliar and patristic legislation common to the whole Catholic Church, or at most by the law proper to the entire Church of the East. On the other hand, after 1453, the patriarchate of Constantinople, increasingly dismantled both by the establishment of Catholic communities and by the emancipation of the dissident Churches, which acquired their autocephaly, introduced a new law, not recognized, at least in principle, by the other Churches, and to which the designation Greek or Hellenic is more properly applied.
III. SOURCES. – Canon 2 of the Council in Trullo established the sources of Byzantine canon law as follows: 1) the 85 canons known as the Apostolic Canons, extracted from Book VIII of the Apostolic Constitutions; 2) the canons of the ecumenical Councils of Nicaea I (325), Constantinople I (381), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451); 3) the canons of seven local councils held in the East: Ancyra in Galatia (ca. 314), Neocaesarea in Pontus (between 314 and 325), Gangra in Paphlagonia (mid-fourth century), Antioch in Syria (314, or 330–32), Laodicea in Phrygia (between 347 and 381), Sardica in Moesia (343), and Constantinople (394), to which is added a single local council of the West, that of Carthage in 419; 4) the canons of twelve Fathers of the Eastern Church: the holy archbishops of Alexandria Dionysius (d. 264), Peter (d. 311), Athanasius (d. 373), Timothy (d. 385), Theophilus (d. 412), and Cyril (d. 444); St. Gregory of Neocaesarea (d. 270), St. Basil of Caesarea in Cappadocia (d. 379), St. Gregory of Nyssa (d. ca. 390), St. Amphilochius of Iconium (d. ca. 403), and St. Gennadius of Constantinople (d. 471); among the writings of the Fathers of the Western Church, only the letter written by St. Cyprian of Carthage in the name of the bishops of Africa at the Council of 256, on the Baptism of heretics, is accepted; 5) finally, the 102 canons of the Council in Trullo itself.
To complete the list of the sources of Byzantine canon law, one must naturally add the 22 canons of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the Second Council of Nicaea (787). The Byzantine dissidents add the 17 canons of a double council (called the First-Second Council) held in the church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople in 861, under Patriarch Photius, as well as 3 canons of another council convened in the church of Hagia Sophia in 879 under the presidency of the same patriarch. Furthermore, the Byzantine commentators of the Middle Ages received in the Corpus of canon law writings by other patriarchs of Constantinople, namely: a synodal letter of St. Tarasius (784–806), addressed to Pope Hadrian; 35 canons of John II the Faster (582–95); two canons attributed to St. Nicephorus (806–15); and also two responsa of Nicholas Grammaticus (1084–11).
IV. COLLECTIONS. – In addition to the chronological collections composed in accordance with Canon 2 of the Council in Trullo, which were gradually supplemented as the canons of new councils or the decisions of patriarchs were added, the Church knew, almost immediately after the publication of the second edition of Justinian’s Code, a Collectio LX titulorum, now lost, composed around 535. The first systematic collection of canons to have come down to us is the Collectio L titulorum, compiled by John Scholasticus at Antioch around 550 and reissued by him at Constantinople after his elevation to the patriarchal see of that city in 565 (G. Voell-H. Justell, Bibliotheca iuris canonici veteris, II, Paris 1661, pp. 499–602; cf. V. Benešević, Synagoga 50 titulov i drugie iuridiceskie sborniki Ioanna Skolastika, Petersburg 1914). From the period preceding the Council in Trullo there also survives a valuable and precise Synopsis canonum, revised around 965 by Simeon Logothetes and known chiefly through the commentary of Aristepe (Voell-Justell, op. cit., pp. 673–709; G. Rhalles, M. Potles, Σύνταγμα τῶν θείων καὶ ἱερῶν κανόνων, IV, Athens 1854, pp. 393–416). Finally, among the systematic collections one must number a Liber poenientialis, of uncertain date, mistakenly known under the name Nomocanon Ioannis Ieunatoris, the patriarch of Constantinople from 582 to 595 (Rhalles-Potles, op. cit., pp. 432–45; cf. Zaozerskij-Khakhanov, Nomokanon Ioanna Postnika, Moscow 1902; A. J. Almasov, Kanonarij monakha Ioanna, Odessa 1907).
The most characteristic feature of the collections of canon law, however, is the extensive welcome they give to legislation concerning ecclesiastical matters issued by the civil authority, often regarded as a true, if not autonomous, source of canon law. At first, these texts are found gathered in separate collections; thus there are: the Collectio XXV capitulorum, extracted from Justinian’s Code and already appended to the Collectio LX titulorum (G. Heimbach, Ἀνέκδοτα, II, Leipzig 1840, pp. 145–207); the Collectio LXXXVIII capitulorum, compiled by John Scholasticus as a supplement to his canonical work (Heimbach, op. cit., pp. 208–34); the Collectio XXII capitulorum, extracted from various Novels of Justinian (Voell-Justell, op. cit., pp. 660–72); and the Collectio Tripartita, extracted from the Corpus iuris civilis, more precisely from the first 13 titles of the Code, with indication of the respective parallel passages (whence the collection is also called Paratitla), from the Digest and the Novels, with a commentary by Anastasius Scholasticus on the latter (Voell-Justell, op. cit., pp. 1217–1361).
Yet it was not long before the laws of the civil authority concerning ecclesiastical matters (νόμος) and the canons of the Church (κανονες) were brought together in a single collection and under the same headings, giving rise to the famous collections known as Nomocanons.
Already toward the end of the sixth century, an unknown author distributed under the headings of the Collectio L titulorum the imperial texts of the Collectio LXXXVII capitulorum, thus forming, in a thoroughly artificial manner, the first of the Nomocanons; a translation of it into the Slavonic language made in the ninth century is attributed to St. Methodius (H. Schmid, Die Nomokanonübersetzung des Methodius, Leipzig 1922). But the best known of these collections is the Nomocanon XIV titulorum (PG 104, 441-976; I. B. Pitra, Iuris ecclesiastici Graecorum historia et monumenta, II, Rome 1868, pp. 433-642; Rhailles-Potles, I, Athens 1852, pp. 1-335; cf. V. Benešević, Kanoničeskij Sbornik XIV titulov so utoroj cetverti VII věka, Petersburg 1905; K. E. Zachariae von Lingenthal, Über den Verfasser und die Quellen des Pseudo-Photianischen Nomokanon in XIV Titeln, there 1885; V. Narbekov, Nomokanon Konstantinskago patriarcha Fotija, Kazan 1899). The first recension of this Nomocanon, which probably made use of an earlier collection of 14 titles compiled around 580, dates from the time of Heraclius, about 620, and comprises three parts: the first contains the arrangement of the canonical texts in 14 titles; the second is a chronological collection of the canons; the third contains the civil texts, extracted from the Collectio Tripartita and from the Novels of Heraclius. The second recension of this Nomocanon, made in 883 and traditionally attributed to Patriarch Photius, introduces the later canonical texts into the collection and inserts among the canons references to the corresponding civil documents, thus forming a Nomocanon in the full sense of the word. There is also a third, little-known recension, made by Theodore Bestas in 1080, who was content to reproduce the civil documents in full and to insert references to the text of the Basilica, the new and extensive legal collection of the Macedonian dynasty. Translated into Slavonic during the course of the twelfth century according to the recension known as the Photiian recension (cf. Benešević, Drevne-slavjanshaja Kormcaja XIV titulov bez tolkovanij, Petersburg 1906), enriched and commented on in 1198 by the noted canonist Balsamon, the Nomocanon in 14 titles was and remains the most representative and fundamental monument of Byzantine canon law.