"According to the Customs and Usages Aforesaid"? The Legal Sources of the Assizes of Romania and Legal Culture in Crusader Greece

After the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Crusaders established Frankish and Latin polities in the Greek Orthodox lands of Greece, or Romania. After a century, these polities were already in decline, with resurgent Byzantine power, Slavic expansionism, and Latin adventures threatening to end even the Principality of Achaea, the most powerful Latin polity. However, in the mid-1340s, legal scholars in Achaea compiled the Assizes of Romania, to formalize the feudal customs that had prevailed in Romania for the last century. These Assizes, theoretically based on the Assizes of Jerusalem, would go on to govern Latin Greek polities for the next four centuries. The Assizes are therefore a feudal law code for a medieval principality with an incredibly diverse cultural makeup. However, the Assizes do not reflect this diversity, but are instead an example of what Peter Topping calls a standard feudal law code. In my thesis, I will explore the legal traditions that informed the Assizes of Romania, and argue that the tradition of the Lombard Laws and the Liber Feudatorum was responsible for shaping the Assizes.

English-language secondary scholarship surrounding the Assizes has been limited to Peter Topping’s work in the 1940s, and recent work on translating medieval law codes will provide the groundwork for contextualizing my project. Using French, Jerusalemite, Italian, and Byzantine law codes as comparisons, I examine each assize and postulate a legal source, ultimately concluding that many of them derive from the Lombard Laws of northern Italy. The project will help to continue the field of medieval legal studies, as well as shedding light on the cultural makeup of the elite of the Principality of Achaea. The poster itself will feature maps of Crusader Greece and medieval Italy, and a chart featuring the legal sources informing each part of the Assizes. This chart will show what percentage of the Assizes are derived from Italian customary law, Byzantine law, the Assizes of Jerusalem, and French sources. This will allow viewers to understand the methodology and results of the study.