As we will see in Chapter 4, law books written by East Syrian bishops in the early ninth century prescribe forms of betrothal and marriage very similar to those of other regional legal cultures and to ancient, pre-Sasanian ones. Without overstating direct connections, this implies the continuity of regional common law traditions in Sasanian Mesopotamia, likely transmitted through scribal practice rather than encoded in normative treatises.63 When Sasanian Christians did not go to Zoroastrian judicial figures to contract marriages, we should imagine them doing so according to these regional legal traditions through the services of local Christian scribes.
Either way, Sasanian Christians would have been operating within the framework of Sasanian norms of judicial practice. The standard method of validating the content of a legal document in the Sasanian Empire was to attach to it a clay bulla impressed with the seals of office-holders and witnesses. If a document was sealed by a state official, a Sasanian court accepted it as fully valid. If a document carried only the seal impressions of private individuals as witnesses, it was up to the judge to determine its probative value.64 Presumably, any marriage agreement drawn up by a Zoroastrian judge would have received an authenticating seal impression. But even if non-Zoroastrian contracts were sealed only by witnesses, the descriptions of Sasanian judicial procedure we have suggest that they still would have been admissible before Sasanian judges, just at a lower level of evidentiary value. In other words, they still functioned under the auspices of the Sasanian judicial system, not in a fully autonomous Christian legal sphere. Additionally, Christian formulas and iconography on recent seal findings indicate that some Christians held imperially recognized offices, as does the Sasanian dynasty’s frequent interest in employing bishops in official capacities such as imperial embassies.65 Such individuals’ seals would presumably have granted marriage contracts full legitimacy, even if they did not conform to the Zoroastrian norms we see in the Middle Persian model contract. In these various ways, we should imagine Sasanian Christians operating under the purview of the Sasanian administration and its judicial apparatus even when they did not marry according to the same substantive norms as their Zoroastrian co-subjects.
Much as in the Roman Empire, the fact that marriage as a legal relationship did not fall under the exclusive purview of East Syrian law does not mean that ecclesiastical figures played no role in its administration. It is entirely likely that priests attended and blessed marriages, although the earliest positive evidence for an East Syrian liturgical ceremony of betrothal is not earlier than the seventh century.66 Furthermore, prohibitions of un-Christian marital practices form a significant part of East Syrian canon law from the Sasanian period. Mar Aba is exemplary in this respect; the distinctive Iranian forms of marriage enshrined in Sasanian law and common among some Iranian Christians—especially close-kin marriage and polygamy—compelled him to issue a substantial body of regulations for lay household life that became foundational to the later East Syrian legal tradition.67 Like their contemporaries to the west, East Syrian bishops such as Mar Aba used the same techniques of pastoral censure and exclusion from Christian communion to promote their notions of Christian sexual morality among the laity; East Syrian law sometimes ventured beyond the territory of Roman canon law only because a greater range of household forms were lawful and customary in the Iranian empire.
On the administrative side, we can certainly expect that many of the communal judicial venues at which Christians contracted marriages according to common law traditions were ecclesiastical audiences and that many of the local notables who served their communities as scribes, as witnesses, and in other judicial capacities had positions in the church. A recent survey of Syriac and Middle Persian seals belonging to Sasanian Christians, for example, includes a number that identify the holder as a deacon, priest, or metropolitan.68 In the late 600s, the Judicial Decisions of the East Syrian patriarch Hnanishoʿ I (r. 686–98) mention two marriage agreements that have been validated with the seals (Syriac singular ṭabʿā) of ecclesiastical officials, one a bishop and the other a traveling priest.69 These are likely examples of clergymen carrying on the legaladministrative functions of their Sasanian-era predecessors.
In sum, ecclesiastical figures in the Sasanian Empire were no doubt involved in the civil-legal business of the communities under their purview, including contracting marriages. But ecclesiastical law itself retained for the East Syrians a more restricted role. Rather than functioning as a comprehensive system that sealed off East Syrians from imperial legal institutions, it promoted appropriately Christian modes of conduct by regulating individual believers’ participation in Christian communion. Imperial and local civil traditions set the practical legal framework for marriage among Sasanian Christians in a manner similar to their Roman counterparts.
Religion, Magic, and Domesticity
Christian tradition put considerable claims on lay marriage and sexuality in the societies of late antiquity, but it ran up against other normative orders like imperial legal traditions, Greco-Roman sexual ethics, and Iranian marriage customs. As we have framed the story so far, much of this friction related to the public side of the institution of marriage: that is, the legal, moral, and theological statuses that those normative orders ascribed to men and women who had sex and cohabited with one another. For example, in the terms of Sasanian law a union between a woman and her nephew could be a valid marriage, while to East Syrian bishops it was unlawful fornication (zānyutā); sex between a man and a prostitute entailed no meaningful legal consequences in the Roman Empire, but it made the two into one flesh according to Christian theology. Before concluding, it is worth considering as well the relationship of Christian religiosity to some domestic aspects of late antique marriage, those that impinged less on public life. Late antique ecclesiastics prescribed norms for the private spaces of Christian households too; but again, practice varied considerably, and there is much evidence that the devotional side of household life was eclectic in ways that surreptitiously undermined the authority of Christian religious elites and their normative traditions.
Among the domestic activities that bore considerable attention from Christian theologians was sex itself, and we have seen that the prescription of monogamy and procreation characterized their traditions from an early date. Within the household, this translated into an emphasis on abstinence during fasting seasons and sexual restraint in general,70 as well as condemnation of the sexual exploitation of slaves. How completely the Christian moral-theological vision impelled householders to reorganize domestic life in these terms, which occurred behind closed doors in ways that divorce or taking a third spouse did not, varied over time and space. But if the lawfulness of specific sexual practices within domestic spaces received a good deal of ecclesiastical concern, it is also as important to recognize that late antique societies knew an entire realm of ritual practices related to sexuality, domesticity, and the inner affairs of households, neighborhoods, and kin networks far different from the doctrines and modes of piety prescribed by ecclesiastics. Essentially, we are dealing with what modern scholars call, with an imprecise but heuristically useful term, “magic”: a wide array of practices that tapped into the extrahuman, unseen powers that filled the universe in order to effect healing, protect against personal and familial calamities, or visit negative effects on one’s enemies.71 Such practices typically included “amulets, recitations of incantations, and performance of adjurational rituals.”72 These were frequently administered by learned practitioners other than religious professionals like bishops; in such cases, the latter tended to denigrate and proscribe magic as unlawful, unholy “sorcery” (Syriac ḥarrāshutā). Yet magic remained ubiquitous in the late antique Mediterranean world and western Asia, and it was practiced and patronized across the religious spectrum. Some Christians must have understood that magic fell outside the bounds of what the bishops considered properly Christian,73 but it remained an integral part of the life courses of untold numbers of laypeople formed less exclusively in the church’s high doctrine. Talismans, amulets, and adjurations were a way to look after one’s interests that coexisted largely unproblematically with one’s religious affiliation.
For our purposes, the important point is that magical practices were deeply connected
