under the Sasanians. The fall of the dynasty to the Arab conquerors, however, likely entailed the loss of imperial prestige on the part of its judicial officials; though they no doubt continued to offer judicial services, they now lacked the backing of state power that had made their services attractive for Sasanian subjects of any religious affiliation. In response to this relative vacuum, as well as the permissive stance of caliphal governance, George took the opportunity to claim an entirely new ecclesiastical jurisdiction over laypeople’s civil affairs.9
George’s synod represents the most assertive example of this interest on the part of the East Syrian ecclesiastical hierarchy. Two unique East Syrian legal works from the latter half of the seventh century, both highly innovative in form, genre, and content, provide further evidence. These texts deal especially with the law of inheritance and succession: how property devolves from one generation to another and thereby reproduces the material wealth and social standing of lineages. Through them, we can observe how the establishment of the caliphate entailed not only continuities in Christian communal structures but efforts to strengthen those structures by formalizing an ecclesiastical role in the life of lay families. The first text in question is the Law of Inheritance, a treatise by Shemʿon (fl. mid-seventh century), bishop of Revardashir in Fars province in southwest Iran, composed originally in Middle Persian but extant in a Syriac translation. The second is the collected Judicial Decisions of Patriarch Hnanishoʿ I (r. 686–98, mentioned in Chapter 1). These cover a variety of topics, but the majority convey Hnanishoʿ’s judicial decisions on inheritance disputes, many of which laypeople or lower clergy brought directly to the patriarch.10 The significance of these texts rests in two features: the subjects they address and their genre. As we have seen, East Syrian bishops had cultivated a tradition of ecclesiastical law throughout the Sasanian period. The bulk of that tradition, however, consisted of the hoary genre of canons issued by bishops assembled at synods. By its nature, synodal legislation tended to address the broad areas of immediate concern for which synods were convened, which usually meant church organization more than the affairs of laypeople. Shemʿon and Hnanishoʿ’s texts are different. They concern themselves with detailed points of family law, offering precise, casuistic considerations of how inheritances should be distributed. For example, the cases that Shemʿon treats include a man who dies with only his wife and brother as potential heirs and one who has only a granddaughter and a nephew.11 One of Hnanishoʿ’s decisions concerns a widow whose male in-laws have tried to appropriate her deceased husband’s estate rather than let her son inherit it.12 By contrast, one of the few Sasanian-era synodal canons to treat inheritance prescribes only a general principle: “every Christian who nullifies the will and testaments of the deceased” shall incur divine punishment, a far cry from the detail of Shemʿon’s and Hnanishoʿ’s rulings.13 Furthermore, these seventh-century works differ from synodal canons in that they are not bodies of collective legislation but compositions by individual specialists—bishops who have taken on the role of jurist to delineate norms for civil life or to provide justice to laypeople in need.14 Shemʿon’s treatise gives a theoretical justification for this role: God has entrusted the “leaders of the church” (mdabbrānē d-ʿēdtā) with administering His “magnificent laws and teaching” (nāmosē tmihē w-mallpānutā) that guide human life.15
Map 2. The Medieval Islamic Caliphate
Shemʿon and Hnanishoʿ exemplify how East Syrian bishops stepped into expanded judicial roles after the fall of the Sasanian state and before the formation of a strong caliphal judiciary. Shemʿon’s law book conceptualizes the intergenerational transfer of wealth as an area of social life newly subject to ecclesiastical pastoral care and repackages principles of Sasanian inheritance law as a Christian tradition. Similarly, Hnanishoʿ’s decisions show how a high church official could take on a judicial role in regulating the disbursement of inheritances and, therefore, the reproduction of lineages, which had been one of the primary areas of activity of the Sasanian judiciary.16 Shemʿon’s and Hnanishoʿ’s efforts in this regard were not entirely unprecedented; we have a few Sasanian-era canons that give guidelines for both intestate inheritance and bequests.17 To judge by Shemʿon’s discussion, however, those few precedents in no way added up to an authoritative, comprehensive body of communal law; the very problem from which his treatise followed was that the “teaching of our Lord [mallpānutā d-Māran] … did not determine a law for deciding civil judgments [psāqā d-dinē].”18 In Hnanishoʿ’s case, earlier patriarchs surely adjudicated comparable lay disputes; but there appears to have been no conception that such decisions might constitute a formal body of East Syrian civil law, and only in the seventh century did the ecclesiastical administration take an interest in preserving them.19
Shemʿon’s and Hnanishoʿ’s works, then, exemplify efforts to formalize ecclesiastical rulings as the substantive body of a more comprehensive, specifically Christian civil law tradition in a time of institutional transition effected by the Arab conquests. They point as well to the convergence of marriage, kinship relations, and property rights as the social arena for which laypeople most frequently sought ecclesiastical help and into which the new conditions of caliphal rule most facilitated the extension of ecclesiastical authority. Late antique canon law had enjoined chaste sexual practice within the ancient institution of marriage. The establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate provided bishops of the Church of the East the opportunity to begin bringing the material imperatives of household reproduction under the purview of Christian law as well.
MARRIAGE AND RELIGIOUS BELONGING IN GREATER SYRIA
Unlike their East Syrian contemporaries, bishops in formerly Roman Syria and western Mesopotamia (as well as in Egypt) were not as actively concerned with extending ecclesiastical law into lay civil and household affairs. This difference stems from the fact that the end of Roman rule and the fall of the Sasanians had different implications for the caliphate’s Christian subjects. It is likely that the Christians of formerly Sasanian Iraq and Iran were less interested in going to the Zoroastrian judges of a no longer Zoroastrian state when they could turn to their own clerics instead, a grassroots impetus for the East Syrian ecclesiastical experimentations with communal law in the seventh century. In formerly Roman provinces, by contrast, the same Christian administrators, upper and lower clergymen, and others who served in judicial capacities remained more or less in place in the decades after the conquest (excluding those who fled with the Roman armies). Bishops in Syria thus did not have the same motivation as those in Iraq and Iran to emphasize new loci of judicial authority or to actively reconstitute their legal traditions to encompass inheritance law; they already had Roman law, or whatever was understood as Roman law in any given locale. What they did face was a shifting socioreligious landscape as the conquerors settled in the towns of Syria, bringing their new monotheistic message with them. Against this backdrop, the marital practices of Syrian Christians received heightened pastoral attention, evident in a range of episcopal letters, from bishops seeking to define social boundaries between their flocks and the conquerors.
The contrast between the institutional innovations undertaken by bishops in the eastern caliphate and in Syria is particularly evident among the Chalcedonians, those Christians who adhered to Roman imperial orthodoxy. In the first decades of the seventh century, jurist-bishops in Greek-speaking territories had continued the characteristically late Roman concern with legal codification, as inspired by Justinian, by composing the first nomocanons, novel collections of civil and ecclesiastical law;20 but after the conquests, we have no evidence of comparable endeavors by Chalcedonian bishops living under the Medinan caliphs or the Umayyads. The Syriac Orthodox or West Syrian Church, defined in theological terms by its opposition to Chalcedonian orthodoxy and its adherence to miaphysite Christological doctrines, presents a somewhat different case. Some West Syrian bishops of the later seventh century invested considerable energy in consolidating a communal legal tradition particular to their church. The major figure in this development is Jacob of Edessa (d. 708), a monk and bishop originally from the region
