“The dead do not inherit after the live”: the monks, juridical reality and everyday life in Byzantium

The article deals with the problem what happened to a subject of the Byzantine emperor when becoming a monk, whether he was to lose or change his juridical capacity or not at all. Such questions taken apart from all the other sources are artificial constructions of sort; they only begin being a living reality in a system of law. So evidence from written (hagiography, the norms and dispositions of Basil the Great, the statutes of the Middle Byzantine period) and documentary sources (the papyri) was added, which reflects another reality intersecting only partially with law. In the course of the research work, the fol-lowing conclusions have been made. The three strata of reality – the juridical one, the ideal of renouncing completely to one’s property, and the everyday life –overlapped only partially each other. The status of a monk depended less on legislation than on his own choice as to the proper kind of monasticism. The legal death (according to the monastic ideal and a part of legislation) and the lessening of juridical capacity (capitis deminutio) only followed in the coenobitic communities with the strictest rules concerning the monk’s right to have property. The rest of the monks were completely free to dispose of their property and make testaments