The Nomocanon: The Zakonopravilo of St. Sava

The Zakonopravilo (literally “Law-Rule”; also the Nomocanon of St. Sava) is the great compilation of canon and civil law that Sava completed around 1219/1220 to govern the newly autocephalous Serbian Church and the Serbian kingdom. Drawing together the canons of the ecumenical councils and Fathers with Roman-Byzantine civil law — the Procheiron, Justinian’s Novellae, and the commentaries of Aristenos and Zonaras — in seventy chapters, it became the first constitution of the Serbian church and state, the foundation of Serbian law, and, transmitted as the Kormchaya kniga (“Book of the Helmsman”), the working law-book of the Russian and Bulgarian churches as well.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox

What a Nomocanon Is

A nomocanon (Greek nomos, “law” + kanon, “canon”) is a combined collection of civil law (nomoi, the imperial and secular law) and church law (kanones, the canons of councils and Fathers), arranged so that the two bodies of law can be used together. The genre was a Byzantine creation; its great monuments were the Nomocanon in 14 Titles (associated with the name of Patriarch Photios) and, by the twelfth century, the commented canonical collections of John Zonaras, Theodore Balsamon, and Alexios Aristenos (Nomocanon, Britannica and OrthodoxWiki; on the wider tradition see Orthodoxy Guide: Canon Law). To give a new church its law was to give it a nomocanon; and Sava, an Athonite formed in Byzantine canon law, undertook to provide one for Serbia in the Slavonic tongue.

Compilation and Date

Sava compiled the Zakonopravilo in the years around the autocephaly. The standard account holds that he began the work on Athos, likely from about 1208, drawing on the canonical libraries of Hilandar, and completed it in 1219/1220 — finishing it, on one account, at Thessalonica as he returned from Nicaea, so that the new church returned to Serbia with both its autocephaly and its law-code in hand (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia: “most likely began in 1208 while at Mount Athos” and “completed it in Thessaloniki upon returning from Constantinople”). The conjunction is significant: the Zakonopravilo is the legal complement of the 1219 autocephaly — the instrument that made the self-governing church also a self-ordering one (see Autocephaly 1219).

[Disputed: The exact date and the place of completion are given variously. Most accounts date the Zakonopravilo to 1219 or 1220 and associate its completion with Thessalonica or Serbia; the long composition (begun c. 1208 on Athos) means the work has no single date. The attribution to Sava is traditional and broadly accepted, though, as with all such compilations, the degree of his personal redaction versus the work of collaborators cannot be precisely measured (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia; standard editions of the Zakonopravilo).]

Contents and Structure

The Zakonopravilo is not an original code but, in the proper sense, an anthology and adaptation of the Byzantine legal inheritance, rendered into Serbian Church Slavonic and ordered for use. Its seventy chapters integrate a remarkable range of sources (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia):

  • The canons of the ecumenical and local councils and the canons of the Holy Fathers — the church law proper;
  • The Nomocanon in 14 Titles and the older Nomocanon (Synagoge) of John Scholastikos, the framework collections;
  • The commentaries of Alexios Aristenos and John Zonaras on the canons, so that the canons came with their authoritative interpretation;
  • The civil law: the Procheiron (Prochiron) — the handbook of Byzantine civil law issued under the Macedonian emperors — and selections from Justinian’s Novellae, covering marriage, property, inheritance, procedure, and the relation of church and state.

The structure, as the standard description gives it, comprises seventy chapters — six introductory, forty-four on church law, and twenty on civil law — making it “a completely new compilation of civil and religious regulations” (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia). In selecting Aristenos’s commentary (the briefer, more usable epitome) over the fuller Balsamon, Sava chose a practical, governing text rather than a scholarly one — a code to be applied, not merely consulted.

The First Constitution of the Serbian Church and State

The historic significance of the Zakonopravilo is that it gave Serbia, at a single stroke, the legal foundation of both its church and its state. It was, in the standard formulation, “Serbia’s first Serbian-language church and state constitution,” supplying the law by which the autocephalous church governed itself and by which the Serbian kingdom ordered marriage, property, the courts, and the relation of the crown to the church (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia; “Saint Sava Law (Nomocanon of Saint Sava) and Law of Stefan Dušan,” DOAJ). Where the 1219 autocephaly gave Serbia an independent church, the Zakonopravilo gave that church — and the kingdom around it — a complete working law in its own tongue. It is the legal monument of the symphony of church and state that Sava built (see Faith, Letters, and Learning), and it remained the basic law of medieval Serbia until and alongside the great secular code of Tsar Stefan Dušan (1349/1354).

The Kormchaya Kniga: A Slavic Inheritance

The Zakonopravilo did not remain Serbian. As the most complete and usable Slavonic nomocanon of its age, it was adopted across the Slavic Orthodox world under the name Kormchaya kniga — the “Book of the Helmsman,” the law-book that steers the ship of the church (Nomocanon, OrthodoxWiki). It passed early to Bulgaria, and to the Russian Church: in 1262 the Metropolitan of Kiev, Cyril II, requested a copy and is recorded as preferring the Serbian redaction of Sava over the Bulgarian, and the Kormchaya became the foundational canonical collection of the Russian Church, eventually printed at Moscow in 1650 and 1653 (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia; on its Russian afterlife see Orthodoxy Guide: Russian Monasticism). Through the Kormchaya kniga, Sava’s compilation became one of the most widely used legal texts of the entire Slavic Orthodox world for some four centuries — a reach far beyond the Serbian kingdom for which it was made.

Sava did not compile his nomocanon out of nothing; he stood at the end of a long Byzantine effort to organize canon and civil law into a single usable corpus, and the Zakonopravilo cannot be understood apart from that inheritance. The decisive framework collection was the Nomocanon in 14 Titles, a Constantinopolitan compilation of the late sixth and early seventh centuries that arranged canonical and imperial law under fourteen thematic headings, and whose revised recension of 883 became permanently associated with the name of Patriarch Photios — by Sava’s day the standard nomocanon of the Byzantine Church (Nomocanon, OrthodoxWiki and Britannica; Orthodoxy Guide: Canon Law). Behind the Title-collections lay the bare canonical material itself: the canons of the seven ecumenical councils, of the local councils, and of the Fathers, which by the twelfth century had received a great wave of learned commentary in Constantinople.

That twelfth-century revival of canon-law scholarship gave Sava his immediate sources. Three Constantinopolitan canonists dominated it: John Zonaras, whose commentary explained the canons historically and theologically; Alexios Aristenos, who commented on the abridged canonical text (the Synopsis) in shorter, more practical notes; and Theodore Balsamon, patriarch-elect of Antioch under Manuel I Komnenos, whose vast commentary correlated the canons with the imperial law in exhaustive detail (Nomocanon, OrthodoxWiki and Britannica). On the civil side, the law Sava drew from was the Macedonian re-codification of Justinianic law: the great Basilika of Leo VI, the sixty-book recasting of the Corpus Juris Civilis into Greek, and the shorter handbooks distilled from it — above all the Procheiron (Prochiron), a compact manual of private and criminal law issued under Basil I. Sava reached past the unwieldy Basilika to the usable Procheiron and to selected Novellae of Justinian, exactly as he reached past Balsamon to Aristenos: at every level the Zakonopravilo prefers the working text to the scholarly one (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia; Orthodoxy Guide: Canon Law).

Why Aristenos and Not Balsamon

The choice of Aristenos’s commentary over Balsamon’s is the most revealing editorial decision in the whole compilation, and it was a deliberate one. Balsamon’s commentary was the more learned and the more complete; it became, in Greek, the authoritative interpretation of the canons. But it was also the work of a Constantinopolitan jurist writing for the imperial church at the height of its legal sophistication — long, allusive, and bound to the living detail of Byzantine imperial practice. Aristenos commented instead on the Synopsis, the abbreviated canonical text, and his notes were correspondingly brief and direct (Nomocanon, OrthodoxWiki and Britannica). For a new church in a new kingdom, needing a law that bishops and royal judges could actually apply in the Slavonic tongue, the shorter epitome was the better instrument. Sava’s preference for Aristenos is thus of a piece with the entire character of the Zakonopravilo: it is a governing code, meant to be used by a young hierarchy, not a scholar’s library. [Disputed: Some scholarship stresses that the Zakonopravilo in fact combines materials from more than one commentator and is not a pure “Aristenos” text; the point is the dominant reliance on the shorter epitome rather than the exclusion of all else (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia).]

Symphonia: The Concord of Nomoi and Kanones

The nomocanon as a genre rests on a particular vision of law, and the Zakonopravilo embodies it fully: the symphonia of nomoi and kanones, the concord of the civil and the sacred law. In Byzantine legal thought, imperial law and church law were not rival jurisdictions but two harmonized expressions of a single Christian order, so that a properly ordered Christian polity required both bodies of law to be available together and read in agreement (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). The very form of the nomocanon — civil and canonical law bound in one book, the canons supplied with their commentary and the relevant imperial law set beside them — is this doctrine made concrete. By translating that form into Slavonic and giving it to Serbia, Sava transplanted not only a set of rules but the underlying conception of a society in which throne and altar order the same Christian people in concord. The legal symphony of the Zakonopravilo is the institutional twin of the church-state symphony Sava built politically (see Faith, Letters, and Learning).

What the Civil Chapters Govern

The twenty civil chapters are not an abstract appendix but the working law of everyday Christian society, and their subject-matter shows what kind of order the Zakonopravilo was meant to produce. Drawn chiefly from the Procheiron and Justinian’s Novellae, they regulate the law of marriage — degrees of kinship and impediments, betrothal, the validity and dissolution of marriage, matters where canon and civil law most closely overlap; the law of inheritance and property — succession, wills, dowry, and the transmission of estates; the law of persons and procedure — the conduct of courts, witnesses, evidence, and judgment; and the treatment of heresy and the relation of church and state, where imperial law lent its force to the defense of Orthodoxy (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia; “Saint Sava Law… and Dušan’s Code,” DOAJ). These were precisely the domains in which a Christian kingdom needed settled rules and in which the sacred and civil laws had to be made to agree, and they explain why the Zakonopravilo could serve at once as the law of the church and the basic law of the realm.

The Zakonopravilo and Dušan’s Code

The Zakonopravilo remained the basic law of medieval Serbia for more than a century, and its relationship to the great secular code of the next age is one of continuity rather than supersession. When Tsar Stefan Dušan promulgated his celebrated Zakonik (Dušan’s Code) at the councils of 1349 and 1354, he did not replace Sava’s nomocanon but built upon it: the Zakonik presupposed the canonical and civil law already supplied by the Zakonopravilo and was, in the medieval Serbian legal tradition, transmitted together with it and with the abridged Byzantine law-book (the Syntagma of Matthew Blastares) as part of a single legal corpus (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia; “Saint Sava Law… and Dušan’s Code,” DOAJ). Sava’s compilation thus stands at the head of the medieval Serbian legal tradition as its foundation, with Dušan’s Code as the crowning secular addition a century and a quarter later — the two together constituting the law of the Serbian empire at its height. [Disputed: The precise textual relationship among the Zakonopravilo, Dušan’s Code, and Blastares’s Syntagma in the surviving Serbian legal manuscripts is a matter of specialist study; what is secure is that Dušan’s Code did not abolish Sava’s nomocanon but stood alongside it (“Saint Sava Law… and Dušan’s Code,” DOAJ).]

The Manuscript Tradition

The text of the Zakonopravilo survives through a tradition of medieval copies, the oldest and most important of which anchors the whole transmission. The Ilovica (Ilovička) manuscript of 1262, copied for the church of St. Michael at the Bay of Kotor (Zeta), is the oldest preserved copy of the Zakonopravilo and the principal witness to Sava’s text (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia). Other early copies — the Rashka and Dečani manuscripts among them — carry the work through the medieval Serbian church, and from this Serbian recension the text spread, under the name Kormchaya kniga, into the wider Slavic world. The survival of the Ilovica copy from 1262, only some four decades after the compilation and in the same year as the Russian request for the text, is what allows the Zakonopravilo to be studied as a concrete document rather than a reconstructed one. [Disputed: Datings and provenances of individual Zakonopravilo manuscripts vary in the literature; the 1262 Ilovica copy is securely regarded as the oldest surviving witness, but the relations among the later copies are debated (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia).]

The Kormchaya Kniga in Russia and Bulgaria

The diffusion of the Zakonopravilo through the Orthodox Slavic world deserves to be told in more detail, for it is the measure of the work’s authority. The text passed early to Bulgaria, where it served the Bulgarian Church, and from there or directly from Serbia it reached the Russian Church. The pivotal moment came in 1262, when Metropolitan Cyril II of Kiev, seeking a sound canonical law-book for the Russian Church in the difficult years after the Mongol conquest, obtained a copy; the tradition records that the Serbian redaction descending from Sava was preferred over the Bulgarian, and it became the foundational canonical collection of the Russian Church under the name Kormchaya kniga, the “Book of the Helmsman” (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia; Nomocanon, OrthodoxWiki; Orthodoxy Guide: Russian Monasticism). For four centuries the Kormchaya governed the canonical life of the Russian Church in manuscript; it was finally fixed in print at Moscow in 1650 and again, in a corrected edition, in 1653 — the latter printing falling in the very years of the Nikonian reforms that reshaped the Russian Church (Zakonopravilo, English Wikipedia; on the Russian monastic and ecclesial setting see Orthodoxy Guide: Russian Monasticism). That a compilation made for a small new Balkan kingdom in 1219 should still be the printed law of the Russian Church four and a half centuries later is the surest testimony to what Sava had achieved: not a local code but the working canon law of the Slavic Orthodox world.

See Also

References

  • Zakonopravilo. English Wikipedia (used to locate the date, composition, seventy-chapter structure, sources — Procheiron, Novellae, Aristenos and Zonaras, Nomocanon in 14 Titles — and the Kormchaya transmission to Bulgaria and Russia).
  • “Saint Sava Law (Nomocanon of Saint Sava) and Law of Stefan Dušan (Dušan’s Code): Sources of Law in Medieval Serbia.” DOAJ (open-access journal article). On the Zakonopravilo as a source of medieval Serbian law alongside Dušan’s Code.
  • Nomocanon. OrthodoxWiki and Encyclopædia Britannica. On the genre, the Nomocanon in 14 Titles, Photios, the twelfth-century canonists (Zonaras, Aristenos, Balsamon), the Basilika and Procheiron, and the Kormchaya kniga (“Book of the Helmsman”).
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. Six Byzantine Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, chapter 4. On the symphonia of nomoi and kanones and the Byzantine legal vision Sava transplanted.
  • St. Sava (attrib.). Zakonopravilo (Nomocanon of St. Sava), c. 1219/1220. The compilation itself; standard critical editions of the Serbian text.