The family

he documents - mostly tax records - of the late Byzantine period differ considerably from those of previous periods, in which only the heads of families are listed. Now, all the members of the family are recorded, a possible cause for this being the donations en masse of land and paroikoi to monasteries and other landowners who, of course, wanted to know how many people were living and working on their property. Thus, more details are available on the structure of the family.

Scholars consider families and households as types of social organisation. The generally accepted definition of the family is that of a social unit founded on blood- and marriage-ties, while the main distinguishing features of a household are co-habitation and common ownership. The vast majority of the population consisted of nuclear families whose members were the parents and the unmarried children, while there was also a considerable number of households, where parents and married children or married siblings lived together in a kind of extended family.

In Byzantine society the family was basically a patriarchal one. The head of the household and the owner of the property was the man, and it was he who was responsible for the payment of taxes. However, the role of women was important and this is proven by the fact that, often, widows - or, more rarely, unmarried women - are mentioned as heads of households. Even surnames might be inherited from the mother's sideof the family, although they were normally transmitted through the man. When a woman married, she usually moved to her husband's home, to which she brought her dowry. It is worth noting that women heads of households were taxed in the same way as men until the 15th century, after which time, under Ottoman rule, as a social welfare measure, widows were taxed less than men.