Quaesitor

Last updated May 03, 2019

The quaesitor (Greek : κοιαισίτωρ, κυαισίτωρ) was a Late Roman/Byzantine police official of Constantinople, specifically a magistrate, responsible for controlling the flow of legal and illegal immigration into the capital city of Byzantium.^[1] The office of the quaesitor was first established in 539 through the Novella 80 of Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565), designed to deal with the arrival of unemployed people to Constantinople living as criminals or beggars.^[1] One of his functions was to investigate people passing through Constantinople by determining their names, origins, and reasons for being in the city.^[1] Furthermore, the quaesitor had the authority to deal with unemployed persons by forcing the physically fit among the unemployed to work in a public industry such as a bakery (if an unemployed person refused to work, he would be expelled from Constantinople).^[1] The quaesitor was also granted judicial functions whereby his court dealt with certain types of crimes such as forgery.^[2]

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It has the longest documented history of any living Indo-European language, spanning more than 3000 years of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history; other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.

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References

1 2 3 4 Bury 1958 , p. 337; Moatti 2013 , p. 87.
↑ Bury 1958 , p. 337.

Sources

Bury, John Bagnell (1958). History of the Later Roman Empire: From the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian, Volume 2. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. ISBN 0-486-20399-9.
Moatti, Claudia (2013). "Immigration and Cosmopolitanization". In Erdkamp, Paul. The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 77–92. ISBN 978-0-52-189629-0.

J. B. Bury Irish historian and freethinker

John Bagnell Bury, was an Irish historian, classical scholar, Medieval Roman historian and philologist. He objected to the label "Byzantinist" explicitly in the preface to the 1889 edition of his Later Roman Empire. He was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin (1893–1902), before being Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge from 1902 until his death.

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[Bury-Moatti-1] 1 2 3 4 Bury 1958 , p. 337; Moatti 2013 , p. 87.

[2] Bury 1958 , p. 337.