International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Olga Karagiorgou
Academy of Athens, Athens, Greece;
[e-mail]
Sealing Practices in the 13
th
-Century Byzantium: 
Changing Habits and Possible Causes
Sealing was widely practiced by the Byzantines in all ranks of society: emperors, distinguished 
members of the civil and the military aristocracy, prominent churchmen, imperial officials, down to 
low ranking clergymen, simple businessmen or even illiterate people would seal their correspondence, 

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whether official or private. Gold, silver and wax seals were used throughout the Byzantine Empire; 
lead, however, due to its physical-chemical properties (low melting point, malleability and easy 
perforation) that made it soft enough to receive the impression of a die, but more enduring than 
wax, remained the most popular metal for the striking of seals.
Sealing in lead seems to have started around the 1
st
century and was first applied in trade 
goods. These early (commercial) seals were made either directly on the fabric covering the packages 
or cast in moulds and then impressed with a single matrix (iron stamp or ring), resulting thus to 
one-sided seals. Such seals were quite common up to the 5
th
century. Later on, however, they gave 
way to the far more popular two-sided lead seals whose striking was facilitated by iron 
boulloteria 
that appeared around the very end of the 3
rd
century and prevailed in the subsequent centuries 
(mostly from the 7
th
c. onwards).
Securing and authenticating letters with lead seals struck by 
boulloteria
was widely practiced 
by the Byzantines, as attested by the high number of the existent lead seals, estimated at present to 
ca. 80,000; in sharp contrast to this number, the preserved 
boulloteria
are no more than ten. Most of 
these seals are kept in state collections such as (in descending order according to number of holdings) 
the Dumbarton Oaks, the Hermitage, the combined Parisian collections at the Bibliothèque national 
de France and the 
Institut français
d’
études byzantines
, the Numismatic Museum in Athens and the 
Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. A quick overview of these sigillographic collections shows that 
the sealing activity of the Byzantines reached its peak during the 11
th
c. and started declining fast from 
ca. 1200 onwards. This decline is not observed just on the sheer number of preserved seals dated to the 
14
th 
and 15
th
c., but also to the social groups that make use of them. While the 11
th
c. exhibits a plethora 
of seals issued by state officials, the preserved seals of the 14
th
and 15
th
c. are, in their overwhelming 
majority, either imperial or ecclesiastical. In fact, on the basis of the sigillographic evidence available at 
present, sealing in lead, as far as the imperial chancery is concerned, comes to an end under Andronikos 
IV Palaiologos and his son Ioannes VII (end of the 1370s).
The present paper offers an overview of the available evidence on the gradual decline of sealing in 
lead in Byzantium from the 13
th
c. onwards and attempts, for the first time, a systematic discussion on 
the various factors (historical, political, demographic, technological) that lead to the almost complete 
abolition of a habit that had “sealed” the everyday life of the Byzantines for many centuries.

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