These conditions were presented to the Council, which ordered the following measures:
“Whoever takes up an abandoned child shall bring him to the Church where that fact will be certified. The following Sunday the priest will announce that a new-born child has been found and ten days will be allowed to the real parents to claim their infant. When these formalities have been complied with, if any one then claims a child or in any way calumniates those who have received it, he will be punished according to the Church laws against homicide.”[386]
Ten years later the act of the Council of Vaison was sanctioned at the Council of Arles and again in 505, by the Council of Agde.
It has been said that this was comparatively little when one thinks of this great union of bishops representing not only the interests of religion but “the moral needs of the epoch.” On the other hand, any criticism would be unjust that did not take into consideration the fact that it was great progress in the face of great poverty and greater barbarity.[387]
Church and State united in the movement for the protection of the child in the laws of Justinian, who, raised to the throne in 527, published in 529, and with considerable changes in 534, a collection of laws that have immortalized his name, in which the great lawyer Tribonian remade the three other codes, the Gregorian, Hermogenian, and the Theodosian.
Justinian proclaimed absolute liberty for foundling children, declaring that they were not the property of either the parents who exposed them or of those who received them.
One of these laws, promulgated in 553, punished severely those who tried to hold as slaves, children who had been exposed. This law stated expressly that all children left at churches or other places were absolutely free. It also stated that the act of exposing a child exceeded the cruelty of an ordinary murder, inasmuch as it struck at the most feeble and the most pitiable.
The imperial edict of 553 invited the Archbishop of Thessalonica and the prefect to give to the foundlings all the help possible and to punish those who disobeyed the injunction with a fine of five livres of gold. In addition, the Justinian Code contained a provision by which a father whose poverty was extreme was allowed to sell his son or his daughter at the moment of birth and to repurchase the infant later. The Emperor also ordered that some organized endeavour be made to take care of children for whom no other provision had been made. Unchanged and little modified, with the exception of those amendments made by the Emperor Leon, the philosopher, these laws and these conditions governed the Eastern Empire from now on until its fall before the arms of the Turks.