Though not a society of mass literacy like modern societies, Byzantine society was a profoundly literate one. Based on information from an extensive array of Byzantine documents from different periods (i.e. homilies, "Ecloga", etc.), Robert Browning concluded that, while books were luxury items and functional literacy (reading and writing) was widespread, but largely confined to cities and monasteries, access to elementary education was provided in most cities for much of the time and sometimes in villages. Nikolaos Oikonomides, focusing on 13th-century Byzantine literacy in Western Asia Minor, states that Byzantine society had "a completely literate church, an almost completely literate aristocracy, some literate horsemen, rare literate peasants and almost completely illiterate women." Ioannis Stouraitis estimates that the percentage of the Empire's population with some degree of literacy was at most 15–20% based primarily on the mention of illiterate Byzantine "tourmarchai" in the "Tactica" of Emperor Leo VI the Wise (r. 886–912).