Institutions of Governance

Basic principles defined the nature and scope of Byzantine government. First, the entire apparatus of government (fiscal, military, legislative and judicial, diplomatic, and also, to a large degree, ecclesiastical) was centralized and under the emperor's control.

Komnenoi), specific families that had been created by this system took it over and dominated its upper echelons. When a presumption of power was associated with a certain family name (“Komnenos,” “Doukas,” etc.), we can say that Byzantium then acquired a real aristocracy. At that point, the contestations for power and civil conflicts that had marked relations between emperors and elites were internalized within the ruling family.

The Byzantine administration is justly famous for its efficiency and complexity (i.e., sophistication, by medieval standards). In reality, it had one chief goal:^[1262] to raise enough taxes to pay for a substantial army, and in this it was successful. While Greece, the islands, and Asia Minor are not especially noted for their fer­tility and natural wealth, Byzantium was the wealthiest monarchy among its peers, and its currency was the gold standard of the Middle Ages until about the thir­teenth century (the solidus, in Greek nomisma, or “bezant”). This was due to good management, not chance. Taxes were generally high and the source of grumbling, but never so high that they sparked agrarian revolts, as happened in the west and in the caliphate. They were, it seems, ruthlessly extracted, and tax-collectors were ubiquitous figures of dread (appearing even in dreams and visions of the afterlife). Basic hearth, poll, and land taxes were imposed according to a census of taxable properties and peoples that was updated by the state at regular intervals; indeed, time itself was measured according to “indictions,” consecutive 15-year cycles that marked an older version of this census. In addition, there was a wide range of surtaxes, imposts, corvees, fees, tolls, and the like. Commercial shipping entering or leaving the empire was required to register at specific ports of call and pay the tax due as a percentage of its value. This requirement was enforced by customs agents. Taxation was thus a chief concern in the life of the Byzantines, and it is no surprise that they strove hard to obtain exemptions, which was one way by which the court could win favor.^[1263] The tax structure could also be used to monetize the economy, if payment was required in cash rather than kind: a switch from the latter to the former allegedly sparked an uprising in Bulgaria in 1040, soon after the conquest of 1018.

The main expense of the Byzantine state was the army. Unfortunately, we have no exact and reliable budget figures. The structure and placement of the army was origi­nally determined by the Arab conquests of the seventh century. The late Roman field armies, or what survived of them, were pulled back into Asia Minor and settled there, where they became mostly defensive. The districts to which they were assigned, and

also the armies themselves, came to be known as “themes” (themata), and for a while these existed in parallel to the old Roman provinces. Military pay was drastically cut back, and soldiers were supported by the proceeds of the land, though how they ac­quired, or were assigned, these lands remains obscure and controversial. The themes eventually became the new provinces of the empire and were governed typically by the general of the thematic army stationed there. As these generals became in­creasingly involved in rebellions against the emperor in Constantinople, the themes were gradually broken up into smaller units and new, more mobile, professional, and better-paid armies were created in the eighth century (first by Constantine V) to counterbalance them and also to enable the empire to go on the offensive against its enemies: these were the tagmata, which were stationed in or around the capital. Parallel arrangements existed for the fleet, and the armed forces were supported by networks of spies and a secret service that prepared the famous Greek fire, an incen­diary weapon that was used mostly at sea but sometimes also on land.

At some point—we do not know when, possibly as late as the tenth century— the emperors formalized the status of the military lands that supported soldiers beyond their pay. The service obligation was now tied to the specific lands regard­less of who owned them, though they were free of all but the basic land tax; their owners could either serve in person or pay the difference to the state. Increasingly, it seems that the state preferred to accept the cash rather than the service, and used it to hire professionals. It is likely that the armies of the age of conquests (late tenth- early eleventh centuries) had more full-time, professional soldiers, both thematic and tagmatic. These are sometimes called “mercenaries” in the literature, but this is wrong: they were professional Roman soldiers. True foreign mercenaries were hired in relatively small numbers (half a dozen units of some 500 men, though the tagma of the Varangians was larger). Norman knights were hired to fight Turks and other Normans, but they proved particularly disloyal and likely to exploit Byzantine weak­ness for their own gain. The imperial army at its maximum size may have had a paper strength of about 140,000, and a large expeditionary force would have been around 15,000 men strong. This “army of the conquests” proved politically dangerous, by producing many rebels against the throne, which is why it was increasingly entrusted to eunuch-generals. It failed to defend Asia Minor from the Seljuks, but, to be fair, the Seljuks may have posed a threat greater than the Roman Empire had ever faced.

By 1081 the army was badly mauled, as was its state fiscal infrastructure, and it had to be overhauled by the Komnenoi in an ad hoc way that lurched from crisis to crisis, sometimes even by “borrowing” Church money.

The Palaiologan “empire” had shrunk so much that most of its territories were assigned to members of the imperial family. By this point Byzantium would have looked familiar to westerners: for the most part, it had no standing army but per­sonal retinues and hired mercenaries. While we have no data for patterns of land ownership in middle Byzantium, it does seem as if large landowners became much wealthier and more powerful relative to small ones in the later period. But it is also likely that at no point in Byzantine history could one challenge the emperor on the basis of private wealth alone: one always needed “institutional” access to some part of the army as well.

In late Byzantine times, the frontier was moving ever closer to the capital, until by the end it was defined by the city walls. But what can we say about frontiers in the peak years of the middle imperial period? First, we should question notions of open borders and fluid “zones of interaction,” which are fashionable cliches. All places are zones of interaction. What made frontiers into borders was, for the Byzantines, the ability of the state to regulate the passage of goods and people through them when it so chose.

The borders took a variety of forms. In some regions, Byzantium and a neigh­boring state (e.g., the Caliphate, Bulgaria) made treaties specifying the location and functions of the borders, that is, who garrisoned which fort and where goods had to pass through in order to be taxed (we have seen that maritime trade also had to pass through specific duty-ports). So there were areas where the jurisdiction of one monarch ended and that of another began. There were also cases of buffer states between larger ones, e.g., the emirate of Aleppo after 970 ce, whose rights, limita­tions, and responsibilities for trade, tax, and war were also spelled out in a treaty. Finally, there were chiefdoms or small principalities that were treated by Byzantium as peripheral client-states, e.g., the Lombard duchies in southern Italy, various cities in the western Balkans, and (at times) the Armenian and Georgian principalities in the Caucasus. The primary method of influence (“control” would be too strong a term) were court titles and their lucrative salaries. Thus Constantinople could pretend that these border lords were client-rulers, even though they were not al­ways loyal. Yet if enough of the aristocracy of such a realm could be bought up, it could in time be annexed. Therefore, in the middle period the border ranged from theoretically “fixed” to conveniently fluid situations. The Byzantines were, for the most part, master manipulators of such situations and had paid agents almost eve­rywhere, who could even foment internal rebellion within a neighboring state that was making threatening moves. They regularly paid or incited third parties to attack the enemies of the empire from behind (e.g., the Rus' against Bulgaria, and Cumans against Pechenegs), allowing the emperors to mediate or pick up the pieces. These strategies were preferable to the risks of battle and far less expensive.

A final matter that must be addressed is the Church. The Ecumenical Patri­archate of Constantinople was another imperial institution whose reach exceeded the boundaries of the empire. The religious map of eastern Europe today roughly reflects the origin of the missionaries who converted each land, whether from Rome or New Rome. While the new churches established in the north generally remained under the jurisdiction of the Church of Constantinople, the empire does not seem to have pursued an active policy of proselytism, and the Byzantines tended to regard foreign converts from paganism as little more than savages.¹⁷ Within the empire, Orthodoxy was a social and legal norm. Judaism was gen­erally permitted, though on a few occasions emperors are said to have wanted to convert all the Jews (they never tried hard enough to succeed). There was a tolerated Muslim minority in Constantinople, with mosques, patronized by the Caliphate. The Syriac Jacobite Church was granted toleration when many of its territories were conquered in the tenth century, but 50 years later the court oc­casionally pressured its bishops to convert and sent them into exile when they refused. Paganism was de facto obsolete and heresies forbidden by law. Yet there was no inquisition. One did not have to go to church, and conformity was achieved mostly through social pressure. Some intellectuals did run into trouble for expressing views that were deemed unorthodox, though it was hard to know in advance what was off limits. At worst, such deviants were fired from their state jobs; only those actively preaching heresy were put to death, though even here the emperors were more zealous than the clergy, for they had to posture before public opinion. Quiet tax-paying communities of the unorthodox were left alone.

In sum, Byzantium was not pluralist or even permissive when it came to religion, but it did not seek to exterminate difference by all means. It is best described as theoretically intolerant but usually pragmatic.

The emperor was effectively the head of the Church.^[1264] He created most of the legal and fiscal framework in which it operated, could appoint and depose almost any bishop or patriarch he wanted, could (alone) convene Councils, and could set matters of practice and even doctrine. Modern Byzantinists have tried to de­fend Byzantium against the accusation of “Caesaropapism” leveled by Catholic and Protestant thinkers. But the defense rings hollow (though the very concept of Caesaropapism is mired in polemic to begin with). The emperors usually had their way in religious matters. Some bishops or monks often stood up to them, but more importantly, imperial policies were criticized in a variety of contexts and means all the time. Hagiographic literature, on which historians rely, attributed the defeat of an emperor in a religious dispute to religious figures, who stood firm against heret­ical policies. After the defeat of Iconoclasm (an attempt to ban religious icons in the eighth and ninth centuries), the Iconophiles rewrote its history as the struggle of the pious against heretical emperors. The Palaiologan emperors also failed to persuade most of their subjects to accept union with the Church of Rome as the price of aid against the Turks, but it is not clear how hard they sold the case. With the decline of imperial power in the late period, the patriarchs rose in importance, especially as their international network of influence and prestige remained in place. It was at this time that the modern polycentric network of autonomous regional Orthodox churches came into being, the most lasting legacy that the Byzantine world has transmitted to our own. Byzantium as a viable state had to be destroyed for this to emerge.