THE LATE ROMAN SYSTEM

In chapters 3 and 4, I outlined the chief developments in the relations between cities and their hinterlands on the one hand, and between landowners and the rural agricultural population of the empire on the other. These developments provide the backdrop to the subject of this chapter and the next, that is, the administrative structures of the Byzantine state, its mode of revenue extraction and distribution, and its military machinery. For the fiscal and military establishments form the two central and interrelated elements of the state administrative apparatuses which secure both its physical defence and its political and institutional reproduction. Contingent upon these are the mode of civil provincial administration and the conduct of foreign policy, and it is to these areas that I shall turn in this chapter.

Let me begin, therefore, with the machinery of revenue extraction. The changes that took place in the organisation of this aspect of state administration during the seventh century were considerable; and the best way to illustrate this, and then to attempt to demonstrate the causes of change and their process, will be to sketch out briefly the systems of the later Roman period (up to about 600) and of the Byzantine period (of about 800–900), respectively.

During the sixth century the extraction and administration of revenues had been organised under the auspices of three departments: the praetorian prefectures, the comitiva sacrarum largitionum and the res privata.