The Economic History of Byzantium - Dumbarton Oaks

988 NICOLAS OIKONOMIDES
and the Balkans. After 730/31, the jurisdiction of each royal kommerkion was defined
either by the name of a province or by the name of a theme, the new military subdivision
of the empire which included a number of provinces. Indeed, we have an example
of a seal belonging to a strategos of Mesopotamia that probably dates from 825/6 and
bears a depiction of the emperor, presumably because the strategos was exercising powers
similar to those of the kommerkiarios at the time. 37 As we shall see below, in the tenth
century the strategos of Mesopotamia received the kommerkion of his theme rather than
a salary.
Once the state had begun to intervene in trade through civil servants and not by
means of entrepreneurs, trade per se naturally passed into the hands of private individuals.
The civil servants confined themselves primarily to collecting the tax levied by
the state on trade, and they used seals far less magnificent than those of the preceding
period. This tax was called the kommerkion after the office that collected it, and it took
the form ofeither a duty on movements of goods or a tax on their sale (though there
was no real difference between the two, given that the kommerkion was refunded on
goods that were reexported, unsold, through Abydos). This process was certainly complete
by the second quarter of the ninth century. 38
Administrative Structures
The Dark Ages also saw the creation, little by little, of the administrative structures of
the middle Byzantine economic and fiscal services. The main administrative change
was the splitting of the early Byzantine praefectura praetorio per Orientem and its replacement
by the logothesia (secretariats) in the central administration; the comitiva sacrarum
largitionum and the res privata, too, gave way to their medieval equivalents. Apart from
the changes in nomenclature, these successive administrative reforms led to the subdivision
of the services and the creation of a whole series of public finance offices, which
were directly dependent on the emperor, originated partly in his economic services,
and monitored one another. The new administrative arrangement is known to us from
sources of the ninth century and will be described below; for the present, I shall try to
present some of the stages in its evolution. 39
The most widespread transformation seems to have come about as early as the time
of Herakleios or his immediate successors. There is testimony from the sixth century
as to the existence of the sakellarios, the treasurer in charge of the royal money, who
may have been connected with the personal services of the emperor. He gained in
importance during the seventh century, controlling payments and thus the mints (of
Constantinople, Ravenna, and Carthage, in the 7th century). Over time, the office of
the sakellarios became still more important; its occupant was detached from the treasury
37 W. Brandes, “Überlegungen zur Vorgeschichte des Thema Mesopotamien,” BSl 44.2 (1983):
171–77.
38 Cf. Laiou, “Exchange and Trade,” 705–9, 713–14.
39 Based on Haldon, Seventh Century, 173ff. Cf. also F. Winkelmann, Byzantinische Rang- und Ämterstruktur
im 8. und 9. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1985).