The Economic History of Byzantium - Dumbarton Oaks

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The Role of the Byzantine State in the Economy Nicolas Oikonomides The adherence of Byzantium to tradition was a feature of every aspect of state life, profoundly affecting relations between the state and the economy and determining the extent to which the former intervened in the latter. However, although the state’s theoretical principles were, of course, founded on tradition, when the time came to put them into practice a realistic approach prevailed: theory survived and continued to have its effect, though without substantially altering the true situation. Those in power intervened frequently in economic life and at many points of it, working on the basis of the old theory that the purpose of action of any kind was to foster the smooth operation of the state machine, of the empire “by the grace of God.” Inreality, however, the changes that came about were profound, and they came about without disturbing the theoretical surface ofthe omnipotence of the state, and of the emperor in particular. It has been said that Byzantium had a “directed” economy, since the intervention of the state was manifest even inrelation to activities, such as trade, that would normally be beyond such controls. This description has now been abandoned, and the economy of Byzantium is now seen as “restrained” by the state; in other words, it was an economy that functioned on the basis of the freedom of transactions but in which the state intervened to prevent the excessive accumulation of wealth, the suppression of the weakest, and the exploitation of the citizens/consumers. Where this intervention is concerned, the Byzantine state was substantively different from the medieval states of western Europe, which functioned under a system of effective decentralization. One of the unchanging characteristics of the Byzantine administration was its centralization: everything passed through the center, everything was controlled from the center. Here there was a fundamental contradiction between theory and reality, since in actuality phenomena of decentralization are often to be observed. However, the contradiction was blunted by the adaptability of the Byzantine state, which was able, when necessary, to confine its control to the bare essentials. In the last centuries of Byzantium, a degree of decentralization is evident, but even then the state kept control This chapter was translated by John Solman.
974 NICOLAS OIKONOMIDES of many parts of the decentralized economy, determining the tax obligations of even those peasants who lived on land from which it collected nothing. 1 Sources The fact that the Byzantines were so attached to tradition causes problems when one is assessing the reliability of the source material, especially since very few archives have survived, and consequently it would be futile to hope to assemble a long series of information of an economic nature. No more than a few thousand Byzantine documents of the seventh tothe fifteenth century have survived to the present day, and of course they cover the entire spectrum of life. Furthermore, the majority of these documents come from monastic archives in specific areas (such as Mount Athos, Patmos, western Asia Minor, Chios, Pontos, and Thessaly), and the information they contain concerns economic activities of a specific kind, principally the cultivation, on the sharecropping system, of land that was (or might become) privileged since it belonged to monasteries. Needless to say, the existence or otherwise of privileges is of decisive importance in determining the role of the state in the agricultural economy. It is true, of course, that the monastic archives also contain documents concerning private property, usually land belonging to lay people that subsequently came into the possession of the monastery by purchase, by donation, or by the owner becoming a monk in the foundation. There are not many of these documents, however, and the laymen to whom they refer were often privileged. Where the role of the state in other forms of economic life—trade, manufacturing, the exploitation of raw materials—is concerned, there is in effect no archival material at all. The comparatively few documents that have survived are mostly in Italian archives and deal only in passing with the Byzantine state. It follows that the primary sources upon which we might have expected to be able to draw for information about the role of the state in the economic life of the country are very scanty, almost nonexistent. Technical texts that preserve details and information of incontrovertible accuracy about the public economy—such as the detailed lists of expenditure on the campaigns against Crete in 911 and 949, discussed later (p. 1015)—are rare. Most of our information comes from sources of a narrative or regulatory nature. The narrative sources sometimes relate what was said about this or that measure that the emperor had taken, frequently distorting it in accordance with the author’s sympathies. Although this information often reflects the reaction of public opinion (or a part of it) to fiscal policy, it is littered with traps because it also expresses a given political position. We have descriptions of the measures taken by the Isaurian emperors written by monks who were sworn enemies of those rulers for reasons that were not primarily economic, but were bound up with the fundamentally theological and 1 In the text that follows, and especially in discussing the agricultural economy and taxation to the time of the Komnenian reforms, I have made extensive use of N. Oikonomides, Fiscalité et exemption fiscale à Byzance, IXe–XIe s. (Athens, 1996).
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