The Economic History of Byzantium - Dumbarton Oaks

994 NICOLAS OIKONOMIDES
household; this was the phylax, whose name came from the building in the great palace
in which it was housed and which had originally been the emperor’s personal treasury,
accompanying him (in the late 10th century) on campaign. Little by little, however, it
developed into a proper sekreton, that is, a department of the civil service.
Side by side with the financial services properly speaking, we must note the existence
of a number of departments that managed the assets of the state, including the logothetes
ton agelon (“of the herds”), who was in charge of the two huge horse-breeding
estates in the provinces of Asia and Phrygia, from which came high-quality horses and
mules for the army. Most of these departments,however, were involved in the management
of the imperial property. The (great) kourator, to whom there are references from
the sixth century to 1012, was largely responsible for managing these assets, including
estates, episkepseis, guesthouses (such as those of Sangarios, Pylae, and Nikomedeia),
and the palaces outside Constantinople, which depended on these lands for their
maintenance. A new and similar department, called the kouratorikion of Mangana (in
Constantinople), was founded early in the ninth century and reorganized by Basil I
(867–886). Last among the major services of this kind was the orphanage of St. Paul,
aprivate institution founded in the sixth century, which came into state ownership and
was reorganized in 1032 and then again under Alexios I Komnenos.
The conquests of the tenth century significantly increased the number of kouratoreia
and episkepseis on the periphery of the empire. The great kouratorikion was abolished
and replaced by an inspector, the ephoros of the imperial kouratoreia. Some of the departments
in Constantinople were amalgamated into the Mangana department, and a new
kouratorikion, of Eleutheriou and Mangana, was set up (possibly under Constantine
Monomachos, 1042–55). It is known to have survived until 1088. In other words, we
have widespread decentralization of the financial departments, over which the state
exercised merely a certain control.
The tenth, and especially the eleventh, centuries saw the development of the “charitable
houses” (euageis oikoi; see p. 1007), institutions that were originally privately
funded. These acquired considerable revenue and were used to finance the upper
reaches ofthe aristocracy on behalf of the state, which is why they were also called
“charitable offices” (sekreta). Here there was decentralization right from the start, and
there was also an attempt to exercise some state control, in the person of the oikonomos
of the charitable houses, to whom there are references from early in the eleventh century
to 1088.
In the eleventh century, we gain the impression that the state was particularly interested
in managerial control of its financial services. A number of new employees, “accountants”
(logariastai), made their appearance in 1012 in the departments of Constantinople
and the provinces, on the estates of the emperor and private citizens alike. It
was not until the last decade of the eleventh century, however, that a central auditing
service was set up. Alexios Komnenos founded two large accounting departments: the
megas logariastes ton sekreton (“grand accountant of the sekreta”), who first appears in 1094
and audited all the fiscal services (thus replacing the sakellarios, presumably using more
advanced methods); and the megas logariastes of the euage sekreta (“grand accountant of
the charitable sekreta”), who audited the institutions connected with the imperial prop-