The Economic History of Byzantium - Dumbarton Oaks

1012 NICOLAS OIKONOMIDES
any significant expenses in the course of his work. Other officials enjoyed higher salaries;
they included the hypertimos, who in1082 was entitled to 20 litrai of gold coins
(though in the meantime these had lost two-thirds of their real value) and the judges
of the time of Andronikos I, who collected the equivalent in silver coins of between 13
and 26 litrai of gold in order that they might remain above suspicion. 102
The salaries of the military and civil commanders of the provinces—the strategoi—
were on a different scale and are known to us from a catalogue of the year 911/912. 103
The strategoi of Asia Minor, Thrace, and Macedonia received 20–40 litrai per year,
those of the maritime themes 10 litrai, and the “guardians of the passes” (the kleisourarchai),
who did not hold the rank of strategos, received only 5 litrai. In the tenth century,
the strategos of Taron was paid 20 litrai. 104 The strategos of Mesopotamia collected the
kommerkion of his province rather than receiving a salary, while the strategos of Chaldia
received half his salary and collected the other half from the kommerkion. None of the
strategoi of the western provinces—from the Strymon to Italy—received a salary, but
they collected synetheiai from the fortified cities in their province (see above, p. 999),
amounting to sums that we can assume were commensurate with those received by
their colleagues in the East, the only difference being that the money in question neither
entered nor left the treasury in Constantinople, as was the case with the cash
collected by the strategoi of Chaldia and Mesopotamia. Even in the public administration,
which seems to have been based primarily on the roga, one can identify mechanisms
for the direct collection of state revenue in the provinces and for its appropriation
by civil servants asasubstitute for a salary. These mechanisms, being more flexible,
would clearly have added to the flexibility of the fiscal sector.
The salaries of the strategoi may look large, but of course considerable expenditure
was attached to the post. Each strategos would have to pay his bodyguard and his personal
administrative staff, provide his own servants, and keep his palace in order. In
other words, the roga of the strategos was in fact an annual budget in which the salary
of the official himself was included. To it, needless to say, we must add the various
“windfalls” the strategos might manage to extract directly from the inhabitants of his
theme; although such payments might amount to a considerable sum for the strategos
and his staff, they appeared nowhere in the books of the official state economy.
The salaries the emperor paid in person to the strategoi each year totaled 26,640
gold coins and accounted for a significant portion of the regular expenditure of state,
given that they covered the expenses of half the provincial governors and their immediate
staffs. At about this period, the Kletorologion of Philotheos, written in 899, tells us
that there were a total of sixty senior state officials in charge of major departments, of
whom only twenty-five were strategoi. If we assume that the officials who were not strategoi,
all of them based in Constantinople, were paid by roga (as seems likely), that most
102 Zepos, Jus, 1:369; Nicetae Choniatae Historia, ed. J. L. van Dieten (Berlin–New York, 1975), 330
(hereafter Choniates).
103 De cer., 1:696–97.
104 DAI, chap. 43, lines 68–69.