Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

206 7. government and administration
required the regular updating of information. It has also been suggested
that the unsettled conditions forced the state to adjust its procedures to recognize
the facts of demographic mobility: the agricultural population
could no longer be tied to the land by imperial legislation, and so methods
of attracting population to underexploited land had to emerge, with a consequent
increase in the numbers of peasant smallholders and the emergence
of the village as a key intermediary between the state and the
tax-payer; also the household came to replace the individual as the basic tax
unit, which would also help the state to avoid the disappearance of mobile
tax-payers. 191
The late Roman state was bureaucratic, certainly in comparison to the
administrative structures of the earlier empire, but, as the foregoing discussion
shows it, it was not a monolithic or petrified structure. There were
competing elements within the administrative structure, for which the
emperor acted as the ultimate umpire, while the balance between the imperial
centre and its local operators and the base of tax-payers also shifted.
The administration provided the eastern empire with at least a century of
significant prosperity, and then proved itself capable of reshaping its structures
to respond to the disruption of its world in the early seventh century.
191 Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century 150–2.
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