Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

the community of the realm 445
dynamic led inexorably to shifts of wealth from kings to their noble supporters.
This model has been applied particularly to the Merovingian
dynasty in Gaul, held to have lost first its land and then its power.
The contrast is, of course, too simple. In the Roman empire, most tax
revenue was committed to paying a professional army (although the existence
of this force was a significant level of power: see p. 443 above), and
the state often had to fall back on unpopular extra taxes (superindictions). 27
Medieval kings, likewise, had some sources of renewable revenue (customs
and tolls, for instance) and other types of reward with which to attract
support: confirmations of title, grants of office (whether ecclesiastical or
secular) and so on. Moreover, royal fiscs could grow as well as diminish.
Many gifts had to be made at the beginning of a reign to establish good relationships
with the men of power in the localities who would be crucial to its
long-term success. But, on the other hand, processes such as confiscations
from defeated opponents would bring other land back into the fisc in the
course of the reign. The wife of the dead Mummolus, for instance, was left
destitute after the Gundovald affair. Hence, a long-lived king might recoup
much, if not all, of his initial expenditure. Nevertheless, the tendency, in
other than a very successful reign, is likely to have been towards royal impoverishment
and the enrichment of noble supporters, and a series of civil wars
or early royal deaths might lead to large losses to the fisc. 28
(c) The limitations of bureaucracy
In the successor states, the militarization of landowning élites also combined
with losses of function to reduce the size and importance of bureaucratic
structures. The need for bureaucrats to run tax-machinery and
monitor spending, for instance, steadily diminished. In most areas,
however, kings continued to employ some bureaucrats who maintained
some Roman traditions. Parthenius, for instance, related to an emperor of
the mid fifth century, was magister officiorum et patricius for the Frankish king
Theudebert in the mid sixth. The vast network of late Roman bureaucratic
openings, however, had ceased to exist. It is impossible to estimate
numbers accurately, but each royal court probably maintained a few tens,
rather than thousands, of bureaucrats. The number of jobs at the local level
was similarly reduced. The workhorse of royal government on the ground
was the count of the city (comes civitatis), but there was only one such post
per civitas. In total, there were only 122 civitates in Gaul, not all of which survived
as units into the post-Roman period, and therefore 122 comites, to
whom can be added a few, seemingly ad hominem, higher commands (duces).
Central and local bureaucratic structures, which had previously focused the
27 It was a superindiction which generated the riot of the statues in Antioch: cf. p. 443 above, n. 23.
28 Model and its critique: Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms esp. ch. 4; several of the essays in Davies and
Fouracre (1986) (esp. those of Fouracre, Wood and Ganz).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008