Taxation is at the heart of the distinction that Wickham, notably in his magnum opus, but also in earlier work,9 Has drawn between strong and weak states in the late and post-Roman period. He places the Roman Empire and the successor eastern empires of Byzantium and the Abbasids into the first, and the western successor kingdoms of the Franks, the Visigoths, and the Lombards into the second category. Wickham argues that the essential political and economic distinction between the two types of state lay in the means at their disposal to raise revenue and the consequent methods of military funding. Sustainable imperial power depended on taxation, that is, the ability of the ruler, employing a professional bureaucracy, to demand and receive revenue in cash or kind from his subjects on a regular and recurring basis. The greatest challenges of running a state or an empire’s finances through a tax system were to maintain the required levels of organization and record keeping, and to secure the population’s compliance with state tax demands. As is evident in contemporary Europe, one of the important distinctions between economically strong and economically weak nations is between those with relatively secure and stable tax revenues, and those with a fragile tax base.
In the early medieval world the major theoretical alternative to taxation was for a ruler to use land as a tool to secure his political and economic viability. Rulers either drew wealth and income from land that they owned and controlled directly, or they could make gifts of land to others, by definition the aristocracy, and rely on them for military and political support. The tax system is relatively impersonal and institutionalized; the land system depends on the personal loyalty of the aristocratic landowners dependent on the ruler.10
The late Roman taxation system was more thorough and systematic than any that preceded it (see pp. 181-5). Agriculture and animal husbandry provided the state with most of its revenue, either in cash or in kind. Individual tax liability was based on the procedure known as iugatio capitatio, a combination of the land and poll tax, which was computed according to units of land, classified according to land usage (iuga) and the numbers of persons living on it (capita). The system depended on maintaining a census of the population and the cultivated land (including lists of farm animals), and keeping the registers up to date. This, at least in theory, was carried out on a fifteen-year cycle, the indiction cycle.
An elaborate bureaucracy combined with continuity of government was indispensable for taxing cultivators and their land in this way. Registers needed to be reasonably accurate and up to date for the system to work at all, and this was labor-intensive work which demanded high literacy and numeracy skills. As landowners and tenants alike were naturally reluctant tax-payers, the state also had to be able to enforce its demands, using both legal means and on occasion outright force. It is also evident that tax collection, which had to be devolved down to innumerable agents at a local level, was wide open to corruption, whenever powerful local officials chose to enrich themselves at the expense of tax-paying tenants, the state, or both together. Corruption is in fact too simple a concept to describe the phenomenon whereby powerful intermediaries, usually large landowners with a background in military or state service, usurped the role of officials in collecting and transferring revenues to the state.11
Peter Heather and Brian Ward-Perkins, in their accounts of the collapse of the western empire, highlight the breakdown or interruption of taxation as a major factor in the decline of Roman power.12 By the mid-fifth century barbarian invaders controlled much of Gaul, Spain, and Africa and thus drastically reduced the amount of taxable land under Roman control. Of course this increased the pressure on the remaining Roman enclaves, as was made clear by
Salvian’s On the Governance of God, written in the 440s, a Christian writer’s attempt to explain the empire’s setbacks in the face of the barbarian invasions. He makes the central point about the reduction of territory with exemplary clarity:
To conclude, the Spanish provinces know whereof I speak, for they have nothing left them but their name; the provinces of Africa know it, whose very existence is at an end; the lands of Gaul know it, for they are devastated, yet not by all their officials, and so they still draw the scanty breath of life in a few far corners, since the integrity of a few has supported for a time those whom the rapine of the many has impoverished. (Salvian, de gub. Dei 4.4, trans. Sanford)
The remaining landowners, pressed ever harder by the state, offloaded as much as possible of their tax obligations onto their tenants:
Now when the Roman commonwealth, already extinct or at least drawing its last breath in that one corner where it still seems to retain some life, is dying, strangled by the cords of taxation as if by the hands of brigands, still a great number of wealthy men are found the burden of whose taxes is borne by the poor; that is, very many rich men are found whose taxes are murdering the poor. . .Think a minute: the remedies recently given to some cities - what have they done but make all the rich immune and heap up the taxes of the wretched? To free the rich from their old dues they have added new burdens to those of the poor; they have enriched the wealthy by taking away their slightest obligations and afflicted the poor by multiplying their very heavy payments. The rich have thus become wealthier by the decrease of the burdens that they bore easily, while the poor are dying of the increase in taxes that they already found too great for endurance. (Salvian, de gub. Dei 4.6, trans. Sanford)
However, the evidence of Salvian and other contemporary sources only illustrates the particular dificulties that the western empire had in maintaining its tax base in the early ifth century, largely caused by a loss of territory to the barbarians. As long as taxation in principle was the mainstay of the Roman state economy, the lesson that was drawn by the post-Roman kingdoms of the west was to maintain the tax systems that were in place before the conquests. The Vandals stepped into the shoes of the Roman landowning class that they had expelled from Africa and used, at least haphazardly, the existing state infrastructure, including the public transport system (Procopius, Bell. Goth. 3.16.12).13 However, when the Romans recovered Africa for the empire in AD 533, they re-entered a province where revenue collection had been lax, and Justinian’s rigorous imposition of the old land tax caused high levels of resistance and resentment:
Since it was no longer possible to find out the revenues of the districts of Libya set down in order in the registers, as the Romans had recorded them in former times, inasmuch as Geiseric had upset and destroyed everything in the beginning,
Tryphon and Eustratios were sent by the emperor, in order to assess the taxes for the Libyans each according to his proportion. But these men seemed to the Libyans neither moderate nor endurable. (Procopius, Bell. Vand. IV.8.25, trans. Dewing)
Much of the resistance that spread over a generation following Justinian’s reconquest of Africa took the form of a major tax revolt.
The Visigoths in Gaul until their kingdom was conquered by the Franks in ad 507, and later in Spain until the end of the seventh century, also maintained forms of land and poll tax on the late Roman model. This was also evidently Ostrogothic practice in Italy until the Justinianic reconquest, for, as Cassio-dorus’ Variae demonstrate, Theoderic and his successors employed the full apparatus of late Roman administration to run the kingdom on their behalf, and taxed the existing Roman population, although the Gothic settlers remained immune. Among the major barbarian kingdoms of the West only the Franks, who had not been part of the first wave of conquest in the early fifth century and were least exposed to Roman infiuence, effectively abandoned taxation as a significant source of state revenue before the end of the sixth century.14 In fact by ad 450 there were few major Roman landowners in Frankish territory between the Loire and the Rhine, and in contrast to the Mediterranean areas a greater proportion of potentially taxable land was directly occupied by the Franks themselves, who would not have been liable to Roman land tax. Thus there was much less reason for Merovingian than for Visigothic or Ostrogothic rulers to maintain a method of raising tax revenue in the Roman fashion, with its attendant bureaucracy.
Just as Rome’s ability to retain control of its tax base faltered in the west during the first half of the fifth century, there are clear indications of similar problems, although for different reasons, a century later in the east. Peter Sarris has argued persuasively that the growth in power of large estate-owners was at the root of a pervasive fiscal crisis in the eastern empire of the fifth and early sixth centuries. The dominant elite in the eastern provinces, above all in the richest province, Egypt, comprised a new aristocracy of high-lying state servants, members of the Constantinopolitan senate, who had been enriched by imperial office holding. They owned much of the land and took over powers that had formerly been exercised by city councils. Crucially, they assumed responsibility for collecting taxes from their tenants, and were able to use their position and connections to ensure that much less of this revenue reached the state treasury than hitherto (pp. 377-9). Tax income suffered accordingly. It is true that the emperor Anastasius acquired a reputation for good financial management and for amassing a treasury surplus at the beginning of the sixth century, but this had come at the cost of neglecting military expenditure. More importantly, the favorable judgment of Anastasius’ financial management refiects the viewpoint of the senatorial class, which was powerful enough to retain control of its landed wealth and pay lower taxes. Justin, and especially Justinian after he took sole power in 527, attempted to recover a higher level of imperial revenue. Over the next fifteen years a torrent of legislation, especially the Novellae concerned with provincial government, was aimed at curbing the powers of great landowners, staunching corruption, and increasing tax revenue.15 These attacks on the interests of the wealthy landowning class were naturally unpopular with many senators, and their resentment goes far to explaining the contemptuous critique of Justinian that Procopius articulated in his Secret History, which consistently defends or represents the viewpoint of the conservative senatorial class.
Justinian’s attempts to increase treasury income were necessary in view of high state expenditure on warfare and building projects. However, state finances were at full stretch to pay the costs of Justinian’s belligerent foreign policy, and on top of this they encountered a shock that no legislation could overcome, the demographic catastrophe caused by the bubonic plague. Whatever its longer term demographic consequences, contemporary sources suggest that up to a third of the population may have perished in the period 542-545, and many administrative procedures, including tax collection, will have been brought to a virtual standstill.16 The gains that legislation had achieved for the treasury in the first part of Justinian’s reign were set into reverse, and the decline can be followed for the rest of the sixth century.17 Rome’s diminishing ability to levy tax in Asia Minor between the late fourth and the late sixth century provides a telling illustration of this decline. Two sources of information provide detailed views of social and economic conditions in the Anatolian countryside at these periods, the letters of Basil the great bishop of Cappadocian Caesareia in the 360s and 370s, and the Life of Theodore of Sykeon, relating to Galatia between c.550 and 613. Basil’s letters reveal that the predominantly rural province of Cappadocia was crawling with tax collectors, including members of the curial class of Caesareia, and tax assessors. A large proportion of his correspondence consists of appeals addressed to high officials both in the province and in Constantinople to secure remittance or alleviation from the state’s tax demands, which are referred to in one letter as a “many-headed hydra” (Basil, ep. 285). Collecting the land and poll tax in the eastern empire during the reign of Valens was an imperial priority, rigorously conducted.18 By the later sixth century tax collectors, whether working directly for the state or as agents of major landowners, had almost entirely disappeared from the landscape. The long Life of Theodore contains only a single reference to tax collection, the activities of a citizen of Ancyra who was charged with collecting government revenue from the inhabitants of the saint’s home village, Sykeon. The villagers took refuge in Theodore’s monastery to avoid this unwelcome attention.19 It is evident that the state’s ability to collect taxes in the eastern empire had been drastically reduced.
In the chaos of the early seventh century, under Phocas and Heraclius, it will have been even harder to maintain levels of taxation. Both Asia Minor and the Near East were overrun by invading Sassanian armies, and Egypt itself was under Sassanian control from 616 to 629. While the cities of Asia Minor for the most part were comprehensively devastated, those in Syria largely survived, but their revenue was diverted to the Sassanians.20 In order to pay the troops during his military counter-offensive, Heraclius was forced to turn confiscated Church silver into bullion (see pp. 457-8). Rome had by now altogether lost its capacity to tax provincial landowners.
The inability to derive tax income from its provinces was thus as much a weakness of the eastern Roman Empire in the final century before the rise of Islam, as it had been in the fifth century west. Revenue was insufficient to maintain even small armies in the field; major mutinies and military defections are a notable feature in the historical narratives of Justinian’s and later wars. State bankruptcy was a sure symptom of acute Roman decline.
Nevertheless, as in the west, post-Roman authorities were eager to inherit the Roman taxation system after the collapse of the eastern empire and adapt it to their own requirements. The test case is Egypt and is illustrated by the archive of administrative letters of the early eighth century from the small town of Aphrodito, written in Arabic, Coptic, and Greek, which were exchanged between Qurra, the Muslim governor of Egypt, and the local pagarch, Basilios. These above all concern the rigorous exaction of tax exactly according to the late Roman pattern: poll tax, land tax both in cash and in produce (mainly grain), and the expenses of public officials.21 Although Egypt was the wealthiest potential source of tax income in the parts of the Roman Empire controlled by the Arabs, it was not unique. The papyrus finds from the town of Nessana in the Negev, which span two centuries from around 500 to 700, fall revealingly into three groups. The first, dating before the Arab conquests, includes documents relating to marriage, divorce, property sales, contracts, loans, debts, and small-scale commercial transactions mostly among a small military community at the settlement. These are followed by a cluster of documentation from the early seventh century dealing with the affairs of a monastery of St Sergius and various church officials. The majority of documents from the third group, dating to the end of the seventh century when the area was under Muslim rule, consist in demands or receipts for taxes, including the land and poll tax, or requisitioning of transport services.22 In Palestine, as in Egypt, the Arabs not only inherited the Roman modes of taxation but enforced them more stringently than before. The general rule that taxation applied to the existing subject population, not to the incoming conquerors, is observable in the former eastern as in the western empire. Although eventually the system of taxation based on land registers eventually gave way in the west, ultimately leading to the emergence of the feudal system, no such evolution is evident in the east. Looking much further ahead it is clear the iugum, the notional land unit which was the basic building block on which assessments of late Roman taxation were based, continued to be used in Asia Minor during the Byzantine Empire and under their successors, the Ottomans (under whose regime it was known as the gift, the term for a yoke of oxen), up to the modern period.
Fiscal collapse can be identified as one of the proximate causes of the fall of the western, and of the implosion of the eastern empire. However, Roman taxation procedures did not perish when Rome surrendered territorial control to its enemies, but were inherited by successor states of all types. They fell out of use in the early medieval West at varying rates, partly resulting from the inability of successor kingdoms to maintain the necessary bureaucracy, and partly from the depletion of the taxable population. In general terms population levels throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East certainly dropped sharply after the mid-sixth century (see pp. 479-91). Even so, where the resident populations still retained title to the land, it made sense for the incomers to try to operate Roman-style taxation. On the other hand when the conquerors took direct control of the land, and themselves enjoyed tax immunity, taxation as an institution lapsed.
World History
