Laiou and Morrison’s The Byzantine Economy is a study, not a story. I read it as an outsider struggling to keep up with the endless silks, vineyards, pottery, glassware, legislation, special taxes and shipwrecks so the conclusions make sense and there is gist to take away. The book covers almost the entirety of the empire’s history, discussing a smorgasbord of points of interest in 250-odd pages. My task was by no means thankless: I carried a little pencil around and soon found myself underlining something at every other paragraph, flipping back to track down passages that had stuck to memory and ending up rereading the entire section in a kind of runner’s high.
I also borrowed a set of sticky bookmarks from our office supplies, and stuck one on wherever I underlined, until I ran out and my copy looked all set for carnival. Nevertheless, it was worth it, because previously I had been dog-earring pages to the point of book vandalism.
There are things in the book that are assumed to be known by a student of economic history, of which like I said I’m only a tourist. Some things are semantic: Monetization doesn’t refer to making money out of something (like your eye-catching iPhone game), it simply refers to transactions carried out in currency, outside the exchange economy. Getting the peasants to pay their taxes in cash, or commuting the soldiers’ pay to cash, are political innovations not to be taken for granted.
Currency, in turn, or rather coinage, wasn’t always the junk metal we’re used to. Coin alloys used to include precious metals at ratios determined by the governmental and economic winds. Sometimes they did resemble the gold/silver/copper hierarchy of video-game nomenclature. Sometimes they had really cool names, like the Komenos dynasty’s hyperpyron, a coin so gold scholars call it “the dollar of the Middle Ages”. Roughly, the more precious the coin, the stronger the state that issued it.
Other things you’re expected to know are historiographical, in particular the traditional view of the empire as a statist monstrosity doomed to collapse under its own weight. Fighting this long-held (and, I understand, outdated) assumption is the book’s mission statement. Finally, the thing that’s treated as most universally known is the thing that barely gets a straight mention: Constantinople’s fatal sack by Venetian crusaders, which, in 1204, all but decapitated the Eastern Roman Empire.
I said the book isn’t a story, but, as a layman, I can but look for narratives. And the narrative that most interests me is the 10th century shift in economics that seems to have led directly to the Sack.
I
By the 10th century, Byzantium had not only recovered from the centuries of the plague that had shrunk its territory but also become very rich. Getting there involved an overhaul of the economy, as population had dwindled and security had broken down. Constantinople in the 8th century was a shell of its former self, at most 70,000 strong, down from an unparalleled 400,000 two centuries earlier. People moved to fortified and elevated communities and their surrounding hinterlands at such an extent that the word kastro came to replace the word polis. In the countryside, L&M tell us, ancient monuments now served as housing and baths had become slaughterhouses. The first great urbanization bequeathed by Rome was a thing of the past.
The Emperors (by and large Heraclians and Isaurians) shuffled populations around in an attempt to integrate the economy. (In a bittersweet turn, around the year 1000 Peloponnese people return to the Pylos region.) It was only one of many forms of state intervention, such as merchants entering Constantinople having to pay a 10% ad valorem tax (the kommerkion); a ban on exporting critical commodities from grain and iron to, for some reason, “fish sauce”; a fix on profit margins (“[merchants] cannot maximize profits by buying cheap and selling dear, they have to maximize turnover and keep capital costs low”); and regulations that allowed guild members to compete with each other while preventing them from “cornering the market”.
Most impressively, following the massive land sales of the 927-8 famine, scenarios where peasants were pressured to sell for peanuts could lead to the buyer losing the land, owing to the laessio enormis (excessive damage) legal interpretation. How many peanuts? Half the property’s “just price”. How much compensation for the buyer? Nada.
It’s not to say that Byzantium ca. the 900s was some sort of welfare state. L&M read a fiscal motive in the laessio enormis (who ends up with the requisitioned land?), which in any case was only occasionally implemented and is ultimately considered unsuccessful as it doesn’t address the economic conditions creating the pressures in the first place. It does however point to an underlying economic ideology, Aristotelian by way of the Church Fathers, wherein such notions as “the poor” or “just price” (as well as “just wage”) have a place. In other words, there is a paradigm of justice, which St. Basil of Cesarea defines as “distributing [to each] what is equitable, or, as the key legislative text of the Book of the Prefect puts it: “the more powerful should not injure the less powerful […] everything should be weighed by a just measure”. By the late 10th century, the state, though largest land- and everything-holder, has created the conditions more a mostly free market of which it the main pole of demand. The aristocracy are obliged to charge lower interest rates, the Emperor stands between rich and poor holding the floodgates, and the currency approaches “dollar of the middle ages” conditions. Too good to last?
II
If you don’t know about the Sack, the summary is that the Fourth Crusade takes a detour towards the Bosporus in response to the xenophobic delirium known as the Massacre of the Latins. Religious tensions between the split Chistendoms are commonly given as one cause to enmity. Another would have to do with the significant concessions given to Venetian, Genoese, and Pisan merchants who were even given their own quarters in Constantinople.
In the 11th and 12th centuries, we’re told, growth accelerates. The countryside more or less feudalizes, a development L&M don’t consider inherently nasty, contra traditional views, though they do conclude peasant exploitation rose. Urbanization goes further than it ever will, with Constantinople recouping its area and 400,00-strong population, while a guesstimate puts second city Thessaloniki at 150,000. Markets open, with states adopting a common maritime law framework, as, after all, someone needs to look out for pirates. This it the time when Byzantine silks are the most coveted across the known world and, across Greece, mulberry trees proliferate to feed the silkworms cultivated by men working alongside women and Greeks alongside Jews. Trade liberalizes, and the stage is set for the first globalization.
As merchants rise in power, however, they are given court titles and Senate seats. The aristocracy don’t like that, and, under the Komnenid dynasty, “men of affairs” are barred from government. An era of nepotism sets in, with twin military and fiscal crises. It’s unclear whether the Komnenians’ military misadventures brought about the debasement of the currency or vice versa. Their policies, however, are documented. On one hand, the land taxes that had accounted for much of the state revenue waned, as lands and revenues were now given as reward and, though estates absorbed more of the peasantry, tax exemptions were becoming norm. On the other, the era saw a rise in tax-farming (a historically odious practice that “almost privatizes” tax collection and the exercise of “regalian rights” such as the confiscation of a murderer’s property. Again, all these inflows were now in a devalued currency.
Some words stand out in a study. Laiou describes first Komnenian Alexios I’s rule as “authoritarian feudalism”; his successors as “lackadaisical”; the entire ruling clan/class “grasping and self-serving”. What does idealand look like under the Komnenians? Two centuries ago, the Emperor’s role was to inhibit wealth accumulation, now, he encourages it through grants and privileges. Symeon the New Theologian, in a parable that doesn’t sound much like a parable, offers that the good merchant is simply he who brings in more bacon. Michael of Ephesos repurposes Aristotelian notions: “just price” is here understood as the market price, while justice is simply the guarantee of security for a free transaction. Most interestingly, he defines interest as profit, which, according to L&M (and colored by my understanding) means that Byzantium beat Western Europe at conceptualizing capital by some nontrivial time, and is but one of several contemporaneous examples of advanced economic thought. “Profit acquires positive connotations in unexpected texts” is probably my favorite quote from the book.
In these conditions, the exemption of the merchants of the Italian quarters from pretty much every tax and trade restriction discussed earlier seem par for the course. What of its effects? L&M carefully balance between yet another traditional view wherein Byzantine slowpokes are left behind by free trade, and a modern one that sees them left better off. Local merchants shared in the profits from the exemptions given, but up to a point; they were ultimately at a disadvantage. Further, though the privileges were instituted to reciprocate for naval help against Norman raids, they were escalated in response to pressure from the same, increasingly domineering navies gradually closing off the seas. With attitudes towards “Latins” turning hostile, it’s no wonder the City at the close of the Komnenid era was a powder keg.
*
Why does a tourist visit economic history? This one sees a promise of a master story, a cross-section of the world mapping people’s interactions across not only space and time but also society, politics and culture. In practice, the discipline encompasses such massive data that the tourist cannot simply agree or disagree with the study, much less draw teachings and parallels. The latter, in particular, is tempting.
Treading carefully, though, there is something to be made of the Byzantine merchant, who might have found himself interpreting for a Latin colleague selling silks off the Pera, by then something akin to an independent economic zone. Power struggles between the merchant class and the aristocracy led to civil wars that have further weakened what’s left of the fragmented empire, whose once mighty Via Egnatia has fallen in disuse, and where contracts now require the signatory to renounce laesio enormis protections. Though the Church is the largest landholder, in the theology of the times, notions of a lost self-sufficient agricultural paradise appear. As for the old chestnut that says it would be preferable for the Turkish turban to rule the City than the Latin mitre, L&M attribute it to a Byzantine official and merchant who had his fortune securely invested in the public debt of Venice and Genoa, and was a citizen of both.
the Budafoki amended 