The bureaucracy possessed some constant characteristics throughout its history. Its posts were the coveted objects of intense competition and personal rivalries. Its nominal salaries were frequently inadequate, and often they expected that the candidate purchased his post. The result was graft and corruption that repeated efforts at reform never eliminated. Rank-consciousness permeated the bureaucracy as well as Byzantine society overall. Throughout its history the concept of taxis (order) is central for understanding the mentality and operations of the bureaucracy. Levels of efficiency varied, and the quality of an administration ultimately determined an emperor's ability to wield effective authority. There was no hereditary possession of bureaucratic offices, but emperors and their subordinates often filled posts for personal or factional reasons, rather than on the basis of strict merit. The term of office for most prominent positions depended on the will of the emperor. This bureaucracy was never static; it was always subject to change. Some ranks and titles continued to be mentioned in the protocol lists after they had become obsolete and their functions forgotten.
We may divide the history of Byzantine bureaucracy into three periods: early Byzantine, from the fourth through the sixth centuries; middle Byzantine, from the seventh through the eleventh centuries; and late Byzantine, from the end of the eleventh century trough the disappearance of the empire in the fifteenth century.
The early Byzantine bureaucracy derived from the late Roman bureaucracy. The imperial comitatus, the group of ministries attached to the person of the emperor that formed the central government, included the sacrum cubiculum (household) with its cubicularii (chamberlains), castrensiani (domestic personnel), silentiarii (ushers), scholae (guards), and the consistorium (the most important officials and advisers of the emperor, the notarii [secretariat], and several other prominent officials). The quaestor was the emperor's chief legal adviser and drafter of legal documents; the magister officiorum (master of the offices) controlled the administration and distribution of palace offices and commanded the scholae.
The count of the sacred largesses directed the mines and mints; collected some taxes and paid stipendia or donatives; directed the imperial weaving factories and the issuance of clothing or clothing allowances to the court, the army, and the civil service; and controlled customs duties, certain special taxes on senators, and the military recruit substitute tax called the aurum tironicum. The comes rei privatae (count of the privy purse) administered and collected rents from state property, claimed and confiscated property (such as escheat property) for the state, and handled the sale of state property and payments in cash from its treasury. The vast praetorian prefecture of the east, directedby the praetorian prefect, was responsible for levying taxes; issuing rations to the army and civil service, and fodder or fodder allowances to high officer and officials; managing the postal service; supervising arms factories, and maintaining such public works as roads, bridges, posthouses, and granaries. The praetorian prefecture contained an elaborate hierarchy of officials and secretaires.
Most provincial governors in the early Byzantine period were called praesides (singular, praeses), although occasionally they were moderatores or correctores, or even, in certain cases, proconsules or consularii. These governors held supreme civilian authority and only in rare cases of an emergency exercised any military authority. They wielded legal authority subject to appeals to the courts of the praetorian prefecture. There are, however, several cases of combined civilian and military authority, in the reign of Justinian, because of security threats; the joining of civil and military authority was not a radical departure but an extension of existing practices for insecure regions. Nevertheless, we may justly regard these dual civil-military jurisdictions as anticipations of what happened in the middle Byzantine period.
The bureaucracy and civil administration underwent substantial change in the seventh and eighth centuries, even though much of the nomenclature originated in earlier Latin terminology; the best sources date from the late ninth and tenth centuries. Two fundamental classes of offices (axiai) are those granted by insignia (dia brabeion), which were honorific and might be held by someone who also held an office with a function, and offices granted verbally (dia logou), which included the most important imperial administrators.
Officers granted through insignia were subdivided into those granted to bearded men and those granted to unbearded men (eunuchs). The honorific offices of bearded men included such elevated ones as caesar, nobilissimus, and curopalates, all of which were reserved to members of the imperial family until a very late period; zoste patrikia, magistros, vestes, anthypatos (proconsul), and patrikios (patrician); such senatorial ranks as dishypatos (twice consul), hypatos (consul), vestitor, silentarios, apoeparchon (praefecturius), and stratelates; and distinguished imperial dignities that originally involved personal service to the emperor and required payment of money, but for which the rank holder received an annual salary: protospatharios, spartharocandidates, spartharios, strator, candidatos, and mandator. Among the offices dia brabeion that eunuchs held were vestes, patrikios, praipositos, protospatharios, primikerios, ostarios (doorkeeper), spatharokoubikoularios, koubikoularios, and nipsistarios (holder of the imperial washbasin).
Certain offices awarded dia logou were reserved for eunuchs: parakoimomenos (head of the imperial bedchamber), protovestiarios (head of the imperial wardrobe and its treasury), ho epi tes trapezes (head of the imperial table service) were among the most important.
Major bureaucrats included the protoasekretis, who prepared the final revisions of imperial acts and could exercise some legal authority; the logothete of the drome, who controlled the roads and imperial post, and was in charge of foreign relations; the sakellarios, the general supervisor of imperial finances; the logothete tou stratiotikou (military treasurer), whose treasury kept the registers of soldiers, their obligations and lands, and paid soldiers, maintenance in wartime.
By the ninth century chartularioi had replaced some previous head officals. Ho epi tou sakellio was the imperial treasurer, and his subordinates were imperial notaries who kept central account books and the prontonotaries responsible for the civilian affairs of individual themes; ho epi tou vestiariou (head of a public wardrobe that included a treasury and an arsenal for the fleet); ho epi tou eidikou (the head of a special treasury, which paid senatorial salaries, outfitted fleet, and cntrolled precious objects of gold and silk made by imperial factories); megas kourator (administartor of the private estates of the emperor); kourator tes manganes (another administrator of particular imperial domains); and the orphanotrophos (director of the major orphanage at Constantinople). These new fiscal bureaus replaced the defunct comitiva sacarum largitionum, the treasuries of the praetorian prefectures, the res privata, and special treasuries for certain imperial estates. Each major office had its own officium of subordinate officials.
Important legal officials included the eparch or prefect of Constantinople, who supervised the administration of the city, including its police, commerce provisioning, prices, trades, morals, spectacles, and a special civil and criminal court as well as an appellate jurisdiction. Other important legal authorities were the kuaistor, who investigated falsification of documents and problems of familial law and supervised provincials who came to Constantinople, and ho epi ton deeseon, who studied petitions addressed to the emperor, as well as other judges (kritai) of tribunals. Among the major supplementary officials was the mystikos, or confidential officer of the emperor, who appeared in the ninth century.
The stratarch class included the hetaireiarch, who commanded several contigents of foreign mercenaries that guarded the palace in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries; the drungarios tou ploimou, who commanded the imperial fleet; the logothete ton agelon (logothete of the flocks and herds), who supervised imperial estates for the raising of horses for the army; the comes tou stablou (sount of the stable); and the protospatharios epi ton basilikon, who headed an imperial guard of spatharioi, candidatoi, and mandatores.
Military administration changed dramatically in the middle Byzantine period, with the strategoi of themes replacing the agistri militum and, by the eighth century, thematic administrations replacing the old provincial structures. The protonotarios of each theme, who was ultimately subject to the chartoularios tou sakelliou, headed each civilian administration in his themes. By the tenth and eleventh centuries the judges (kritai) of themes were assuming control of finances and other aspects of civilian administration. The other principal class of military commanders was the domestici, who commanded the respective bodies of tagmata; the domestic of the theme of the Optimaton; and the count of the walls of the palace at Constantinople.
The eleventh century witnessed the appearance of the megas logiarist as supreme minister of the budget and of financial administration, and of the vestiarion (wardrobe) as the sole central treasury. The logothete of the sekreta (administrative agencies) became the head of most of the civil service. The mesazon (intermediary) also appeared in the eleventh century. He was a chief imperial secretary who often acted as chief minister; he dispatched petitions and assisted the emperor with all aspects of administration, mediated between the emperor and his subjects, and made some judicial decisions. The keeper of the inkwell (epi tou kanikleiou) was responsible for the contents of imperial acts and for affixing authentication. The evstiarion became the sole treasury in the Komnenian period and continued to be so in subsequent centuries; its scope included all aspects of fiscal administration and maintenance of fiscal records that comprised both taxes and exemptions.
The Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 did not permanently destroy the Byzantine bureaucracy, for they reconstituted much of it at Nicaea. The Nicene civil service included imperial secretaries and some members of the imperial household: the protovestiarios (keeper of the imperial wardrobe), epi tes trapezes (steward), pinkernes (butler), and the parakoimomenos (chamberlain).
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the chief administrative division of a theme district was the katepanikion under a praktor (later an energon, who was appointed by the duke of a theme and exercised fiscal, and later also judicial responsibilities). Fiscal surveys were made in the themes by exis tai (who performed the apograph , survey). The duke still wielded authority over soldiers within his theme, but such soldiers had lost most of their effectiveness. The best soldiers were salaried mercenaries, and the theme was primarily an administrative and judicial unit by this date; it retained only a vestige of its military origins.
Assuming the existence of any monolithic party at any moment in the history of the Byzantine Empire is incorrect. Bureaucrats and soldiers were not normally polarized rival factions. In fact, bureaucrats were related marriage and by personal rivalries and interests to particular larger factions and familial groupings. Even in the late tenth and eleventh centuries there were bureaucrats who possessed marital ties with so-called great military families. One cannot hypothesize any simplistic rivalry of bureaucrat and military leaders; factional alignments were more complex and more fluid. Furthermore, bureaucrats who lived in and around Constantinople often possessed properties and enjoyed familial relations with those who resided in rural regions far from Constantinople, whether in Europe or in Anatolia. Therefore one should avoid assuming that bureaucrats developed an exclusively Constantopolitan perspective in their policy-making and factional groupings. Bureaucrats probably did identify with Constantinople and its suburbs, but they often maintained or developed wider ties with other, scattered areas of the empire. Even the eunuchs were often recruited from within the borders of the empire, and therefore were likely to favor their families and regions of origin. (The Byzantine practice of sometimes giving important posts to eunuchs of domestic origin contrasts with the practice in many other bureaucratic or slave empires, such as that of the Mamluks, of acquiring eunuchs only from distant regions, so that they could have no potential domestic loyalties or conflicts of interest.)
The Byzantine bureaucracy, despite its limitations, contributed to the lengthy endurance of the Byzantine Empire. Its formalized procedures helped make the empire itself more important than any particular political, intellectual or military leader. The empire did not depend exclusively of finding exceptional leaders; it possessed methods of government and financing that could function in a more or less satisfactory fashion even during a period of mediocre leadership at the top.
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Last modified: Thurs Dec 10, 1998