FREE A HISTORY OF THE BYZANTINE STATE AND SOCIETY PDF Warren T. Treadgold | 1044 pages | 01 Oct 1997 | Stanford University Press | 9780804726306 | English | Palo Alto, United States A History of the Byzantine State and Society - Warren T. Treadgold - Google книги Induring a war against the Persians in Mesopotamia, the emperor Carus was killed, allegedly by a thunderbolt but more probably by assassination. The Roman army proclaimed A History of the Byzantine State and Society son Numerian emperor. Soon it abandoned the Persian war and slowly withdrew into Anatolia. When the army reached Nicomedia inDiocles, the commander of the imperial bodyguard, announced that Numerian himself had been murdered. After executing the supposed assassin, Diocles had himself proclaimed emperor. His claims were rejected by Carus's surviving son, Carinus, who had been ruling at Rome and now led an army against Diocles. A civil war began, and early the next year the forces of the two emperors clashed at the Margus River in the middle of the Balkans. The battle went well for Carinus until he too was assassinated, leaving Diocles the temporarily undisputed ruler of the Roman Empire. Like most of his predecessors over the past fifty years, Diocles was a capable career officer from an obscure family in Illyricum. In comparison with similar emperors, he was a middling general but an excellent manager, with an education slightly better than average. He appears to have been around forty years old at his accession. According to plausible reports, he had been born at Salona on the Illyrian coast, to a father who was a freedman and a scribe. Appropriately for a scribe's son, he showed a liking for records and numbers, and wrote without literary pretensions. Salona was in Latin-speaking territory, but A History of the Byzantine State and Society Greek name of Diocles suggests Greek origins, and he was equally at ease speaking Latin or Greek. Although in he Latinized his Greek name to Diocletianus, he was the nearest thing that the empire had yet had to an emperor of Greek stock. Diocletian had no son, but decided he needed another emperor to share his powers and the dangers he faced. A preference for the Greek East may lie behind his decision to retain control over it and to entrust the Latin West to someone else. At Milan, in JulyDiocletian adopted as his son one of his Illyrian comrades in arms, Maximian, giving him the rank of Caesar, or junior emperor. Henceforth the defense of the provinces west of Illyricum became the primary responsibility A History of the Byzantine State and Society Maximian, while the defense of Illyricum and the A History of the Byzantine State and Society remained that of Diocletian. The next year, when Maximian faced a usurping emperor in Britain, Diocletian strengthened his colleague's hand by promoting him to Augustus, the highest imperial rank. Diocletian still kept a formal precedence over Maximian. As an expression of their relationship, Diocletian styled himself Jovius, claiming the patronage of Jupiter, king of the gods, and titled Maximian Herculius, assigning him A History of the Byzantine State and Society patronage of Jupiter's son Hercules. A History of the Byzantine State and Society practice Maximian continued to defer to his senior colleague's judgment. But each emperor maintained his own court and ran his own army A History of the Byzantine State and Society administration, with a separate praetorian prefect in Latin, praefectus praetorio as his chief lieutenant. Although the empire remained juridically one, and on occasion was ruled by a single emperor again, after its eastern and western parts always had different prefects and separate administrations. From this time forward, we can follow the history of the East with only occasional attention to the West. Before Diocletian, jurisdiction over the eastern and western parts of the empire had sometimes been separated for a time, either by a rebellion in the East, like Diocletian's own, or as an emergency measure, like Carus's entrusting the West to his son Carinus before departing for Persia. But Diocletian's arrangement was more systematic than those temporary divisions. Although for an emperor without a son to adopt an heir and tide him Caesar had long been standard practice, Diocletian meant Maximian, who was only a few years his junior, to be a colleague rather than an A History of the Byzantine State and Society. Diocletian plainly realized that, at a time when internal rebellions and external invasions had become endemic, the empire was too big for one emperor to rule and defend. What remains striking is that Diocletian took as his own portion not the Latin West but the Greek East, to which he attached Latin-speaking Illyricum, his own homeland. Although his motives cannot be reliably reconstructed, he evidently believed that the East, with Illyricum, was at least as important a part of the empire as the West, and A History of the Byzantine State and Society appropriate domain for the senior ruler. Given the threat that the empire faced from foreign invasions and military rebellions, part of his reason was surely that the larger part of the army was stationed in the East — twenty — three of thirty-four legions as of the early third century — where it faced the empire's single strongest adversary, Persia. The East as Diocletian defined it also included the empire's best recruiting ground, in Illyricum, and its richest farmland, in Egypt. Leaving Maximian to defend the West, Diocletian concentrated first on strengthening the frontiers in the East. He began recruiting more troops. In two campaigns he drove some Sarmatian raiders back across the Danube frontier, and built new fortifications to keep them out. In he negotiated a peace with Persia, establishing a Roman protectorate over Armenia and securing the Mesopotamian border, which he defended with more fortifications. He established his principal residence at Nicomedia, where he had first taken power. On the coast of Asia Minor but facing Europe, Nicomedia was in the middle of Diocletian's eastern domains and midway on the road between the Balkan and Mesopotamian frontiers. Diocletian hardly supposed that naming a permanent colleague would be enough to solve the problem of the empire's security. He felt that the empire, including its western part, needed a bigger army and more fortifications, and more revenue to pay for them. Probably inhe introduced a new system for taxation and the requisition of supplies, which also applied to the western provinces ruled by Maximian. For centuries the Romans had levied taxes of different kinds all over the empire, at widely different rates. The inflation of the previous century had slowly rendered monetary A History of the Byzantine State and Society almost worthless, so that the government increasingly met its expenses by requisitions of labor or goods, such as uniforms for the soldiers and grain for city dwellers. Originally such requisitions had been paid for in money at fixed rates, but as inflation made the value of the payments nugatory they had gradually ceased to be made. Under this makeshift system assessment was inefficient and burdensome, and raising taxes was difficult. Diocletian realized that the best way of maximizing receipts while minimizing economic dislocation was to standardize the taxes and requisitions according to his subjects' ability to pay. Collecting taxes or requisitions that fell equally on each man, household, or measure of land had the obvious disadvantage that some men and households could afford to pay much more than others, and some land was far more productive than other land. Uniform rates that the rich could pay easily would ruin the poor, and rates that the poor could pay would be absurdly low for the rich and yield little revenue. Yet any assessment of land and other property according to their monetary value would rapidly become obsolete as the coinage continued to inflate. To make a reliable assessment possible, Diocletian defined two standard units to measure tax liability. One was the caput — literally meaning "head," but better translated as "heading" because it was a theoretical unit for varying numbers of taxpayers. It was supposed to stand for a set amount of wealth, which happened to be well above that of the average taxpayer; it could represent the resources of many poor households, the property of several middling ones, or a fraction of the fortune of a rich man. Seemingly the wealth taken into account was limited to real estate. The second unit was the jugum "yoke"representing a set acreage of first-class plowland; apparently it could also be a larger portion of worse land or a smaller portion of better land, so that each jugum would be of approximately the same value. The juga A History of the Byzantine State and Society to have been designed to assess requisitions of grain, and the capita to assess other taxes, in coin or in kind. Evidently regions that produced a large surplus of grain, notably Egypt, were assigned more juga and fewer capita than others. The quantity of grain levied per jugum; and tax per caput, could vary from year to year according to the government's needs. Yet the intent appears to have been that in a given year an equal quantity of grain should be levied per jugum and an A History of the Byzantine State and Society amount of tax per caput, at least within the jurisdiction of each emperor. This system must have taken some time to put into effect. Each city A History of the Byzantine State and Society assigned a quota of capita and juga for its territory, and the city councils, which had always been responsible for collecting taxes and requisitions, now had to collect the taxes and requisitions that corresponded to their cities' quotas.