East Roman Empire

  General Description   We begin our Eastern Roman Empire period in 395 CE, when it was permanently divided from what became the Western Roman Empire ^{[1] [2]} and end it in 631 CE as the Arab expansion and other developments led to a dramatic social transformations in Byzantium.
A phase of ’stagflation’ spanned the century between c. 450 and 541 CE, during which large estates became more influential, elites grew in number and formed mutually hostile factions, and ’sociopolitical instability increased’. ^[3] Matters were made worse by an outbreak of plague in 541 CE, and further usurpations and civil wars in the 7th century made the staggering empire a ripe target for the Arab conquests. ^[3]
Population and political organization
The Christian emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire was the chief lawmaker and military commander but not the most important religious official - instead, in the pagan tradition of Byzantine ceremony, he himself was treated as divine. ^[4] When he entered his consistorium (council), several curtains were raised to herald his arrival in the style of the eastern mystery religions. Meetings of the emperor’s council were infused with an atmosphere of sanctity, and the historian H. W. Haussig has pointed out that many important decisions were in fact ’discussed and settled outside this body’. ^[4] The most important religious official in Constantinople was the patriarch, who was chosen by the emperor; ^[5] the pope in Rome was the most important of the five patriarchs of the Roman Empire as a whole. ^[6]
Based in the palatial city of Constantinople, the emperor presided over a large professional bureaucracy that sought to intervene in most aspects of its citizens’ lives. Departing from the old pattern of relative Roman disinterest in the formal codification of Roman law, the East Roman emperors in the 395‒631 CE period twice brought together and promulgated official legal codes that were sourced from the empire’s Christian era (that is, since the time of Constantine the Great). The first of these was the Codex Theodosianus (439 CE), which was followed by the Codex Justinianus (534 CE). The Eastern Roman Empire also maintained a formal alliance with the Western Roman Empire, meaning that laws promulgated in one half of the empire had to be communicated to the other half and applied in both East and West. ^[7]
Below the god-emperor was the office of praetorian prefect, which came with considerable temporal powers. The governmental reforms of 395 CE gave this official ’unlimited jurisdiction’ on economic matters, ^[8] which he used to plan the Roman economy in a similar way to that of Egypt, which had been functioning well for six centuries. ^[8] The praetorian prefect also supervised the postal system and public works, managed the guilds, and ran the production of arms and other manufactured goods as a state monopoly. He was responsible for the annona (food distribution) to the cities and army, and was given license to control prices in the cities and order new industrial production. ^[8] The government had numerous other officials and departments, including a magister officiorum who, in addition to running the departments of protocol and foreign affairs and the palace guard, was also head of the ’political police (schola agentium in rebus)’. ^[9]
In the 6th century, desperate economic times led to the payment of high officials and soldiers in luxury clothes, while manufactured goods and food were used as currency. Coinage was still in circulation but the proportion used as payment for salaries shrank considerably. ^[10] The number of residents in Constantinople grew from about 300,000 in 400 CE to 500,000 a century later, but then fell back sharply to about 200,000 due to the troubles of the 6th century. The baseline population of the empire was about 15 million, which peaked at 20 million when times were still good in 500 CE.
Fifth-century Constantinople was a monumental city of great splendour and wealth: it possessed five imperial palaces, six domus divinae Augustarum (’mansions of the divine Augustae’) belonging to empresses, three domus nobilissimae (mansions for the top nobility) and 4,388 domus mansions. ^{[11] [12]} The contemporary source (the 5th-century Notitia urbis Constantinopolitanae) also records 322 streets with 153 private baths. ^{[11] [13]} Public buildings included squares, baths, underground cisterns, aqueducts, shops, and entertainment buildings including theatres and hippodromes. ^[11]
Gladiatorial combat was banned as part of Constantine’s programme of Christian moral reforms in 325 CE and disappeared sometime in the 5th century. The traditional Greek gymnasium, once a central institution in every Graeco-Roman city, where young men trained in athletics, had also fallen out of use but acrobatics was a profession and the nobility enjoyed various sports. ^[14] The most impressive large-scale public entertainments, provided by the state, were chariot races. These were held in Constantinople and other cities of the empire. ^[15] At some point during this era, the government decreed that drinking booths should close at 7 pm to reduce alcohol-related disorder. ^[16]

[1]: (Morgan 2012) James F. Morgan. 2012. The Roman Empire: Fall of the West, Survival of the East. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.

[2]: (Barnwell 1992, 1) P. S. Barnwell. 1992. Emperor, Prefects, & Kings: The Roman West, 395‒565. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

[3]: (Baker 2011, 245-46) David Baker. 2011. ’The Roman Dominate from the Perspective of Demographic-Structural Theory’. Cliodynamics 2 (2): 217-51.

[4]: (Haussig 1971, 54-55) Hans Wilhelm Haussig. 1971. History of Byzantine Civilization, translated by J. M. Hussey. London: Thames and Hudson.

[5]: (Cunningham 2008, 529) Jeffreys E, Haldon J and Cormack R eds. 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies. Oxford University Press. Oxford.

[6]: Johannes Preiser-Kapeller 2015, personal communication.

[7]: (Millar 2006, 1) Fergus Millar. 2006. A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief Under Theodosius II 408-450. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

[8]: (Haussig 1971, 52) Hans Wilhelm Haussig. 1971. History of Byzantine Civilization, translated by J. M. Hussey. London: Thames and Hudson.

[9]: (Haussig 1971, 53) Hans Wilhelm Haussig. 1971. History of Byzantine Civilization, translated by J. M. Hussey. London: Thames and Hudson.

[10]: (Haussig 1971, 100) Hans Wilhelm Haussig. 1971. History of Byzantine Civilization, translated by J. M. Hussey. London: Thames and Hudson.

[11]: (Diehl 1923, 748) Charles Diehl. 1923. ’Byzantine Civilization’, in The Cambridge Medieval History, Volume IV: The Eastern Roman Empire (717-1453), edited by J. R. Tanner, C. W. Previte-Orton and Z. N. Brooke, 745-77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[12]: (Angelova 2015, 153-55) Diliana N. Angelova. 2015. Sacred Founders: Women, Men, and Gods in the Discourse of Imperial Founding, Rome through Early Byzantium. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

[13]: (Angelova 2015, 153-155) Diliana N Angelova. 2015. Sacred Founders: Women, Men, and Gods in the Discourse of Imperial Founding, Rome through Early Byzantium. Oakland: University of California Press.

[14]: (Roueché 2008, 679) Charlotte Roueché. 2008. ’Entertainments, Theatre, and Hippodrome’, in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, edited by E. Jeffreys, J. Haldon and R. Cormack, 677-84. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[15]: (Roueché 2008, 680) Charlotte Roueché. 2008. ’Entertainments, Theatre, and Hippodrome’, in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, edited by E. Jeffreys, J. Haldon and R. Cormack, 677-84. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[16]: (Diehl 1923, 760) Charles Diehl. 1923. ’Byzantine Civilization’, in The Cambridge Medieval History, Volume IV: The Eastern Roman Empire (717-1453), edited by J. R. Tanner, C. W. Previte-Orton and Z. N. Brooke, 745-77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.