• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The splendor of Byzantine ceremonial in rooms with doors of bronze and ceilings in gold and silver awed the foreigner, especially when a bit of mechanical wizardry was thrown in. Liudprand of Lombardy, on a diplomatic mission in 949, describes an imperial audience:

Golden lions guarding the throne “beat the ground with their tails and gave a dreadful roar with open mouth and quivering tongue.” Bronze birds cried out from a gilded tree. “After I had three times made obeisance … with my face upon the ground, I lifted my head, and behold, the man whom just before I had seen sitting on a moderately elevated seat had now changed his raiment and was sitting at the level of the ceiling.”

Beneath the glittering ritual we can perceive a prototype of today’s bureaucratic state. A hierarchy of officials, including the custodian of the imperial inkstand, who readied the quill pen and red ink with which the emperor signed decrees, minutely supervised this “paradise of monopoly, privilege, and protectionism” that subordinated the individual’s interest to the state’s.

Constantinople organized its trades in tightly regulated guilds; controlled prices, wages, and rents; stockpiled wheat to offset poor harvests. Officials inspected shops; checked weights and measures, ledgers, quality of merchandise. Hoarders, smugglers, defrauders, counterfeiters, tax evaders faced severe punishment.

Unlike the West, trade or industry seldom bore a stigma. One empress distilled perfume in her palace bedroom. The emperor himself was the empire’s leading merchant and manufacturer, with monopolies in minting, armaments, and Byzantium’s renowned luxury articles. Justinian had founded its famed silk industry with silkworm eggs smuggled into Constantinople. (Hitherto the empire had paid a pound of gold for a pound of Chinese silk.) Special brocades from imperial looms and other “prohibited articles” not for sale abroad made prestigious gifts for foreign princes.

Import, export, sales, purchase taxes, and shop rents swelled the imperial coffers (Basil II left 200,000 pounds of gold)—this at a time when the West more often bartered than bought. Nor were interest-bearing loans condemned as sinful; in the West they were, and this put moneylending into the scorned hands of Jews. Justinian set an 8 percent ceiling on interest—12 percent on maritime loans because of increased risk. (The borrower did not have to repay if ship or cargo was lost to storm or pirate.) Insurance and credit services were developed. Banking was closely audited. The gold solidus, the coin introduced by Constantine and later called bezant for Byzantium, held its value for seven centuries—history’s most stable currency.

In the spirit “if any would not work, neither should he eat,” the indigent were put to work in state bakeries and market gardens. “Idleness leads to crime,” noted Emperor Leo III. And drunkenness to disorder and sedition—so taverns closed at eight.

God’s state would protect the working girl: a fine of two pounds of gold for anyone who corrupted a woman employed in the imperial textile factories. Incest, homicide, privately making or selling purple cloth (reserved for royalty alone), or teaching shipbuilding to enemies might bring decapitation, impalement, hanging—or drowning in a sack with a hog, a cock, a viper, and an ape. The grocer who gave false measure lost his hand. Arsonists were burned.

The Byzantines came to favor mutilation as a humane substitute for the death penalty; the tongueless or slit-nosed sinner had time to repent. Class distinctions in law were abolished. Judges were paid salaries from the treasury instead of taking money from litigants, “for gifts and offerings blind the eyes of the wise.”

“Men … should not shamelessly trample upon one another,” observed Leo VI, the Wise. Contractors had to replace faulty construction at their own cost. Housing codes forbade balconies less than ten feet from the facing house, storing noxious matter, or encroaching on a neighbor’s light