Governing Rome — Roman Bureaucracy
Rome, in its more than two thousands years of history, developed an intricate bureaucracy to rule its expanded territories. As it went from a small city state on the Tiber river to having to govern an empire spanning Europe, West Asia and North Africa, it had adapt and innovate in order to maintain control of its empire.
In 400 BC, Rome was still a rather minor power that did not even fully controlled the River Tiber. From 380s to 338, the Romans were able to impose their rule on the Latins to the east and south of the city. From 327 to 272, the Romans were able to dominate the Italian peninsula up to the Arno. From 264 to 241, the Romans fought the the First Carthaginian War. After a protracted struggle, they were able to defeat the Phoenician city state and take control of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. Rome faced its greatest challenge in the Second Carthaginian War (218–202), as Hannibal crossed the Alps and inflicted terrible defeats on them. However the Romans prevailed and became the dominant power in the western Mediterranean. In 190, the Romans defeated the Seleucid Empire (one of Alexander’s successor states based in Syria), thus gaining naval dominance over the eastern Mediterranean. The Roman legions crushed the Macedonian phalanx in the Battle of Pydna in 168 BC, thus establishing Roman control over the region. Meanwhile, the Romans had began expanding in northern Spain (since 179). Until then, the Romans had been a mainly Mediterranean power. It was in the 50s that Julius Caesar directed Roman expansion northwards. Caesar pushed Roman frontiers to the Rhine while his successor Augustus to the Danube.
Rome was ruled by an aristocracy within the framework of an oligarchic republic. This political system fostered a consensus between the elites regarding the rotation of leading families in power, which prevented civil wars and tyrannies until the final century of the Republic. The rapid expansion of the republic meant that it had to find new ways to control and maintain those new territories.
The major innovation came after 264. It was the creation of provinces outside peninsular Italy. Another constitutional innovation was the creation of extra high-level annual magistracies (praetorships). Those new officials were taksed with providing these provinces with continuous supervision. The term provincia originally denoted a sphere of responsibility. It took on a territorial meaning from 227 when the number of praetorships (from two to four) and quaestorships (from six to eight) increased to meet the demands of ruling the imperial holdings of Rome. The new officials had the jobs of ruling Sicily and Sardinia. The formation of two regular Spanish provinces in 197 led to the addition of two more praetorships and quaestorships.
All these officials operated with small personal staffs. The Roman Republic, despite managing to conquer large parts of the Mediterranean, had relatively light bureaucracy. The bureaucratization of the Roman state, a long and slow process, can be traced to the Roman Empire, when there was a more systemic effort to provide a more centralized administration of the provinces.
This gradual bureaucratization of Rome was the result of its attempts to maintain an army of around 350,000 soldiers to protect its extended imperial holdings, which of course required taxation that had to be collected by a bureaucracy.
A major change was made by the first Emperor, Augustus (27 BC — 14 AD), who reformed revenue collection, bringing large parts of Rome’s empire under consistent direct taxation instead of asking for intermittent tributes. Taxation was determined by population census and private tax farming was abolished in favor for civil service tax collectors. This made provincial administration far more tolerable, decreased corruption and oppression and increased revenues.
While numbers vary, the officials of the central administration may have been as high as 5000 during the Antonine times (96–180). The Emperors made use of freedmen for administrative duties, naming them to such offices as ab epistulis (in charge of correspondence), a libellis (in charge of petitions) and a rationibus (in charge of accounts).
The garrisoned provinces of the Empire were under the direct control of the Emperor and ruled by his appointees while the public provinces were ruled by senators selected by lot, according to the Republican practice that was maintained. The governor had to command the military forces in his province (whose size varied) and enforce laws and regulations. He was assisted by a quaestor (in public provinces) or a procurator (in imperial provinces), legates, military tribunes, centurions and informal employees (‘friends’). He would also have an entourage of freedmen and slaves, that certainly wasn’t vast but whose numbers are generally underestimated (when the governor of Macedonia went to a religious visit in 165, he took 29 people with him that were deemed important to be mentioned and there were certainly more).
Citizens could petition governors to complain about local problems and corrupt officials. The professionalism of the governors varied; in public provinces the term of office was often one year while in Egypt (an imperial province) three. Merit did play a role in appointments as there was a certain level of competence in that social sub-class which was believed to have been the result of gentlemanly upbringing (the so called paideia — culture): male members of the elite were expected to acquire elaborate literary education.
Below the governors, as mentioned above, there were a number of officials (both formal and informal) that carried out his tasks. There were also jurists who maintained a small army of clerks to provide accurate census. An official correspondence from Egypt in 298 shows the complaints of a governor regarding the failure of his officials to carry out his orders; what this shows is that it was generally expected that officials would carry out the tasks given to them. While by no means a modern administration, the Roman state was able to influence peoples’ lives.
Rome has been called by some historians a confederation of city-states and that is true as the Roman state preferred on a local level to delegate tasks to city-states and in provinces that did not have such traditions, Rome brought them into being as far as it could. City authorities had to maintain order and extract revenue not only for the city itself but also from the countryside that was allocated to that city and where the majority of the population lived.
While it is true that the Roman Empire wasn’t as heavily bureaucratized as the Han Dynasty of Imperial China, the Roman Empire did have a bureaucracy even in this early imperial period that tends to be underestimated; the officials, as stated above, had a large number of slaves who worked informally in administrative jobs.
Under Diocletian and Constantine in the late third and early fourth centuries, the Roman Empire underwent an even greater bureaucratization in order to deal with the threat of external enemies and internal instability. The Empire was to be ruled by two Emperors, one in the West and one in the East, who could respond faster to internal and external threats. In order to maintain a large army to defend the Empire from the ‘barbarian’ threat, more taxes were needed [Diocletian introduced a new system of taxation based on heads (capita) and land (iugera)], which needed to be collected by an expanding civil service.
The army of the Eastern Empire seems to have increased from about 190,000 to 300,000 and there was a [albeit lesser] expansion in the West too. The pay was too low however and this certainly hurt the quality of those armed forces [many of whom were stationed in frontiers and were losing their military capabilities]. The number of officials was also expanded, with the East maintaining around fifteen thousand, twenty-five hundred of which were in the central government.
The burden of this expanded government was greater in the West, which was suffering more from ‘barbarian’ invasions. In the fourth century, sources actually tell that in the West there was a lack of manpower for the army, which illustrates that the administrative structure that could maintain an expanded military was broken under the pressure of economic decline and loss of land to invaders. The civil service was subordinated to military strongmen (magister militum) in an attempt to deal with the crisis but the West eventually collapsed.
The East was able to fare better but the number of soldiers in military campaigns greatly decreased; Julian invaded the Persian Empire in 363 with 120,000 men while Belisarius campaigned in North Africa in 533–4 with a force of 10,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry. This shows both the change in the way of warfare but also, as far as our subject regarding bureaucracy is concerned, the strains of the system.
The loss in the seventh century of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa and much of the Balkans to invaders meant that there was a decrease both in revenues and officials, both in the civil service and in the military. Egypt contributed revenues of something between 1.4 and 2.6 million solidi. Syria must have generated about 1 million solidi. The loss of the east may have accounted for as much as 75% of the state’s revenues. Those regions were also densely populated, so there was demographic loss for Rome too. It has been estimated that in 600, Rome had a population of 17 million while in 641 it had a population of 10.5 million.
The Empire became more agrarian and less densely populated during this period. The basic unit of the fiscal system were the villages (choria) in the countryside, where the peasants that worked the farmlands lived. Arab geographers of this period would describe the Empire as having no cities and being instead made up of prosperous fortresses and villages.
This had a large impact on the state structure; from about 150,000 soldiers during Justinian’s reign and 109,000 in 641, in 770s the empire had about 80,000 men. The bureaucracy was restructured. The system of prefectures and provinces was replaced by Themes, provinces ruled by a Strategos, a military officer who had both civilian and military duties and was thus a return to the model of governance of the early Empire.
The central civil service was reorganized into more numerous but less powerful ministries. The chiefs of those officials were called logothetes (the postal regarding communications, embassies and internal security, the general responsible for taxation and the military for paying the army). The protoasecretis kept government records. Although there were more high officials, overall the bureaucracy decreased in number; in the eighth century the number of bureaucrats in the central government fell to six hundred (from twenty-five hundred in Diocletian’s time).
The recovery of the Empire, which began expanding its borders during the Amorian and Macedonian dynasties from the ninth to eleventh centuries, meant that there was greater population and revenues. This helped monetize the economy. The annual increase in the index of coins found in Athens and Corinth were 1 and 4 percent respectively, a fourfold/sevenfold increasing in 969 respectively.
This allowed for an expanded military and a modest increase in the civil service. In the 840s the army was about 120,000 men strong while in the 960s around 150,000. By 1025, the army may have overall reached near 200,000 men, though in campaigns the number of men rarely exceeded 40,000 (and that during great campaigns — most of the time the expeditionary forces were smaller).
The civil service had less influence in this period compared to the military establishment and the aristocratic families of Anatolia and as such the expansion of the bureaucracy was far more modest compared to that of the army. The ministries of the previous period decreased somewhat in influence while palatine officials, such as the Grand Chamberlain (an eunuch) had much wider influence. An area in which the bureaucracy expanded was that of legal issues. As the Macedonian emperors promulgated new law codes, they increased the number of judges appointed to the capital and provinces. The bureaucracy tended to be more open to new talents than the military, which was dominated by established aristocratic families.
After 1025, the emperors favored the bureaucrats who provided a counter-weight to the influence of Anatolian magnates. The civil service thus became more prominent and influential in government. The number of officials increased as members of the merchant class purchased offices, although they usually had no administrative tasks. As such the bureaucracy nominally expanded.
During the Doucas and Komnenoi dynasties, the highest posts were given to relatives as the governance became more a dynastic affair. Relatives of the Emperor were granted titles that were graded by degree of kinship to the Emperor and according to the seniority of the kinsman within each degree. The Byzantine Empire was governed by lineage and kinship.
The loss of the interior of Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks and the catastrophic defeats of the Byzantine army, as well as the generally bad economic situation, meant that Alexios Komnenos (1081–1118) had an army of around 20,000 men. The Komnenoi thus made much use of foreign mercenaries.
With regard to the central administration, the traditional logothetes were subjected to a single logethete of secreta (departments). Regarding provincial administration, the number of Themes increased as they fractured and the position of Strategos lost importance; the governor was a civil official title judge or praetor.
Despite the setbacks of the eleventh century, the economy was flourishing under the Komnenoi and they were able to maintain a strong, centralized bureaucracy. The Komnenian Empire was greatly centralized by the standards of the age and it had all the functions of a fully developed pre-industrial state: standing army and navy, elaborate bureaucracy and monetary taxation. This centralization and identification with the capital, Constantinople, proved to have detrimental effects to the Empire: the limits of the empire coincided with the territory which a mobile military emperor from Constantinople could control without allied aid.
After the fall of Constantinople in 1204 to the crusaders, the centralized bureaucratic structure of the empire suffered a blow from which it was unable to make a full recovery. A government-in-exile was established in Asia Minor, the Empire of Nicaea. The Emperors granted land to aristocrats and family members they trusted, a situation similar somewhat to the Western feudalism. It was the Empire of Nicaea that eventually reconquered Constantinople in 1261, restoring the Empire.
The high officials in the bureaucracy were relatives of the ruling house. The new chancery was an extension of the emperor’s private secretaries. The Mesazon headed the smaller bureaucracy and had the role of a ‘Prime Minister’ of sorts. The central government was far smaller than before and highly dependent on the emperor himself. A large part of the army was maintained through the use of pronoia grants, that is the granting of the state’s fiscal rights over an individual/group of individuals to soldiers. The pronoia system provided the state with inexpensive soldiers and it increased their effectiveness as they could afford better equipment and would be eager to defend their means of income.
The state shrunk more and more until only Constantinople remained, which fell to the Ottomans in 1453.
