THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYover the whole period – from 434 annual payments of gold agreed by Rome
to the Huns stood at 700 lbs, and rose to 2,100 lbs in 447, with a payment of
6,000 lbs to cover arrears; according to Priscus this required a much higher
tax burden on the senatorial class in the east which some could hardly pay.
Surviving hoards of gold solidi from across the Danube are testimony to these
payments. As for commerce, the chrysargyron (gold and silver tax, so-called
because it had to be paid in gold and silver, usually, in practice, gold) was con-
sistently unpopular and was abolished in AD 499 by the Emperor Anastasius
as the collatio glebalis (follis), levied on senators, had been by the Emperor Mar-
cian.^50 Taxation was an ideologically charged issue, and emperors who raised
taxes, even if like Justinian they did so for military purposes, are uniformly
criticized in contemporary sources.
The late Roman taxation system was a complicated and unwieldy affair,
full of inequities and far from perfectly administered. Apart from the cost of
the imperial court or courts and the administration, the state’s major item of
expenditure went towards the maintenance of the army, and this was also the
most diffi cult to organize. If it were true that Diocletian had really doubled, let
alone quadrupled, the size of the army, as well as increasing the bureaucracy
the economic problems of the later empire would indeed have been insu-
perable. Jones put the problem neatly in his famous statement that the late
empire had too many ‘idle mouths’, i.e., non-producers, who had to be paid
for from the diminishing resources of the empire.^51 But few historians today
would be as confi dent as Jones was in 1964. As we have seen already (Chapter
2), Diocletian is more likely to have regularized the status quo than actually
doubled the army in size, and it must be regarded as doubtful whether even
that fi gure could be maintained after the late fourth century. Even at 400,000
plus (other recent estimates would put it higher, as noted earlier), the late Ro-
man army was still an extremely large force, and such an army must certainly
have represented a great drain on resources. An elaborate system of requisi-
tioning and supply had to be in place to get the items needed to the troops
who needed them. Since the later third century and under the Diocletianic
system, much of the army’s pay had been collected in kind, by means of a
cumbersome set of arrangements which one is surprised to fi nd working at all;
in fact, while the method of calculation varied from province to province, it
was possible from time to time to reduce the demand on a particular province,
as with Achaea, Macedonia, Sicily, Numidia and Mauretania Sitifensis in the
fi fth century. However, the regular censuses necessary to keep the registers of
land and population accurate tended not to be held, and great discrepancies
could thereby arise. Once collected, the goods had to be transmitted to the
necessary unit – a further process requiring complicated organization.
Other forms of taxation were also of great importance throughout the impe-
rial period, especially the grain and oil requisitions for the food supply of Rome,
a system Constantine also extended to his new foundation of Constantinople
(Chapter 1). Since the Republic, the Roman government had considered it a
priority to ensure the food supply for the capital, and had maintained free corn