Constantine the Great: The reorganization of the Empire and the triumph of the Church

by John B. Firth

In the conduct of State affairs the Emperor was assisted by an Imperial council, known as the consistorium principis. It included the four Prætorian præfects of whom we have spoken; the quæstor of the palace, a kind of general secretary of state; the master of the offices (magister officiorum), one of whose principal duties was to act as minister of police; the grand chamberlain (præpositus sacri cubiculi); two ministers of finance, and two ministers for war. One of the finance ministers was dignified with the title of count of the sacred largesses (comes sacrarum largitionum); the other was count of the private purse (comes rerum privatarum). The distinction was similar to the old one between the ærarium and the fiscus, between, that is to say, the State treasury and the Emperor’s privy purse. One of the two ministers for war had supreme charge of the infantry of the Empire; the other was responsible for the cavalry. Both also exercised judicial functions and sat as a court of appeal in all military cases wherein the State was interested, either as plaintiff or defendant.

There were still consuls in Rome, who continued to give their names to the year. All their political power had vanished, but their dignity remained unimpaired, though it was now derived not from the intrinsic importance of their office so much as from its extrinsic ornaments. To be consul had become the ambition not of the boldest but of the vainest. (In consulatu honos sine labore suscipitur.) The prætorship had similarly fallen, but it still entailed upon the holder the expensive and sometimes ruinous privilege of providing shows for the amusement of the Roman populace. The number of prætors had fallen to two in Constantine’s day: he raised it to eight, in accordance with his general regardlessness of expense, so long as there was outward magnificence. It is doubtful whether, during the reign of Constantine, there were consuls and prætors in Constantinople. Certainly there was no urban præfect appointed in that city until twenty years after his death, and it seems probable that the Emperor did not set up in his new capital quite such a pedantically perfect imitation of the official machinery of Rome as has sometimes been supposed. His successors, however, were not long in completing what he had begun.

We pass to the senate and the senatorial order, with their various degrees of dignity, which Constantine and those who came after him delighted to elaborate. Every member of the senate was naturally a member of the senatorial order, but it by no means followed that every member of the order had a seat in the senate. The new senate of Constantinople, like its prototype at Rome, had little or no political power. It merely registered the decrees of the Emperor, and its function seems to have been one principally of dignity and ceremony. Membership of the senatorial order was a social distinction that might be held by a man living in any part of the Empire and was gained by virtue of having held office. The order was an aristocracy of officials and ex-officials, distinguished by resplendent titles, involving additional burdens in the way of taxation—the price of added dignity. A few of these titles are worth brief consideration. To the Emperor there were reserved the grandiloquent names of Your Majesty, Your Eternity, Your Divinity. Members of the reigning house were Most Noble (Nobilissimi). To the members of the senate, including the officials of the very highest rank, viz., the consuls, proconsuls, and præfects, there was reserved the title of Most Distinguished (Clarissimi), while officers of lower rank, members of the senatorial order but not of the senate, were Most Perfect (Perfectissimi) and Egregious (Egregii), the former being of a higher class than the latter. Such was the order of precedence in Constantine’s reign, but there was a constant tendency for these honourable orders to expand, due, no doubt, entirely to the exigencies of the treasury. Thus the high rank of Clarissimi was bestowed on those who previously had been only Perfectissimi and Egregii, and two still higher orders of Illustres and Spectabiles were created for the old Clarissimi and Perfectissimi. The two topmost classes were thus given an upward step.

Such was the new official aristocracy, while a rigid line of division, quite unknown to Republican and early Imperial Rome, was drawn between the civil and the military officers of the Empire. The military forces themselves were organised into two great divisions, (1) the troops kept permanently upon the frontiers, and (2) the soldiers of the line. The first were known as Limitanei (Borderers) or Riparienses (Guardians of the Shore), the second name being specially applied to the soldiers of the Rhine and the Danube. All these troops were stationed in permanent camps and forts, which often developed into townships, and it was a rare thing for a legion to be moved to another quarter of the Empire. Boys grew up and followed their fathers in the profession of arms in the same camp, and were themselves succeeded by their own sons. The term of service was twenty-four years, and these Limitanei were not only soldiers but tillers of the soil, playing a part precisely similar to the soldier colonists of Russia in her Far Eastern provinces. The soldiers of the line (Numeri), on the other hand, served for the shorter period of twenty years. They included the Palatini,—practically the successors of the old Prætorian Guard,—the crack corps of the army, who were divided into regiments bearing such titles as Scholares, Protectores, and Domestici, and enjoyed the privilege of guarding the Emperor’s person. Most of the legions of the line were known as the Comitatenses. These were employed in the interior garrisons of the Empire, and Zosimus—whether justly or not, it is impossible to say—accuses Constantine of having dangerously weakened the frontier garrisons and withdrawn too many troops into the interior. The control of the army, under the Emperor and his two ministers for war, was vested by the end of the fourth century in thirty-five commanders bearing the titles of dukes and counts,—the latter being the higher of the two. Three of these were stationed in Britain, six in Gaul, one each in Spain and Italy, four in Africa, three in Egypt, eight in Asia and Syria, and nine along the upper and lower reaches of the Danube.

Such was the structure which rested upon the purse of the taxpayer and upon a system of finance inherently vicious and wasteful. The main support of the treasury was still, as it had always been, the land tax, known as the capitatio terrena, the old tributum soli. It was the landed proprietor (possessor) who found the wherewithal to keep the Empire on its feet. Diocletian had reorganised the census, and, in the interests of the treasury, had caused a new survey and inventory to be made of practically every acre of land in every province. By an ingenious device he had established a system of taxable units (jugum or caput), each of which paid the round sum of 100,000 sesterces or 1000 aurei. The unit might be made up of all sorts of land—arable, pasture, or forest—the value of each being estimated on a regular scale. Thus five acres of vineyard constituted a unit and were held to be equivalent to twenty acres of the best arable land, forty acres of second-class land, and sixty of third-class. Nothing escaped: even the roughest woodland or moorland was assessed at the rate of four hundred and fifty acres to the unit. The Emperor and his finance ministers estimated every year how much was required for the current expenses of the Empire. When the amount was fixed, they sent word throughout the provinces, and the various municipal curiæ, or town senates, knew what their share would be, for each town and district was assessed at so many thousand units, and each curia or senate was responsible for the money being raised. The curia was composed of a number of the richest landowners, who had to collect the tax from themselves and their neighbours as best they could. If, therefore, any possessor became bankrupt, the others had to make up the shortage between them. Those who were solvent had to pay for the insolvent. All loopholes of evasion were carefully closed. Landowners were not permitted to quit their district without special leave from the governor; they could not join the army or enter the civil service. When it was found that large numbers were becoming ordained in the Christian Church to escape their obligations, an edict was issued forbidding it. Once a decurion always a decurion.

The provincial country landowner and the small farmer were almost taxed out of existence by this monstrous system. Every ten or fifteen years, it is true, a revision of the assessments took place, and there were certain officials, with the significant name of defensores, whose duty it was to prevent the provincials from being fleeced too flagrantly. But a man might easily be reduced to beggary by a succession of bad harvests before the year of revision came round, and the defensor’s office was a sinecure except in the rare occasions when he knew that he would be backed at the headquarters of the diocese. During Constantine’s reign, or at least during its closing years, there is overpowering evidence that the provincial governors were allowed to plunder at discretion. They imitated the reckless prodigality of their sovereign, who, in 331, was compelled to issue an edict to restrain the peculation of his officers. There is a very striking phrase in Ammianus Marcellinus who says that while Constantine started the practice of opening the greedy jaws of his favourites, his son, Constantius, fattened them up on the very marrow of the provinces.[^[147]] Evidently, the incidence of this land tax inflicted great hardships and had the mischievous result of draining the province of capital, and of dragging down to ruin the independent cultivator of the land. Hence districts were constantly in arrears of payment, and the remission of outstanding debt to the treasury was usually the first step taken by an Emperor to court popularity with his subjects.

In short, the fiscal system of the Empire, so far as its most important item, the land tax, was concerned, seemed expressly designed to exhaust the wealth of the provinces. It helped to introduce a system of caste, which became more rigid and cramping as the years passed by and the necessities of the treasury became more urgent. It also powerfully contributed to crush out of existence the yeoman farmer, whose insolvency was followed, if not by slavery, at any rate by a serfdom which just as effectually robbed him of freedom of movement. The colonus having lost the title-deeds of his own land became the hireling of another, paying in kind a fixed proportion of his stock and crops, and obliged to give personal service for so many days on that part of the estate where his master resided. The position of the poor colonus, in fact, became precisely similar to that of a slave who had not obtained full freedom but had reached the intermediate state of serfdom, in which he was permanently attached to a certain estate as, so to speak, part of the fixtures. He was said to be “ascribed to the land” (ascripticius), and he had no opportunity of bettering his social position or enabling his sons to better theirs, unless they were recruited for the legions.

SOLIDUS OF MAXIMIN DAZA.