GOLDEN BEZANTS
It took a lot of money to be able to do all these things—to pay the expenses of the emperor and his court and government, and of the army, the navy, and the church, to say nothing of bribing foreign rulers and their ambassadors. And this money did not come from conquering fabulously rich lands and then making them hand over their treasures as tribute or as booty.
This method was the way the old Roman Empire had become wealthy. In fact, the famous Roman statesman Cicero, who had a rich province to govern, boasted to his friend Atticus that the natives loved him because he did not make them give him a well-furnished palace in every city where he spent the night. They thronged from every village and hamlet to cheer him because he did not force them to borrow money and then pay him back with forty-eight per cent interest!
But in Byzantine days there were very few fabulously rich countries left to conquer, and the Byzantines had to find some other source of wealth. They had to rely on hard work and on their own skill and cleverness. They supported themselves on the little farms that nestled in every Balkan valley and the huge estates that sprawled over Thrace and Anatolia (the Asiatic part of modern Turkey). They earned a living, sometimes even amassing treasure, in the many industries that were found in every Byzantine city. They became wealthy from their world-wide foreign trade.
Nobody can say today just how wealthy they were. One historian says that the Byzantine state had an annual budget of one hundred and twenty million dollars in gold, but another says that it was only twenty million.
No matter which was right, and it was probably the first, you would still have to multiply the figure many times to find out what it is worth in modern money. Anyway, this was only the money spent by the government; it did not include the vast sums and the enormous property owned by private citizens. There may have been fifteen million people in the Byzantine Empire, and while some of them were poor as poor could be, a great many of them were very rich indeed.
Of all ways of making a living, farming probably came first. Rich or poor, almost every Byzantine had an eye for the land, that is, everyone except the city mobs who couldn’t bear to be too far away from the excitement of the Circus.
In fact, many people say that the reason the Byzantine Empire finally lost its wealth was because the average Byzantine preferred to invest his money in an estate rather than in foreign trade. The Byzantines let foreign trade fall into the hands of the Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans. Then when the Turks came and the richest provinces fell into the hands of the invaders, there was nothing to fall back on, and no money to pay soldiers to hold the Turks off.
If that is so, it was for the same reason that the Byzantines did not like the navy; foreign trade was too uncertain and there was no way to figure out your risks. Just take pirates alone. The Aegean Sea and in fact the whole eastern Mediterranean was strewn with islands behind which lurked swift ships, manned by swarthy corsairs. They were as dangerous as Captain Kidd or Henry Morgan, and they kept Byzantine traders terrified.
“What am I going to do?” jeered one of them, a Genoese, as he boarded a heavily laden Byzantine merchant vessel. “Seize you and your goods, and cut off your noses!”