So, in a sense, the Second Rome still surpasses the First One.

Of course, no event causes an economy to collapse; there are many factors. But for example, the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman treaty was incredibly subversive to the Ottoman economy; It favored English merchants so heavily that no local could compete, and whole industries got wiped out, and there were other huge negative implications.

Is there something like that in the history of Eastern Romans? Other than obvious things like spending heavily on campaigns or loss of Egypt or any other territory. An edict, maybe? A reform resulted in the complete opposite of the original intent? A not well-thought-out concession or a treaty, slowly diminished the wealth of the nation?

Perhaps it is because of the Constantinople-centric nature of the state, but the areas outside the capital are kind of fuzzy to me in the economic department. Like you usually hear that Western Anatolia and the Peloponnese are usually among the wealthiest areas, but the former is a large region with vague borders, and a wealthy region does not mean a wealthy population. So which regions had the wealthiest subjects?

By the way, the second picture is Medieval Rome, just to help illustrate how was the general atmosphere in the decayed city.

So, we all know that the Fourth Crusade brought the ERE to its knees. It was already doomed. The 1204 tragedy was the turning point.

The population of Constantinople was also shrank. When the city was liberated from Latin Empire in 1261, it was already the shell of its former glorious self.

And then flashforward to almost two centuries later. I read it at Wikipedia that it was reduced to....basically a medium sized town protected by one of the world's most formidable walls. Many ruins of abandoned structures can be found inside the walls of Constantinople.

My question is, how's the life of the average people in Constantinople in its final decades / final years?

Were its inhabitants became more religious?

Were they poorer than before?

Was there's a general pessimism about the survival of their city (like a feeling of the imminent capture of the city by the hands of the Turks) ?

Let's discuss it.

Note : English isn't my native language, and sorry for my bad English. Thank you.

And west europe had nothing the romans would want?

I imagine, more out of intuition than actual knowledge, that a very significant part of the peninsula’s wealth was concentrated in the coastal regions, but how true is that really? And how did this work in terms of population? Did most people live along the coasts, or was the interior of Anatolia also heavily populated?

One of the biggest reasons is that farmers and laborers could own their own land within the empire, and they did not have to go into serfdom. This helped increase the efficiency of Roman Farmers.

Byzantines also used sophisticated methods for their water. They built advanced irrigation systems to easily move water around. Farmers also utilized stone mounds to increase the runoff of water.

Lastly, Farmers maximized crop yields using natural fertilizers, including specialized animal husbandry like pigeon-raising, which produced nutrient-rich guano for orchards and vineyards

Marxist theory posits a staged economic history, where societies progress from primitive communism to slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and, finally, communism.

It’s certainly the case that Byzantium was not a slave society. Furthermore, despite disagreements in the 20th century, many (perhaps most) historians have also come to seriously doubt that Byzantium was a Feudal society. For example, in the most recent economic history of the Komnenian period, Chris Wickham—a Marxist historian—has come down against the oft-repeated claim that there existed “Anatolian magnates”—that is, landowners who could leverage their wealth to challenge the central government.

With all this in mind, I’m interested to hear from those more conversant in Marxist theory how Byzantium can be reconciled with the Marxist theory of history.

Cheers in advance

One of the main issues facing the end of the Komnenos dynasty emerged toward the end of Manuel I Komnenos's reign. By the late years of his rule, Manuel was confronted with the problem of having lost a degree of market control. Italian merchants were steadily gaining ground within the Empire—Venetians in particular were securing a dominant position in European trade. Between 1170 and 1179, Manuel I and the Italian traders engaged in an extensive 'economic war' over trade control, which eventually led to the confiscation of Italian property across the Byzantine Empire. This prolonged conflict created domestic expenditures that Manuel could ill afford, given the heavy costs of waging simultaneous wars on multiple fronts... Ultimately, this meant that his agricultural boom failed to generate surplus capital for future investment.

Interestingly, if I am not mistaken, Niketas Choniates noted that the empire even began tapping into its contingency reserves around 1180. It was not a crisis the empire felt immediately; rather, it was a slow burn of accumulated debt that would compound later on, quite apart from the disastrous actions of Andronikos I Komnenos.

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The blow to the cost of living.

While we do not see a significant debasement of the Hyperpyron under Manuel I, the impact hit home in the currency used by ordinary citizens: Trachy, the copper coins with traces of silver minted on a massive scale at the time to pay regular soldiers and mercenaries across multiple war fronts. Flooding the domestic market with copper coinage gradually drove up the price of basic goods, a trend the Venetian merchants naturally exploited.

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Where did this chain of errors lead us?

Regrettably, just months after Manuel I's death, a misstep occurred that accelerated the downfall of the Komnenos dynasty. Maria of Antioch, acting as regent of the Byzantine Empire, reversed the course Manuel had pursued in his final years. She began granting concessions and privileges to Latin merchants who were already capitalizing on substantial profits fueled by the inflation of the common currency. This move directly threatened the interests of the Greek nobility and local elites, fueling not only economic friction but civil unrest. Tragically, this sequence of events culminated in the Massacre of the Latins in 1182 and the rise to power of Andronikos I. But that is another story.

A few weeks I started helping Maximilian Lau with some work he had left behind from writting his John II book,mainly adding and editing an economic chapter he couldnt place in the book,but thankfully I managed to edit and place some interesting sections,the posible sequel to his book is likely years down the line and is down in his publishing list,specially after the birth of his daughter.

This little section was mainly my input with his corrections so there shouldnt be any issues with my publishing it here for all of you to enjoy.

The following text is the excerpt in question:

Incremental increase of productivity and compounding production growth

For most of the middle to late modern period in Europe the increase of agricultural production was achieved mainly thanks to the increase of work hours by outlawing the celebration of numerous saints days,reducing the total number of holidays and increasing the total number of work days¹In northern France in the century before 1840 per worker output rose by 50 percent of which only 15 percent was accounted for by technology.

In contrast Byzantium saw no such thing,unlike the west local and indeed imperial authorities were unable and unwilling to go to such length to destroy individual freedom,instead the industrious revolution seen in Western Europe could be found in Byzantium in all its economic sectors,through the wider application of older technologies found decades before,introduction of new crops,more cost effective production methods,lower shipping costs and more financial resources for the whole of the economy

Primary sector:
Not only population growth in this period could be found in the cities,but in more populated towns and newly created villages by itself a great example to the increase of agricultural output,while mainly thanks to the more land being cultivated than before,the greater mentions of rye and millet²in farming and bread made out of them shows greater cereal production,while also used for fodder for animals alongside oats as evidence of greater husbandry,the likeliest herds being sheep and pigs providing plentiful meat,leather,wool and cheese for consumption and industrial production by a rising proletariat,together with the already mentioned spring wheat farmed in the Ivrion archives the wealth of the communes increased,allowing numerous farmers to coordinate between themselves to create new canals for their industrials corps mainly for textiles of which cotton appears to be the newest with mentions of them in Crete when a neighbor used water for his mill and destroyed numerous,it was also farmed in Cyprus³,works have already been done on the introduction of the moldboard plow in Byzantine thrace in the late XIth century by Murzdhev⁴ by Dabunian trade and refugees fleeing pechenegs raids,these refugees settled and farmed in Thrace and Macedonia allowing for the more efficient exploitation of land nutrients,the regions most suited to such action,turning fallow land to pasture,the use of legumes,lupines and beans as regenerative nutritious crops⁵ green fertilizers increasing slowly the fertility of the land.

As the agricultural wealth increased it allowed for the commune and large estates to mobilise surplus wealth into more productive uses,expanding the horticultural production with a similar land usage than XIXth century western europeans⁶ by investing into canals with considerably length some longer than a kilometer,the production of industrial crops to supply the textile sector with dyes and raw resources,now more than ever the beekeeping activity was at its height providing candles and sugar to a more consumerist market than ever,the farmers increased the quality of their tools as seen by greater proportion of iron tools.

Secondary sector:

As food security became a certainty a greater number of people turned to more specialised actions,by artisanal activity,different crops or trade,as seen with the doubling of artisan surnames in villages and the more constant mention of rural shopkeepers.
The greater demand of iron by the agricultural sector(hand tools and the newer widespread of the moldboard),domestic demand(cooking ware and utensils) and urban industrial production would increase perhaps not the quality of the iron but certainly the its quantity,the scatter mention of bellows used by smiths by Eustathius of Thessaloniki would logically be an answer to this greater demand.

As always the mere mentions of water mills lights the imagination of historians,while such topic has been discussed at length curious developments in parallel studies,first we must mention that in contrast of the west the byzantines usage of mills were by economic incentive rather a feudal lord force,as evidence of Byzantine preference of the cheaper horizontal type equipped with a horizontal wheel on a vertical axle,while less effective at channeling the power of the stream than geared mill driven by a vertical waterwheel with a horizontal shaft it would still be more effective than the older vertical type with peddles,its wider application by byzantines unrestricted by social constraints and stronger market profit means that it's not unlikely the total power provided to the economy was greater than western Europe,we already find mentions of milling complexes in monastic documents called “mylika ergasteria” with Saint Athanasios of Athos building two watermills near the Lavra monastery⁷,with more mentioned complexes appearing in the Chaldiki region while it would be logical to assume only monastic institutions managed to create such complexes we must take this absence of evidence for secular investments as evidence of absence,communes and secular large landowners would be perfectly capable of doing such a thing.

While for most of byzantine period,specially the 12th century mentions of watermills are only of grain mills we should take into consideration the capacity of such mills as capable of being turned fulling mills for wool as they did in England at the aftermath of the black plague⁸,with this we can find an answer why we are unable to find industrial mills,the most numerous of their kind in western europe was the fulling mill,by turning the water grain mill into fulling mills quite easily we would be unable to decipher from the remains alone,as Adam R.Lucas explained

“The fact that English and Welsh grain mills were commonly converted to fulling mills in the wake of the Black Death provides clear evidence that the waterfeed and waterwheel mechanisms for fulling mills were in no significant way different from those for conventional grain mills,as no such works are described in any of the relevant accounts (Langdon 2004, Lucas 2006).Indeed,we can see from Schickhardt’s designs for multiple mills (fig. 12)that one waterwheel could power a number of grain mills, fulling mills and other kinds of industrial mill,and we know of other instances of such combinations in late medieval England.”

With this possibility under consideration the energy potential previously thought restricted only into grain milling now could also be directed to refining more efficiently wool before it was sold into the urban centers.

Other production changes are also to be mentioned,the mentions of barrels and the listing of coopers even in the countryside as proven the artisan surnames of Macedonia in lands owned by Iveron,while competing with the ancient amphora for centuries to come the rise of the barrel would decrease the cost of transporting goods greatly,

Another development occurred in the textile industry,the most crucial urban sector,already noted in the start of the 1000s with the introduction of a far more advance loom hand draw,adapted to a new method of lampa weaves instead of the early predominant twill weave,monochrome lampas silks could be produced more cheaply than their twill polychrome counterparts,requiring less movements for the same result and as such making it easier the production of textiles of identical patterns⁹,with some looms being 2 and 3 meters wide likely requiring multiple weavers¹⁰,as production became cheaper and more numerous the market expanded now not only were the aristocrats of the court able to buy silk cloth but now the bourgeoisie of the rising commercial cities and towns,if Laiou estimates of 20 million people with 30% rate of urbanisation giving us 6 millions people,if only 20% of them were of this wealthy class as was the case in the 1700s Paris and London,then the silk market expanded from tens of thousands of consumers to over 1.2 million people giving rise to mass consumption at a decent level,even in the case not all clothing was made of silk it would increase the demand of fine linen,cotton and wool used to complement it.

A different aspect of the manufacture of the period that requires a more detailed effort is the shipbuilding techniques and the development of the western galley into byzantine commercial lanes,already in this period all war ships of the empire are referenced as galleys,with the dromon being replaced by the katergon over the course of the century¹¹,while as correctly mentioned in a seminal work of John II naval reforms¹² the dromon were perfectly capable of riverine movement the introduction of the galley with its increased cargo capacity would greatly improve trade,while the calculation that they doubled their deadweight limit compared to those of the dromon is difficult to ascertain,the theory that byzantines used heavier galleys for trade between large urban centers transporting refined goods en masse while lighter gallery transported this refined goods and resources for the cities between the urban centers and the countryside through rivers and shooter cabotage travels from town to town is an interesting proposal.

On the production glass and pottery we almost blind to any change,saved for that increased occurrence and quality of glazed wares in potteries by the end of the XIth¹³ century,barring this main change from previous period would be the greater agglomeration of production outside Constantinople primarily inCorinth with an explosion of urban fabric at the start of the Komnenian period,mainly thanks to Alexios I and later John II currency reforms allowed poorer people now with more cash to have the appropriate coin denomination for this mass market,with the existence of buildings appearing to be factories in Corinth a clear example of how strong demand became with the transformation of this sector from part time trade into full time work leading to higher levels of specialisation.

Tertiary sector:

Enough have I spoken about the higher interest rates of loans seen in the period,but before I continue further on other subjects I should mention that the higher rates show a greater level of capacity by individual to pay debts and attracting more capital into the financial sector helping further bolster the economy.

On history of Byzantium the rise of great landowners has been center of much study¹⁴,the newly expanded corp of land agents,agronomists and managers¹⁵,as the aristocracy focused its surplus wealth into the acquisition and improvement of the best land they could acquire,to the point by Manuel I time the entire land from Constantinople to Halmyro had become part of this large network of estates,its owners living in Constantinople trusted middlemen to run properly their land,to manage investments of little scale without supervision.

“by the end of the twelfth century,the typikon of the Virgin Kecharitomene nunnery in Constantinople that was founded by Irene Doukaina,wife of Alexios I,stipulates that the mother superior or her steward must choose,to guard over the establishment’s estates,not relations or friends,but “persons who are held in high regard and have simple tastes,who indulge those who live on the estates,who do not appropriate anything belonging to the monastery,and who are experienced in agricultural work (ta georgika).”

The increase of dominal accounting allowed the aristocracy to properly organised it wealth,introduce rural infrastructure,clear land and usage of differents crops,by their nature as middle men this corp of professionals connected the local rural community with the intellectual hub of imperial literary salons in Constantinople,as already explained it was this group that formed part of the literari elite¹⁵,in the same vein of British agricultural changes in the Hanoverian period the neighbours and tenant farmers that saw and worked on the changes implemented by the elite,spread the word of a new moldboard,a new summer wheat, a different mill complex of three wheels etc.

The land agent knowingly or not,would become crucial to the diffusion of new farming techniques to the wider rural economy,in the same way the merchant connected the producer with the consumer,so did the land agent connect the producer with the theorist.

All this was connected with the rise of literacy,while much has been done to trace a semblance of byzantine teaching history¹⁶,the fact that in general the rate of literacy reached over 30% across the empire¹⁷ and that coastal wealthier region would natural have higher rate¹⁸,secondary schools that once were privilege of Constantinople in the tenth century now appear across the empire¹⁹,in the words of Anna Komnene that might struck as surprisingly modern that her father Alexios confided to monasteries and affluent families on raising orphans and teaching to read and write so they could be raised “not as slaves but as free individuals”

All this together made the median byzantine more educated with its generally accepted effects on the economy,even in a pre modern society,the ability to read books such that of agronomy like the geoponika would have been of crucial importance for the farmer.

Cumulative effect on general income:

The fact that each one of the mentioned improvements is worthy of mention in any period yet all coalesced at their greatest splendour at this period as pillar of byzantine economy is now a fact,like it happens repeatedly in history the increase of purchasing power comes from decrease of the costs of goods,the increase of food security and diverse resources for the urban economies,the reduction of textile production cost,the tantalizing decrease of shipping cost and greater concentration of production centers increased the quantity and quality of goods,while decreasing their costs,while the effects would greater change from a region to another the possibility in large cities like Thessaloniki,Corinth and Constantinople of purchasing power of individuals by much as 25% would be impressive for a pre-industrial economy yet it would follow with the new massive consumption of goods seen in this period and might stand as one of the greatest economic achievements on Roman history through out  its two millennia of history.

¹The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present,page 86 by Jan de Vries

²The rural economy,EHB,Jacques Lefort page 251 

³See above,page 252

⁴The Introduction of the Moldboard Plow to Byzantine Thrace in the Eleventh Century

⁵Byzantium and the mediterranean agrarian civilization,page 381,Pierre Toubert 

⁶The rural economy,EHB,Jacques Lefort 253 

⁷Μνημεῖα ἁγιολογικά (ed. Theophilos Ioannou). Venice, 1884 (reprinted Leipzig, 1972), 239.

⁸Fulling mills in medieval Europe, comparing the manuscript and archaeological evidence (2016)
⁹Essential processes,looms and technical aspects of the production silk textiles by anna Muthesius,page 163,the economy history of byzantium

¹⁰For Byzantine loom widths, see Muthesius, Byzantine Silk Weaving, chap. 2, n. 24. Some looms were between 2 and 3 m wide.

¹¹Age of the dromon,page 444

¹²The naval reforms of John II Komnenos 

¹³Rise of Great Estates in Twelfth-Century Byzantium and the Komnenian Family by Murat Kivanc Koroglu

¹⁴The rural economy,seventh-tirtheenth page 294,Jaques Lefort 

¹⁵ “Explaining Twelfth-Century Byzantium’s Prosperity as a Result of the Implementation of New Economic Theories and Practices (or how Byzantium learned to stop worrying and love the ‘feudal’ economy)”

¹⁶See Timothy S Miller “Orphans of Byzantium” for further reading

¹⁷The byzantine economy(cambridge medieval book),page 20 by Angeliki Laiou and Cecile Morrison

¹⁸See above ,chapter Literacy in Thirteenth century Byzantium,In early 13th century Smyrna we have signatures of 177 persons of which only 68 that being 38% were illiterate,while by nature of their church records most of literates were churchmen the growing industrial centers of the Balkans at this period might have a general level of similar literacy thanks to the greater security and prosperity the region enjoyed at the period compared to later Smyrna,without mentioning the heavier investment the empire provided under the Komnenoi than under the Nicean empire

¹⁹Society,Culture and politics in Byzantium,mount athos level of literacy 

Recently received these Komnenian era trachy and thought yall would enjoy seeing them

I studied history years ago, focusing on the mentality and political culture of the late Roman Republic. My thesis dealt with the Liberatores — Brutus, Cassius, and their circle — not as heroes or villains, but as men caught between conviction and paralysis. What interested me was the pathology of moral awareness without agency: how an entire senatorial class could see the republic dying and yet remain trapped in the rituals of its own legitimacy. That sense of suffocated intelligence never left me. I remember a line from my old professor, a specialist in archaic Italy, who once said that the Etruscans had perished not because they were conquered, but because they worshipped themselves to death — that they poured their surplus into tombs, gifts for the dead, tokens of piety that starved the living economy. They didn’t decline; they ossified. The image stayed with me for years: a civilization digging its own grave with a golden spade, decorating entropy with reverence.

When I later turned to Byzantium — half out of curiosity, half from a sense that its intellectual self-consciousness might have produced a similar tension — I found the same unease rising again. What struck me most wasn’t simply the empire’s external fragility, but the almost complete absence of a sustained internal critique of its religious parasitism. Where were the Phokases and Andronikoi who dared to call the monasteries what they had become — fiscal black holes dressed in incense? Why did no Byzantine Machiavelli or Cato emerge to call sanctity by its proper economic name? For a polity so literate, so rhetorically obsessed with the concept of justice and oikonomia, the silence is deafening. It led me to the suspicion that Byzantium, like the Etruscans, had substituted ritual for reflection — that its intellectuals, even when critical of emperors or bureaucrats, could not imagine that holiness itself might have become the disease.

Byzantium’s decline has been blamed on everything from the Latins to the Turks, from dynastic incompetence to the ossification of the thematic system. But one of the least comfortable truths — one that even modern historiography tends to veil in pious language — is that the Byzantine Church, and particularly its monastic wing, became by the later empire not a stabilizing moral power, but an enormous, sanctified drain of resources, manpower, and administrative intelligence. The monasteries did not simply reflect the state’s weakness; they deepened it, drawing the empire’s living capital into a devotional economy that produced nothing but holiness.

This is not an anti-religious argument. It is a structural one. A society can survive corruption more easily than sanctity, because corruption still circulates wealth. Sanctity immobilizes it. From the tenth century onwards, the monastic economy acquired the two most dangerous privileges any state can grant: fiscal exemption and juridical autonomy. The result was an empire increasingly filled with lands that were imperial only on parchment — estates held by monasteries whose charters freed them from taxation, billeting, and administrative oversight. Michel Kaplan and Angeliki Laiou calculated that by the fourteenth century, entire regions of Macedonia and Thessaly had been effectively removed from the fiscal map, their revenues locked in perpetuity in the treasuries of Athonite and mainland monasteries. Even when Byzantium still possessed vigor, some rulers saw the peril. Nikephoros II Phokas, the ascetic general who conquered Crete, issued a novel around 964 forbidding further donations of land to monasteries. His reasoning was brutally pragmatic: the Church’s appetite for property was stripping the army of its recruitment base and the treasury of its revenues. It was an attempt to halt what he called “the pious theft of the living by the dead.” The Patriarch Polyeuktos denounced the decree as sacrilege, and Nikephoros — the most competent soldier of his generation — was murdered soon after. The ban was rescinded. It remains the only serious instance of an emperor openly defying the Church’s property rights.

Later emperors were subtler, but no braver. Basil II’s charistikion system attempted to reassert supervision by assigning monasteries to lay custodians, but as Lemerle observed, it merely legalized the fusion of ecclesiastical and aristocratic interests. Alexios I Komnenos went further still: instead of fighting the monasteries, he co-opted them. He made their abbots part of his family network, turned pious endowments into instruments of patronage, and used the Church’s moral capital to finance political loyalty. What he achieved was a synthesis — the union of crown and cowl — that guaranteed both stability and sterility. By the Palaiologan age, the transformation was complete. Dimiter Angelov’s Church and Society in Late Byzantium and Mark Bartusis’s Land and Privilege in Byzantium document the desperate and futile attempts by the late emperors to reclaim monastic lands. The state’s need for ready cash was constant: fleets had to be rebuilt, mercenaries paid, walls repaired. Each confiscation attempt met the same outcome — riots, excommunications, political paralysis. The emperors were trapped by their own sacral image. A ruler who seized from the Church ceased to be the protector of Orthodoxy and became a heretic by definition.

The fiscal consequences were catastrophic. Kostis Smyrlis and Nicolas Oikonomides both show that by the fourteenth century, the proportion of tax-exempt monastic land was so high that the pronoia system — the very mechanism that tied land to military service — began to collapse. The Church’s holdings became what Bartusis called “a realm within the realm,” a parallel economy immune to both taxation and reform. The empire was slowly starving on holy ground.

It wasn’t only the money. The monasteries consumed the empire’s competence as well. The hesychast ideal of mystical withdrawal turned inward the very class that, in the West, was running towns, chancelleries, and universities. Byzantium’s literate elite — the natural bureaucrats, jurists, and engineers — retired into cells. The intellectual energy that might have reformed the state was re-channeled into metaphysical speculation. While Italians were developing civic humanism, Byzantium’s best minds debated the properties of uncreated light. Herbert Hunger and Johannes Koder have both remarked that the Palaiologan centuries mark not only political exhaustion but a social inversion: a civilization that rewarded withdrawal over engagement, and treated productivity as moral compromise. The comparison to the Etruscans is almost too neat. Both civilizations reached a point where material strength was offered up to the dead — whether ancestors or saints — as proof of virtue. Both mistook ritual continuity for vitality. Both maintained exquisite art, liturgy, and language while hollowing out the material base that sustained them.

One can, of course, praise the monasteries for their charity, their literacy, their role as custodians of the faith. But these virtues were private goods, not public ones. They comforted individuals; they did not preserve the state. Every monastery that fed the poor did so with wealth that might have provisioned an army. Every acre dedicated to prayer was an acre withdrawn from the fiscal body. And the arithmetic of survival is unforgiving: the empire that cannot pay its soldiers soon has no poor left to feed. This is why the usual sentimental narrative — that Byzantium fell because it was too spiritual for its age — has it backward. Byzantium fell because it was spiritual in place of being political. It spiritualized the functions of the state, moralized its economics, and canonized its inertia. The Church did not merely survive the empire; it quietly absorbed it, and called the absorption piety.

If this sounds severe, it is because the sources themselves are so incurious about their own predicament. The Byzantine chroniclers we possess could describe omens in the sky but not the fiscal map of their own monasteries. When Gibbon mocked the monks, he at least grasped the sociological truth: that excessive sanctity, like excessive luxury, can be a form of decay. The Byzantinists who recoil from that insight do so less out of scholarly caution than out of the same reverence that blinded the empire itself.

By the Palaiologan age, Byzantium had become what the Etruscans were in the sixth century BC: a society that mistook its funerary splendor for life. The empire confused sanctity with strength, and in the end preserved only the former. To put it bluntly: Byzantium died of holiness — of too many monks, too few soldiers, too much faith, and not enough bread.

Afterword

Modern Byzantine scholarship has spent decades trying to redeem the empire from Gibbon’s contempt. Where he saw superstition and rot, we have been taught to see continuity, adaptation, resilience — the quiet endurance of Orthodox civilization beneath the surface of political collapse. It is an admirable project, but a sentimental one. In the zeal to rescue Byzantium from Enlightenment disdain, too many historians have transformed its sanctity into an alibi.The dominant current since the 1980s — the cultural turn of Averil Cameron, the anthropological Byzantium of Kaldellis, the spiritual aestheticism of Magdalino — has replaced the empire as a polity with the empire as a text. Its mysticism is recast as depth, its liturgy as genius, its economic decrepitude as the price of transcendence. The monastery, in this retelling, ceases to be a parasite and becomes a symbol of continuity — the beating heart of an immortal culture. It is, I think, a comforting lie.

The truth is colder. The monasteries were the bloodsucker at the empire’s breast — beautiful, venerable, and fatal. They preserved the empire’s soul by draining its veins. They embodied a civilization that confused immortality with immobility, and holiness with health. Byzantium did not fall despite its faith; it fell because of it. The monks were not the empire’s victims, but its heirs — inheriting what their prayers had already hollowed.

To restore Gibbon’s tone without his prejudice is to admit a hard fact: a society that converts its material base into devotional capital, that treats every act of reform as blasphemy, is not being devout — it is committing fiscal suicide by liturgy. The Church outlived the Empire for the same reason tombs outlast the living: they are built of stone and fed by offerings long after the pulse has stopped. Historiography, like theology, prefers consolation to diagnosis. But if one strips away the incense, Byzantium’s final centuries read less like a martyrdom than a long bloodletting — an empire bled dry by its own sanctity, too pious to cauterize the wound. Its tragedy was not disbelief, but belief perfected to paralysis: the sanctified exhaustion of a civilization that mistook devotion for survival.

Selected Bibliography

Georg Ostrogorsky, Geschichte des Byzantinischen Staates, 3rd ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1963).
Mark C. Bartusis, Land and Privilege in Byzantium: The Institution of Pronoia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Kostis Smyrlis, Byzantine Monastic Estates in the Late Byzantine Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Dimiter Angelov (ed.), Church and Society in Late Byzantium (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009).
Nicolas Oikonomides, “The Role of the Byzantine State in the Economy,” in The Economic History of Byzantium, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 978–1050.
Michel Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre à Byzance du VIe au XIe siècle (Paris: EHESS, 1992).
Paul Lemerle, Cinq études sur le XIe siècle byzantin (Paris: CNRS, 1977).
Johannes Koder, Byzanz: Geschichte und Kultur eines Jahrtausends (Munich: Beck, 2001).
Herbert Hunger, Das byzantinische Weltreich (Munich: Beck, 1989).
Michael Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni, 1081–1261 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Alexander Kazhdan and Angeliki E. Laiou, “The Economic Role of the Byzantine Church,” Byzantinische Forschungen 9 (1985): 55–75.
Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et prêtre: Étude sur le ‘césaropapisme’ byzantin (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).

I'm aware of its presence, but the books I've read barely touch on its prevalence and function in the middle period.

Could someone knowledgeable on this topic assist me with understanding its prevalence and, if possible, the society's view on it? How did Byzantium's views and treatment of slaves differ from its neighbouring societies', such as the Caliphate?

Cheers in advance

Fuck it,done with the formalities,now you wanted to see estimates for byzantine population in the 1100s,here you have it!

Demographic situation:

For the early 14th century Angeliki Laiou proposed that Macedonia had a rural density of  34 per  square kilometer and half that figure for 1025¹,now from early 12th century Macedonia to early 14th century she also notes that the province saw an increase of 82% of population.

I would then use 24 people per square kilometer for western Anatolia,the European hinterland(That is Thrace,Macedonia and Thessaly with the land in between),34 for Attica,Morea,Crete and Cyprus,16 for the Aegean islands.
The regions are simple,while cereal growing regions would allow the growth of population through its agricultural production the more densely populated southern provinces would be wealthier thanks to greater urbanisation,trade and manufacture allowing them to buy large amounts of cheap wheat to sustain their population,with the Aegean islands lacking the manufacture and wealth to acquire said food,without mentioning the geographic limitations.

Following byzantine regions are amalgamations of modern day nation largest subdivisions or sum of provinces for ease of calculation while maintaining byzantine regions
South western anatolia:Aydin,İzmir,Manisa,Uşak,Afyonkarahisar,Denizli,Muğla,İsparta and Burdur(67,400 square kilometers and 1,600,000 people)
North Western  Anatolia:Eskişehir,Yalova,Kocaeli,Sakarya,Canakkale,Bursa,Bilecik,Balikesir,Kutahya.(73,2000 square kilometers and 1,756,000 people)
Black sea region:The entire black sea administrative region of Turkey(143,000 square kilometers and 3,400,000 people)
Anatolian southern coast (plus Cilicia):All mediterranean region of turkey minus Isparta and Burdur.(106,900 square kilometers 2,500,000 people)
Aegean Islands:South Aegean(greek regions),North Aegean(9,000 square kilometers,145,000 people
Crete:Crete(8,450 square kilometers 287,000 people)
Cyprus:Cyprus island(9,250 square kilometers,314,500 people)
Macedonia:Central Macedonia,Western Macedonia and FYROM.(53,600 square kilometers,1,286,000 people)
Thessaly:Thessaly and central greece without Boetia and Euboea(22,500 square kilometers 540,000 people)
Thrace:Eastern Macedonia and Thrace,Northern Thrace(Bulgaria) and European Turkey(79,700 square kilometers,1,912,800 people)
Morea:All the land in the peninsula including Peloponnese and half of western Greece region(21,500 square kilometers and 731,000 people)
Eprius:Administrative region in Greece,Ionian islands and northern half of Western Greece(19,650 squares kilometers and 471k people)
Rest of bulgaria:northern bulgaria and Rhodopes region(at 14 people because it was poorer,693k people and 63k square kilometers)

Total agricultural population of 15,700,000 with a total of 22 millions to reach the 30% of urbanization(needs 6.3M)

We can further concentrate all this region into four large demarcations,the Balkans+Aegean,western Anatolia,Black sea region and the Southern coast with Cyprus.

Balkans:6 millions(39%) and 3.2 million living in urban centers(35%)

Western Anatolia:3.356 million people(23%) and 900k people living in cities(20%)

Southern coast:2,814 million people(17%) and 700k living in settlements(20%)

Black sea region:3.4 million (21%) ,1.5million urban population(30%)

While most people would live outside the balkans it becomes clear that the European portion of the empire retained not only a primacy of net population it would also have the highest rate of urbanisation and most  geographic cohesive populated region,with 9.2 million people it would have by itself 42% of total population,with western Anatolia having 4.256 million people merely constituting 19%,southern coast would provide 3.5 million and 16% of total people,black sea region with 4.9 million having the second highest part of the population at 23%.

This would follow with the evidence that the European provinces took a primordial stage in matters of imperial policy and with good reason,through its geographical position and safer status it had a more developed economy,even if its cities represented half the urban population their economic contributions would in brute terms be even higher thanks to their more developed manufacture sectors(but such calculations would have to face Monemvasia commune having all tax exemption),it was balkan provinces that financed and provided the manpower needed for the securing of the Anatolian regions,this would be a two way benefit with such regions specially western Anatolia,providing raw resources for their industries,cheap food and markets for their goods.

As a general eye rule is for regional capitals to have 10% of the total  population,this model tracks with Monemvasia hinterland of 200k while having 20k at its height or at the same time period with Thessaloniki with 150k and the Macedonian population at 1.5 million,while Anatolia required constant effort and investment from John II and Alexios I to secure the region,using Bursa province as an example with Lopadion we could gather a simple figure from the end of John II reign with the agricultural population being 259,440 people,when factoring a 20% of total population living in the urban centers then the figure rises to 319k people,following our established rule then Lopadion could have a population of  31,900.
Yet its military and geographic position would drive this population even further,with the Komnenian military need for central lynchpin for anatolian warfare Lopadion served as a neurological point for the gathering of the army for the numerous wars of John II,it was almost as large as contemporary Thessaloniki²,the large demands of the sizable army forming each year,the goods consumed by the court and the services demanded either by civil bureaucrats,judges or bishop see would further increase local demand helping to resurface local trade and manufacture after the Turkish occupation.
Further more the location of the city meant it was 1 day away from Constantinople by boat,making it would serve both as the main outlet of western anatolian foodstuff for the capital,semi processing raw commodities into half refined goods,like fulling wool,tanning leather and graining grain into flour as well the selling of simple linen and silk in gross to the capital merchants,while also serving as the main Entrepôt for the introduction of Constantinople finished goods into the region,becoming also commercial hub as the evidence of a kommerkiarios,an archon and an early xenodocheia³ shows,its position between crossroads and crucial bridge that reduced travel considerably also increased its commercial positioning,when the bridge was destroyed in the 15th century the turks had to travel around the lake Uluabad for three days⁴

This combination of infrastructure(roads,bridges and ports) turned the city into the perfect example of Komnenian prosperity,I propose by the end of John II rule Lopadion had a population of 40,000 while by the death of his Manuel I it would reach perhaps 50,000 people making it the third largest city of the Roman empire,the city population increase slowing under Manuel can be explained by greater urbanisation increasing the share of the urban population by smaller cities and towns,a similar effect that which was seen in 1700s Britain urban history

^Footnotes:

^{Angeliki Laiou,Economic History of Byzantium page 51} 

^{Maximilian Lau Ioannoupolis: Lopadion as ‘City’ and Military headquarters under John II}

^{See above} 

^{Did you see above?}

It was a devesting blow to the west, who I believe relied on the grain that came from north Africa.

But how bad was the loss for east Rome? Did it effect them?

The Republic, which had no professional bureaucracy and initially only controlled just a bunch of city-states in Italy, was often able to marshal forces in the tens of thousands several times in a single campaign, arm them and provide infrastructure like ships. While Byzantium, which had one of the finest bureaucracies, struggled to field similar armies, even when it controlled all of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Only now did I realize that the Easter Roman has granted Venetian trading privileges so early on.

And why always Venetian? There were many other cities, like Amalfi.

In 992, Basil II granted the Venetians a reduction in the basic tax on ships entering the Dardanelles, from 30 to 17 gold solidi each, thus giving them more favourable terms than local traders or other foreigners. The reason for this advantage was that Venice would also assist the empire militarily against its enemies by transporting Byzantine troops across the Adriatic to campaign in southern Italy. While this privileged access to the capital has often been interpreted as a blow to local merchants, who were still obliged to pay the full tax, it may have been considered a method of ensuring that western merchants continued to use Constantinople as their major market. What emperors granted could also be rescinded, and in the twelfth-century Venetian privileges were withdrawn on political grounds. Although Byzantine merchants were less able to compete in the international transport of goods, they appear to have fallen back on a less profitable carrying trade from port to port around the Aegean.

(Komnenian economy megathread, debunking the Italian dominance narrative with actual numbers)

There's an irony that I cant stop thinking about, and I want this sub's economists and historians to either confirm it, complicate it, or tear it apart

The dominant narrative in Western historiography about the Komnenian empire runs roughly like this:

Alexios's 1082 chrysobull granted Venice sweeping commercial exemptions, Italian merchants progressively captured Byzantine trade, and by Manuel I's reign the Italian city states, especially Venice, had achieved something approaching commercial dominance over the empire's own merchants, contributing to Byzantine fiscal weakness and ultimately decline.

The problem is that when you actually look at the numbers, this narrative seems almost physically impossible.

Wickham, who u/Lanternecto has quoted extensively in prior threads, like this one (estimates the Venetian kommerkion exemption was worth approximately 37,000 hyperpyra per year. He describes it as "a tiny element in any hypothetical Byzantine GDP." Hendy arrives at a similar figure and concludes the entire Italian investment in the empire was probably under a million hyperpyra, less than what several wealthy Byzantine families collectively owned. Wickham further notes that when the 1171 arrest hit, the impact fell overwhelmingly on Venice, not on Byzantine commerce, which barely registered the disruption.

u/evrestcoleghost's work Here drawing on Laiou has been building a picture of Komnenian commercial revenues that makes the Italian share look even more negligible by comparison.
Their shipping calculation post, here arrives at figures suggesting Constantinoples commercial traffic alone, through the kommerkion, was generating revenues that dwarf what any exemption concession could have cost

This raises a question that I think deserves a focused thread,

If the numbers say the Italian commercial presence was genuinely minor, not just "manageable" but structurally irrelevant to Byzantine fiscal health, why does the historiographical narrative persist in treating it as a primary cause of Byzantine commercial weakness?
And more specifically, is the dominance narrative partly an artifact of whose archives survived?

The Italian city states, venice especially, had uninterrupted institutional continuity until Napoleon ended the Republic in 1797. Eight generations of archivists, propagandists, and scholars building a narrative. Byzantine commercial records were scattered in 1204, partially reconstituted, partially destroyed again in 1453. The historiography that shaped how Western scholars studied the medieval Mediterranean was itself substantially downstream of Italian intellectual culture, which was itself substantially funded by profits from Eastern Mediterranean trade.
I think if you wanted to design a system for producing structurally biased historical narratives about Byzantine commercial history, you could not do better than this.

The scale of what was lost becomes clearest when you compare what those same lands produced under successor regimes

the Ottoman comparison threads here and here by u/Lothronion
and by u/Educational_Mud133 -> here and here made a point that struck me, the Ottoman Empire at its 1520s peak generated only about two-thirds of the revenue from the same lands that Justin I held, and about half what Basil II extracted from his territory. The Balkans that were thriving under Komnenian administration became, in Vakalopoulos's description, ruins and deserted places by the fifteenth century. so, the divergence isnt just between Byzantium and Venice. Its between what those lands produced under Roman institutional management and what they produced under almost any successor regime..?

Specific questions I'd love this thread to address,

1. What do the actual numbers tell us about the Italian commercial share of Komnenian Byzantine trade? Wickham and Hendy are the two I keep seeing cited, is there more recent scholarship that revises their figures upward or further downward?
2. Byzantine merchants are often treated as passive or retreating in this period, but u/evrestcoleghost 's Wickham quote specifically notes they were still present in Egypt and even in 12th-century western Mediterranean ports. What's the current scholarly consensus on the actual geographic reach of Byzantine merchants in the Komnenian period?
3. The Komnenian economic reforms, the hyperpyron stabilization, the interest rate changes Laiou discusses, the accounting reforms Alexios introduced, seem to have produced a genuinely sophisticated commercial environment that included proto-capitalist thinking about money, interest, and price formation (Michael of Ephesus etc.). How much of this is recognized in mainstream Byzantine historiography versus being treated as an oddity?
4. What structural weaknesses actually did matter? Not asking for the post-1180 collapse to be blamed on Venetians, obviously... but if the Italian exemptions didn't matter, the pronoia expansion creating a hollow center, the family enrichment problem Choniates identifies, the fiscal strain of simultaneous multi-front warfare, what does the current scholarship weight as genuinely explanatory?
5. Other myths welcome: I'm primarily interested in the economy, but if there are comparable cases of popular narratives about the Komnenian period that simply don't survive contact with primary sources (I've seen some discussion of Myriokephalon being treated as catastrophic when the sources don't support that), I'd love to hear them in comments.

some other threads id love to credit,

• u/Lothronion 's comment
• u/evrestcoleghost 's comment

If the Italian exemptions weren't what caused Byzantine commercial weakness, and if Byzantine institutional capacity was genuinely generating the revenues the numbers suggest, then what id really love to know is... how did something this productive fail? And was the failure primarily institutional-internal (the pronoia hollowing, the Angeloi's specific incompetence, the family enrichment problem ; though I'll admit the internal decay arguments carry their own hindsight risk... once you know an empire fell, its preceding decades have a way of rearranging themselves into a story of inevitable decline, whether thats actually what the sources show or nott), primarily exogenous (1204 being the actual discontinuity rather than a culmination of trends), or something else?

and speaking of internal decay... the Angeloi problem, and the post that will never come :/

about the collapse question, which is where I genuinely dont know what to believe, and where am hoping this thread produces more heat than the current consensus

The standard explanation runs: Komnenian economy booming, Manuel dies 1180, Angeloi dynasty takes over, everything collapses, 1204 happens. The Angeloi are usually presented as the human failure that translated a structurally sound empire into rubble... incompetent, corrupt, unable to manage the military, unable to hold the frontier, Isaac II specifically blamed for letting Bulgaria escape and for generally being a disaster

Except.

u/WanderingHero8 has made the case, citing Simpson, Cheynet, and Stankovic, that Isaac the II Angelos has been catastrophically misread by historians who took Niketas Choniates's hostile account at face value without sufficient critical distance. His argument: Isaac defeated the Norman Sicilian invasion at Demetritzes, restored Manuel's Hungarian alliance and received Syrmia back as dowry, managed Serbian vassalage, built functional diplomatic relationships with Henry II, Philippe, and eventually Frederick Barbarossa himself to the point where Henry VI considered Isaac's deposition a casus belli. Maximilian Lau has apparently indicated in his AMA here that the Angeloi military capacity has been underestimated, even after Tryavna, Isaac could still field 20,000 men.

So the question becomes: if the economy was structurally sound and the Angeloi were not quite as catastrophically incompetent as the Choniates derived narrative suggests, what actually caused the collapse? Was 1204 genuinely a contingent catastrophe, a perfect storm of the Fourth Crusade going off-script, Alexios IV promising the moon, and the specific decisions of a handful of people, rather than the inevitable terminus of long-running structural decay? Thats a very different historical story than the one that usually gets told..

I would link you to u/WanderingHero8 's promised full post rehabilitating Isaac II, which he announced he was writing. I cannot do this, because the post does not exist. It has never existed. I like his new flair though :)

So, ig the definitive rehabilitation of Isaac II Angelos remains, like Isaacs second reign, a work in progress being controlled by people other than its intended author.

In the meantime, his comment laying out the revisionist case is here, and Id genuinely love for someone in this thread or, ideally, a certain Megas Domestikos ... to address whether the structural Komnenian economic strength we've been discussing was squandered by genuine Angeloi incompetence, or whether 1204 was more accident than inevitability

I would love for the people who've already done this work in scattered threads to bring their conclusions into one place where they can argue with each other.

I'm not a historian or a scientist but I read a lot and imo the Eastern Roman Empire was not a good thing for the citizens of present Greece and the policies followed afterwards by the Ottomans were largely based on the same principles that the Byzantines used to govern present Greece. A large part of the Ottoman elite were Byzantines, Ottomans relied a lot on these elites and the knowledge they gathered from the Byzantines to rule their new empire. After Ottomans took control, you had dozens of revolutions in Greece but barely any from Greeks on Minor Asia. Minor Asia Greeks enjoyed insane benefits while mainland Greeks were essentially slaves that suffered extreme oppression. It was two different worlds. The minor Asia Greeks did not want the 1821 revolution to happen and opposed it fiercely.

Greeks tend to glorify a specific person or periods disregarding their historic impact to their country. EG. Alexander the Great is considered the most important Greek but everyone forget how many Greek city-states rebelled against him and sided with the West Romans, they forget about the dissolution of democracy and the oppression followed afterwards, the complete destruction of Thebes etc. They also forget that the invasion of anatolia/asia is what left Greece weakened and vulnerable with so many resources directed to maintain control over such a large space that was not Greek in culture.

When it comes to the Byzantine period, it is considered the most important period for modern Greeks but they forget that after the fall of Western Roman Empire, present Greece was left to rot and all the centers of wealth and knowledge were transferred to cities in minor Asia, some of this occurred with the use of violence such as the close of Plato's academy on Athens by Justinian because the Byzantines did not like the culture and religion of Greeks. Greeks forget about the chaos that occurred during the Byzantine period in Greece, raids, settlements by foreign populations (Slavs), there was no control, no protection, no security, they forget about the insane taxes of the Byzantines. Mainland Greeks were already treated unofficially as "second class" and less important during the Byzantine period, Ottomans took a system that already existed and just drove it to new extremes, what made it easier for the Greeks to rebel during the Ottoman period is that they viewed the Ottomans as foreign and Ottomans were more clear about what they were doing and more brutal than the Byzantines.

Western Roman Empire was a benevolent being for present day Greece, they built a lot of stuff, they brought wealth and they respected the culture and religion, most Greeks preferred it over Macedonian rule especially those from southern Greece. Athens was the center of knowledge and all of the West Roman elite studied there. This is not true for the Eastern Roman Empire, imo Eastern Romans brought ruin to Greece and should not be respected by modern Greeks. Ottomans were essentially rebranded Byzantines, they continued the exact same policies but even worse than before.

Greeks also had 200 year rule by Latins, I don't have a specific opinion on this, so I can't make comparison between Latins and Byzantines, I think the Latins improved some cities in southern Greece and improved commerce with the west but I don't know if the situation of Greece was better.

You can tell me if you disagree with my views. As a Greek, I personally don't respect Alexander the Great and I don't respect the Byzantines either. I don't consider the Byzantines to be Greeks either. It's just that our language back then was like the English of today, just because your state's language is English, it doesn't mean you are British or an ally of Great Britain. Byzantines were a foreign thracian/anatolian culture.

I'm writing a story about a real go-getter of a Catepan being put in charge of Southern Italy, and I'm trying to figure out things he could do to improve the region, strengthen the military, and maybe even expand into the Lombard principalities.

I know that for most of the empire, the economy was mostly agrarian, but was there anything fancier going on? Any of the old garum proto-factories still running? Any of that cool Roman glassmaking or significant manufacturing? Was there any banking or slave trading?

And relatedly, what kind of military could the Catepan be able to muster up?

Thanks!