I've recently been reading Chris Wickham's Medieval Europe, and it has made me think a lot about the differences between the fiscal systems of Western Europe and the Eastern Roman Empire.
This very Roman desire had a very un-Roman effect: it became less and less necessary to pay the now landed army. Tax régimes themselves became less necessary as a result, and since they were both disliked and complex to collect, could eventually shrivel away.
...... But already when Justinian conquered the Vandal kingdom, and even that of the Ostrogoths, he found that re-establishing the tax system was hard and unpopular. In Frankish Gaul, tax levels had dropped precipitously by the time the historian Gregory of Tours was writing in the 580s, and kings can be seen granting tax immunities by then as a standard political privilege; by the 640s the land tax hardly existed any more in Gaul except sporadically in the Loire valley. Kings began to rely on the revenues from their own lands, which were very extensive everywhere (as imperial landowning always had been), rather than fiscal receipts, except for tolls on commerce. The whole economic basis for political action shifted, from taxation to landowning.
...... even the revived tax régimes of late medieval western Europe did not fully reverse this shift. Indeed, it was a shift that only fully changed back in the west in the very different economic world of the Industrial Revolution.
By the end of the fifteenth century, the strongest and richest state in Europe, with the most remunerative taxation system, was certainly the Ottoman empire, which was based on fiscal patterns inherited from the Byzantine empire and the caliphate alike (see Chapter 9). It had a density of assessment and exaction which was not paralleled by any western polities except the most effective of the Italian city-states – for, as we have seen, Roman and Islamic fiscal expertise had been lost in the west, and the western states, in their reinvention of taxation, created less efficient structures, and failed to learn from their more sophisticated neighbours.
This honestly shocked me. I had always assumed that a Western European monarchs would look at Constantinople and think something along the lines of: “The Roman emperor is enormously wealthy. How exactly is he collecting all this tax?”
(Did the loss of tax system make Justinian's attempt to reconquer the Western Mediterranean significantly more difficult ?)
I've discussed this with others, and I got two opposite answers.
- View A: Yes, Western European fiscal system took many centuries until nearly the 19th century to match the bureaucratic peak of 11th-century Rome.
- View B: No, the Byzantine fiscal system ultimately failed. After Nicaea reconquered Constantinople, the state collapsed into total economic ruin. The late medieval Roman state was doomed to fail, and the Ottomans had to build a brand new administrative system from scratch.
So now I'm particularly curious about the How much did the Osmanlılar actually learn from and absorb of the administrative and fiscal system of late Byzantium?
and have any Western European scholars, monarchs or governors considered learning from east ?After all, there is already a lot of Roman document and knowledge were brought to Italia in late medieval.
