the purse; Liutprand was astonished to see theme commanders receive bags of gold as salaries in Constantinople. Even so the decentralization inherent in the system could serve as a focus for political and religious tensions and encourage coups and revolts by ambitious warlords. For most of our period, however, the balance between ruler and local strongmen was tipped in favour of the former, and a series of strong dynasties initiated by successful soldier-emperors enabled Byzantium to avoid the fate of Visigothic Spain or Lombard Italy.

Another crucial strength of Byzantium was that local officials at first formed a dutiful meritocracy with no entrenched family position or landed wealth. By the ninth century, however, these figures had put down strong local roots and become a hereditary aristocracy similar to those of the west; as cohesive families emerged with distinctive surnames, their most powerful members amassed vast estates and began to exercise powers of patronage over the thematic soldiers and peasants, the military and fiscal linchpins of the Byzantine state. A Paphlagonian landowner in the late eighth century owned 48 estates and 12,000 sheep, and in the ninth century a Peloponnesian heiress bequeathed 80 properties and 3,000 slaves to the emperor. The conditions were being created for a proto-feudal society comparable to the dominance which western aristocrats exerted in their localities through landholding. In Lombard and Carolingian Italy the monarchy succeeded in keeping their nobles in check by essentially ad hoc methods; under the Lombards a king's military prestige could count for more than formal hierarchy, and the Carolingian rulers relied on the appointment of loyal Frankish nobles and their supervision by royal inspectors (missi). The death of Louis II in 875 ushered in a period of dynastic uncertainty and administrative weakness as magnates usurped royal rights and lands and built up their local power and wealth. Despite the relative sophistication of royal government in Italy, it lacked the trump card enjoyed by the eastern empire; Byzantine aristocrats had a vested interest in the imperial system, because their ambitions were best served by attachment to a central court which was the source of legitimacy, lucrative offices, and dignities essential to their status.

-38-