disenchantment with Byzantium. Thereafter the western emperor became an ideological focus and a de jure ruler for the west, even though the unity of the Carolingian Empire soon crumbled and some elements in Rome and southern Italy retained a snobbish attachment to Byzantium for its power and wealth. The rivalries between the two empires were well brought out in a letter of 871 from the Carolingian Emperor Louis II to his eastern opposite number in which Louis justified his claim to the title of Roman emperor on grounds of virtue, inheritance, and divine anointing and condemned the Greeks for their 'cacodoxy'. While the lines were drawn for the suspicion and antagonism which led to the conflicts of the crusading period, awareness of shared Christian belief and common hostility to outside threats could persist. The Byzantine Emperor Theophilus addressed a plea to Louis the Pious for aid in the face of Arab raids and Louis II's polemical letter was written in the context of attempts to forge an alliance against the Arab threat in the central Mediterranean.
Administrative structures in the west had none of the strengths of those of Byzantium. Whereas the latter had inherited a unitary capital, salaried administrators, and a centralized system of justice and finance from Roman times, the power of western rulers rested on the much flimsier basis of military prowess, church support, and an ability to cajole loyalty out of often recalcitrant nobles. Byzantium's strength lay in her ability to control and utilize her resources effectively; most of her provinces were scarcely, if at all, richer than the west's but she had the machinery to extract whatever surpluses existed to finance a glittering court and an all-embracing administration. The bureaucratic and educational capacity remained to keep up tax registers and to employ paid officials to collect imperial dues, and a reliable gold coinage was maintained less for the purpose of stimulating economic activity than in order to facilitate the smooth collection of taxes and their disbursement to troops and officials. Such a sophisticated system gave the administration enormous advantages, but the contrast between a monolithic east and a fragmented west should not be pressed too far.
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