(Continuation of my previous post)
What "killed" the ancient Roman administrative system in the West was not the rise of feudalism, but the decline of cities and the drop in long distance maritime and fluvial trade. Both phenomena must have affected dramatically imperial revenues, and the only way to avoid a fiscal collapse would have been to ensure that the Roman state was able to collect directly the two main taxes that gravated the peasants:
- The poll tax (capitatio).
- And the land tax (iugatio).
These two taxes had formed by far the main share of Roman direct fiscality since Republican times. But just as in any premodern society (and in practice, in all post-agricultural societies, including our contemporary western one) the elites were largely exempt from direct taxation. During the Principate, anybody who belonged to the senatorial class was exempt from these taxes, and some social groups (like soldiers who had been awarded the "honorable dismissal") also enjoyed fiscal exemptions.
Due to the collapse of the Roman monetary system during the III c. CE, Diocletian's reforms established that these taxes would be paid henceforth in kind, and not in coin, but this put an enormous logistic problem on the shoulders of the imperial
fiscus. This must have necessarily needed an expansion not only of imperial bureaucracy, but also of the necessary personnel to collect, transport, store and guard such large amounts of goods. In parallel to this, the privileged classes (which enjoyed tax exemptions) increased steadily during the IV-V c. CE:
homini spectabili,
clarissimi,
illustres, increased in number as these social stus were hereditary and the emperors awarded them liberally to functionaries and military men (usually, the access to certain imperial officies meant the automatic acquisition of such social status). Another expanding collective that enjoyed ever-higher fiscal privileges was the Church: by the late IV c. CE, all churchmen were exempt from direct taxation, and the same happened with the increasingly large estates owned by the Church.
In the West, most of this privileged elite was not based in cities; this only happened in Rome itself, in whichever city the imperial court was based at any given moment (in succession, Trier, Milan and Ravenna) and in the case of bishops, which were tied to the seat of their bishopric. But archaeology has confirmed that in the IV c. CE aristocratic
villae flourished like never before in rural landscapes across the West, at the same time that cities contracted. This "flight" of elites from cities was mainly due to fiscal reasons: Roman law made compulsory for city councils to meet the tax demands imposed by the emperors and enforced by their territorial administration, and if the city council was unable to gather the amounts decreed by the emperor, its members were liable to cover the missing amount from their patrimony. Imperial legislation during the IV and V c. CE in the West insists once and again that the class of
decuriones (from which members of city councils were recruited) were tied to their rank and could not leave their city; the need to constantly repeat this measure (still Valentinian III in the mid-V c. CE was futilely trying to impose it) implies that the imperial administration was unable to apply it.
In this context, the great beneficiaries of this situation would have been the Church, as bishops, who were exempt from tax obligations, increased their power steadily in their respective cities, and as members of the decurion class decided to enter the Church in increasing numbers and even forfeit their properties to it in order to sustract it from the reach of the imperial fiscus (married churchmen were not an uncommon sight at the time), and the higher members of the elite who were part of the imperial administration and/or had extensive rural estates that were protected from taxation by the personal rank of the owner (this also applied obviously to ecclesiastical lands).
The end of direct Roman rule and the appearance of the new Germanic kingdoms did not suppose a break in these trends; this only happened in Britain and in parts of the Danubian provinces, where Roman cities and social structures were wiped out almost entirely. But in Gaul, Italy, Hispania and North Africa the late Roman social and administrative system was kept in place, and it evolved in different ways across the West. The place where changes happened at a quicker place was Gaul; during the VI c. CE, in the lifetime of Gregory of Tours, the Frankish kings stopped making regular censuses, without which it was impossible to carry on the collection of direct taxes, and the cities kept shrinking in importance.
But in Visigothic Spain, despite the "ruralizing" trends in society and the economy at large, cities remained more important, and the Visigothic kings kept in place an administrative system directly modeled upon the late Roman one, that lasted until the Umayyad invasions in the 710s CE. The
Regnum Gothorum was divided into provinces (the exact same late Roman provinces that existed in the late Roman empire) each ruled by a
dux, and each province was subdivided into
territoria with a city at the head of each one, just as in Roman times. Only difference was that now every city/
territorium had a bishop and a secular
comes ("count") appointed by the king at its head. This means that, at least on paper, the administrative system was more "centralized" in Visigothic Spain that during the Roman empire. We know that there was a privileged class too in Visigothic Spain, and that it enjoyed the same legal privileges the old Roman elite had enjoyed. This class included the remnants of the old Roman aristocracy, a new "warrior" aristocracy of "barbarian" origin, and the bishops and abbots (an innovation with respect to Roman times). But from a purely administrative point of view, and with the limited evidence at hand, it is difficult to find many social and administrative differences between Roman Spain in, say, 410 CE and Visigothic Spain in the eve of the Muslim conquest. Only the disappearance of the Roman
villae as the predominant mode of agrarian settlement, substitued now by "medieval" villages, which leaves open the question of how and where did the Visigothic elites live; in a specific case (the Bierzo region in northwestern Spain) the hagiographical
Life of Saint Martin of Dumio tells us that the local aristocrat resided in an
oppidum, which scholars take to mean he resided in some sort of fortified settlement, but nothing else, as archaeology (until now) has been unable to solve this puzzle.
