Anthony Kaldellis: observation

Transcript context

…… encourage corruption, and then there’s a bureaucracy, and there’s a momentum, and this is just how humans are. Yes. So this happens in East Roman society too. I’ll give you some examples. So there’s not a tax code as such, but what you— The way it operates is through basically exemptions. So you petition for an exemption. You might be a monastery, you might be a wealthy— You might be someone well-connected to the court. You might be a struggling provincial village, and you petition the emperor or some official, and you say, “Hey, we know we had a bad season,” or, “The barbarians came through and they took all of our… We can’t pay the taxes. Could we have an exemption?” And emperors often are granting these exemptions for very specific things, like maybe for this year or for that tax or whatever. The problem is that the emperors are discovering every once in a while that their officials are granting these exemptions sort of on their own. So every once in a while, the emperors have to, like, clear house when they have to, like, cancel all of these exemptions and start the whole process again. But later on, once we start to have documentation, like maybe in the 11th century, we see that every little—well, not every, but we have all these monasteries, these little villages, these high officials, and they all have these documents that give them exemption from this or that or the other thing, and it gets so complicated, and that’s how it works. But it is the engine of society that makes the whole thing work, ’cause you have to fund—I mean, there’s infrastructure projects, but you have to also fund the army, and the army’s necessary to defend against all the military incursions.…

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