.
I will now tell how he ruined the landowners everywhere; although it
were a sufficient indication of their sufferings to refer to what I have
just written about the officials who were sent to all the cities, for
these men plundered the landowners and did what other violence has been
told.
Now it had formerly been the long-established custom that each Roman
ruler should, not only once during his reign but often remit to his
subjects whatever public debts were in arrears, so that those who were
in financial difficulty and had no means of paying their delinquencies
would not be too far pressed; and so that the tax collectors would not
have the excuse of persecuting, as subject to the tax, those who really
owed nothing. But Justinian, during thirty-two years' time, made no such
concession to his subjects, and consequently those who were unable to
pay had to flee their country and never return. Others, more prosperous,
grew weary of trying to answer the continual accusations of the
informers that the tax they had always paid was less than required by
the present rate on their estates. For these unfortunates feared not so
much the imposition of a new tax as that they should be burdened by the
unjust weight of additional back taxes for so many years. Many, indeed,
preferred to abandon their property to the informers or to the
confiscation of the state.
Besides, the Medes and the Saracens had ravaged most of Asia, and the
Huns and Slavs all of Europe; captured cities had either been razed to
their foundations, or made to pay terrible tribute; men had been carried
off into slavery together with all their property, and every district
had been deserted by its inhabitants because of the daily raids: yet no
tax was remitted, except in the case of cities that had been captured by
the enemy, and then only for one year. Yet if, as the Emperor
Anastasius had done, he had decided to exempt the captured cities from
taxation for seven years, even so I believe, he would not have done as
much as he should.
For Cabades retired after doing hardly any damage to the buildings, but
Chosroes burned to the foundations everything he took, and left greater
ruin in his track. Yet to these remaining sufferers, for whom he made
this ridiculous remission of taxes, and to all the others, who had many
times been invaded by the army of the Medes, and been continually
plundered by the Huns and barbarous Saracens in the East, and to those
Romans who had met an equal fate daily from the barbarians in Europe,
this Emperor straightway became a more bitter foe than all the
barbarians put together. For as soon as the enemy had retreated, the
landowners immediately were overwhelmed by new requisitions, imposts and
levies.
What these were I will now explain. Those who owned land were compelled
to feed the Roman army, according to a special assessment determined by
the actual emergency but arbitrarily fixed by law. And if sufficient
provisions for the soldiers and horses were not to be found on their
estates, these unfortunates had to go out and buy them at an excessive
price, wherever they could, even if they had to transport them from a
distant country to the place where the army was quartered , and then
distribute them to the army officials not at a legal price, but at the
whim of the commanders. This requisition, called co-operative buying,
took the heart out of the landowners. For it made their annual taxes
easily ten times what they had been, as they had not only to feed the
army, but often to transport grain from Constantinople. Barsyames was
not the only one who dared this outrage, for the Cappadocian before him
had done the same, and Barsyames's successors after him. And this is
what co-operative buying meant.
The "impost" was an unexpected ruin which suddenly attacked the
landowners, pulling up their hope of livelihood by the roots. In the
case of estates that had run down and been deserted, whose owners and
farmer tenants had either perished or left the country, on account of
their misfortunes, and disappeared, a ruthless tax was still laid on
those who had already lost all. This was called the impost, levied
frequently during this time.
The nature of the third levy was briefly as follows: Many losses,
especially at this time, were suffered by the cities, whose causes and
extents I refrain from describing now, or the tale would be endless.
These losses the landowners had to repair, by special assessment on each
individual; and their troubles did not even stop there. The pestilence,
which had attacked the inhabited world, did not spare the Roman Empire.
Most of its farmers had perished of it, so that their lands were
deserted; nevertheless Justinian did not exempt the owners of these
properties. Their annual taxes were not remitted, and they had to pay
not only their own, but their deceased neighbors' share. And in addition
to all of this, these land-poor wretches had to quarter the soldiers in
their best rooms, while they themselves during this time existed in the
meanest and poorest part of their dwellings.
Such were the constant afflictions of mankind under the rule of
Justinian and Theodora; for there was no release from war or any other
of these calamities in all their time.
While I am on the subject of quartering, I should not fail to mention
that the householders in Constantinople had to quarter seventy thousand
barbarians, so that they got no pleasure from their own houses, and were
greatly inconvenienced in many ways.
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