The Secret History

by

Procopius of Caesarea

translated by Richard Atwater

(Chicago: P. Covici, 1927 New York Covici Friede 1927)

Reprinted, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961, with indication
that copyright had expired on the text of the translation.

23. HOW LANDOWNERS WERE RUINED

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.