Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

Political and social conditions in the Empire

Page 5

The provincial or theme organization had been broken up by the Latin dominion and could not function normally under the Palaeologi. For the earlier type of provincial administration the Empire had not enough territory, The former title of the governor of a theme, strategus, wholly disappeared under the Comneni and was replaced by the more modest title of dux. The term theme has sometimes been used by modern scholars for the province of Macedon and Thessaly in the fourteenth century. But a province separated from the capital by the Turkish and Serbian dominions became a sort of despotat whose ruler was almost independent of the central government. Usually, a member of the imperial family was at the head of such a new state. At the end of the fourteenth century Thessalonica received as her despot one of the sons of the Emperor John V. The Despotat of Morea was also ruled by sons or brothers of the imperial dynasty.

Social relations between the higher and lower classes were very strained under the Palaeologi. Agriculture, always considered the real basis of the economic welfare of the Empire, fell into decay. Many fertile provinces were lost; the rest were devastated by the almost continuous civil strife and by the fatal passage of the Catalan companies. In Asia Minor the economic prosperity of the border settlers (akritai), also based on agriculture, was thoroughly undermined by the repressive measures of Michael VIII and the victorious advance of the Turks.

Large landownership was a distinctive feature of the Palaeologian epoch. The ruined peasants were in the power of their landlords. Quite a number of Greeks became powerful landowners in Thessaly after 1261. In the western part of Thessaly, which was seized by the Despot of Epirus, and in the northeastern part of Thessaly, which belonged to the Byzantine Emperor, the wealthy landlords played a most important role, and established feudal relations with smaller landowners. But owing to the Catalan devastations at the beginning of the fourteenth century and the invasions of the Albanians, the land system of Thessaly fell into a chaotic condition. Many Albanians became large landowners. Some improvement in the administration of the land was made, when in 1348 the king of Serbia, Stephen Dushan, took possession of Thessaly. In some mountainous parts of Thessaly there were to be found some individual peasant landownership and free peasant communities.

On the power and wilfulness of the large landowners (archonts) in the Peloponnesus important information is given by Mazaris. Earlier in the fourteenth century, John Cantacuzene wrote that the internal decay of the Peloponnesus was the effect not of the Turkish or Latin invasions, but of internal strife, which made the Peloponnesus more desert than Scythia. When Manuel, son of John V, was appointed Despot of Morea, he more or less restored agriculture, so that the Peloponnesus became in a short time cultivated, and the population began to come back to their homes. But the Turkish conquest put an end to the Byzantine work in Morea.

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