7 - Bureaucracies, Elites and Clans: The Case of Byzantium, c.600–1100

Summary

When the French courtier and economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712–59) first coined the term ‘bureaucracy’ in 1745, he defined it as ‘an illness’, and like Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), who described the French governmental system and its attendant social mores as ‘the giant power wielded by pygmies’, he regarded it as a bad thing. Of course, since Max Weber we have evolved a far more sophisticated and highly theorized view of what ‘bureaucracy’ can mean, so that rather than a pejorative description, the term now carries a heuristic and analytical value relating to a range of usually large-scale and functionally determined social organizations.

If we try to describe the administration of the East Roman or Byzantine empire (Map 7.1.) between the sixth and eleventh centuries CE simply in terms of its structural shape, we find something that looks remarkably modern – a complex set of institutionalized relationships determined by their function with respect to the needs of the state. Most of the administrative posts typical of the middle Byzantine period and found in the sources of the seventh to eleventh centuries can be traced in some way to a late Roman equivalent, sometimes directly, and involving the continued use of the same title, sometimes indirectly or with a change of name but a continuity of function. The east Romans did not necessarily differentiate by functional category in the way that modern historians tend to do to make sense of structures in our own terms, so any breakdown of the Byzantine administration will necessarily do some injustice to the ways in which Byzantines themselves perceived their system to operate. Whether we lose or gain by applying Weber's criteria for bureaucracy is a moot point, and the key question is what might be the analytical value of employing the term. Crudely put, Weber defined ‘bureaucracy’ by a number of key elements: to count as a bureaucracy, a system should possess a clear hierarchy of authority; written rules governing conduct; a full-time and salaried officialdom; the personnel themselves have no ownership over the resources with which they operate; and there is a separation between organizational bureaucratic roles and life outside the organization.