Byzantium at War AD 600-1453（战争中的拜占庭：公元600-1453年）（5）
作者：John Haldon约翰·哈尔顿
出版商：Routledge Taylor & Francis Group
自翻：流潋紫琳
Background to war：The political world of Byzantium
战争背景：拜占庭的政治世界
The Christian Roman state was structured as a hierarchy of administrative levels: at the top was the emperor, understood to be God's representative, surrounded by a palace and household apparatus, the centre of imperial government and administration. Civil and fiscal government was delegated from the emperor to the praetorian prefects, whose prefectures were the largest territorial circumscriptions in the state; each prefecture was further divided into dioecesae or dioceses, which had a predominantly fiscal aspect; and each diocese was divided into proviuciae or provinces, territorial units of fiscal and judicial administration. These were further divided into self-governing poleis or civitates, the cities, each with its territorium or hinterland (which might be more or less extensive, according to geographical, demographic and other factors).
（基督教罗马国家是由行政层级构成的:在最高的是皇帝，被认为是上帝的代表，周围是宫殿和皇家器具，是帝国政府和行政管理的中心。民事与财政管理由皇帝委托给行政长官，他们的州府是全国最大的行政疆域;每个行政区又进一步分为教区或教区，主要涉及财政方面；每个教区又分为省或省，财政和司法行政的领土单位。这些城市被进一步划分为自治的城邦或城市，每个城市都有自己的领土或腹地(根据地理、人口和其他因素，这些地区或多或少可能是广泛的)。）
Rural production dominated the economy, but the cities were the homes of a literate elite of landowners. Social status was largely determined by one's relationship to the system of imperial titles and precedence, whether one had held an active post in the imperial bureaucracy, and at what level, and so forth, although regional variations were marked. The Church and the theological system it represented (from the late 4th century the official religion of the Roman state) played a central role in the economy of the Roman world - it was a major landowner - as well as in imperial politics, in influencing the moral and ethical system of the Roman world, and in directing imperial religious policy. The prevailing view was that the emperor was chosen by God, that he had to be Orthodox, and that his role was to defend the interests of Orthodoxy and the Roman i.e. Christian oikoumene (the inhabited, civilised - Roman - world). The political implications were such that heresy was construed as treason, and opposition to the (Orthodox) emperor could effectively be treated as heresy. The late Roman state was thus a complex bureaucracy, rooted in and imposed upon a series of overlapping social formations structured by local variations on essentially the same social relations of production across the whole central and east Mediterranean and Balkan world. Social and political tensions were exacerbated by religious divisions, local economic conditions, imperial politics, and the burden placed upon the tax-paying population as a result of the state's needs in respect of its administrative apparatus and, in particular, its armies.
（农村生产主导了经济，但城市是有文化的地主精英的家园。社会地位很大程度上取决于一个人与帝国头衔和优先权系统的关系，一个人是否在帝国官僚机构中担任过活跃的职位，在什么级别，等等，尽管地区差异很明显。教会及其所代表的神学体系（从 4 世纪后期开始成为罗马国家的官方宗教）在罗马世界的经济中发挥了核心作用——它是一个主要的地主——以及在帝国政治中，影响了罗马帝国罗马世界的道德和伦理体系，并指导帝国的宗教政策。普遍的观点是，皇帝是由上帝选择的，他必须是东正教，他的角色是捍卫东正教和罗马人的利益，即基督教 oikoumene（有人居住的文明 - 罗马 - 世界）。政治含义是异端邪说被解释为叛国罪，反对（正统）皇帝可以有效地被视为异端邪说。因此，晚期罗马国家是一个复杂的官僚机构，植根于并强加于一系列重叠的社会形态，这些社会形态由整个地中海中部和东部以及巴尔干世界的基本相同的社会生产关系的地方变化构成。宗教分歧、当地经济条件、帝国政治以及国家对行政机构，特别是军队的需求导致纳税人口的负担从而加剧了社会和政治紧张局势。）
These structures were radically transformed between the later 6th and early 9th centuries, and as the result of a number of factors, the single most important being the Islamic conquests. By 642 all of Egypt and the middle-eastern provinces had been lost, Arab forces had penetrated deep into Asia Minor and Libya, and imperial forces had been withdrawn into Asia Minor, to be settled across the provinces of the region as the only available means of supporting them. Within a period of some 12 years, therefore, the empire lost something over half its area and three-quarters of its resources - a drastic loss for an imperial state which still had to maintain and equip a considerable army and an effective administrative bureaucracy if it was to survive at all. While many of the developments which led to this transformation were in train long before the 7th-century crisis, it was this conjuncture that served to bring things to a head and promote the structural responses that followed.
（这些结构在 6 世纪后期和 9 世纪早期之间发生了根本性的转变，由于多种因素，其中最重要的是伊斯兰的征服。到642年埃及和中东各省都已失守，阿拉伯军队深入小亚细亚和利比亚，帝国军队已撤回小亚细亚，在该地区各省定居是唯一可用的手段支持他们。因此，在大约 12 年的时间里，帝国失去了一半以上的领土和四分之三的资源——对于一个仍然需要维持和装备一支庞大军队和有效行政官僚机构的帝国来说，这是一个巨大的损失。其根本就是为了生存。虽然导致这种转变的许多发展早在 7 世纪危机之前就已经开始，但正是这种结合使事情变得更加重要并促进了随后的结构性反应。）
The changes that accompanied the developments of the 7th century affected all areas of social, cultural and economic life. There occurred a 'ruralisation' of society, a result of the devastation, abandonment, shrinkage or displacement of many cities in Asia Minor as a result of invasions and raids. The defensive properties of ‘urban’ sites, their direct relevance to military, administrative or ecclesiastical needs, and so on, played the key role in whether a city survived or not. Constantinople became the pre-eminent city of the empire.
（伴随 7 世纪发展而来的变化影响了社会、文化和经济生活的所有领域。由于入侵和袭击，小亚细亚许多城市遭到破坏、遗弃、缩小或流离失所，社会发生了“农村化”。“城市”遗址的防御属性，它们与军事、行政或教会需求等的直接关系，在一个城市能否幸存的过程中发挥了关键作用。君士坦丁堡成为帝国的杰出城市。）
The social elite was transformed as 'new men' selected by the emperors on a more obviously meritocratic basis increased in number, and who were initially heavily dependent on the emperor and on imperially sponsored positions. Yet as a result of its increasing grip on state positions and the lands it accrued through the rewards attached to such service, this elite soon turned into an aristocracy, during the 8th and 9th centuries still very dependent on the state, during the 10th and especially the 11th increasingly independent. The state had to compete directly with a social group whose enormous landed wealth and entrenched position in the apparatuses of the state meant that it posed a real threat to central control of fiscal resources.
（社会精英被转变为由皇帝挑选的“新人”数量明显增加了精英统治的基础，这些人最初严重依赖皇帝和帝国资助的职位。然而由于其增加对国家立场和控制土地应计通过奖励等附加到服务,这个精英群体很快变成了新贵族,在第八和第九世纪仍然非常依赖于状态,但在第十世纪,特别是十一世纪越来越独立。国家必须与一个社会群体直接竞争，这个群体拥有巨大的土地财富，在国家机构中占据着根深蒂固的地位，这意味着它对中央财政资源的控制构成了真正的威胁。）
The events of the 7th century also produced a reassertion of central state power over late Roman tendencies to decentralisation. The state was both limited, and in its turn partly defined, by the nature of key economic relationships. This is exemplified in the issue and circulation of coin, the basic mechanism through which the state converted agricultural produce into transferable fiscal resources. Coin was issued chiefly to oil the wheels of the state machinery, and wealth was appropriated and consumed through a redistributive fiscal mechanism: the state issued gold in the form of salaries and largesse to its bureaucracy and armies, who exchanged a substantial portion thereof for goods and services in maintaining themselves. The state could thus collect much of the coin it put into circulation through tax, the more so since fiscal policy generally demanded tax in gold and offered change in bronze. There were periods when this system was constrained by circumstances, resulting in the ad hoc arrangements for supplying soldiers and raising tax in kind, for example (as in the 7th century), and it also varied by region. But in a society in which social status and advancement (including the self-identity of the aristocracy) were connected with the state, these arrangements considerably hindered economic activity not directly connected with the state's activities. For the continued power and attraction of the imperial establishment at Constantinople, with its court and hierarchical system of precedence, as well as the highly centralised fiscal administrative structure, consumed the whole attention of the Byzantine elite, hindering the evolution of a more localised aristocracy which might otherwise have invested in the economy and society of its own localities and towns, rather than in the imperial system.
（7世纪的事件也使中央国家权力重新确立，而不是罗马晚期的权力下放倾向。国家既受到关键经济关系的性质的限制，又受到部分限制。这体现在硬币的发行和流通中，这是国家将农产品转化为可转移的财政资源的基本机制。发行硬币主要是为了给国家机器的车轮加油，财富通过再分配的财政机制被挪用和消耗：国家以工资和赠款的形式向官僚和军队发行黄金，他们用黄金换取商品的很大一部分和维护自己的服务。因此，国家可以通过税收来收集大部分投入流通的硬币，更重要的是因为财政政策通常要求对黄金征税并提供零钱。曾有一段时间，该制度受环境限制，导致临时安排供应士兵和提高实物税，例如（如在7世纪），并且也因地区而异。但在一个社会地位和进步（包括贵族的自我认同）与国家相关的社会中，这些安排大大阻碍了与国家活动没有直接联系的经济活动。因为君士坦丁堡的帝国建立的持续权力和吸引力，其宫廷和等级优先制度，以及高度集中的财政行政结构，消耗了拜占庭精英的全部注意力，阻碍了更加本土化的贵族的发展。否则，他们可能会投资于自己的地方和城镇的经济和社会，而不是投资于帝制。）
The growth in the power of the elite was stimulated by two developments. In the first place, there took place an increasing subordination of the peasantry to both private landlords and to holders of grants of state revenue. In the second place the state conceded from the later 11th century the right to receive the revenues from certain public (i.e. fiscal, or taxed) districts or of certain imperial estates with their tenants, encouraging a process of very gradual alienation of the state’s fiscal and juridical rights. By exploiting the award by the emperors of fiscal exemptions of varying sorts, landlords — both secular and monastic — were able to keep a larger proportion of the revenues extracted from their peasant producers for themselves, as rent, while the government's hold on the remaining fiscal land of the empire was constantly challenged by the provincial elite. This had important consequences, for it meant that the overall burden placed on the peasant producers grew considerably. Tenants of landlords with access to imperial patronage attempted to free themselves from many of these impositions through obtaining grants of exemption of one sort or another, although the needs and demands of the local military meant that privileges were often entirely ignored. The amount of resources Lost to the state through grants of exemption twin additional taxes cannot have been negligible, while the burden of landlords' demands on peasant tenants is hinted at by an 11th-century writer who notes that cancelling fiscal privileges treed the rural communities from the burdens which they owed in rents and services.
（精英权力的增长受到两个发展的刺激。首先，农民越来越从属于私人地主和国家财政拨款的持有者。其次，从11世纪后期开始，国家承认有权从某些公共（即财政或税收）地区或某些帝国地产及其租户那里获得收入，这鼓励了国家财政和税收逐渐异化的过程。法律权利。通过利用皇帝授予的各种财政豁免，地主——无论是世俗的还是寺院的——能够将农民生产者的收入中的更大比例作为租金保留给自己，而政府则保留剩余的财政收入。帝国的土地不断受到省级精英的挑战。 这产生了重要的后果，因为这意味着农民生产者的总体负担大大增加。 有权获得帝国赞助的地主的租户试图通过获得一种或另一种豁免的授权来摆脱许多这些强加，尽管当地军队的需要和要求意味着特权往往被完全忽视。通过免除双重附加税而损失给国家的资源数量不容忽视，而地主对农民租户的要求负担由一位11世纪的作家暗示他们在租金和服务方面的负担。）
The split between the interests of the landed and office-holding elite on the one hand and the government which is evident during the later 10th and 1.1th centuries was papered over front the time of Alexios and until the end of the 12th century by yin-Lie of the transformation of the empire under the Komnenos dynasty into what was, in effect, a gigantic family estate, ruled through a network of magnates, relatives and patronage that expanded rapidly during the 12th century and that, in uniting the vested interests of the dominant social-economic elite with those of a ruling family, reunited also the interests of the former with those of a centralised empire. The factional politics that resulted from these developments, in particular over who would control Constantinople and sit on the throne, become apparent in the squabbles and civil wars which followed the defeat of Romanos IV by the Seljuks in 1071, a situation resolved only by the seizure of power by Alexios 1 in 1081. By the end of the 12th century, if not already a century earlier, the vast majority of peasant producers in the empire had become tenants, in one form or another, of a landlord. The elite had meanwhile crystallised into a multifactional aristocracy, led by a few very powerful families, with a number of dependent subordinate and collateral clans, Under the Komnenoi, the imperial family and its immediate associates monopolised military and higher civil offices, while the older families who had been its former rivals dominated the bureaucratic machinery of the state. In the provinces local elites tended to dominate. It was these social relations that facilitated the internecine strife and factionalism that marks the 14th and 15th centuries in particular.
（在10世纪后期和11世纪很明显，一方面是土地和公职精英与政府之间的利益分裂，在亚历克西斯时代一直被掩盖，直到12世纪末才被科穆宁王朝统治下的帝国展现，实际上变成了一个巨大的家族庄园，通过12世纪迅速扩张的权贵、亲属和赞助网络进行统治，并且为了统一既得利益，居统治地位的社会经济精英与统治家族的精英，也将前者的利益与集权帝国的利益重新统一起来。由这些事态发展导致的派系政治，特别是关于谁将控制君士坦丁堡和登上王位的问题，在1071 年塞尔柱人击败罗曼诺斯四世之后的争吵和内战中变得明显，这种情况只能通过夺取来解决1081年由阿莱克修斯一世掌权。到12世纪末，如果不是早一个世纪的话，帝国中的绝大多数农民生产者已经以一种或另一种形式成为地主的佃户。与此同时，精英阶层形成了一个多派系的贵族，由几个非常有权势的家族领导，有一些附属的下属和附属部族。曾经是它的前竞争对手的人主宰了国家的官僚机构。 在各省，地方精英往往占主导地位。正是这些社会关系促成了14和15世纪的内讧和派系斗争。）
未完待续
