The Contexts of Roman Society, Part 11: Property Distribution and the Roman Home
The Roman Empire was not an equal society, nor did it have any intention of trying to be one, in the material sense. Everyone was supposed to be equal under the law (most fake meat pizza presentations to government officials have historically been due to allegations of favoring certain individuals or groups threatened with legal proceedings) but that did not extend to the ownership of property. Some degree of inequality was considered natural; even poor peasants thought that successful farmers should benefit from their labor and skill, provided they did share that bounty with their community which had supported them. As that qualifier shows, there were concerns, but those were related to ensuring that those at the bottom had enough to sustain themselves and that any gains made were done honestly and fairly, not through extortion, corruption, and cheating of others.
Trying to determine exactly how wealth was distributed throughout Roman society c. 1640 is difficult given the limitations of records. Tax reports and court records of wills are the best sources but have their limitations. Their survival record is patchy and their coverage of the lower classes is threadbare. Court records of wills, for example, only exist when a formal will was made and a court was involved, usually because the will was contested. However most inheritances would’ve been by peasants and handled at the village level, and thus lost to historians. That said, some figures have been calculated, although the numbers given should be used to establish a general framework as opposed to being a precise number.
[1] Kotyaion was a prosperous small city of 13,000 inhabitants around 1640. Known mainly for its textile production, it was situated on several prominent roads, including main Imperial highways, and thus heavily involved in local trade. Since it was urban, it is thus not truly representative for most of the Roman population which was rural, but a large proportion of the population was still involved in agriculture (like most towns and small cities). Furthermore, given the small size and inland location (interior Opsikia) of the city, it did not attract the super-wealthy as did the great cities of the Empire. These factors, combined with the degree of surviving records, make these smaller cities the usual source of representing Roman wealth distribution during this period.
(Note that wealth percentages are based on the total in private hands. Government and church holdings were significant factors, but were distributed extremely unevenly geographically. For the sake of simplicity, they are excluded from the analysis.)
Based on these records and analysis, in 1640 the wealthiest 10% of Kotyaion’s population possessed 40% of the wealth in the area, with the top 25% owning 67%. The wealth share of the uppermost quartile had also grown noticeably in the last forty years; at the beginning of the century the proportions of the top 10% and top 25% were thirty three and sixty respectively. While the exact figures detail from location to location, the proportions seem to be roughly consistent geographically across the Empire; the cities of Rhodes, Mystras, and Adana give comparable records. This particularly holds for the trend of disproportionately more wealth concentrating in the hands of the top quartile.
Statistics of these nature vary significantly not with geographical location but with the degree of population concentration. While even the smallest village has some degree of wealth inequality, the pattern is that the Gini coefficient goes up as the population of a selected settlement goes up. [The Gini coefficient measures wealth inequality on a scale from 0-absolutely perfect equality-to 1-one individual owning literally everything. The higher the number the more unequal the wealth distribution.] Larger settlements are more likely to have big populations of poor and destitute, while also attracting the rich, interested in political and economic connections.
However while the uppermost quartile was certainly holding a disproportionate amount of the property, in the likes of Kotyaion or Mystras there was not much in the way of a mega-rich. The top 10% possessed 40% of the wealth, but the top 1% by itself held 5.5% of the wealth. This is in stark contrast to major cities like Smyrna or Constantinople. In Smyrna the top 3% owned 45% of the property, while in Constantinople it was 51%. In both those great cities, the top 10% owned about 70% of the property in 1640, a slightly greater proportion than that held by the top 25% in Kotyaion.
The wealth was concentrated into fewer hands in the big cities, and the difference between the poor and the rich was also much starker. In a random village, the disparity between a rich and poor peasant was noticeable, but that was nothing compared to the disparity between a street sweeper and a dynatos. In Kotyaion, the ratio between the wealth of the average 1% holding and that of a bottom 95% holding was 1:18. In Constantinople it was 1:112 (excluding Imperial holdings). Thus Rhomania did have its mega-rich, but they were exclusive to the major cities, and there they dominated the landscape.
Thus property and wealth in Rhomania followed a similar pattern to that of office holdings, although not as extreme. A large minority, but still definitely a minority, owned the majority of material holdings. But unlike office holdings, which had been making some progress, albeit not much, in being opened to people lower on the economic scale, material holdings were gradually getting more concentrated. And the extent of the concentration, and the rate of its increase, paralleled the size of cities.
Even given the widespread acceptance of economic inequality as a concept, there were those who condemned this shift. The poor, even though they might have much less than the rich, should have enough to sustain themselves and their families, and the immense wealth of the mega-rich, juxtaposed to the urban poor, seemed to be denying the poor that level of security. Some of the Orthodox clergy took the lead in condemning this shift. A village priest or even the Bishop of a small city might be used to the level of inequality where they were stationed, considering that natural, but still be jarred by what they saw when they visited Antioch or Constantinople.
Thus the majority of the Romans had to make do with a minority of the resources. Three-quarters of Kotyaion’s population split out one-third of the property between them. Given this constraint, it is unsurprising that the average Roman did not have much in the way of property. In this regard, many Romans lived in very similar material circumstances to their ancestors of the High and Late Medieval periods. [2]
In a survey of material possessions, one noticeable feature is the commonality of washing equipment such as basins or buckets. These were small, mostly good for hand, feet, and face washing, although the contents of a bucket could be poured over one’s head as a shower. These show the emphasis Romans placed on cleanliness, but also the limitations. For more thorough and full-body washing, nearly all Romans had to look outside their homes. Furthermore while most households would have an example of this basic washing equipment, most would not have very many of them. Usually one or two would be shared amongst all the occupants.
The absence of certain items is likely more striking to the modern reader. Many Roman households below the mesoi did not have separate beds, chairs, tables, and eating ware.
Most Roman households had wooden or stone couches set against the wall that would line three sides of a room. At night they would be covered in mattresses and would serve as the bed. During the day the mattresses would be put away and the couches would then be used for seating, hence the lack of chairs. Typically a Roman house had beds and chairs, or neither. Tables were a bit more common, but oftentimes a large storage chest would be put into place to act as a temporary table.
Given the expense of furniture, and the cheap and multi-use purpose of the wall couches, these lacks are not too shocking. More startling is the absence of individual eating ware. The number of plates, cups, and eating implements in many households were usually outnumbered by the number of occupants. At mealtime many Romans ate with their fingers off a common serving plate, shared spoons with soups and stews, and drank from a common jug. Knives and forks were rare, and when present were also shared.
Monasteries and hospitals took the lead in lessening this behavior. There food needed to be strictly rationed and equal, which was much easier to ensure when each individual also had their own plate, cup, and spoon.
While the above setup could describe a Roman household in both 1300 and 1600, things were changing. In 1300 even a middle-class Roman household would’ve followed the above setup to its entirety. Only the rich had beds and ate food with individual forks. By 1600, that middle-class household likely had beds and chairs and it certainly had individual tableware. The use of individual tableware, because of its comparative cheapness, had spread more widely down the economic scale, but its lack of progress was still quite noticeable. As one historian put it, ‘in 1300 ninety percent of Romans did not have their own fork. Three hundred and fifty years later, fifty percent of Romans still did not have their own fork’.
It should be noted that Roman peasantry, as a whole, were not destitute by the standards of pre-industrial peasantry. But that standard was one of a material base extremely, almost unimaginatively, low by the standards of post-industrial societies. A lonely fork that one did not have to share could and did function as a marker that one was moving up in the world.
[1] For my numbers, I am using the OTL Ottomans of the early modern period as the baseline. The numbers in the update are tweaked, but the trend of increased wealth inequality in bigger cities is copied. My sources for Ottoman wealth distribution are:
Hülya Canbakal, “Reflections on the Distribution of Wealth in Ottoman Ayntab” in
Oriens 37 (2009).
Metin M. Coşgel and Boğaç A. Ergene, “Inequality of Wealth in the Ottoman Empire: War, Weather, and Long-Term Trends in Eighteenth-Century Kastamonu,” in
The Journal of Economic History Vol. 72 No. 2 (2012).
[2] For this section I am relying on the following source.
Nicolas Oikonomides, “The Contents of the Byzantine House from the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Century,” in
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 44 (1990).
