Rhomania’s General Crisis, part 9.1-Gathering the Kindling:
As blood soaks into the soil of Mesopotamia and the streets of Naples ring with angry cries, long-simmering and long-suffering Isauria finally boils over. In retrospect, the surprise is not that some kind of explosion happened, but that it took so long to detonate.
The Kephale of Isauria is Kalos Papadopoulos, a tall well-built man who at 61 years old has an appearance that in modern times would be described as ‘silver fox’. He is a textbook example that appearance does not positively correlate with personality. He is very corrupt, using his position to garner personal gain for himself. With his legal knowledge, he is very adept at tricking would-be partners into complicated arrangements that always end up with him holding everything at the end of the day.
The most disturbing example of his desire for gain at the expense of all else involves his niece. Her parents had died and he had been appointed to manage her inheritance until she came of age. When that happened, she sued him for mismanagement and misappropriating assets that rightfully belong to her. A week later a gang of men broke into her home and beat her half to death. The lawsuit coincidentally was then withdrawn, while Kalos ended up, as usually, metaphorically walking away with his niece’s inheritance.
Kalos has been smart with his corruption though. From Constantinople’s point-of-view, he has been a good civil servant. The tax receipts always arrive on time and at required levels, and his paperwork is always in order. He could probably get any provincial posting he wanted, but he has always gone for more isolated districts in central and eastern Anatolia. The pickings there are smaller than in more prosperous districts, but the odds of getting into trouble with higher authority are also smaller. A Prokathemenos in Attica in 1654 who tried to pull a similar maneuver with a cousin’s inheritance ended up getting decapitated by a Long Knife for his trouble.
Isauria is a step up in significance from Kalos’s earlier postings, and his age seems to be amplifying his greed and eroding his carefulness. One common tactic is demanding provisions for his tax officials as they make their inspections, which is standard practice, but in excessive amounts above regulation. He then takes those extra provisions and sells them on the market. This is behavior that hardly helps near-famine conditions.
In the autumn of 1660, a delegation of local notables present a gift to the Kephale at his office in Laranda, the capital of the Kephalate. (Most of the locals call the town Karaman, proof of the significant Karamanid influence in the area.) It is a pizza but with pineapple slices on it. The Roman culinary tradition that only meat goes on pizza has already been established, but this famous example is what really pushes the image that to put non-meat on pizza is an accusation of false dealing. Pineapple was chosen because it was exotic and expensive, a way of accusing Kalos of being extortionate and extravagant.
The gesture is a way of accusing Kalos of crimes, but since it is not a verbal or written accusation covered by law, the Kephale is unable to bring charges of libel or slander. Given his skill at manipulating the law and courts to his own advantage, this tactic was well-planned by the local notables. Kalos seems to have ignored the petition. Anything more serious will have to be done through formal channels, and he is confident he can continue to play the system. There is no record of whether or not he ate the pizza, but one hopes his depravity has some limits.
From a distance of nearly four centuries, such a gesture seems quixotic and primarily just seems to be the historical origin of a quirky Roman culinary and cultural custom that exists to this day. But at the time it was a serious gesture of discontent, a warning that things could get worse if things do not change.
The next prominent gesture is much less amusing to the modern reader. In May 1661, as the Roman army is pressing into northern Mesopotamia, a family of five hangs themselves from the trees in the front yard of the Kephale’s townhouse. It is the ultimate gesture of despair and destitution, and the ultimate reproach to the magistrate’s failure and injustice. It is an action that a Chinese audience would immediately understand, although it is unlikely there is a direct connection. More probably, despair and a desire to shame the Kephale overrode the Orthodox Christian prohibition against suicide. (Kalos had been personally involved in dispossessing the family, via exploitation of debts.)
According to rumor, Kalos’s reaction to the ghastly sight was simply to comment that Isauria produces strange fruit on its trees.
To the south of Laranda, in the villages that border the highlands where the Grand Karaman hold sway, Konon of Galesion has begun preaching. It is his first long-term foray outside the lands of the Grand Karaman, save for a visit to Ikonion, since arriving in Isauria from the Holy Mountain of Galesion. To the angry and burned-out peasants, his message of a better world, of a world made right, is electrifying.
His listeners are overwhelmingly village peasants. They are used to hard lives, with existences constantly shaken by bouts of ill fortune and pain that come seemingly out of nowhere: a bad harvest; a sudden illness that takes away the life of a key breadwinner; an accident that maims a child. Taxes and special requisitions also fall into these categories. But these sufferings are at least familiar. That does not mean they do not hurt, but it makes them easier to accept.
Yet the world is changing, and for many, the change is not for the best. In the past century, the Roman economy has become substantially more monetized and commercialized. (The shift in paying the army all in cash, rather than in a mix of land grants and cash, played a major role.) These effects have also been much more widespread, percolating into regions that had been little affected by such economic trends in earlier centuries.
Before, peasants were used to operating on a basis of self-sufficiency, with perhaps a little surplus used to build up favors with neighbors or to buy a few little luxuries or otherwise-unavailable essentials from a small-scale peddler after paying the taxes. Now, to generate the needed cash to pay taxes and to operate in the more monetized economy, they need to produce more for the market. This tends to take away time and resources from self-sufficiency agriculture, for example by growing cash crops instead of grain, which means they have to engage with the market economy even more to ensure access to all the materials they need.
This exposes them to market fluctuations, which to most peasants seem to come out of nowhere for no reason and to be completely arbitrary. Economic downturns hurl them into the clutches of predatory moneylenders. By law, rates of interest on loans are regulated and capped, but such rules are hard to enforce on individual or small-scale loan sharks operating out in the rural countryside far from centers of civic authority. Circuit judges offer some possibility of legal relief, unless said officials are corrupt and paid off by moneylenders, in which case popular discontent naturally increases.
Economic loss leads to land loss, and the tendency has been, especially in the last few decades, for land to concentrate into fewer and fewer hands. Peasants are forced to become tenants on lands they used to own, or thrown off entirely to make way for other enterprises, such as sheep ranges. This is an utter humiliation, bitterly resented particularly as sometimes the loss of ownership of one’s land is linked with a supposed loss of manhood.
This is not the first time the land issue has come up during Rhomania’s medieval history. Concern about smallholding peasants being gobbled up by large landed estates recurs frequently in much of Constantinople’s legislation during the central Middle Ages. But there are also some major differences.
In previous centuries, those taking up the land of the peasantry had been rural magnates. These are still present, but any new large landowners come from other backgrounds, such as urban merchants or perhaps even the predatory moneylenders who had driven the harsh debt cycle. Furthermore, the rural magnates of yesteryear did tend to keep the peasants on as tenants; they needed the agricultural labor.
But many of the landowners of this year are looking to produce profit and minimize labor costs. Rather than skimming rent off the top and leaving the preexisting system in place, they reshape by consolidating estates, focusing on cash crop production, and increasing the land dedicated to pasturage. This means many peasants are not needed as laborers and so are turfed out completely. It is this process which has swelled Rhomania’s urban populations over the last decades.
In the Middle Ages, the Roman government had depended heavily on smallholding peasant agriculture for taxes and army recruits, while officers had come from the dynatoi. This had made the loss of these smallholdings into large rural magnate landholdings, better able to resist tax demands, a serious problem. Given their near-monopoly of high military command experience, such magnates with private armies, could be a serious danger, as a young Basil II could attest.
Now the Roman government has access to other forms of taxes (including more stringent enforcement on the greater landowners) and is not dependent on the dynatoi for its officer class (a major reason why it is able to enforce those taxes on the dynatoi). Thus, this process is not a threat to its manpower or tax base. In some ways it is an improvement, as consolidated estates producing for the market are more efficient and better at producing an exploitable surplus than peasant subsistence agriculture. This means the government hasn’t been nearly as interested in curbing this trend as would have been the case seven centuries earlier.
The peasants of Isauria certainly have no interest in offering up their livelihoods and possibly their lives on the altar of ‘progress’. (Destitution often means death, from starvation. Emigration to the cities offers a possible escape, but given the disease reservoirs to which rural folk have limited immunity, that choice often results in death.) Konon of Galesion offers them a different world.
In late July, Kalos Papadopoulos gets a missive from Constantinople asking him directly what he is doing about Konon. The Kephale is aware of the monk’s preaching, but considers him little more than another annoying rabble rouser. He is unaware of Konon’s connection with the Grand Karaman, but the White Palace, which is, is less sanguine.
Kalos is a bit stung, and also alarmed, by the missive. He is not used to this amount of direct attention from Constantinople and would very much not like for this trend to continue. Well, if Constantinople wants this Konon business resolved quickly, so be it. On July 29, the same day that Duke Maddaloni enters Naples, he leaves Laranda with a column of troops, determined to silence the meddlesome monk.
