Honour by David Donachie

Author:David Donachie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McBooks Press
Published: 2023-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The capital city to which Flavius Belisarius returned as a partially successful general was one in turmoil and the target of the unrest was the Emperor Justinian, the cause being his well-intentioned efforts to effect some very important changes to a system that had become ossified. The law codes were stuffed full of statutes that no longer had any relevance while the treasury was not as full as it should be, meaning that to pursue his aims and prosecute a war in the east Justinian needed to get in all the taxes owed from a population well versed in avoidance, none more so than the richest patricians and merchants.

The problem the new Emperor had was not in the policies but in the people he chose to implement them. The recodification of the laws was handed to a senator called Tribunianus, famed for his knowledge of jurisprudence. Initially his reforms were greeted with approval, but slowly it began to be obvious that as the man in charge of judicial judgement too many of the cases were being decided in favour of his friends. Even less palatable was the suspicion that bribes were involved, for Tribunianus seemed to be a very much richer fellow halfway through the recodification than he had been at the outset.

Such matters tended to concern the upper reaches of Roman society but to that class the real trouble lay in taxation. The task of ensuring collection was allotted to John the Cappadocian and in that breast the population found a degree of venality that, as it went on, became increasingly intolerable: too much of what he soaked from their income was going into his coffers and not the treasury. John inflamed feelings even more by flaunting his increasing wealth in a way that was both crass and dangerous.

John had also been ordered by Justinian to cut the number in what was an exceedingly bloated bureaucracy, which meant separating men, mostly nobles, from their means of earning a living, as well as removing from them their status as imperial placemen. Given many had bribed their way to their occupation, this struck at the very heart of the class of people the empire relied on for support.

Disenfranchised men tend to foregather and these nobles were no exception; what held back the growing tide of anger was that they did not actually all combine into one group. Some gravitated towards the Blue faction, much favoured by the imperial couple, in the hope of reinstatement by ingratiation. Others joined the Greens, the party of the merchants and seen as the opposition to imperial fiscal overreach. The fact that they went their separate ways tended to hide just how serious was the discontent, given they had a habit of directing their resentments at each other.

If Flavius had heard rumours of it - no one could avoid the criticisms of John the Cappadocian for they were so loud they even reached the provinces he ran - he had no idea of the depth of feeling into which he rode into Constantinople.

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