Thread by @byzantinemporia

I am currently reading “…And Forgive Them Their Debts” by Michael Hudson, a history of Jubilees from Sumer and Babylon through ancient Israel and the New Testament. It is fascinating so far (thread).

The title adapts the words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Jesus conflates sin and debt in a literal way: through him, the King of Heaven forgives man his debt of sin, just as kings used to forgive small landholders their tax arrears.

This would have made perfect sense to his audience, because Jubilees were given theological significance in Leviticus: the land of Israel was God’s, its residents just tenants for the span of their lives. No one could truly own the land.

Jubilees should not be mistaken for a primitive form of bankruptcy—they served a much broader purpose. Whereas bankruptcy wipes the slate clean, it also demands the forfeit of most goods.

The purpose of a jubilee, by contrast, was to keep farmers in possession of their land, and thereby preserve the social order.

Ancient Near Eastern kings understood that the social system depended on a large base of small freeholders. If this class sunk into debt bondage, it would destroy society:
1.) Fewer men to serve in the army.
2.) Fewer men with a stake in the system, creating unrest.

3.) Concentration of wealth in fewer hands, which could then challenge the king.

Whereas bankruptcy preserves the individual, the jubilee preserves society.

This practice was not adopted in the wider Mediterranean world. Although Greek tyrants, fueled by popular discontent, occasionally forgave debts and redistributed land, there was no systematic way of doing this within the system—it required an actual revolution.

The problem was even worse in Rome. Not only was there no institution of jubilee, but the city’s rapid expansion brought in huge numbers of slaves, allowing large landowners to amass huge estates that didn’t need free labor. This impoverished the lower orders over generations.

The last century of the Roman Republic saw conflict between the Optimates, the aristocratic party, and the Populares, which represented the plebeians. This culminated in about a century of civil war.

By the time the Gracchi tried to redistribute state lands, it was probably already too late to reform without tearing society apart:
1) There was no recognized institution of jubilee to begin with.
2) Creditors were largely private individuals, not the state.

Caesar can be understood as a Roman version of the Greek tyrants, a populist leader who came to restore the social order. In order to save the Roman system, he had to fundamentally transform it. This preserved things for another three centuries, but at great cost.

Interestingly, a similar dynamic between landowners and the common people dominated the Late Byzantine period. Michael VIII (1261-82) made the pronoia, a grant of tax-farming rights in return for military or other state service, hereditary.

This led to a huge concentration of wealth among the aristocracy.

As the empire’s fiscal and military crisis grew worse, pronoiarioi had to squeeze ever-greater amounts from the population to finance the army, even as the military aristocracy itself was getting wealthier.

Slavery had largely disappeared by this time, but the lower orders were being beggared all the same.

This problem was made even worse by the fact that the empire was increasingly indebted to Venetian and especially Genoese merchants, who were granted special trading rights. The Byzantines even traded away vital parts of their empire to the Italians, such as the suburb of Galata.

After Andronicus III died in 1341, a civil war broke out between two factions: one led by John Cantacuzenus, the former emperor’s right-hand man and superlative representative of the military aristocracy; the other by Alexius Apocaucus, John’s low-born former protégé.

Although John was a good administrator and general, he was also resented as one of the wealthiest men in the empire, the beneficiary of Michael VIII’s changes to the pronoia system. Alexius made hay of this fact, tearing apart the empire's social fabric in the process.

This conflict is the central drama of ‘Midway Through the Plunge’, which is about Byzantium’s precipitous decline in the mid-14th c. I am (slowly) working on the 3rd edition, including a substantial rewrite of the war itself to include more about the underlying social conflict.

If you purchase it now or have already purchased, you will be able to download the new edition as soon as it is available. Get it on Amazon here:
amazon.com/Midway-Through…

And here’s link for ‘….And Forgive Them Their Debts’:
amazon.com/forgive-them-t…

I will write up a review and article on this when I finish reading.