Tributary Empires: Late Rome and the Arab Caliphate

Abstract

I wish in this chapter to set up a comparison between the late Roman Empire and the early Arab Caliphate, as state structures. Before I do, however, some points about comparison in itself seem to me to be helpful. There are always, before very recent times, three main problems confronting anyone who wishes to compare across historical societies. The first is the nature of our evidence. Different cultures produce different sorts of documentation, and think it important to record — and to preserve the records of — different sorts of things. When one adds to that the hugely different survival rates of our documentation across the vicissitudes of the centuries, the problem of comparing like with like only increases. In the late Roman Empire, outside the tax records of Egypt, the main evidence for state and fiscal structures comes from imperial laws. In the Umayyad and ‘Abbãsid Caliphate of the mid-seventh to early tenth centuries, again outside the tax records of Egypt, the evidence for state and fiscal structures comes from the huge political narratives compiled around AD 900 by al-Baladhurï and al-Tabarï. You would think that Egypt would therefore be the axis of any comparison between Rome and the Caliphate, and on one level it is, but actually sixth-century (i.e. Roman) and eighth-century (i.e. caliphal) tax and administrative records for Egypt are not that different. The fiscal structures of the two states, or empires, were in reality very different, in many ways, but it is the other sources which show this, and we have to use them differently and expect different information to be privileged in them.¹