ABSTRACT
Johannes Koder, on the other hand, is concerned with ‘rational-legal’ authority, in this case as seen in the detailed account of the duties of the Eparch of Constantinople in the ninth and tenth century, as shown in the Eisagoge, and the slightly later Book of the Eparch (Koder is indeed the expert on the relationship between the two). He sets out the duties as shown in the latter text, in detail. ese are doubtless somewhat idealised; the ‘rational-legal’ elements of eparchal power need not have been as complete as these essentially normative texts would like to claim. But what is very clear in the Book of the Eparch (as also, fairly regularly, in many Byzantine narrative sources) is the assumption that there was indeed a real ‘bureaucratic’ hierarchy in the City, with ocial roles laid out at every level as Max Weber would have wanted, up to the extremely powerful eparch at its head (the heir of the urban prefect of Roman times, and the opposite number to the urban prefect still in existence in tenth-century Rome). As with commentators on coins, the assumptions matter as much as the reality when authority was conjugated on the ground.
