ABSTRACT
The corn of south Russia could be brought by sea to the city, and the overland trade from China, India, Persia came through Armenia and Asia Minor to Byzantium as to a great emporium. The capital was sited also to be a ‘defence in depth’ to the north-eastern and eastern frontiers of the empire: to those of the Danube, of Armenia and of Syria. As to the machinery by which the Byzantine empire functioned, its civil administration had grown out of the service of the later Roman empire, as described in the eastern part of the Notitia Dignitatum. The emperor was the supreme Roman magistrate, though his office had acquired a Christian significance and his autocracy an eastern character in imitation of the Persian monarchy. A great English Byzantinist would set the beginning of the Byzantine empire at the very foundation of the city by Constantine, after the losses to the Arabs.
