ABSTRACT
The Xth century is a period of social transformation in the Byzantine empire. Becoming the paroikos of a big landowner was not necessarily a bad arrangement for a peasant, at least in the short run. The decrease of the fiscal revenue was felt in Constantinople and the Xth century emperors issued a series of novellae, the purpose of which was to stop the wealthy from acquiring land belonging to the free small peasantry. Powerful and poor had to pay the basic land tax, the demosion, which was calculated for all according to the same rates and was directly proportionate to the value of the taxed property. Although presented here as an extraordinary arrangement, the soldiers’ cash contribution is in fact a well-known procedure. The passage of the De Administrando Imperio that we are studying has been used to estimate the total number of soldiers of the Peloponnesos, who provided the 7.200 gold coins.
