Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Vol. 33 No. 2 (2009) 115–132 © 2009 Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham DOI: 10.1179/174962509X417627 Private property and state finances. The emperor’s right to donate his subjects’ land in the Comnenian period * Kostis Smyrlis New York University The question of the respect of private property in Byzantium is examined through the analysis of a series of confiscations of real estate situated in Constantinople, which were carried out from 1082 to 1202 in favour of the Italian republics of Venice, Pisa and Genoa. It is argued that these confiscations were not arbitrary but justified by the circumstances. Finally, these expropriations are set against the developments in the system by which the state remunerated its servants in the period after the eleventh century, increasingly by land grants. Understanding the extent to which private property was respected by the medieval Byzantine state is essential for anyone who wishes to examine the nature of that polity and its evolution over time. It is about deciding whether Byzantium was a despotic state governed by an all-powerful emperor and whether the principles of Roman law remained valid through the Middle Ages. The question of private property and of the state’s rights over the land has been raised repeatedly by Alexander Kazhdan. In several books and articles Kazhdan has insisted on the existence of the ‘state’s supreme ownership, dominium directum, over the land tilled by the Byzantine population’ that restricted the property rights of individuals. Using examples that come from the tenth and eleventh century, he has found several indications of the existence of this supreme ownership, most important among these being the state’s right to confiscate private property. 1 Based on the analysis of a number of confiscation cases, the same scholar has concluded that the state had the right to seize private properties arbitrarily, without having recourse to any * I dedicate this article to the memory of Angeliki Laiou who shared with me some of her ideas on confiscation. I would also like to thank Jacques Lefort and one anonymous reader for their valuable comments. 1 See in particular A. Kazhdan and S. Ronchey, L’aristocrazia bizantina, dal principio dell’XI alla fine del XII secolo (Palermo 1997) 177–85 and A. Kazhdan, ‘State, feudal, and private economy in Byzantium’, DOP 47 (1993) esp. 95–8.