Narrowly-based theory of diocesan decline and vicars' judicial authority.

What is it about?

Staggering full secondary sources. Is aware that vicars were at their height until the end of the 4th century but fails to examine the reasons for their effectiveness until that time and up tp the 430s when external events and internal policies made them redundant as the government abandoned a massive in kind tax collection system in favor of payment in gold and pursued a gradual return to two-tier governance in practice if not in structure. The author of the book claims that the lack of unequivocal selection criteria for the court cases is a symptomatic characteristic in Roman allocation of governing authority which was fatal to the success of dioceses and vicars. In fact he claims they were still born from creation by Constantine and Licinius in 313/14 but never proves it since 1) he does not look at the totality of the vicars' responsibilities (increased by Constantine who gave them and prefects oversight of all fiscal matters including appeal authority in debt cases even of the Treasury and the Crown Estates in 328-329), 2) does not know that the Constantinian Dynasty's administrative policy was regionally centered (a major change in the way the empire would be governed); 3) does not examine the relationship between vicars and their regional counterparts in the Treasury and the Crown Estates (their offices were almost always in the same city!) 4) does track the prefecture's control over criminal and civil cases involving senators (criminal cases were removed from the urban prefect of Rome in 317) 5) does not examine the same regarding soldiers (criminal defendants' cases handed to the military in 355 and civil in 413 in the East); or the vicars (and prefects and proconsuls) powers in these matters over staff of the prefecture, Treasury and Crown Estates (the Treasury got control over civil cases in 385 and the Estates always had control in civil cases and minor criminal charges over Crown tenants). He doesn't pull the strings together so that the reader can get an idea how the dioceses acutally functioned which seems to have been quite well. The author does not treat the administrative and fiscal matters where their authority was more clear-cut nor examine the non-judicial ways the vicar could exercise control such as executive orders, insistence on following orders, instructions, procedures, regulations. tax demands. He does not examine the relationship of vicars to the Treasury and Crown Estates without which it is not possible to understand how the vicars might have been able to exercise targeted, and limited control over independent ministries. He accepts the inevitable decline of dioceses without examining the period 330-440 when theses districts were important and doing "their job" especially before the disruptions in the West from the first decades of the 5th century. His perspective skews the historical record: dioceses were central to the Constantinian dynasty's administrative program and afterwards were enlisted in the centralization drive of the perfects from the 360s esp. with Theodosius I and his immediate successors which encroached on the SL and RP which fought back with some success till the 440s claiming that their taxes and revenues could not be collected with prefectural interference. The author says vicars and dioceses were created (he accepts 313/14 as the date rather than 297 or later) without a clear idea of their purpose. This is not correct: it was done for on-the-spot administrative control of regions by officials, vicars, who after 330 were the only officials in the diocese with superior, i.e. appeal, authority. The vicars were created by two emperors who had had experience with ah hoc trouble-shooting vice-prefects and 25 years plus with regional comptrollers of the Treasury (SL) and Crown Estates (RP) created and used during the reign Diocletian and after before 313/14 . Vicars were mainly judicial officials with general administrative oversight prior to Constantine's reforms of 325-329 which made them the senior finance officials of the dioceses. From 330 the word diocese refers only to their districts, the word no longer being used for the fiscal units of the Treasury. Vicars had become fiscal cops over the whole administrative apparatus of the dioceses: they were supposed to control and coordinate the activities of governors and coordinate these with the Treasury regional comptrollers, and when needed with the general managers of the Crown Estates. Vicars were the keepers of the global diocesan budgets composed by the prefectures) and guarantors of liturgical assignments made by governors. They could not change these: they were supposed to make sure those responsible for meeting the government's demands did what was asked. Their staff rarely collected taxes or intervened: this was the job of the governors, municipalities. All vicars had a wide range and mélange of authority and power to control a diocese. The author in pursuit of a one-size-fits all hypothesis that they were given insufficient authority fails to see this. The author ignores the wider administrative and historical context of the 4th century. He does not examine how the administrative apparatus actually operated or didn't as intended.

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Why is it important?

It's important because the book is about the major fiscal unit of the empire and its relationship to the rest of the bureaucratic apparatus. The author presents a lop-sided view of vicars by excluding the fiscal which himself admits increased in importance from 325 A.D. by citing this reviewer's work on several pages, 18, 38, 55, 89, 174-175 which were added just before publication in 2012. He hardly mentions the SL and RP - in fact he dismisses their importance - "the significance of rationales should not be overestimated" p. 55 in his pursuit of a one-for-all 'fatal flaw' explanation in this Post-Doctoral Dissertation. What he presents is excellent - the masters of the topic primary and secondary material is superb but hampered by what was left out the fiscal side as if the judicial along could tell 'the story' of dioceses. The fatal flaw hypothesis is too simplistic and refuted in The Justice of Constantine, John Noel Dillon, 2016. The fiscal and administrative have been given short shrift. Second he supports the orthodox viewpoint that Roman administrative was reactive, haphazard and a something of a patchwork (to use A.H.M. Jones' word for it): it was indeed but responses were not devoid of rationality. However, there is evidence that some of it was thought out deliberately in the years 285-345 though this is not to claim that it was rationally planned at a go which the author accuses me stating p. 298 when what I wrote was that reactions were rational to ad hoc situations no one plans a bureaucracy in one go over a 60-year period which in the title of my work. By the latter year a pattern emerges: the whole system is held together by a series of overlaps, bundled tasks and triangulation. An example is the appointment of a senior agent of the master of the offices the emperor's eyes and head of State Security as Head of Office from the early 340s. This linked the diocese to the prefecture and to the palace in one person by two different lines of communication. The vicar were triangulated administratively and judicially with the governors and regional officials of the SL and RP. The diocese was the center of the system - the prefecture was a control point except in the diocese directly governed by a prefect - over the units which did the great bulk of the work, the provinces and the municipalities. The upper units were for policy-making, directives, systems integrity maintenance, investigation, regulation, and coordination.

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