A prosperous commercial age coexisted with chronic state fiscal crisis

Evidence

By the 10th century a new kind of grant, differing in several important respects from the earlier forms, made its appearance. Despite the general com­ mercial prosperity of the age, the government was in a state of chronic financial crisis. A spendthrift court, an inflated and corrupt bureaucracy, and a mercenary army made exorbitant demands on resources that were already diminishing through the loss of provincial lands to local dynasts and, later the exhaustion or loss to invaders of gold and silver mines. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 359

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Commercial prosperity while the state starved — a structural paradox where private wealth did not translate into fiscal solvency, echoing tax-base problems in modern economies.
• XREF: Connects to my law-merchant reading: economic vitality running ahead of, and partly outside, institutional state capacity. — connects to: The US budget deficit has been stabilizing global capitalism — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1222