•The Tema System and its Historical Background The theme (Greek: singular – θέμα, plural – θέματα themata), was the main local administrative unit of the Byzantine Empire for approximately seven centuries. The word means military district. The theme system was established in the seventh century, when the Byzantine territories began to be conquered by Muslim armies, replacing the earlier main local unit, the Roman diocese system, which had been established by the Roman emperors Diocletian and Constantine I.
The reason for this division was that it allowed local governors to command the troops in their regions, declare themselves as autonomous emperors, and attempt to seize central authority from the local troops. This system generally produced favorable results for 300 years in each region of the Byzantine Empire.
The term “thema” has two different meanings. It refers to both a kind of military region and to civil regional administrative units. The theme was the organization of the land parcels granted to the soldiers for farming. Technically, the soldiers were military units formed to fight under the command of a strategos (provincial governor). They were not the owners of the land they were given and cultivated; the land belonged to the state. The soldiers who worked the land had the right to harvest the crops and to receive the yield and profit from the cultivated land.
The theme system was constantly shocked by the decline of the Byzantine Empire and became very difficult to implement, as many old regions were lost and many of the regions in the border areas were constantly changing hands, with the Latin Empire established by the Franks who captured Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade and applied a medieval hierarchical system similar to the Frankish apanage system, which established subordinate states. This was another reason for the collapse of the theme system.
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