No matter which was right, and it was probably the first, you would still have to multiply the figure many times to find out what it is worth in modern money. Anyway, this was only the money spent by the government; it did not include the vast sums and the enormous property owned by private citizens. There may have been fifteen million people in the Byzantine Empire, and while some of them were poor as poor could be, a great many of them were very rich indeed. Of all ways of making a living, farming probably came first. Rich or poor, almost every Byzantine had an eye for the land, that is, everyone except the city mobs who couldn’t bear to be too far away from the excitement of the Circus. In fact, many people say that the reason the Byzantine Empire finally lost its wealth was because the average Byzantine preferred to invest his money in an estate rather than in foreign trade. The Byzantines let foreign trade fall into the hands of the Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans. Then when the Turks came and the richest provinces fell into the hands of the invaders, there was nothing to fall back on, and no money to pay soldiers to hold the Turks off. If that is so, it was for the same reason that the Byzantines did not like the navy; foreign trade was too uncertain and there was no way to figure out your risks. Just take pirates alone. The Aegean Sea and in fact the whole eastern Mediterranean was strewn with islands behind which lurked swift ships, manned by swarthy corsairs. They were as dangerous as Captain Kidd or Henry Morgan, and they kept Byzantine traders terrified. “What am I going to do?” jeered one of them, a Genoese, as he boarded a heavily laden Byzantine merchant vessel. “Seize you and your goods, _and cut off your noses_!” But besides pirates, there was wind and weather, land robbers (if you shipped your goods by caravan), and the possibility that some prince or emir would confiscate your property and say that it was indemnity owed to him by the Byzantine Government. And there was only the most primitive kind of insurance to take care of you in time of trouble.