The supreme importance of the ruling city was one distinguishing feature of the later Roman Empire that Byzantium retained and refined with more tenacious conservatism than the Romano-Germanic successor kingdoms of the medieval West. The other was the state structure which ensured that even in its darkest hour, the Byzantine Empire maintained a standing army, regular taxation and a specialised civil judiciary. Whether for good or ill, Byzantine subjects were as systematically and professionally governed as any people before the age of mass communications. Although we possess only a tiny fraction of the documents formally addressed to, or issued by, public officials in the entire Byzantine period, this is sufficient to convey an impression of extraordinary statism. The golden age of medieval Byzantine state institutions and ideology was over by the time of Manuel Komnenos, and its passing was not unconnected with the Comnenian regime. Twelfth-century Byzantium produced no codifications of laws and protocol, no treatises on diplomacy and warfare comparable to those of the ninth and tenth centuries. Its main contribution to legal literature was in canon law, and one contemporary canonist, John Zonaras, expressed a profound disillusion with the current state of the imperial system.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that imperial administration somehow regressed under the Komnenoi. What emerged from the reforms of Alexios I was a scaled-down but more tightly co-ordinated continuation of the pre-existing system of bureaux (sekreta).