page_title: Magister officiorum
section_title: Late Roman Empire
hierarchical_section_title: Magister officiorum / History and functions / Late Roman Empire
caption_attribution_description: English: Magister Officiorum (Eastern Empire) from Notitia dignitatum, a parchment manuscript held by the w:Bodleian Library, Oxford Shelfmark: MS. Canon. Misc. 378
context_page_description: The magister officiorum was one of the most senior administrative officials in the late Roman Empire and the early centuries of the Byzantine Empire. In Byzantium, the office was eventually transformed into a senior honorary rank, simply called magistros, until it disappeared in the 12th century.
context_section_description: Although some scholars have supported its creation under Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305), the office can first be definitely traced to the year 320, during the reign of Roman emperor Constantine the Great (r. 306–337), but was probably created sometime soon after 312/13, probably as part of an effort to limit the power of the praetorian prefect (praefectus praetorio) the Roman emperor's chief administrative official. 
  The magister was first given command of the palace guard, the Scholae Palatinae. He was also appointed head of the palatine secretariats, divided into four bureaux, the sacra scrinia, each under a respective magister: the scrinium memoriae, the scrinium epistularum, the scrinium libellorum and the scrinium epistolarum Graecarum. The first bureau handled imperial decisions called annotationes, because they were notes made by the emperor on documents presented to him, and also handled replies to petitions to the emperor. The second handled correspondence with foreign potentates and with the provincial administration and the cities, the third dealt with appeals from lower courts and petitions from those involved in them, and the fourth handled the documents issued in Greek and the translation of Latin documents into Greek. Constantine also transferred the supervision of the agentes in rebus, a corps of trusted messengers who also functioned in a bureaucratic role as monitors of the imperial administration, to the magister. Control of the feared agentes, or magistriani as they were also known, gave the office great power.
  The office rose quickly in importance: initially ranked as a regimental commander, tribunus, by the end of Constantine's reign the magister was a comes and member of the imperial consistorium was one of the top four palatine officials (along with the quaestor sacri palatii, comes rerum privatarum and comes sacrarum largitionum). In order of precedence in 372 they ranked in the highest of senatorial ranks, illustres, behind the prefects, urban prefects and highest generals.
  The magister became a kind of "Minister of Internal Security, Administrative Oversight and Communications". The holders of the office were the emperor's chief watchdogs. Almost all routine business was channeled to the office of the magister through the secretariats from other ministries such as the prefectures, the Treasury ('res summa, from 319 the Sacrae Largitions,') the Crown Estates ('res privata') which performed the function in this respect as control points or bottle bottles to catch and vet information (though higher officials and military officers always  had the right and duty to communicate with the emperors if the matter was important enough).   
  In a move that further strengthened the authority and power of the magister, sometime in the early 340s Sometime in the early 340s he was made inspector-general of the cursus publicus, the State Post. Perhaps at the same time, senior agentes were appointed as heads (principes) of the staffs of the most important provincial governors: the praetorian prefects, the vicars of the dioceses, and the proconsuls of the provinces of Africa and Achaea. The placements gave the magister, and by extension the emperor, on-the-spot "watchdogs" over the upper echelons of the administration, as the princeps was a key position: his role was to control the staff, not to do paperwork; he composed confidential reports directly for the magister officiorum, without the praetorian prefect's involvement, and vetted all business coming in and going out of the office and countersigned all documents. A law of 387 forbids the legal staffs of the prefects and vicars from instituting legal proceedings without the princeps's permission or order (as an additional means of determining the validity of a legal suit.
  The office's powers were further enhanced in the eastern (or Byzantine) half of the Empire in 395, when Emperor Arcadius (r. 395–408) stripped the Praetorian Prefecture of the East of some of its jurisdiction over the cursus publicus, the palace guard (Scholae Palatinae) and the imperial arse
caption: The insignia of the Eastern magister officiorum as displayed in the Notitia Dignitatum: the codicil of his office on a stand, shields with the emblems of the Scholae regiments, and assorted arms and armour attesting the office's control of the imperial arsenals.
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