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Perhaps more than any other pre-modern polity the Eastern Roman Empire has been defined by its urban centre, even sometimes being described as a form of city state.1 Prior to the sack of Constantinople in 1204, the empire had had institutional continuity in a city unconquered since Septimius Severus' reign a thousand years before, which became the eastern empire's undisputed centre from 395. Around a broadly stable urban core, however, the wider polity changed radically over this period. With the ever-changing external situation, Constantinople cannot but have assumed greater proportions in East Roman historical thought over the early and central Middle Ages. Moreover, Constantinople's literary construction was inevitably informed by the City's real structural position as the hub of the East Roman state. By the period c.1000-1200, the exponential growth of Greek literature allows us a kaleidoscopic view of the discourses through which the medieval Romans of the east framed their world.2 In particular, this 'Golden Age' of historiography * I would like to thank Phil Booth, Michael Jeffreys, Elizabeth Jeffreys and Peter Frankopan for their help reading and commenting on this paper through various drafts. It could not have been produced without their invaluable comments, criticisms, and suggestions. 1 See, for example, Anthony Kaldellis' arguments concerning the East Roman view of their world as a city: Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 42-119; he has nuanced this view more recently to present the empire as a republic, consisting of several "sovereign" cities, held together by the Constantinopolitan centre, see: Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic (Cambridge, Mass., 2015). For another recent work on the Constantinopolitan 'imperial city state' , see Ioannis Stouraitis, "Roman Identity in Byzantium: A Critical Approach," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 107 (2014), 175-220. 2 This period, especially the twelfth century, has been appropriately described as the "Third Sophistic": Kaldellis, Hellenism, pp. 225-307.

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This article addresses the themes of urban agency and state-centrism by analysing the agency of merchant capital and taxation in processes of urbanisation. The case study is the city of Ani, a now abandoned site in central south Caucasia straddling the Turkish-Armenian border, in the long thirteenth century c.1200-1350. This global-historical conjuncture is defined by the height of the medieval Commercial Revolution and its central Eurasian expression, the Silk Road. By 1200 Ani had developed as a thriving commercial centre for over two hundred years, with merchants coming to dominate the political economy in the city and its environs. By the mid-fourteenth century, however, this wealthy commercial class was no longer in evidence, with Ani's urbanising process fundamentally transformed, beginning a rapid deurbanisation. Utilising contemporary theories of (de)urbanisation found in Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddima, this article first outlines Ani's development up to 1200, focusing on the role of interregional and intercontinental commerce, and the urban elite's rising dominance in landholding. Having established the mercantile and rentier regime of accumulation on which Ani's development depended, we turn to the period of Zakarian-Mkhargrdzeli rule under the Georgian kingdom c.1200-1236, finding a wealthy commercial class hegemonic in the city's political regime as well as the regime of accumulation. The final section, then, details the urban elite's fortunes under Mongol Eurasian hegemony, and particularly the effects of drastically increased taxation in this political realisation of the medieval Silk Road. Ultimately the story of Ani in the global long thirteenth century forms a crucial case study for the combined agency of taxation and capital in urbanisation, both beneath and within the level of the state system, speaking to their contradictory symbiosis. At the same time, the city as a site of accumulation forms a crucial bridge in the Armenian merchant bourgeoisie's trajectory from the medieval Commercial Revolution into the coalescence of capitalist modernity.