To these ordinary burdens, however, fell to be added in the first place the requisitions which were made.  The costs of military administration were in law defrayed by the Roman community.  It provided the commandants of every province with the means of transport and all other requisites; it paid and provisioned the Roman soldiers in the province.  The provincial communities had to furnish merely shelter, wood, hay, and similar articles free of cost to the magistrates and soldiers; in fact the free towns were even ordinarily exempted from the winter quartering of the troops—­ permanent camps were not yet known.  If the governor therefore needed grain, ships, slaves to man them, linen, leather, money, or aught else, he was no doubt absolutely at liberty in time of war—­nor was it far otherwise in time of peace—­to demand such supplies according to his discretion and exigencies from the subject-communities or the sovereign protected states; but these supplies were, like the Roman land-tax, treated legally as purchases or advances, and the value was immediately or afterwards made good by the Roman exchequer.  Nevertheless these requisitions became, if not in the theory of state-law, at any rate practically, one of the most oppressive burdens of the provincials; and the more so, that the amount of compensation was ordinarily settled by the government or even by the governor after a one-sided fashion.  We meet indeed with several legislative restrictions on this dangerous right of requisition of the Roman superior magistrates:  for instance, the rule already mentioned, that in Spain there should not be taken from the country people by requisitions for grain more than the twentieth sheaf, and that the price even of this should be equitably ascertained;(11) the fixing of a maximum quantity of grain to be demanded by the governor for the wants of himself and his retinue; the previous adjustment of a definite and high rate of compensation for the grain which was frequently demanded, at least from Sicily, for the wants of the capital.  But, while by fixing such rules the pressure of those requisitions on the economy of the communities and of individuals in the province was doubtless mitigated here and there, it was by no means removed.  In extraordinary crises this pressure unavoidably increased and often went beyond all bounds, for then in fact the requisitions not unfrequently assumed the form of a punishment imposed or that of voluntary contributions enforced, and compensation was thus wholly withheld.  Thus Sulla in 670-671 compelled the provincials of Asia Minor, who certainly had very gravely offended against Rome, to furnish to every common soldier quartered among them forty-fold pay (per day 16 -denarii- = 11 shillings), to every centurion seventy-five-fold pay, in addition to clothing and meals along with the right to invite guests at pleasure; thus the same Sulla soon afterwards imposed a general contribution on the client and subject communities,(12) in which case nothing, of course, was said of repayment.