The crisis in which the Roman Empire found itself in the 3rd century brought about changes that accelerated the shift from the late Roman to the Byzantine Empire. One of the main areas in which reorganization and rationalization were needed if the empire was to extricate itself from the crisis was public finance. Reforms by the first Byzantine emperors in the field of financial administration and fiscal policy aimed at stabilizing the economy, as too did state intervention in agriculture and urban financial activities. Such intervention became a characteristic feature of the Early Byzantine economy.