Download PDF | The Grand Strategy Of The Byzantine Empire By Edward N. Luttwak, Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2011.
513 Pages
Preface
Once largely neglected, as if the entire Roman empire had really ended in 476, the eastern half that we call Byzantine by modern habit now attracts so much attention that it is even the subject of popular histories. While many are interested in the culture of Byzantium, it is the epic struggle to defend the empire for century after century against an unending sequence of enemies that seems to resonate especially in our own times.
This book is devoted to one dimension of Byzantine history: the application of method and ingenuity in the use of both persuasion and force—that is to say, strategy in all its aspects, from higher statecraft down to military tactics. When I first started to study Byzantine strategy in earnest, I had just completed a book on the strategy of the Roman empire up to the third century that continues to attract both inordinate praise and strenuous criticism. My original intention was simply to write a second volume to cover the subsequent centuries.
What ensued instead was the discovery of an altogether richer body of strategy than the earlier Romans had ever possessed, which called for a vastly greater effort of research and composition. In the end, this lasted for more than two decades, albeit with many interruptions—some due to my not entirely unrelated work in applying military strategy in the field. There was one compensation for this prolonged delay: several essential Byzantine texts once available only as scarcely accessible manuscripts, or in antiquated editions replete with errors, have now been published in reliable form. Also, a consider-able number of important new works of direct relevance to Byzantine strategy have been published since I started on my quest long ago. For in recent years Byzantine studies have indeed flourished as never before.
A great wave of first-class scholarship has illuminated many a dark corner of Byzantine and world history—and it has also inspired a climate of high-spirited generosity among the practitioners. Although I am more student than scholar in this field, I have experienced this generosity in the fullest measure. Soon after I started reading for this book, circa 1982, George Dennis, whose translation of the Strategikon is the most widely read of Byzantine military texts, gave me an advance typescript of his work that would be published as Three Byzantine Military Treatises.
Twenty-six years later, he sent me a typescript of part of his eagerly awaited edition of Leo’s Taktika, which I urgently needed to complete this book; generosity is mere habit for George T. Dennis of the Society of Jesus. Walter E. Kaegi Jr., whose works illuminate the field, also gave me valuable advice early on. Others whom I had never even met, but simply importuned without prior introduction, nevertheless responded as if bound by old friendship and collegial obligations. Peter B. Golden, the eminent Turcologist amply cited in these pages, answered many questions, offered valuable suggestions, and lent me two otherwise unobtainable books. John Wortley entrusted me with the unique copy of his own annotated typescript of Scylitzes.
Peter Brennan and Salvatore Cosentino offered important advice, while Eric McGeer and Paul Stephenson and Denis F. Sullivan, whose work is here conscripted at length, read drafts of this book, uncovering errors and offering important advice. John F. Haldon, whose writings constitute a library of Byzantine studies in themselves, responded to a stranger’s imposition with a detailed critique of an early draft. Because what follows is intended for non-specialists as well, I asked two such, Anthony Harley and Kent Karlock, to comment on the lengthy text; I am grateful for their hard work, considered opinions, and corrections.
A third reader was Hans Rausing, not a specialist but a profound and multilingual student of history, and to him I owe valuable observations. Stephen P. Glick applied both his encyclopedic knowledge of military historiography and his meticulous attention to the text, leaving his mark on this book. Nicolò Miscioscia was my able assistant for a season. Christine Col and Joseph E. Luttwak researched and graphically prepared all the maps, no easy task amidst endless revisions. Michael Aronson, senior editor for social sciences at Harvard University Press, was the active proponent of my earlier book on Roman grand strategy a long time ago.
It was with unending patience over two decades that he asked for this book as well, and his experienced enthusiasm is manifest in the physical quality of the publication, an effort in which he was ably assisted by Donna Bouvier and Hilary S. Jacqmin of the Press. It was most fortunate that they commissioned Wendy Nelson to serve as manuscript editor. With infinite care and talented discernment she uncovered many a stealthy error, and gently indicated infelicities in need of remedy. Finally, it is a pleasure to thank Alice-Mary Talbot, also here cited, Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, and the always helpful Deb Brown Stewart, Byzantine studies librarian at Dumbarton Oaks. I might have dithered forever instead of finally composing the text had I not met Peter James MacDonald Hall, who demanded the book and removed the excuse of all other work.
The Invention of Byzantine Strategy
When the administration of the Roman empire was divided in the year 395 between the two sons of Theodosius I, with the western portion going to Honorius and the eastern to his brother Arkadios, few could have foretold the drastically different fates of the two halves. Defended by Germanic field commanders, then dominated by Germanic warlords, increasingly penetrated by mostly Germanic migrants with or without imperial consent, then fragmented by outright invasions, the western half of the empire progressively lost tax revenues, territorial control, and its Roman political identity in a process so gradual that the removal of the last imperial figurehead, Romulus Augustus, on September 4, 476, was mere formality.
There were local accommodations with the invaders in places, even some episodes of cultural integration, but the newly fashionable vision of an almost peaceful immigration and a gradual transformation into a benign late antiquity is contradicted by the detailed evidence of violence, destruction, and the catastrophic loss of material amenities and educational attainments that would not be recovered for a thousand years, if then.1 Very different was the fate of the eastern half of the Roman empire commanded from Constantinople.
That is the empire we call Byzantine by modern habit though it was never anything but Roman to its rulers and their subjects, the romaioi, who could hardly identify with provincial Byzantion, the ancient Greek city that Constantine had converted into his imperial capital and New Rome in the year 330. Having subdued its own Germanic warlords and outmaneuvered Attila’s Huns in the supreme crisis of the fifth century that extinguished its western counterpart, the Byzantine empire acquired the strategic method with which it resisted successive waves of invaders for more than eight hundred years by the shortest reckoning. Again and again the eastern empire was attacked by new and old enemies advancing from the immensity of the Eurasian steppe, from the Iranian plateau homeland of empires, from the Mediterranean coasts and Mesopotamia, which came under Islamic rule in the seventh century, and finally from the reinvigorated western lands as well.
Yet the empire did not collapse in defeat until the conquest of Constantinople in the name of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, to then revive once more in much-diminished form until the final Ottoman victory of 1453. Sheer military strength was enough to provide ample security for the Roman empire when it was still undivided and prosperous, encompassing all the lands around the entire Mediterranean and reaching deep beyond them. Moderate taxation and voluntary recruitment were sufficient to keep fleets and some three hundred thousand troops in constant training in frontier forts and legionary garrisons, from which detachments (vexillationes) could be gathered in field armies to suppress rare internal rebellions or repel foreign invaders.2 But until the third century, the Romans rarely had to fight to obtain the benefits of their military strength.
In every frontier province there were flourishing cities and imperial granaries to tempt the empire’s neighbors, but they usually preferred a hungry peace to the certainty of harsh Roman reprisals or even outright annihilation. Commanding superior combat strength, the Romans at their imperial peak could freely choose between pure deterrence with retaliation if needed, which required only field armies, and an active defense of the frontiers that required garrisons everywhere, and both were tried in succession during the first two centuries of our era. Even later, when old and new enemies beyond the Rhine and Danube coalesced into mighty warrior confederations, while in the east formidable Sasanian Persia replaced its weaker predecessor Arsacid Parthia, Roman armies were still strong enough to contain them effectively with a new strategy of defense-in-depth.3
The Byzantines never had such an abundance of strength. In 395 the empire’s administrative division—it was not yet a political division, for both brothers jointly ruled both parts—followed the boundaries between east and west first decreed by Diocletian (284–305), which bisected the entire Mediterranean basin into two almost equal halves. It was a neat division, but it left the eastern Roman empire with three counterpart, the Byzantine empire acquired the strategic method with which it resisted successive waves of invaders for more than eight hundred years by the shortest reckoning.
Again and again the eastern empire was attacked by new and old enemies advancing from the immensity of the Eurasian steppe, from the Iranian plateau homeland of empires, from the Mediterranean coasts and Mesopotamia, which came under Islamic rule in the seventh century, and finally from the reinvigorated western lands as well. Yet the empire did not collapse in defeat until the conquest of Constantinople in the name of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, to then revive once more in much-diminished form until the final Ottoman victory of 1453. Sheer military strength was enough to provide ample security for the Roman empire when it was still undivided and prosperous, encompassing all the lands around the entire Mediterranean and reaching deep beyond them.
Moderate taxation and voluntary recruitment were sufficient to keep fleets and some three hundred thousand troops in constant training in frontier forts and legionary garrisons, from which detachments (vexillationes) could be gathered in field armies to suppress rare internal rebellions or repel foreign invaders.2 But until the third century, the Romans rarely had to fight to obtain the benefits of their military strength. In every frontier province there were flourishing cities and imperial granaries to tempt the empire’s neighbors, but they usually preferred a hungry peace to the certainty of harsh Roman reprisals or even outright annihilation. Commanding superior combat strength, the Romans at their imperial peak could freely choose between pure deterrence with retaliation if needed, which required only field armies, and an active defense of the frontiers that required garrisons everywhere, and both were tried in succession during the first two centuries of our era.
Even later, when old and new enemies beyond the Rhine and Danube coalesced into mighty warrior confederations, while in the east formidable Sasanian Persia replaced its weaker predecessor Arsacid Parthia, Roman armies were still strong enough to contain them effectively with a new strategy of defense-in-depth.3 The Byzantines never had such an abundance of strength. In 395 the empire’s administrative division—it was not yet a political division, for both brothers jointly ruled both parts—followed the boundaries between east and west first decreed by Diocletian (284–305), which bisected the entire Mediterranean basin into two almost equal halves. It was a neat division, but it left the eastern Roman empire with three separate regions on three different continents.
In Europe the eastern boundary, marked off by the provinces of Moesia I and Praevalitania, now in Serbia and Albania, also encompassed the territories of modern Macedonia, Bulgaria, the Black Sea coast of Romania, Greece, Cyprus, and European Turkey—the ancient Thrace—with Constantinople itself. In Asia, imperial territory consisted of the vast peninsula of Anatolia, now Asiatic Turkey, as well as Syria, Jordan, Israel, and a slice of northern Iraq in the provinces of Mesopotamia and Osrhoene. In North Africa, the empire had the provinces of Egypt, reaching far up the Nile in Thebais, and the eastern half of modern Libya, composed of the provinces of Libya superior and Libya inferior, the earlier Cyrenaica. This was a rich inheritance of productive and taxpaying lands for the first ruler of the eastern empire, Arkadios (395–408).
Grain-exporting Egypt and the fertile plains of coastal Anatolia were especially valuable, and only the Balkans had recently been seriously damaged by the raids and invasions of Goths, Gepids, and Huns. But from a strategic point of view, the eastern empire was at a great disadvantage as compared to its western counterpart.4 On its long eastern frontier, running some five hundred miles from the Caucasus to the Euphrates, it still had to face the persistently aggressive Sasanian empire of Iran, which had long been the most dangerous enemy of the united empire—but it could no longer summon reinforcements from the armies of the west. It has recently been argued that the Romans had an Iran complex dating back to the humiliating defeat at Carrhae of 53 BCE, while in reality the Sasanians were not especially expansionist.5 Perhaps so, but their rulers styled themselves “King of Kings of Eran and non-Eran” (Šahan Šah Eran ud Aneran) and the Iran part alone encompassed Persia, Parthia, Khuzistan, Mesan, Assyria, Adiabene, Arabia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Caucasian Albania, Balaskan, Pareshwar, Media, Gurgan, Merv, Herant, Abarsahr, Kerman, Sistan, Turan, Makran, Kusansahr, Kashgar, Sogdiana and the mountains of Tashkent, and Oman on the other side of the sea—thereby including some actual Byzantine territory, important Byzantine dependencies in the Caucasus, Armenian client states, and central Asian lands that the Byzantines certainly never ruled but in which they had critical strategic interests, notably a succession of valiant allies.6
The situation in the northeast was almost as bad; the Byzantines had to defend the Danube frontier against successive invaders from the great Eurasian steppe—Huns, Avars, Onogur-Bulghars, Magyars, Pechenegs, and finally Cumans—all of them mounted archers inherently more dan gerous than the Germanic enemies of the western empire on the Rhine frontiers. Even otherwise formidable Goths fled in terror from the Hun advance—and that was before Attila had united the Hun clans and added many foreign subjects, Alans, Gepids, Heruli, Rugi, Sciri, and Suevi, to his strength. Nor did the eastern empire have the safe hinterlands of the western half: coastal North Africa, which was then fertile and exported much grain, the entire Iberian Peninsula shielded by the Pyrenees, the southern Gallic provinces safely distant from the dangerous Rhine, and Italy itself shielded by the natural barrier of the Alps.
The geography of the eastern empire was very different: except for Egypt and eastern Libya, most of its territories were too near a threatened frontier to have much strategic depth. Even Anatolia, which certainly shielded Constantinople from overland invasion from the east, was mostly settled and productive along its Mediterranean and Black Sea coastal strips, both exposed to attacks from the sea. With more powerful enemies and a less favorable geography, the eastern empire was certainly the more vulnerable of the two. Yet it was the western empire that faded away during the fifth century. In essence, the eastern, or Byzantine, empire so greatly outlasted its western counterpart because its rulers were able to adapt strategically to diminished circumstances by devising new ways of coping with old and new enemies.
The army and navy, and the supremely important tax-collection bureaucracy that sustained them both along with the emperor and all his officials, changed greatly over the centuries, but there is a definite continuity in overall strategic conduct: as compared to the united Romans of the past, the Byzantine empire relied less on military strength and more on all forms of persuasion—to recruit allies, dissuade enemies, and induce potential enemies to attack one another. Moreover, when they did fight, the Byzantines were less inclined to destroy enemies than to contain them, both to conserve their strength and because they knew that today’s enemy could be tomorrow’s ally. It was so at the beginning in the fifth century, when the devastating strength of Attila’s Huns was deflected with a minimum of force and a maximum of persuasion—they attacked westward instead—and it remained so even eight hundred years later: in 1282, when the powerful Charles d’Anjou was preparing to invade from Italy intent on conquering Constantinople, he was suddenly immobilized by the loss of Sicily to explosive revolt, the result of a successful conspiracy between emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos (1259–1282), King Peter III of distant Aragon, and the master plotter Giovanni da Procida. Michael wrote in his memoirs: “If we should say that it is God who gave the Sicilians the freedom they now enjoy, but trusting in us to bring it about, we would be saying nothing but the strict truth.”7 The epic survival of the Roman empire of the east was thus made possible by unique strategical success. This had to be more than just the winning of battles—no sequence of fortunate victories could have lasted eight centuries in a row. Indeed the empire suffered many defeats, some seemingly catastrophic. More than once the greater part of imperial territory was overrun by invaders, and Constantinople itself was besieged several times from its foundation in 330 to its ruinous seizure by the Catholic Fourth Crusade in 1204, after which it was not an empire that was restored but only the Greek kingdom that finally expired in 1453. The strategical success of the Byzantine empire was of a different order than any number of tactical victories or defeats: it was a sustained ability, century after century, to generate disproportionate power from whatever military strength could be mustered, by combining it with all the arts of persuasion, guided by superior information. The current terms would be diplomacy and intelligence, if one could disregard their largely bureaucratic character in modern conditions—all use of those words in what follows is to be understood in inverted commas. Having neither a foreign ministry nor intelligence organizations as such, the Byzantine empire did not have professional, full-time diplomats or intelligence officers, only varied officials who sometimes performed those functions in between or along with other duties. To persuade foreign rulers and nations to fight against the enemies of the empire—most difficult precisely in times of weakness when such persuasion was most needed—was only the most elementary application of Byzantine diplomacy, though easily the most important. As for intelligence, the emperor and his officials could not even keep systematic files, as far as we can tell, and espionage with all its eternal limitations was almost their only means of collecting intelligence. But however ill-informed they may have been by modern standards, the Byzantines still knew much more than most other contemporary rulers. For one thing, even though they did not have accurate maps— and it has been argued that the Romans could not even think in cartographic terms—their road building proves that they were perfectly well informed about routes and linear road distances.8 That was quite sufficient to manipulate less informed foreigners, especially newly arrived steppe chieftains from the east.9 The near contemporary Menander Protektor preserves the bitter complaint of a Turkic chief in 577: As for you Romans, why do you take my envoys through the Caucasus to Byzantium, alleging that there is no other route for them to travel? You do this so that I might be deterred from attacking the Roman Empire by the difficult terrain [high mountains hard for horses]. But I know very well where the river Danapris [Dniepr] flows, and the Istros [Danube] and the Hebrus [Maritsa, Meric]. That was a direct threat, because the three rivers mark the route to Constantinople along the steppe corridor that runs north of the Black Sea.10 Sometimes the empire’s military strength was abundant enough to allow it to mount major offensives that conquered vast tracts of territory; then diplomacy was mostly employed to extract concessions from other powers intimidated by Byzantine victories—or at least to keep them from interfering. Sometimes the Byzantine army and navy were so weak—or their enemies so strong—that the very survival of the empire was made possible only by foreign allies successfully recruited long before, or just in time: more than once, bands of warriors from nations nearby or remote suddenly arrived to tip the balance and save the day. In between these extremes, there commonly was a more balanced synergy, in which diplomacy guided by superior information was empowered by capable military forces, while military strength was in turn magnified by well-informed diplomatic action. All of that, and some good fortune too, were needed to preserve the Roman empire of the east, because it was inherently less secure than the Roman empire of the west that it would so greatly outlast. Persuasion usually came first, but military strength was always the indispensable instrument of Byzantine statecraft, without which nothing else could be of much use—certainly not bribes to avert attacks, which would merely whet appetites if proffered in weakness. The upkeep of sufficient military strength was therefore the permanent, many-sided challenge that the Byzantine state had to overcome each and every day, year after year, century after century. Two essential Roman practices that the Byzantines were long able to preserve—as the western empire could not—made this possible, if only by a very small margin at times. The first was a system of tax collection that was uniquely effective for the times and that none of the empire’s enemies could begin to match. After a total budget was calculated—itself an invention of huge conse quence—the total amount of revenue to be provided by the principal tax, the land tax (annona), was apportioned downward, first province by province, then city district by city district within each province, and finally down to individual plots of land in proportion to the estimated value of their output.11 During the seventh century the top-down apportionment of an overall imperial budget seems to have ended, but the collection of the land tax assessed field by field continued in a bottom-up flow of revenue.12 There were many problems. Most obviously, the salaries of the evaluators, collectors, bookkeepers, auditors, inspectors, and supervisors were themselves a huge expense—those officials accounted for the greatest part of the imperial bureaucracy. In addition, officials accepted bribes, extorted illegal payments, and diverted revenues to their own pockets, judging by the many laws enacted by many emperors against those practices. There were also laws to safeguard the interests of smallholders, a class especially favored by emperors because they or their sons were deemed the most likely recruits, which tell us that wealthy landlords used their influence to divert tax collection from their broad acres to the plots of small-holders or even tenants. Yet for all its faults, the fiscal machine that the Byzantines inherited had a decisive virtue: it worked year after year more or less automatically to supply vast amounts of revenue, mostly in gold. This income flow paid for the expenses of the emperor’s court and of the entire civil bureaucracy but mostly served to sustain the armies and fleets. The resulting circulation of gold itself stimulated the development of the Byzantine economy: as salaried officials, soldiers, and sailors spent their money, they created a liquid market for farmers, craftsmen, and professionals of all kinds, who thus earned gold to pay for their taxes as well as their own market needs.13 From the strategic point of view, the most important consequence of regular taxation was regular military service. While most of their enemies had to rely on tribal levies, volunteer warriors, freebooters, or impressed peasants, with scavenging in the field to provide their supplies, the Byzantines could keep salaried imperial soldiers and sailors on duty all the year round, although they also had part-time reservists subject to recall. That in turn allowed the vigorous revival of the second essential Roman practice that had decayed by the fifth century: systematic military training, both the individual instruction of new recruits and the regular exercise of unit and formation tactics. That may seem no more than what any army must do as a matter of course—how else would full-time soldiers pass their time? But most of those who fought the Byzantines were not full-time soldiers, they were levies summoned to the fight with no formal training, some with formidable, if narrow, traditional fighting skills, others with none. Besides, training as a continuous activity requires not only full-time forces, but also a serious degree of professionalism. Even today, most of the 150 or more extant armies both large and small barely train their recruits, who mostly receive only a couple of weeks of instruction in dress and ceremony, barrack-square drills, and the firing of personal weapons. After that, the recruits are assigned to units that now and then engage in mostly ritualistic exercises, and that hardly ever are combined in formations to carry out maneuvers—if realistic, they would only expose everyone’s lack of training, so paradeground theatricals are much preferred (I once witnessed a one-kilometer progression by a battalion of 42 tanks that kept in exact formation to the inch; weeks of training had been wasted on the tactically worthless show). Over the centuries, the Byzantine army and navy had their cycles of institutional decay and recovery, but Byzantine survival through constant wars, often fought against superior numbers, could not have been possible without fairly high standards of training. It is characteristic of the Byzantine empire that when it was most immediately threatened in the year 626 by the converging forces of Sasanian Persia and the Avars, then both at the peak of their strength, and the remedy of emperor Herakleios (610–641) was the boldest of counteroffensives, everything started with vigorous training: [Herakleios] collected his armies and added new contingents to them. He began to train them and instruct them in military needs. He divided the army into two and bade them draw up battle lines and attack each other without loss of blood; he taught them the battle cry, battle songs and shouts, and how to be on the alert so that, even if they found themselves in a real war, they should not be frightened, but should courageously move against the enemy as if it were a game.14 Like their modern counterparts, and unlike traditional warriors, Byzantine soldiers were normally trained to fight in different ways, according to specific tactics adapted to the terrain and the enemy at hand. In that simple disposition lay one of the secrets of Byzantine survival. While standards of proficiency obviously varied greatly, Byzantine soldiers went into battle with learned combat skills, which could be adapted by further training for particular circumstances. That made Byzantine soldiers, units, and armies much more versatile than their enemy counterparts, who only had the traditional fighting skills of their nation or tribe, learned from elders by imitation and difficult to change. In describing the battle of the river Nedao of 454, in which the Huns were defeated by their Germanic subjects in revolt, the Gothic historian Jordanes describes how each nation fought: “One might see the Goths fighting with lances (contis), the Gepids raging with the sword, the Rugi breaking off the spears in their own wounds, the Suevi fighting on foot, the Huns with bows, the Alani drawing up a battle-line of heavy-armed [cavalry], and the Heruli of light-armed warriors.”15 Goths could certainly fight with swords as well, and the Gepids with lances, just as the classic Roman auxiliary trio of Balearic slingers, Cretan archers, and Numidian spearmen could fight with other weapons too. But while their enemies went into combat with a characteristic weapon or two, whether thrusting spear, sword, throwing javelin, dart, sling, lance, or composite reflex bow, by the sixth century Byzantine troops were trained to fight with all of them. Man for man this made them superior to most of the enemies they faced in battle and, along with unit exercises, endowed Byzantine armies with superior tactical and operational versatility. To this, the Byzantines added the higher level of grand strategy, their own invention and not an inheritance from the past as were the fiscal system and the Roman tradition of training. There were no planning staffs, no formal decision processes, and no elaborate statements of “national strategy,” which would have been alien to the mentality of the times. But there was an entire culture of strategic statecraft that emerged by the seventh century, and continued to evolve thereafter. It comprised a rich body of military expertise, well illustrated in surviving handbooks and field manuals that can still be read with interest; a sound tradition of intelligence, which inevitably is sparsely documented, though revealing traces do remain; and finally the most characteristic aspect of Byzantine strategic culture: the varied ways of inducing foreign rulers to serve imperial purposes, whether by keeping the peace or waging war against the enemies of the empire. The Byzantines had to survive by strategy or not at all. We have already seen that the eastern empire was less favored in its geography and in its enemies than the western empire, and lacked the superior resources that the united empire had been able to deploy against its strongest enemies. Nor could obdurate resistance have sufficed. Sheer tenac ity against all odds accounts for many a surprising outcome in war. It does happen that military forces seemingly superior by far are held, worn down, and finally repelled by defenders sustained by intangible and invisible strengths—whether regimental cohesion, exceptional leadership, intense religious faith, a stirring political ideology, or simply an amplitude of confidence in themselves. The Byzantine record includes many an episode of fierce resistance against vastly superior forces, none more splendid than the last fight of May 29, 1453, when the last emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus fought to the death against the armies of the Ottoman conqueror Mehemet II with five thousand loyal subjects in arms. The loyalty that emperors could evoke from their troops was employed with better success in countless fights until the last, but obdurate resistance, no matter how sturdy, cannot explain the Byzantines’ survival either—they often faced enemies much too strong to be long resisted by defensive combat alone. It was by creative responses to new threats—by strategy, that is—that the empire survived century after century. More than once, successive defeats reduced it to little more than a beleaguered city-state. More than once the great walls of Constantinople came under attack from the sea or by land, or both at once. But time after time, allies were successfully recruited to attack the attackers, allowing the imperial forces to regain their balance, gather strength, and go over to the offensive. And when the invaders were driven back, as often as not imperial control was restored over larger territories than before. The enemies of the empire could defeat its armies and fleets in battle, but they could not defeat its grand strategy. That is what made the empire so resilient for so long—its greatest strength was intangible and immune to direct attack. Byzantine strategy was not invented all at once. Its initial elements emerged as a series of improvised responses to the unmanageable threat of Attila’s Huns, the greater-than-expected threat in modern parlance. Ever since the imperial frontiers were first breached on a large scale under emperor Decius (249–251)—in one incident among many, in the year 250 a band of Franks crossed the Rhine and reached all the way to Spain—all manner of remedies had been tried. Some were ephemeral and some were lasting, some remedies were narrow and some were on a grand scale, notably the empire-wide fortifications and military enlargement of Diocletian, and the standing field army of Constantine.16 For a century and a half, these incremental and exclusively military measures were not unsuccessful in protecting core imperial territories from incur sions and territorial invasions, though at great cost to the taxpayers and to frontier populations left unprotected. But the incremental approach reached the end of its road with the arrival of Attila’s Huns. For the specific tactical and operational reasons outlined in Chapter 1, military measures by themselves could no longer offer any hope of success. That is when major strategic innovation occurs, not when it is first possible and perhaps much needed, but when all concerned finally accept that existing practices are bound to fail and that lesser remedies cannot suffice. This finally happened in Constantinople under Theodosios II (408–450),17 when it became clear that no amount of military force within the realm of practicality could stop Attila’s incursions, because they combined attributes previously believed to be mutually exclusive: they were both very fast and also very large. It was therefore useless to intercept them with small forces, no matter how mobile; and they penetrated deep in unpredictable directions, so that it was very hard to intercept them at all—and if the encounter did take place, the Huns could usually outfight their enemies anyway. The outcome of the military impasse was the emergence of a distinctly different strategic approach that was much less reliant on active military strength—it did require strong walls—thereby circumventing the military superiority of Attila and his similar successors. What ensued over the next century, however, was not the straightforward consolidation of the new strategy, but rather a reversal of course and a return to a primarily military approach. With an army greatly strengthened by major tactical innovations learned from the Huns, with good leadership and good fortune, the empire reverted to an offensive military strategy of conquest under Justinian (527–565). Successful war in North Africa and Italy might have continued in spite of accumulating threats on other fronts, had the bubonic plague not arrived to wreck the entire Byzantine state and its army and navy. Recent evidence from the polar ice proves that it was the most lethal pandemic in history till then, and it is certain that the more densely inhabited empire, with its many crowded cities, suffered more than its enemies. By the time Justinian died, the role of force had declined again, and the process continued under his successors, but it was only under Herakleios at the start of the seventh century that the distinctive grand strategy of the Byzantine empire was fully formed—just in time to overcome, if only just, the greatest crisis in its existence. The invention of Byzantine strategy was therefore a long process, which started when Attila and his Huns, with numerous Germanic sub jects, Alans, and assorted camp followers to swell their numbers, threatened to destroy the Roman empire of the east, having already undermined what was left of the western empire. Who were the Huns? It has often been suggested that the Huns (Hunni, Chunni, Hounoi, Ounoi), unknown in the west until about 376 when they attacked the Goths, were arrivals from East Asia, the powerful XiÃngnú (or Hsiung-nu) nomad warriors who greatly troubled Handynasty China. They are described in some detail in a military report (in which the Roman empire is Da Quin, “great China,” in recognition of its comparable civilization) incorporated in book 88 of the monumental dynastic history of the later Han empire, the HòuhànshÄ compiled by the celebrated historian Fàn Yè.18 There is some material evidence that suggests a connection—finds of iron cooking cauldrons of a specific design that can be attributed to both, which would have been used to cook their favorite horse-meat stews, among other things—but there is also chronological evidence that separates them, because the XiÃngnú are last heard of in what is now Mongolia or further east in historic Manchuria, some three centuries before the appearance of the Huns west of the Volga—an excessively long time for even the most leisurely of migrations.19 As for the similarity in the sound of their names, it means nothing. With a monosyllabic language like Chinese, plausible identities and etymologies that meet the requirement of the sound alone “can be constructed from anything and for anything”; one example suffices: the English word typhoon is probably not from da feng (“big” and “wind”) as confidently believed by people who speak both languages, but more likely from Arabic tufan, “storm” by way of Portuguese.20 The powerful Huns who suddenly became known to the Romans around 376 may have had no large origins at all, nor a specific ethnicity. They could have been, and probably were, formed just like many a better-documented warrior “nation,” by a process of ethnogenesis around a fortunate Tungusic, Mongol, or Turkic clan, tribe, or war band. That is, success attracts camp followers to share in the plunder; the resulting numbers add strength that subjects weaker groupings and enslaves individuals, perhaps in large numbers. All additions of whatever sort enlarge the nation, within which individuals may retain separate subjective identities for as long as they desire, but which tends to become increasingly homogeneous with time, at a rate that depends for each assimilating group on the strength of its prior identity, and no doubt on the degree of its prior cultural, somatic, and linguistic similar ity to the emerging common type. Just as collective success makes the nation, failure unmakes it, with disaffiliating groups either reverting to prior identities or embracing a new one, normally that of the more successful nation that arrives on the scene. In our own days, families of varied origins who lived in the Soviet Union acquired a Russian identity when that was the dominant nationality of a seemingly eternal empire, only to revert to prior ethnic identities when the Soviet Union declined even before it actually disintegrated, while some embraced entirely new identities after emigrating to Germany, Israel, or the United States. Hugely controversial when applied to the Goths or more broadly “Germanic” populations, with everything from nineteenth-century Germanism, twentieth-century Nazi mythology, and twenty-firstcentury sociology thrown into the debate, the concept of ethnogenesis was originally introduced to describe much simpler processes in the Eurasian steppes.21 They have no high mountains and remote valleys to shelter the weak, allowing them to preserve their identities, while the shared patterns of pastoralism flatten many differences anyway, so that immediate accommodation to stronger arrivals was followed by assimilation as a matter of course. It was too soon for that process to have formed a common nation when Attila became the supreme ruler of diverse “Huns,” Alans, Goths, Gepids, and assorted others, and his death undid the power of the Huns anyway. But there had already been much cultural integration by his time—the very name Attila is not Hunnish. After summoning proto-Chuvash and Old K’art’velian (less exotically, old Georgian), to scant effect, after dismissing perhaps too hastily the etymologies of Hungarian-nationalist historians: Attila = Atilla = Atil = Turkic “big river” = Volga, the unsurprising conclusion of the most eminent Hunologist is that Attila is Germanic or, if one prefers, Gothic: “little father.”22 There had been some assimilation no doubt, even perhaps of the “youth of Syria” who were captured in a 399 raid through the Caucasus, according to the poet Claudian in his masterpiece of invective against Eutropius—the eunuch consul whom Claudian unfairly blamed for the Hun irruption, in which cities were set on fire and youngsters were dragged off to slavery.23 Less biased sources confirm the raid itself and the enslavements—although one adds the very interesting information that other local youths volunteered to join the Huns to fight in their ranks.24 That should not be a subject of wonder. The Huns were uncouth and pagans too, they had just pillaged, killed, and maimed their fellow citizens, perhaps friends or relatives. But for young men, or veteran soldiers for that matter, to join the Hun columns in a land just devastated by them was to go immediately from the category of the defeated and plundered to the category of the victorious, rich in the plunder loaded on their packhorses and wagons or tied behind them, including women. That was and still is the essential mechanism of ethnogenesis. Success creates nations out of diverse groups, and then expands them by attracting volunteers. Soon enough, such expanding groups cease to be ethnically homogeneous but still preserve their original label, thus becoming pseudo-ethnic entities in greater or lesser degree. Thus after the Huns rose and fell and dispersed into other nations, it was the turn of the Avars to go from prestigious clan to a mighty power in the Balkans with many men, further swollen in numbers by their more numerous Slav subjects.25 After expanding with success, eventually there was a first defeat in 626 before the walls of Constantinople that caused Slavic defections; other defeats further diminished the Avars over time, decisively so in 791 at the hands of Charlemagne himself. After that the Avars became smaller still—small enough to be attacked by the lesser power of the Bulghars, and soon they disintegrated entirely to be absorbed by other nations. By then, their former abode in what had been Roman Pannonia was occupied, as it still is, by the moderately successful Magyars, originally a tribe which became a nation by assimilating similar tribes that adopted its ethnic name, and who mostly still live in Magyarország, the country of the Magyars that only foreigners call Hungary. Given the nature of ethnogenesis, what is formed by its processes of fusion, assimilation, subjection, and capture should be called, not a nation at all, for that does imply a degree of ethnic homogeneity, but rather a “state,” for it is an essentially political entity after all. The only impediment is that some populations, such as the important Pechenegs, remained loosely affiliated tribes, clans, and war bands; they had an identity but not overall chiefs or common institutions, so “nation” they must be after all. Such indeed were also the Huns, a large nation by the time Attila came to rule over them as sole king, endowing them with the essential institutions of a state, and making them far more powerful than before.
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