Download PDF | The Byzantine Art Of War, By Michael J. Decker (Author), Westholme Publishing, 2016.
274 Pages
INTRODUCTION
ON May 29,1453, the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II led his 80,000-man army through the breach in the walls of the ancient capital of eastern Rome, Constantinople, where many of the 7,000 defenders lay dead. The dramatic assault, made possible by one of the earliest and most impressive displays of gunpowder artillery, punched through the hitherto impregnable fortifications, and led to the death of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, who perished in the assault; his body was never found.
Greek legend holds that at the end of days, Constantine will return and rise from the floor of the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to lead the Greek nation to final victory and the restoration of God's Roman Empire on earth—the Christian Byzantine state.
In the spring of 1453, though, the noose that finally strangled the last vestiges of Greek independent political life from the Balkans was long in the tightening. Since 1356 the Ottoman Turks had made Edirne, in eastern Thrace, their capital and steadily strengthened their hold on the empire's former European lands. The Byzantines had been fatally weakened by the sacking of the capital of Constantinople two and half centuries prior in 1204 by the Christian crusaders from the West. This date marks the effective end of Byzantium as a major military and pan-Mediterranean power; after the sack of the capital, Latin warlords and their Venetian allies partitioned the empire while disparate Byzantine rulers regrouped and attempted to mount an effective resistance.
Either date, 1204 or 1453, is arguably an appropriate one for marking the end of the Roman Empire. Although for centuries prior to either conquest the vast majority of the empire's inhabitants spoke Greek, and we refer to them as Byzantines, they called themselves Romans and viewed their empire as the state once ruled by Augustus or Trajan. After all, they were the direct inheritors of the Roman Empire's territory in the eastern Mediterranean, continued its administrative and legal framework without interruption, and, most important for our purposes, relied on the military apparatus that evolved from the old Roman legionary armies of antiquity.
The most striking thing about the Byzantine military, and Byzantine society at large, was its remarkable longevity. These medieval Romans, with their Greek speech and Christian faith, clung tenaciously to their culture in the face of constant internal and external pressures. Warfare, although never embraced by the majority of Byzantines as a virtue in the way that many western peoples viewed it, was nonetheless an essential component of the Byzantine experience. Foreign enemies were constantly at the door and they came from all directions, especially at the end of the empire's existence, when westerners threatened the shrinking borders of the state as much as did eastern and northern peoples.
It is impossible to find anything like the pax Romana of the emperor Augustus and his successors, when Rome presided over one of the more tranquil periods of European history, having slaughtered most serious foes and bloodily dispatched of entire races in the process. However it was won, no parallel time of quietude ever descended on the Byzantine realm. Although the citizens of the empire probably fully expected a period of peace following the end of the brutal, apocalyptic struggle with Persia in the 620s, their hopes were sorely dashed when the ravenous armies of Arabia descended on the eastern provinces and rent them from the imperial grasp forever. In a matter of decades the Arab foes and bearers of the kernel of a new religion, Islam, were battering at the gates of Constantinople itself, and the empire had lost most of its territory to the Arabs or other invaders.
The survival of the embattled state and its much-reduced armed forces is one of the miracles of history. Far outclassed in terms of manpower and wealth and subjected to military challengers on multiple fronts, the Roman Empire of Byzantium nevertheless survived the assaults they received in the Dark Ages and emerged with a transformed state and society. The army, for which the bureaucracy and its tax system existed, both absorbed the blows of its enemies and dealt more shocks through rebellions and internal discord that marked the seventh through ninth centuries. Despite the upheavals, societal trauma, and the loss of so much territory and manpower, the Byzantine army adapted and fought on.
By the time the Macedonian dynasty, the greatest of the medieval empire, came to power in the form of the usurper Basil I (867—86) the Byzantines were poised to embark on a two centuries-long program of expansion. Their reformed armies pushed the frontier into the borderlands of the caliph and reestablished Byzantium as the predominant power in the Mediterranean world. No state in European history absorbed such losses, survived, and revived to such prominence. At the center of this revival was the army, and the collective action of society, emperors, commanders, and soldiery make for one of the more compelling stories in world history.
In the pages that follow, I provide an overview of the basics of the medieval Roman army, including organization, logistics, armament, tactics, and strategy as well as delve into how these were employed. Although it is doubtful that the Byzantines ever thought of war in terms of grand strategy or professed military doctrines based on perceived universal experiences in war, one can clearly detect patterns to their approach to warfare with the benefit of hindsight. I call this the Byzantine Art of War.
THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN for a nonspecialist audience and students of military history and has been spurred by my own interest in the subject and by the enthusiasm for which my lectures on the topic at the University of South Florida have been received. In its crafting I am greatly indebted to the work of outstanding scholars the world over, especially John Haldon, who has pioneered much work on the Byzantine army, Timothy Dawson, Walter Kaegi, James Howard-Johnston, Taxiarches Kolias, Eric McGeer, Philip Rance, Dennis Sullivan, Warren Treadgold, and a host of other accomplished academics too numerous to mention.
The reader wishing to know more will find the references necessary to pursue specific topics at their leisure—for this reason, and because I anticipate an audience whose primary language is English, I have endeavored to supply as many English-language secondary sources and translations as possible. I reference these in the notes. Original language sources may be found in the Abbreviations and Bibliography. Finally, in an effort to produce a text as unencumbered as possible, I have limited diacritics in transliterating foreignlanguage names, terms, and sources and restricted the number of notes. I trust that those who wish to explore the subject further will find the bibliography an adequate gateway into a vast and growing body of literature on Byzantine warfare.
ONE, HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
EARLY PERIOD (FOURTH TO SEVENTH CENTURIES)
After six years of construction, the shining new capital city of Constantinople was consecrated on May 11, 330. By the time the city was completed, its founder, the emperor Constantine, was a hardy and hale emperor fifty-eight years old. Constantine had built a magnificent metropolis on the narrow straits that divided Europe from Asia and was the gateway into the vast hinterland of Anatolia and the Near East. Roman builders largely demolished and remodeled the old Greek fishing town on the site, Byzantium, into a city worthy of being capital of the greatest empire on earth. Thus, for many modern historians, the year 330 marks the beginning of the “Byzantine” or “East Roman” Empire.
For their part, the Romans gathered on that spring day on the shores of the Bosphoros had no sense of a break with the past, rather they viewed with satisfaction the achievements and continued power of eternal Rome under their vigorous leader. The inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire called themselves Romans until the destruction of their state by the Ottoman Turks in the spring of 1453.
Constantine, like many of his successors, would find that the new capital was convenient for campaigns northward, across the Danube and against the Sarmatians and Goths. In 322, prior to his becoming sole emperor, Constantine attacked the Iranian Sarmatian tribes north of the river and won a major victory, claiming the conquest of Sarmatia, Sarmatia Devicta on coins issued in 323-24. Both the Sarmatians and Germanic Goths provided troops to Licinius, the emperor in the east and the main rival of Constantine.
In 332, Constantine ordered the old bridge of the emperor Trajan to be restored across the Danube, a symbolic act intended to convey to the neighboring peoples that the Romans would return to Dacia, which had been conquered by Trajan but abandoned by Constantine advanced with his Sarmatian allies against the tribal confederation that the Romans called Goths, a disparate mix of people of uncertain origin with a core Germanic element whose exact complexion and identity still remain open to debate. The Goths lived in a broad belt of territory across eastern Europe, namely present-day Romania eastward to the southern Ukraine and the Crimean steppe. Since the third century Gothic tribesmen had raided Roman territory and from nearly the same period some served in the Roman army.
Despite the Goths' considerable numbers and military capacity, Constantine's forces defeated those of their king Ariaric, whose people suffered tremendously from the war and the cold—one source states that 100,000 died. While exaggerated, the figure underscores the bloody contests between Romans and Goths along the northern frontier. The Gothic clans accepted Roman overlordship and remained at peace until the end of their rule. In the closing years of his reign, Constantine again campaigned against the Sarmatians,
resettling thousands of them in Thrace, Scythia, Italy, and Macedonia.t Sothorough was the emperor's pacification of the Danubian frontier that no disturbances are known during the remainder of his rule.
Constantinople provided a valuable strategic location for wars in the east, whence the emperor could march against the most serious threat—the Persian Empire ruled by the Sasanian dynasty, whose ascent to power a century prior had led to increasingly serious hostilities and major Roman setbacks, most notably the collapse of the Roman eastern defenses in the 250s. For centuries, the Romans had battled Iranian peoples in the east, first the Parthians, and then their Sasanian successors. Even at its height the empire proved incapable of digesting Mesopotamia—Hadrian disgorged the conquests of Trajan and beat a hasty retreat and this in spite of the dominance of Roman arms and the
discomfiture of the Parthian enemy. These facts betray the lack of a Roman answer for their eastern question: they could rarely win decisive victory over the civilized power on their Syrian border and in those rare instances when they did so, they seemed to prefer a Parthian or Persian enemy to their own hegemony east of the Tigris and Euphrates.
The nadir of Roman power in the east came in 260 when the Roman emperor Valerian confidently advanced east to meet the upstart Iranians in Roman Mesopotamia only to meet disaster at the Battle of Edessa (modern Urfa in southeast Turkey) and fall prisoner to the mighty Sasanian “King of Kings” (Shahanshah) Shapur I (ca. 240—ca. 270). The death of Shapur I around 270 led to internal bickering among the Persians that allowed the Romans to seize the initiative. During his brief reign (282-83) the emperor Carus marched in force through Assyria and down the Tigris to southern Mesopotamia and the Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon (about 35 kilometers south of modern Baghdad).
This type of campaign, which saw the Roman army march deep into Mesopotamia against the Sasanian capital, was to be repeated several times in later centuries, and in each later excursion there is a sense of déja vu— once the Romans got there they did not seem to know what to do about the place. Even if they did capture Ctesiphon, as allegedly did Galerius in 298, they did not stay. Perhaps it was the size of the city (really an agglomeration of settlements clustered on the Tigris and along various canal branches), the stubbornness of Persian defenses, or the difficulty of maneuver in a complex, conurbated landscape cluttered with canals.
Perhaps it was the unmercifully hot and pestilential land that stymied the Romans. Equally likely, the propaganda value of having reached Ctesiphon far outweighed the difficulties of capturing or administering an occupation. In July or August 283, the sudden death of Carus forced the Romans to withdraw under their new emperor, Numerian—one among many such failures. The youthful Numerian himself died in November 284, when the former duke (dux) of Moesia on the Danube, Diocles, assumed the imperial power and became Diocletian.
Diocletian stitched the Roman Empire whole after a half century (235-84) of military anarchy, economic trauma, and civil unrest. He made far-reaching changes in the civil administration, the military, and attempted to stabilize the economy. Although not revolutionary (Carinus had associated relatives in his rule as a fellow Augustus and Caesar), Diocletian formulated a bold solution to the succession crises and attendant chaos that had gripped the state in recent decades. By 293 he established a scheme based on the “rule of four” (Tetrarchy).
The Tetrarchic system divided the empire into two zones governed by an emperor (Augustus) each with a subordinate (Caesar) who would take power once the senior emperors stepped aside voluntarily. As Constantine, among others, would prove, this system was effective only if men were willing to give up power, something that has occurred only rarely in history. In military matters, the most important changes were a considerable expansion of the army. During the tumultuous years of the military anarchy, the ceaseless civil and foreign wars had led to critical degrading of the empire's military forces. Diocletian inherited an army of about 389,000 men and, through a great conscription program, nearly doubled its size to somewhere over a half million men.* There was an increase in the proportion of cavalry units in order to provide more offensive capabilities and match horsed units of their northern and eastern opponents.
Our best evidence suggests that Diocletian and Constantine molded a Roman army considerably different from their predecessors. The aim of this program was to stabilize the frontiers and to ensure internal security which had been shattered in previous decades. Despite their bellicosity and propaganda, the Romans entertained no serious intention of annexing lands beyond their great river boundaries—the Rhine, Danube, Tigris, and Euphrates. But as the third century unfolded the policing of these permeable frontiers had become increasingly problematic, with multiple threats posed by barbarians who had become gradually more sophisticated and militarily capable. Roman frontier management with its frequent punitive raids, the infrequent large-scale invasion, and the complexities of trade and recruitment from among the tribes and neighbors who were often the target of aggression was both stimulated by and reacted to the shifting conditions of the vast borderlands. Diocletian's determination to keep the barbarians out is best viewed today in the massive fortifications of the east at places like Lejjun in Jordan and Resafa in Syria. In these places, rather standardized, large-scale legionary encampments embedded frontier troops in a line of defense. The troops that garrisoned these forts were called limitanei, border troops or frontier guardsmen who were regular soldiers and not, as some have speculated, a kind of militia. The frontier forces were strong enough to handle internal policing and local disturbances; in Syria the aggressors were often Bedouin tribal raiders. In the case of full-scale invasion, the frontier fortresses were meant to hold the line long enough for the arrival of the recently created mobile field army (comitatus) comprised of elite cavalry and infantry units initially drawn from loyal and seasoned legions, especially on the Danube frontier. The limitanei also formed part of the expeditionary armies on major campaigns, but without backing from the mobile imperial field army frontier garrisons lacked strategic initiative. When the enemy arrived in force, as did the Persians at Nisibis in 337 and the Goths on the Danube in 376, they faced strongly manned hard points that they could not risk bypassing.
In 336 war broke out with Persia. Constantine sent east his nineteen-year-old son, the Caesar Constantius, to prepare for the brewing conflict. Constantius had mixed success while his father spent the year 337 preparing for landing a knockout blow against the Sasanians that he hoped would deliver peace to the Roman eastern flank. But the emperor was never to undertake the campaign. Constantine fell ill around Easter of 337 and traveled across the Marmara straits to take the hot waters at Helenopolis in Bithynia (modern Hersek). Sensing his end was near, he summoned his clergy and sought baptism, which had been postponed by the emperor following the common Christian belief of the day that the sacrament cleansed one of all sins committed to that point. On May 22, 337, the emperor died and with him hopes of punishing the Sasanians.
Constantine had divided the empire among his three sons: Constantine II, Constans I, and Constantius II. Constantine II ruled the territories in the far west including Spain, Gaul, and Britain. Constans II ruled the central portion including Italy and North Africa, while the east fell to Constantius (337-61). In addition, their cousins Dalmatius and Hannibalianus served as Caesars. It is difficult to conceive how Constantine envisioned such a brew of power sharing would work in practice, given that he had himself single-handedly overturned the Tetrarchy. In any case, the situation did not long survive him. In 337, Dalmatius and Hannibalianus were butchered along with other family members at the instigation of Constantius. Constantine IIT met his end in an ambush in Aquileia in 340 and his elder brother Constans in 350 fell victim to the rebel Magnentius. This dynastic strife distracted Constantius from his task of defending the eastern frontier against the Sasanians who had aggressively renewed the war.
Constantius proved a vigorous, if yeoman, commander. His loss of Amida (359) was a terrible blow to Roman prestige and underscored Persian might, but throughout his reign Constantius fought aggressively to defend Roman interests in the east. After the bloodletting of the succession was over, the young emperor faced a Persian siege of the city of Nisibis (today Nusaybin, Syria) on the upper Mesopotamian plain, an ancient city that was the linchpin of Roman defenses in the region. In either 337 or 338, the Persians battered the city in a grueling siege led by the young, vigorous King of Kings Shapur II (307—79) himself. Pitted against the shah was the local Syrian bishop of the city, Jacob of Nisibis, who organized the defenses and bolstered the morale of the citizens. Confronted over seventy days with a stubborn defense that confounded assaults using mobile towers and efforts to undermine the walls, Persian engineers dammed the local river Mygdonius and diverted it, unleashing the power of the pent-up waters against the city walls, one portion of which gave way beneath the rush of the torrent. The Persians delayed their attack as the waters had turned the approach to the breach into a quagmire. The next morning, the Sasanians were shocked to find the breach filled with rubble to the height of the previous wall and defended by the soldiers and citizens of Nisibis, urged on by their omnipresent bishop. Shapur's last assault failed and the Persians were forced to decamp.
The rest of the war between Constantius and Shapur is muddled in our sources; it seems that there were numerous large-scale clashes—rare for the day —between the Romans and Persians, including two more major sieges of Nisibis and two encounters at the salient of Singara, in what is now western Iraq. Probably in the 340s, Singara fell to the Sasanians. In most of these battles, the Romans were bested, though in their assault on Nisibis in 346, the Persians failed to take the town. Their third attempt, in 350, saw the Sasanians mount a colossal four-month effort in which they once again flooded the plain around the city with waters diverted from the Mygdonius River. According to one account, they assaulted the city on boats—surely an amazing sight in what was once the midst of the desert steppe—but were repulsed by the valiant efforts of the
defenders.* The war ground to a draw.
An uneasy calm settled between the two antagonists since internal rebellions against Constantius made it difficult to devote men and material to fighting the Sasanians. The emperor appointed his cousin Gallus to command of the eastern front in 351. The young Caesar, perhaps twenty-five at the time, was effective militarily but unpopular among the local elites at Antioch; he was executed in 354 for alleged treason. More than by Gallus's abilities, the Sasanians were largely restrained from offensive operations because of conflict on their own eastern front in Central Asia with the Chionites, a group of uncertain origin, but probably Iranian-speakers whom Shapur defeated and absorbed into his armies. Roman writers call the Chionites “Huns,” but their ethnic makeup and way of life are unknown. Whatever the case, Shapur integrated large numbers of Chionites into his army and again turned his eye westward after peace negotiations broke down. By 359, the shah with his new Chionite troops under their king Grumbates probed Roman defenses along the Euphrates, bypassing Nisibis and seeking a passage across the flooded river. A high-level Roman deserter, who had fallen into debt and could not pay his taxes, the protector Antoninus, guided the Persians. Antoninus was well placed to be a spy, likely with wide-ranging access to imperial intelligence including the order of battle of the eastern armies and their logistical situation. His information was vital to Shapur, who on account of it attacked Amida, which fell after a bitter siege of seventy-three days of fighting vividly depicted by the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, including a night attack by the Romans that nearly overwhelmed the Persian camp and the final herculean efforts of the Sasanians to carry their siege mounds to the walls.2 Shapur sacked the city and deported its inhabitants to Khuzestan in what is now southwest Iran.
In the wake of the serious defeat, Constantius reshuffled his high command. More critically, he ordered his cousin Julian, the Caesar in the west, to dispatch Gallic troops to reinforce the east. Julian refused this order on the grounds that his troops were mutinous and declined to serve away from home. Instead, the Gallic legions proclaimed Julian emperor, whereupon they happily marched east to confront Constantius. Upon hearing the news of his cousin's rebellion, Constantius was apoplectic—his rage, coupled with the strain of years of campaigning and the heavy defeat at Amida—killed him, probably of an embolism, November 3, 361, in Cilicia. Julian, now uncontested, donned the imperial purple and immediately set about reversing what he saw as the pillars of the decadent house of Constantine: a devout pagan, Julian offered sacrifices personally to the old gods, ordered the temples reopened, and actively legislated against Christians. He was careful, however, to avoid outright persecution so as not to create more martyrs. Nevertheless, the animosity Christians held against the apostate emperor who had departed the true faith and had risen to power to destroy it knew no bounds—one Christian bishop dreamed that he saw a vision of the popular military saint, Merkourios, spearing the emperor.
Julian was an effective leader and, despite his rather frail frame and awkward manner, a fine soldier. Unlike most commanders, Julian personally fought in engagements, an act that won him widespread admiration among his soldiers, but betrayed a recklessness that would be his undoing. Perhaps his greatest strength was his zeal and devotion to the idea of Roman greatness as well as a personal identification with Alexander. Along with the desire to avenge recent defeats, these ideals drove the emperor to strike a decisive blow against the Persians, something that neither Constantine nor Constantius could do. A victory by the pagan emperor over the feared Sasanians would further undermine the Christian faith that Constantine and his sons had thrust upon the empire. In March 363 Julian left Antioch at the head of a large army that moved down the banks of the Euphrates, accompanied by a river supply fleet. Julian ordered the Roman client king of Armenia, Arsaces, to form a second invasion column and invade from the north. The emperor's forces made good speed and encountered only sporadic resistance on the way to Ctesiphon, which Roman forces reached in April. After defeating the garrison of Ctesiphon and sensing that the Persians were in his hands, Julian rebuffed Shapur's peace overtures, but he was unable to force his way into the Sasanian capital. Instead, as the weather grew hotter and Persian sabotage of the irrigation complex around the sprawling metropolis of Ctesiphon created a fetid quagmire, the Roman high command made the fateful decision to burn the supply fleet and strike inland.
Shapur II shadowed the Roman army as Julian moved northward along the banks of the Diyala River, then the Tigris on his way back to Syria. The Sasanians practiced scorched earth and launched constant harassing attacks that turned the march into a running battle across northern Mesoptamia. Exhausted, suffering from heat, thirst, and starvation, the Roman forces were ground down by desert combat. On June 26, the emperor fought in a major engagement against a large Persian force. Because of the searing heat he rushed to battle without his armor. A Sasanian cavalryman thrust him through with his spear and Julian died in his tent the same day.
The army elected Jovian emperor, the compromise choice selected not on merit but because he posed no threat to imperial elites. By this time, disaster threatened to overwhelm the entire Roman field army, caught as it was far from home and facing a potent enemy who was starving the Romans to death. Jovian proposed peace, and the terms that he accepted were devastating. Nisibis, the powerful Roman bridgehead and thorn in the side of the Persians, was unceremoniously handed over along with the territorial gains made long before by Diocletian. The strategic balance tipped toward the Sasanians but Jovian did not live long beyond the ink drying on the disastrous treaty; the emperor died in western Asia Minor in the winter of 364. His successor, Valentinian (364-75), chose his brother Valens (364—78) as co-emperor in March 364. Like many military men in the late antique empire, the brothers were Pannonians (a region on the central Danube) and among the last effective soldier-emperors of late antiquity. Valentinian assumed control of affairs in the west and Valens governed the eastern half of the state from Constantinople. In 364 the brothers divided the army into eastern and western forces and then left one another to stand on their own resources. Valens marched east and was in the central Anatolian city of Caesarea in Cappadocia when news came of the rebellion of Prokopios, a male relative of Julian and, as a member of the house of Constantine, a serious rival to the upstart emperor. Divisions among the conspirators led to the defeat and execution of Prokopios, who had Gothic military support.
With the east quiet for the moment, Valens turned his attention to punishing the Goths. In a three-year war he humbled the Gothic tribes north of the Danube. When the war wound down in 370 concessions on both sides led to relative quiet in the north for the next five years and established an equilibrium. Neither side could foresee the maelstrom that would destroy the Gothic polity and drive the tribes into a headlong collision with Rome.
Like many nomadic powers, the Huns appeared to have spontaneously generated in the vast steppe that swelled from the Black Sea to China. In the famous and oft-quoted fourth-century description of Ammianus Marcellinus, they were half-beasts who stitched together garments from the skins of field mice and who led a life of savagery forever on horseback. The truth is obscured and cannot be recovered; probably there was a much longer time horizon of Gothic-Hun contact and warfare than Ammianus leads us to believe.2 Huns, whose ethnic origin is widely debated and uncertain, were most probably a mixed group of steppe warriors of Turkic language.2 Nomad armies commonly integrate the conquered into their ranks and by the fifth century, the Huns included Chinese, Germanic, and Iranian elements along with the original Hun groups.
The Huns burst onto the European scene in 375 and smashed through the Gothic communities stretching from the Crimea to Transylvania, forcing the flight of many to the banks of the Danube where they sought to enter Roman territory as terrified refugees. Valens, who esteemed the Goths as good troops who had long provided serviceable recruits for Rome as well as formidable enemies, allowed the thousands of beleaguered people to cross the river. Once the Goths were out of immediate danger in Roman territory, the Romans struggled to maintain order and neglected to provide supplies to the mass of people whose precise numbers are unknown. When posing the question Ammianus, quoting the Roman poet Virgil, noted one might as well ask how many grains of sand were in the Libyan desert, so great was the host.2
Roman officials took advantage of the precarious state of the Goths and demanded high prices for food, exchanging dogs for children and treating their guests with contempt. After a riot in which Romans and Goths battled while Gothic and Roman leaders feasted at the city of Marcianople (today Devnya, Bulgaria) the Goths rose in revolt. They were led by Fritigern, the tribal head of a group of Goths known as the Tervingi. Other Goths from Roman army units in Thrace joined Fritigern, who disavowed the agreement with the Romans and began pillaging. A sharp encounter with local Roman troops ended in the Goths victorious and rampaging throughout Thrace.
By 377 Valens was alarmed—he ceased hostilities against Persia and prepared a strike against the Goths who ran amok in Thrace and Moesia. Gothic elements had formed themselves into a keen fighting force, well equipped with captured Roman arms and well provisioned. By 378, the Goths were hemmed in by troops from the western half of the empire under the emperor Gratian (367— 83), son of Valentinian, who moved to assist his uncle Valens in the east. Though Gratian's advance forces advised Valens to wait for the full western field army to arrive before giving battle, the eastern emperor was impatient for a major victory that would bring glory and legitimacy to him and give the Romans a free hand to deal with their eastern question. Fritigern's army moved past Adrianople to the northeast and awaited reinforcements from the Greutungi Goths to whom he appealed as allies. Valens had been assured by his scouts that the Goths numbered only ten thousand, while the eastern field army was probably three times larger. Fritigern sued for peace, but Valens rebuffed his overtures and attacked the Gothic position on August 9, 378. Only the brief account of Ammianus survives, and due to the fact he was not an eyewitness and more concerned with the events surrounding the battle, we have only the faintestview of what happened that momentous day.2
The Greutungi made a sudden appearance in the nick of time to reinforce Fritigern's Tervingi. These reinforcements put the Goths close to numerical parity with the Romans. The Goths took up position on a hill, surrounding a wagon laager in which their families sheltered. The Gothic cavalry were away from the laager, burning the fields to hinder the Roman advance through the morning hours. The Romans arrived in mid-afternoon in the heat of the day in some disorder. Roman elite troops, too eager for battle, advanced before the rest of the army was fully ready and were easily repulsed, while the Roman cavalry on the left advanced to the laager beyond the support of their infantry where they were surrounded by the Gothic cavalry and infantry and routed. The Goths now attacked the Roman left flank and pressed the Roman ranks in a vice. By late afternoon the Roman infantry broke and fled and the slaughter was on. Valens himself was killed and his body never found. Adrianople was a disaster that rivaled Cannae in its significance, with two-thirds of the eastern army killed. The arrival of Gratian did little to halt the losses, as the young western emperor was reluctant to shed his own troops' blood in a risky confrontation with a menacing foe. Gratian recalled a disgraced senior commander, the Spaniard Theodosius, out of forced retirement and elevated him to Augustus. The western emperor provided some men and materiel for the unnerving task of staunching the open wound of the Gothic War.
Although many Goths attacked the Romans after Adrianople, some were induced to serve the empire. Increasingly, it was Gothic troops recruited into imperial service (labeled here as elsewhere by historians “Byzantines” or “East Romans” and later on “Greeks” due to the primary language of the empire) who formed the rank-and-file and officer corps of the eastern army. The Byzantines struggled to integrate their Gothic troops and failed to blend them fully into imperial society. The increasing “barbarization” of the army and officer corps, which endured for about a century from Adrianople, paralyzed the eastern state at a critical time and contributed to eastern passiveness and ineffectiveness against the Huns and other enemies. Fortunately, although there were some sporadic hostilities, the fifth century was generally quiet on the Persian front. This calm was due primarily to conditions within Sasanian Persia, whom the Hunnic Hephthalites had humbled when they killed the Sasanian Shah Peroz and captured his son, Kavad. Kavad ascended the throne in 488 and consolidated his authority against formidable internal enemies, then turned against Byzantium. The war of 502-6 marked the first hostilities between the empires for sixty years. Along with Hephthalite troops, Kavad captured the major Byzantine fortress cities of Theodosiopolis, Martyropolis, and Amida while Arab auxiliaries under the fearsome Arab chief Nu'man pillaged Mesopotamia. Roman bungling and a divided command led to the war dragging on until 506.
By 527, Kavad (488-531) and the Sasanians once again waged war against the Romans. This time war erupted because of disputes over the Caucasus, coupled with the alleged refusal of the emperor Justin I (518-27) to adopt Kavad's son and heir, Kosrow (531—79). From 527-31, Byzantines and Persians fought along the fortified frontiers of Armenia and in a series of lightning raids executed by Mundhir, the Arab king and Sasanian proxy. Mundhir's opponent, the Roman-sponsored antagonist the Arab Harith, fought a series of bitter contests against the Persian Arabs. During these wars, both sides won and lost many battles. The general effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the soldiery and their commanders, along with strategic and logistical limitations, made these wars of attrition in which neither side could (or perhaps wished) to deal a knockout blow against the other. For all their propaganda and history of hostility, these ancient states appreciated the known and valued their ability to negotiate and manage their biggest enemies. When Kavad died in 531, Kosrow negotiated the “Endless Peace” out of necessity to deal with internal problems. Justinian (527-65) used the breathing room he gained to embark on recovering former Roman lands in the western Mediterranean. By the end of his reign he had recovered part of North Africa, southern Spain, and Italy.
The terrible consequences of all-out warfare between Byzantium and Persia unfolded in the first decades of the seventh century. When the emperor Maurice was assassinated in 602, his Sasanian counterpart, Kosrow II (590-628) (whom the Romans had helped regain his throne during a civil war of 590-91), warred against Byzantium, ostensibly to avenge the killing of Maurice. In complexion, Kosrow II's war was remarkably different than past encounters. While at first the Sasanians seem not to have intended to permanently occupy Byzantine lands, the total collapse of Roman resistance opened the possibility and the Sasanians quickly adapted their strategy.
The Roman-Persian War of 602—28 was an epochal struggle, which one historian has aptly called “the last great war of antiquity.”42 The two powers ceased sparring and now grappled for supremacy. The coup launched by the usurper Phokas (602-10) divided the Byzantine command and _ sparked resistance to the regime, which faced invasion from the east and internal rebellion. From the outset things went badly for the Romans; by 609-10 their defenses in Syria and Upper Mesopotamia collapsed, allowing Persian forces access to the Anatolian plateau and Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. These eastern provinces formed the rich, weakly defended underbelly of the Byzantine state where a combination of military defeat, religious dissension, and civil war made them low-hanging fruit plucked by Sasanian hands. In 609 the Byzantine governor of far-away Carthage in Byzantine North Africa equipped a fleet and land army in revolt against the emperor Phokas. In 610, the fleet arrived at Constantinople and deposed Phokas whereupon Heraclius, son of the African governor, ascended to the throne.
Heraclius's initial efforts against the Persians were disastrous. His heavy losses near Antioch in 613 led to the Sasanian conquest of Damascus in the same year, and in 614 the Persians sacked the holy city of Jerusalem, carrying away the “True Cross,” the holiest of relics and a potent symbol of the discomfiture of the Byzantines and Christianity. By 619 Alexandria was betrayed to the Persians, and Egypt, the bread basket and most populous region in the empire, fell into Sasanian hands. Backed by the church and employing a highly religiously charged propaganda, Heraclius retrained and reformed the shattered Byzantine army. In 624, the emperor struck into Persian Armenia and Azerbaijan and sacked several cities there, then frightened off Kosrow with a bold strike against the shah and his army. When Kosrow fled, his army disintegrated and left the Byzantines to plunder extensively. In the following year, the Persians dispatched three armies against the Byzantines, but Heraclius outmaneuvered these forces and defeated them in turn. The year 626 brought the climax of the war. The Byzantines drew into alliance with the powerful Western Turk empire that lay astride the north and east of the Persian frontier. A twopronged Roman-Turk offensive was a strategic nightmare for the Sasanians. For their part, the Persians allied with the new power north of the Danube, the nomadic Avar khaganate, and sought to envelop the Roman state. Persian troops ranged against the great city of Constantinople across the Bosphoros straits to the east, while Avar troops besieged the city. The Persians’ allies were to ferry across the Sasanian troops to complete the siege force, but the Byzantine fleet thwarted these efforts. In the meantime, the emperor Heraclius, who had made a colossal gamble in leaving his capital on its own to face the ponderous weight of Persian attack, renewed the offensive in the east. Buoyed by Turkic steppe nomads and Christian allies from among the principalities of the Caucasus, the emperor boldly drove into the heart of the Sasanian Empire. By January 627 the Romans ravaged the fertile heart of Persian Mesopotamia, scarring the land black with their burning.
Inside the capital, disaffected elements of higher Persian society acted to salvage the state and staged a coup on February 23. The Shahanshah was first imprisoned, then executed after his son Kavad II was crowned. The young Kavad lasted less than a year and the Persians descended into dynastic and political chaos. By 630, the Sasanian generalissimo, Shahrvaraz, had taken control, but the fate of both Near Eastern empires was about to be sealed.
About the same year that Shahrvaraz ascended the Sasanian throne and the Romans continued their return to their recently regained provinces, a charismatic Arabian preacher named Muhammad seized his home city of Mecca. Born about 570 and having had a series of revelations beginning around 610, the best guess of historians is that Muhammad had been actively preaching and recruiting converts for the two decades prior to 630. The identity forged by the reception of Muhammad's message fostered a confident and aggressive spirit among the early community of believers who followed the nascent religion of Islam. The core of Muslim believers, the Companions (Arabic sahabi, pl. sahaba) carried the small body of new co-religionists to the conquest of the Arabian Peninsula and thence to Syria. The invasion of Roman Syria was a natural arena in which to expand; the Arabs of Mecca had extensive trade and property networks there, and the Romans were weak from decades of fighting.
The early Arab armies owed their success in part to Arab warfare experiences in the peninsula and in service of the great powers, in part to religious inspiration and apocalyptic vision, and in part to greed. Despite the decades of warfare, most areas remained relatively unscathed—their territories had only rarely, if ever, been traversed by armies or witnessed sustained sieges or battles, and their populous cities and numerous inhabitants promised rich pickings.
The first Arab attacks on Byzantine Syria had, in fact, preceded the concluding acts of the Persian War. The minor skirmish at Mu'ta, in what is today Jordan, ended in a Byzantine victory and was immortalized in Muslim memory as a heroic eo in which several prominent early Arabian heroes became martyrs./* It was also a battle in which appears Khalid b. alWalid, outstanding commander and critical leader of the great conquests. When the higher commanders were slain, leadership fell to Khalid, and he is credited with executing the withdrawal of the Muslim forces. As with all of the Muslim conquests, our sources are much later, often piecemeal, or even contradictory, and any reconstruction set forth is our best available interpretation.
When Muhammad died in 632, the Muslim community chose a caliph to be the spiritual and political head of the body. The Muslim invasion of Syria gathered momentum during the reign of Muhammad's successor, the caliph Abu Bakr (ca. 632-34). In 634, the Arab commander Amr b. al-As led a small Muslim army against Gaza, where he defeated the local Byzantine garrison. Probably in the same year, Khalid b. al-Walid led a raiding party from Iraq across the Syrian desert along the fringes of Roman occupation. Khalid's Muslims attacked the Ghassanid Arabs on the Christian holy feast of Easter. The Ghassanids were Arab Christian allies of the Byzantines and march wardens of the empire's desert frontiers. Khalid's attack on the Ghassanids led to the surrender of the important nearby city of Damascus, whose citizens capitulated and agreed to pay tax in exchange for Muslim protection.“
In summer of 634, the Arabs again encountered Byzantine forces, this time at Ajnadayn./4 We have no contemporary information regarding the battle, but we know that the Muslims were once more victorious. The remnants of the Byzantine forces withdrew to Damascus and there faced a Muslim siege. The relief forces that Heraclius sent from his command center of Homs were defeated en route. The details provided of the Muslim siege of Damascus reflect later traditions which claim that one half of the city surrendered peacefully while the other half was stormed. Such incongruities in the sources allow us to only sketch the events of the conquest. What is generally agreed is that Heraclius mobilized a sizable force and marched them south to relieve Muslim pressure on Damascus and to end the Arab threat. It is doubtful at this time that the Byzantines understood that they were dealing with a new religious movement, nor could they recognize any difference between the Muslim Arabs and other Arab groups, of whom the Romans were often disdainful. Clearly by 635—36 the Byzantine high command comprehended that provincial forces had failed utterly in containing the threat and that decisive action was needed.
In 636 Heraclius, now old and ailing, dispatched a large army, variously estimated at 15,000—20,000 strong. They assembled in the Golan Heights, in the traditional pasturelands of their Ghassanid Arab allies. The Muslims prepared to meet the enemy field army with a force that seems to have been slightly larger and was commanded by prominent believers, including Abu Ubayda, Khalid b. al-Walid, Amr b. al-As, and Yazid b. Abi Sufyan, the brother of the future caliph Mu'awiya. No contemporary accounts of the subsequent Battle of Yarmuk survive; therefore, reconstructing the course of individual battles or campaigns cannot be done with confidence.!2 Though the details are opaque, the outcome of the conflict is clear—the Arab army won a crushing victory that ejected Heraclius and the Byzantines from Syria. Roman forces regrouped behind the Taurus Mountains on the Anatolian plateau as they had done during the dark years of the recent Sasanian wars. The emperor must have looked on his forces with a mix of emotions as he recalled the days spent in the highlands drilling his warriors to battle readiness before their epic encounter with the Persians more than a decade previously. But the emperor, now a sexagenarian, and his empire were exhausted by the decades-long war with Persia. Men and resources were Strained to the limit and morale was catastrophically low. The imperial authorities were neither nimble enough nor capable enough to resist the determined and skilled Muslim advance. City after city fell.
The rich land of Syria was not the only prize sought by the Muslims. In 639 Amr b. al-As led a raid across the Sinai to Pelusium, the gateway to Egypt, which fell in early 640. Muslim reinforcements spearheaded a full-scale invasion of Egypt. The key fortress of Babylon on the Nile (near modern Cairo) fell in 640, and Alexandria surrendered the following year. By 647 the Muslims were on the offensive against Byzantine North Africa, where they crushed the local commander Gregory at Sbeitla in a battle that broke the backbone of Byzantine resistance. The first Arab civil war (656-61) that ended with the establishment of Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan (661-80) as caliph afforded the Romans in Africa some breathing space in which to regroup. Despite the promising start, Africa did not fall easily—the conquest would not be complete until the Byzantines were driven from Carthage in 698.
DARK AGES AND MIDDLE PERIOD (SEVENTH TO TWELFTH CENTURIES)
Further east, Heraclius and his successors managed to withdraw the remnants of their shattered armies to Anatolia where the strategic triage included settling soldiers in the countryside in scattered garrisons and holding the line along the Taurus. This highland frontier (Map 4), roughly the same that Heraclius had managed to maintain in the dark days of the Persian War, was constantly pressured by the new Umayyad caliphate. On numerous occasions Muslim flying columns penetrated the plateau, and from an early date raids became a regular feature of life in the uplands of Byzantine Anatolia. Like the later English chevauchées of the Hundred Years' War, Muslim raids were generally fast-moving plundering forays that aimed to keep the empire off-balance and weaken its social and economic fabric. However, once Mu'awiya constituted aMuslim fleet, the Mediterranean became a battleground where the empire fought for its life as the Islamic tide rose to the capital itself. The caliph launched a vast expeditionary army against Constantinople and established an operational base in the Sea of Marmara in 674. This sustained series of attacks were only defeated in 678 by determined defenders aided by the early use of a new weapon: “Greek fire”, a naptha-based incendiary (see Chapter 8). In 717 the Muslims renewed their efforts to destroy the Byzantine state with a massive attack on the capital and once more they suffered heavy losses and defeat. Such was the weakness of the Byzantine army that the victorious emperor, Leo III (717-41), made no effort to go on the offensive.
Although they could not know it at the time, the empire had faced the worst of the storm. Yet the disruption of these military encounters was total. Cities shrank and virtually disappeared. The money economy faltered to near collapse. Literary society and high culture declined. Never before had an empire absorbed such unremitting punishment at the hands of an enemy, lost so much territory, and remained intact. Over the dark decades at the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century, the Byzantines adapted themselves to the new situation: they were much poorer in money and men than their enemy. The collapse of cities and the fiscal structure forced extreme economies on the army.
The exact complexion of these changes remains in debate, but it seems that troops were settled in the countryside and provided with the barest of wages. Initially five regional army commands (Maps 4 and 5) were constituted from the remnants of the armies settled in the district—thus the billeting lands of the old Army of the East (Anatole) came to be called the Anatolik. These regional commands were called thema, a word of unknown origin. The thematic army was both qualitatively and quantitatively the inferior of its late Roman predecessor. Equipment and training suffered, but the army remained a professional fighting force with recognizable units and regular drill. The Dark Age thematic army was a defensive force led by commanders who rarely risked pitched battle. Instead, Byzantine commanders preferred to harass and wear out enemies who already had to traverse great distances from their bases in Syria to reach the populated places of the plateau. The low intensity conflict of raid and counter-raid, punctuated by the occasional large-scale imperial or Arab expedition, became the norm from the later seventh through the ninth century.
During this period, the frontier dwellers on the Anatolian plateau of Byzantium developed a military caste of families whose fortunes were linked to war. By 750, the eastern Roman state was recovering somewhat demographically and economically—the first glimmers of a revival may be seen during the reign of Constantine V (741-75) who survived a bitter revolt by several themes. Around 743, Constantine formed a permanent body of professional cavalry regiments (tagmata) stationed in and near the capital where they could quickly muster to the emperor's aid. The tagmata provided a more professional, loyal, and disciplined core on campaign than the provincial armies of the themes. After decades of fitful defense, in 745 Constantine led the tagmata and thematic troops against the caliphate while the latter was hobbled by the Third Civil War.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق