Download PDF | Warren Treadgold - Byzantium and Its Army, 284-1081 (1998).
268 Pages
Preface
This book was written by accident. While working ona general history of Byzantium, I kept encountering unanswered questions about the Byzantine army, and a surprising amount of evidence for the answers. The subject is so central to Byzantine history that I was unwilling to give it cursory treatment, but reexamining it in any depth in the general book would have exaggerated the army's importance and interrupted the rest of the story. So, as I researched and wrote, I gathered. material that I at first expected to put into an article or articles, but finally decided should be a book of its own, though a short one.
It has been kept short by omitting the period after 1081 and focusing on the main evidence for understanding the army’s role in Byzantine history—chiefly the army's size, organization, and pay. Most of the history of Byzantine warfare is so closely related to other events that I saved my remarks on it for the general history. Even so, plenty of room remains for future studies of the army, soldiers, officers, strategy, and more specialized topics.’ 1 only hope that such work will take account of the questions discussed here, correct me when I am wrong, and in any case try to make progress instead of defending the Principle of Unripe Time by Michael Hendy.? Explaining but writing nothing at
so well diagnosed in Byzantine studi why nothing can be done is always safe and eas all is safer and easier, and equally useful.
Byzantine military history has suffered considerably from a tendency to overvalue modem scholarship at the expense of original sources. Here I cite in my notes only books and articles that I found useful for this subject, and I include in my bibliography only works that I cite. Most previous research on the Byzantine army proved to be of only marginal use here because, whatever its merits, it passed over the evidence for the army’s size, organization, and pay that forms the core of this book. My bibliography also omits most translations and reprints, which readers can find easily enough for themselves in library catalogues. All translations given in the text or notes are my own.
Since the army's development continued unbroken from Roman times to the eleventh century, Byzantine military history has also suffered from the recent tendency to exaggerate the differences between Rome and Byzantium.? Of course the empire changed between the time of Augustus and the various dates when we begin to call it the Byzantine Empire (I use 284; some use 324, 395, 476, $65, 610, or 717), and up to the final fall of Constantinople. But those changes can best be understood by understanding what had come before them, To avoid making an arbitrary distinction between Byzantium and Rome, the forms I use here for Greek names and terms are Latinized (or sometimes Anglicized) ones, not the forms based on Classical Greek that many Byzantinists now favor.’
For funding, I am pleased to thank several institutions that were aware only of supporting my general history but incidentally supported chis book as well: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Earhart Foundation, the Wilbur Foundation, the Florida International University Foundation, and All Souls College, Oxford. I can assure them that the other book is coming, I hope within a year, and that this book has contributed considerably to it.5 I would also like to thank Nicholas Purcell for help in obtaining the illustrations, my cartographer, Helen Sherman, and above all my editor, Paul Psoinos, for his usual exemplary work, which saved me from a number of errors.
For whom is this book meant? For anyone interested in either Byzantium or its army. I have avoided jargon and advanced mathematics, which the modest extent and limited complexity of the evidence hardly require. Sophisticated theoretical models are dangerous at this early stage of basic research, when any complicated argument that leads to an improbable conclusion is likely to be wrong. Yet most of my discussion of the army’s size, organization, and pay is based on evidence that is good by the standards of ancient and medieval history. Although the evidence for state budgets is somewhat less so, and the estimates for population that | have borrowed are quite rough, I am still convinced that they are close enough to reality to be helpful. As for those who think that history is totally subjective, they have no grounds to object if the rest of us prefer our way of thinking to theirs.
Introduction
The Byzantine Empire was almost always ready to fight, and often fought for its life. During much ofits history its provinces were military districts called themes, garrisoned by soldiers and governed by generals. Some two-thirds of its emperors led troops before or after their accession, and acclamation by the army, not coronation or inheritance, was what made a man emperor. The army overthrew twenty-odd rulers, and tried to oust many more. It was large and expensive; but on the whole it served its purpose. It held on to nearly all the empire’s land in the fourth and fifth centuries, conquered half as much again in the sixth, held half the original territory through the fierce invasions of the next two centuries, and by the eleventh century doubled the empire’s eighthcentury size. Despite losing a surprising number of battles, the army succeeded in preserving both itself and Byzantium,
Byzantine historians, while making many generalizations like these, have never written a general book on the army before. One of them has noted that “the study of Byzantine military organization and history would seem to be in its infancy,” and so it is.) Though everyone admits that the army changed a great deal over the years, no one seems quite sure how and when it changed. For every period, doubts remain about how big the army was, how many men were in its various units, how much of it was cavalry, how high its pay and total payroll were, and when, why, and how it received land grants in the themes.
Historians of Rome have made much more progress. To begin with, most of them would accept the axiom, “In any general study of the Roman army in its different phases it is essential to have some notion of its size and how much troops were paid.”? They have reckoned the Roman army at about 290,000 men under Augustus and about 375,000 men under Septimius Severus, with some variations in between.’ Most Roman hi torians agree that every legion had about 5,500 men, only some 120 of them cavalry, while the auxiliary troops had units of 500 and 1,000 men, and the Praetorian Guard 4,500 men under Augustus and 5,000 after Domitian*
Roman historians know that basic pay under Augustus was 225 denarii a year, and they are now fairly sure that after three increases it was 600 denarii under Severus.’ They are coming near to agreeing on the amount of the Roman military budget, one estimating 44 million sesterces (111.25 million denarii) under Augustus and another 472 million sesterces (118 million denarii) in the second century.* Though such figures are still being refined within restricted margins for error, they have already proved valuable for focusing and clarifying discussions of the Roman army and economy.
The reason historians of Byzantium lag behind cannot be a lack of information, because their evidence is, if anything, better than that for the Roman army. In fact, since the Byzantine Empire is just a modern name for the eastern part of the Roman Empire in its later phase, Roman his-
torians have used a good deal of carly Byzantine evidence for the army. Byzantine sources include some important kinds of evidence missing for the earlier Roman period, including detailed military manuals and rank lists, two comprehensive payroll figures, and several totals for the number of soldiers, one of which is iteinized by major units.
Yet what one reads about the Byzantine army in general works is usually vague. While Roman military reforms are always attributed to specific emperors, Byzantine military changes are commonly spoken of as processes of gradual evolution, as if soldiers simply decided for themselves whether they were soldiers or not, what and how they should be paid, where to gather in units, and how those units should be organized. The different corps of the themes seem to take shape gradually over a period of years ending only when they are first mentioned in the sources. Later, when new themes and the units known as the tagmata are found, their soldiers seem to appear from nowhere. Finding the soldiers or the money to pay them was apparently not a problem for the Byzantines, or at least seems not to be an interesting problem for us.
More detailed studies of the army can fill many pages without providing a much clearer picture. Efforts to corroborate and interpret the extensive documentation on the army’s numbers, organization, and pay have been rejected as unduly speculative. At the same time, generalizations about the army’s social and economic role have been made on the basis of a few selected bits of evidence, or without any evidence, or even in defiance of explicit evidence, which the modern generalizations are used to dismiss. Nurtured by such neglect of the sources, the study of the Byzantine army has not only failed to grow beyond its infancy but sometimes appears to be regressing.
For example, in a carefitl and usefull study of the Byzantine reaction to the Arab invasions published in 1976, Ralph-Johannes Lilie accepted and used the detailed figures given by Arab geographers for the size of the army, and concluded that the themes and their military land grants were introduced together in the period between 650 and 680.” But in an article published in 1984 Lilie concluded from an ambiguous passage in the eighth-century lawbook known as the Ecloga that no military lands existed then, so that the themes must have developed gradually over two centuries.® By 1987, realizing that the Byzantine government could not have supported an army nearly as large as the geographers describe without relying on land grants, he declared that no figures in the sources could be used because they were unverifiable, as if his interpretation of the Belaga could be verified.”
Using an approach that seems diametrically opposed to Lilie’s but turns out to have much the same result, Friedhelm Winkelmann has argued that the Arab geographers’ figures must be treated with such respect that they cannot be corrected to make sense of them. Winkelmann argued that four discrepancies in the dozens of numbers the geographers cite, rather than being mistakes made in transmitting a single original source, as everyone had previously assumed, represented real changes in the Byzantine army." This interpretation necessarily leads to the conclusion, which he made no attempt to draw or defend, that the army lost 14,000 men in inexplicable places at a time when the empire was expanding strongly." In a subsequent book on Byzantine ranks, Winkelmann pursued his method of collecting texts while rejecting all “Byzantine or modem schematizing” and any attempts to find “‘a clear arrangement or logic in the system.” But the assumption that the Byzantines used a system of ranks with no internal logic is not only speculative but implausible, and requires rejecting much Byzantine evidence. The method resembles writing a grammar of a language without trying to learn it.
At the other extreme, Speros Vryonis has tried to substantiate his claim that Byzantium had “a money economy in the 7—gth centuries” by an estimate of the payroll of the themes in Asia Minor. He compares a payroll of the Armeniac Theme in 811 with a list of salaries of thematic commanders under Leo VI (r. 886-912), and calculates the total payroll by assuming that the payrolls of the themes were more or less proportional to the salaries of their commanders. But during the intervening hundred years the Armeniac Theme is known to have been divided into seven parts. If Veyonis's assumption means anything, the payroll of the Armeniac Theme in 811 should have been proportional not to the later salary of the commander of the Armeniacs but to the sum of the later salaries of the commanders of the Armeniacs, Charsianum, Paphlagonia, Chaldia, Colonia, Sebastea, and Leontocome, all of which were in the Armeniac Theme in 811. Ifso, the correct total for the payroll of the themes of Asia Minor in 811 would be not 690,300 nomismata, as Vryonis estimates, but just 219,600 nomismata, less than a third as much. Vryonis then tries to corroborate his calculations by treating a payroll captured on the Strymon River in 809 as if it were the payroll of the Theme of Strymon, which appeared almost a century later. Finally, Vryonis uses these conclusions to generalize about the prosperity of Asia Minor two additional centuries later, in the late eleventh century.!® The whole discussion, which repeatedly ignores important and well-documented changes in the army between the seventh and eleventh centuries, is not even speculative, but simply erroneous.
Walter Kaegi has recently managed to combine both arbitrary skepti-
ism and arbitrary speculation. He first rejects as “exaggerated” the total of 150,000 men for the army in 559 given by Agathias, though Agathias was a contemporary and a friend of several officials who should have had access to the correct figure, Then Kaegi, citing no evidence, makes various estimates of his own for parts of the army in 630. These estimates confuse the empire’s field army, to which Agathias must be referring, with the frontier troops, who by Agathias’s time were no longer classed as soldiers. For example, Kaegi estimates 24,000 soldiers in Egypt, where no field army was stationed, and treats the frontier troops in Isauria as if they were part of the field Army of the East, from which they were quite separate. Though Kaegi’s estimates add up to 102,000 to 122,000 men, he arrives at a total between 98,000 and 130,000. But even his lowest figure would be compatible with Agathias, since Kaegi himself states that in 630 the army “was almost certainly smaller than that of Justinian’s reign,” perhaps “by as much as one-third.” Thus a plausible report from a reliable source is rejected on the basis of unsupported modern guesses that actually tend to agree with it."*
John Haldon, who accepts Agathias’s total, rejects the Arab geographers’ figure of 24,000 men for the tagmata in the ninth century. Though this number can be corroborated from official Byzantine documents, Haldon finds it too large to fit his Marxist interpretation of the tagmata as an elite of “praetorians” designed to defend imperial ideology. He writes (with the italics in the original): '®
{I]c is methodologically inadequate simply to analyze the texts which give such figures for their internal and comparative consistency and to assume that whatever figures thus result must be “accurate.” We must also ask whether or not—given what we know of the nature, capacity, and dynamic of the social formation in question . . . —the results of the analysis are feasible. Do they fit in with what is otherwise known—or better, assumed [sic|—about the society in question? If figures are arrived at which do not accord with such assumptions, then what the “evidence” appears to “tell” us must be re-assessed, the evidence itself must pos~ sibly be set aside (even if temporarily) as impossible to interpret in a contextually adequate manner.
Despite its refreshing frankness, this defense of ideology against evidence is unlikely to convince anyone with assumptions different from Haldon’s.
Though these authorities all imply that little more can be made of the evidence for the size and pay of the army than they do, their conclusions are almost entirely incompatible with each other. Lilie argues that Byzantine rank lists are so unreliable that nothing can be deduced from them about the army’s size or pay. Winkelmann argues that the rank lists are so reliable that minor inconsistencies in them are evidence not of errors in the lists but of an illogical system from which nothing can be deduced. While ignoring the details, Vryonis is willing to make almost any deductions from statistics in the sources as long as they suggest that the army payroll was high. Kaegi is unwilling to make any deductions from statistics in the sources, even when his own guesses agree with them. Haldon will allow only deductions that agree with assumptions he has made before consulting the statistics, While Lilie, Kaegi, and Haldon have made some significant contributions to Byzantine military history, their attitudes make any satisfactory overall study of the subject impossible. We can hardly expect to advance much farther as long as we avoid considering the bulk of the evidence.
Yet the main reason that no one has yet tried to study all the evidence on the army is probably not that the evidence is unreliable, so difficult to use that nothing can be said about it, so easy to use that anything can be said about it, inferior to guesswork, or ideologically unpalatable. The real problem is that the army is such an integral part of Byzantine history that a proper study of it requires looking at sources stretching over hundreds of years, in the process disturbing many generalizations that have been formulated without doing such work. At the beginning, with so little previous research to build upon, one is also likely to make mistakes.
I have made my share of them in my earlier work on the Byzantine army in the eighth and ninth centuries, mostly through ignorance of earlier and later evidence. For instance, in computing the military payroll I assumed that the officers called decarchs (“commanders of ten”) commanded ten men besides themselves, though diagrams in a military manual dating from about 600 show decarchs leading ten men including themselves.’ This and two smaller mistakes led me to overestimate the size of the army by over 12,000 men. At the same time I assumed that almost 15,000 oarsmen of the themes were paid separately from the soldiers, because I failed to notice that official documents of the tenth century showed oarsmen and soldiers being paid together.'” Since these mistakes tended to cancel each other out, they gave a total only slightly higher than the recorded amount of the ninth-century military payroll; but since they left out of that payroll sums that I then included elsewhere, I overestimated both the army’s size and its payroll by more than a tenth. The present book, which corrects those errors, probably includes other mistakes that I could have avoided if knew everything.
That one can go wrong using the sources, however, does not demonstrate that something is wrong with the sources. The only means of showing that the evidence is unusable would be to make a thorough and careful effort to use it, and by doing so arrive at conclusions that could be shown to be selfcontradictory, incoherent, impossible, or at least highly unlikely. If, on the other hand, most of the evidence can be shown to be selfconsistent and intelligible, only two possibilities remain, Either most of the evidence is reliable and the conclusions it indicates are essentially correct, or it results from a gigantic practical joke concocted by dozens of Byzantines and Arabs over many centuries working in concert to deceive others about what the army was like.
For the present purpose the subject can be limited somewhat. Here I confine myself to basic questions and to the period between 284, the accession of Diocletian, and 1081, the accession of Alexius I Comnenus, Diocletian, besides being for various reasons the first emperor who can be considered “Byzantine,” began far-reaching changes in the army that shaped it for some time thereafter. Though Alexius I made major changes as well, the main reason for stopping with him is that by ro8r the old army of the themes and tagmata had practically disintegrated, so that the later army was of a kind unlike what had gone before. Since the themes and tagmata are known to have included components that dated from the fourth century, 1081 represented the end of a course of development, if not the end of the Byzantine army. I shall begin with an outline of Byz~ antine military history up to that date.
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