Download PDF | (Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies, 22) Georgios Chatzelis, Jonathan Harris (transl.) - A Tenth-Century Byzantine Military Manual_ The _Sylloge Tacticorum_-Routledge (2017).
184 Pages
A Tenth-Century Byzantine Military Manual: The Sylloge Tacticorum
The Sylloge Tacticorum is a mid-Byzantine example of the literary genre of military manuals or Taktika which stretches back to antiquity. It was one of a number produced during the tenth century CE, a period when the Byzantine empire enjoyed a large measure of success in its wars against its traditional enemy, the Arabs. Compiled to record and preserve military strategies, know-how, and tactics, the manual discusses a wide variety of matters: battle formations, raids, sieges, ambushes, surprise attacks, the treatment of prisoners of war and defectors, distribution of booty, punishment of military offences, how to mount effective espionage, and how to send and receive envoys. There is even advice on the personal qualities required by generals, on how to neutralize enemy horses, and on how to protect the troops against poisoned food. The work culminates in an account of the stratagems employed by great Greek and Roman military commanders of the past. While, like so much of Byzantine literature, the Sylloge often simply reproduces material found in earlier texts, it also preserves a great deal of information about the military tactics being developed by the Byzantine army during the tenth century.
It is the first Byzantine source to record the reappearance of a specialized heavy cavalry (the kataphraktoi) and of a specialized infantry (the menavlatoi) used to repel the attacks of the opposing heavy cavalry. There is also a great deal of information on new infantry and cavalry formations and on the new tactics that required them. This is the first complete translation of the Sylloge into English. It is accompanied by a glossary of the specialised Greek military vocabulary used in the work and by footnotes which explain obscure references and identify the author’s classical and Byzantine sources. An introduction places the work in its historical and literary context and considers some of the questions that have remained unanswered over the centuries, such as its authorship and the date of its composition. Georgios Chatzelis is a PhD student at Royal Holloway University of London, UK. Jonathan Harris is Professor of the History of Byzantium at Royal Holloway University of London, UK.
Acknowledgements
The translators would like to express their thanks to Andy Antzara, Charalambos Dendrinos, David Gwynn, Eirene Harvalia-Crook, and Chrysa Zizopoulou for their help, advice, and information and to Michael Greenwood of Routledge and John Smedley of Ashgate for facilitating the acceptance and publication of the volume. When it came to the production stage, they were fortunate to have the assistance of Sheri Sipka and her colleagues at Apex CoVantage whose hard work and eye for detail smoothed the path to the press. Their greatest debt is to John Haldon, whose careful reading of the translation and introduction yielded numerous and extremely valuable corrections, suggestions, and improvements. Lastly, they would like to record their appreciation to the late Frank Trombley (1947–2015) who, by supervising Georgios Chatzelis’s MA dissertation, helped to lay the foundations of this translation
The Sylloge Tacticorum, or Συλλογή Τακτικών (hereafter ST), is a tenth-century Byzantine handbook of military tactics, written in Greek. Its title translates as A Compilation of Tactics and it belongs to the literary genre of military handbooks or Taktika, which stretches back to antiquity. The earliest extant example is from the fourth century BCE, the work of Aeneas the Tactician, a Greek author who wrote on how to withstand a siege. Subsequent handbooks were produced by Asclepiodotus (fl. 40 CE), Onasander (fl. 50 CE), Aelian Tacticus (fl. 120 CE), and Polyaenus (fl. 165 CE), all of whom wrote in Greek. Such works continued to be produced until the late sixth or early seventh century, when the influential military treatise known as the Strategikon of Emperor Maurice (582–602 CE) appeared (hereafter MS).1 Thereafter there was a gap of some centuries until political and cultural developments prompted the revival of the genre in the ninth- and tenth-century Byzantine empire. The historical context It is likely that the ST was compiled in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, probably at some point during the first half of the tenth century CE. It was a period when the Byzantine empire was ruled by the Macedonian dynasty, which had been established by Emperor Basil I (867– 86). Basil’s sons Leo VI (886–912) and Alexander (912–13), and his grandson, Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (913–59), continued the line which was to endure until 1056. Dynastic continuity was threatened in 919, however, when Romanos Lekapenos, the admiral of the Byzantine fleet, seized power in Constantinople. Crowned emperor as Romanos I (920–44) the following year, he ruled alongside the legitimate emperor Constantine VII, who was still only a child. Doubtless Romanos hoped to substitute his own family as Byzantium’s ruling dynasty in due course and as a step towards that he arranged the marriage of Constantine VII to his own daughter Helena. Romanos’s hopes were thwarted when he was overthrown and exiled by his sons in 944. Constantine VII, who was now grown up, was then able to reassert himself, oust the Lekapenos family, and resume rule as sole emperor from 945 until his death in 959. The dynastic uncertainty in Constantinople in the early tenth century made the Byzantine empire vulnerable to attack. The greatest threat did not come from the traditional enemy, the Abbasid Caliphate.
The border between Christian Byzantium and the Islamic caliphate in eastern Asia Minor had long since been stabilised so that Arab-Byzantine warfare now largely took the form of annual raids across the border which aimed only to seize plunder and captives before withdrawing as quickly as possible. Apart from that, defence, fortification, and consolidation were the main preoccupations of both sides and from 720 to the third decade of the tenth century the eastern frontier remained more or less unchanged.2 Rather, the challenge came from the west, from Byzantium’s other long-standing enemy, the Bulgars. Taking advantage of Byzantine weakness during the minority of Constantine VII, the Bulgar khan Symeon (893–927) expanded his territory into Thrace and Macedonia, wiped out a Byzantine army at the battle of Achelous in 917, and twice brought his forces to the very walls of Constantinople. Those fortifications and some astute diplomacy held the Bulgars at bay until Symeon’s sudden death in 927. Thereafter a treaty and marriage alliance with Symeon’s successor Peter (927–69) preserved the peace between Byzantium and Bulgaria for forty years. Relieved from the threat in the west, the Byzantines were free to pursue a more aggressive strategy on the eastern frontier, taking advantage of the increasing weakness of the Abbasid caliphate. Their initial aim seems to have been to neutralise the bases from which Arab raids into Asia Minor had been launched for centuries: the towns of Melitene and Theodosioupolis. The strategic fortresses of Marash, Samosata, and alHadath were also repeatedly attacked. During the reign of Romanos I, these campaigns were led by the leading Byzantine general of the day, John Kourkouas, who held the office of the domestic of the scholae. 3 The first attack took place in 926, when Kourkouas succeeded in breaking into Melitene for a short time before being repulsed. The following year, Samosata was captured and sacked and Theodosioupolis was briefly captured in around 930.4 The response of the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir (908–32) to these attacks was to create autonomous or semi-autonomous districts on the frontier so that defence could be organised locally. The cities of Tarsus and Melitene, which had had their own autonomous emirs for years, possibly served as a model for that practice, which was now extended to northern Mesopotamia where the Hamdanid family provided a series of militarily very able emirs.5 Even so Melitene finally fell to John Kourkouas in 934. For the next ten years, Kourkouas was able to mount a series of successful raids into Arab territory, reaching as far as Edessa in 944.
The Byzantine army had not ventured as far east as that for three centuries.6 Constantine VII continued Romanos I’s policy after 945. Following an unsuccessful attempt to retake the island of Crete in 949, Constantine focused his entire resources on the eastern frontier. The Byzantines pushed further and further into the frontier zone every year, although they often found that their attacks were parried by the formidable Hamdanid emir, Sayf ad-Dawla (945–67). Cities and key fortresses such as Marash and al-Hadath were repeatedly stormed and raids were mounted into the heart of the Hamdanid emirate. Cities which had been taken several times in the past were now definitively annexed: Theodosioupolis in 949 and Samosata in 958.7 These successes set the stage for the even more dramatic Byzantine expansion in the east that was to take place during the second half of the tenth century.8 The literary context The changing military situation on the eastern frontier provided much of the impetus for the production of military handbooks such as the ST. There was, however, a literary and cultural dimension to these works as well. The ST was the product of the Byzantine literary revival known as the Macedonian renaissance. The term is misleading because the revival long predated the accession of the Macedonian dynasty in 867 and signs of it can already be detected during the 780s.9 As the direct threat to the Byzantine empire’s existence faded, literacy and education began to revive. Unlike in the contemporary Christian west, where learning was the monopoly of the Church, in Byzantium education was available at a very high level to lay people and an important step in making it more widely accessible was taken in 857 when the University of Constantinople was refounded in the Magnaura palace with a view to providing educated administrators for the imperial bureaucracy.10 The main concern of this educational and literary revival was not so much the development of new curricula or the production of new and original work but rather the teaching and preservation of the literature of the past, especially that written in classical Greek in ancient and Hellenistic times. The curriculum at the new university
involved the reading, appreciation, and imitation of ancient authors such as Homer, Plato, Euclid, and Lucian and the late ninth and tenth centuries were marked by a sudden increase in manuscript production of the works of classical authors such as these, which were now in demand from wealthy patrons. Another way in which the legacy of the past was preserved and disseminated was through the compilation of handbooks. These were not only reference manuals which described contemporary practices but also compilations of ancient wisdom. An early example was the Kletorologion of Philotheos, completed in 899, which listed the ranks and ceremonial of the Byzantine court in Constantinople.11 The court of Constantine VII was a centre for the production of such works. The emperor himself was a well-educated man and one of his primary concerns, according to a contemporary, was bringing new life to what had been lost in the course of time.12 As part of that concern, Constantine oversaw the compilation of a number of handbooks which preserved information about the empire’s administrative structure, its ceremonial, its history, its diplomacy, agricultural methods, and even its veterinary practices. It was during this period, and with the same end in view, that the first Byzantine military handbooks since the early seventh century were produced, doubtless in conscious imitation of the military handbooks of antiquity. The earliest that survives is the Peri Strategias of Syrianos Magistros (hereafter PS) which seems to date from the ninth century, rather from the sixth as was once thought.13 The Taktika, which is attributed to Emperor Leo VI (hereafter LT) and which was completed in the early tenth century, is a compilation of military practices, many of them drawn from ancient authorities.
The Praecepta Militaria, which is attributed to the emperor Nikephoros II Phokas (963–9), belongs to the second half of the tenth century. As a literary production, the ST belongs to this milieu, although the exact date at which it was compiled is somewhat problematic and will be discussed below. The scope and significance of the text The ST, as it has come down to us, consists of 102 chapters which can be divided in three clear sections. The first section comprises chapters 1 to 56, where a wide variety of military matters is discussed including generalship, sieges, battle formations, marching formations, division of booty, defence against enemy raids, the conduct of raids, mounting of ambushes, pitching camp, posting of officers, espionage, and the conclusion of truces. The second section comprises chapters 57 to 75, which contain information on what might be termed ‘war by other means’: how to protect the army against poisoned food or drink, the preparation of poisonous arrows, the use of flammable mixtures, and how to bring down enemy horses. The third and final section comprises chapters 76 to 102, all of which contain anecdotes about stratagems practised by ancient Greek and Roman military commanders. The ST is a typical product of the Macedonian renaissance in that much of its material is recycled from previous works. Some passages are clearly derived from earlier Byzantine works such as the LT, others from classical writers such as Onasander. Nevertheless, it does reflect the particular conditions and concerns of the time of its composition, the early tenth century, especially the different type of army that the new strategic goals and aggressive policy on the eastern frontier would require. In the past, when defence against annual Arab raids had been the priority, the backbone of the Byzantine army had been the stratiotai, soldiers who held land in return for military service in the provinces known as themata. There had also been a small permanent force under the direct command of the emperor, known as the tagmata. In the new conditions, the professional soldiers of the tagmata became much more prominent than the part-time ones of the themata. A strong, disciplined, specialised infantry and cavalry would be essential to support and protect each other during the march into hostile territory as well as during battles and sieges. It became more and more important to stand and fight in a disciplined formation. That had never been the major priority of the armies of the themata, whose main tactic had been to shadow Arab raiding parties, picking off stragglers and avoiding pitched battles.
In response to the opportunities for attacks into Arab territory in the early tenth century, the Byzantine army evolved new tactics, fighting in a hollow square formation, where the infantry served as a mobile operation base for the cavalry. Units became more specialised with an army typically comprising heavy, light, and medium infantry; menavlatoi; kataphraktoi; lancers; and horse-archers. In contrast to earlier military manuals such as the PS and the LT, the ST is the first treatise to record the use of these kinds of tactics.14 The date and authorship of the text The dating of the ST is problematic even though, unusually for a Byzantine text, it gives a relatively precise time for its own composition in the title: the year 6412 since the Creation, which works out to 903–4 CE. For a long time, this date was universally accepted. The German classical scholar Friedrich Haase (1808–67) even used it to argue that the ST
pre-dated the LT. 15 Later generations were increasingly sceptical, partly because the ST reads so differently from the PS and the LT and contains much material that is not found in them. It has also been pointed out that the oldest surviving manuscript of the work contains the Hippiatrica and medical treatises that are attributed to Constantine VII so that some scholars have concluded that the ST may well have been composed at the same time as these works, perhaps around 950.16 There is, however, currently no consensus on the dating issue. Taxiarchis Kolias has rejected the thesis that the ST dates from the reign of Constantine VII. He argues instead that the material of the treatise fits better into the context of the first half of the tenth century, rather than the second. According to Kolias, the appearance of the menavlatoi and the kataphraktoi cannot be used to support a dating around 950, as their appearance in the ST could just as well be used in the opposite way, namely to suggest that these forms of armament appeared earlier in the tenth century.17 John Haldon has also questioned matters of dating and tradition, considering whether the text was originally written in the time of Leo VI but was later revised with the addition of material that seems to come from the 950s.18 At the far end of the spectrum, it has even been argued that the ST should be dated to the late tenth century or the beginning of the eleventh.19 Current research is seeking to redate the work to the period 920–44.20 The starting point for this argument is methodology proposed by Gilbert Dagron (1932–2015) to determine the time at which a military treatise was written. Dagron identified references to military innovations and technology, attention paid to enemy tactics, and the administrative and socio-political context as the three main determinants.21 The internal evidence of the ST provides us with certain information which, on the basis of Dagron’s criteria, strongly suggests the second to fourth decades of the tenth century.
As far as the first is concerned, the Sylloge preserves a number of innovations which seem to belong to the middle point of evolution between the Taktika of Leo VI and the Praecepta Militaria of Nikephoros II Phokas. The many similarities with LT, together with the gradual evolution in tactics and technology, seem to fit with a time which was still close to the reign of Leo VI, but long enough after to allow for these changes to have taken place. What is more, the frequent offensives which occurred for the first time in this period seem to provide a very appropriate context which justifies these developments. As regards the second criterion, the Sylloge does not provide much new information about enemy tactics but many of the Byzantine innovations that it records correspond with developments in the Arab armies which took place between 900 and 936, and could indeed be seen as a response to them. Last but not least, the Sylloge describes a political and administrative context
which fits best with the first half of the tenth century. The military hierarchy and ranks are almost identical to those of Leo VI, with just a few changes which are by no means as radical as those recorded from the reign of Constantine VII, around 950. Thus the reign of Romanos I Lekapenos appears to be the most attractive period for the dating of the text. The issue of authorship is closely related to that of the date, for the title of the ST specifically attributes the work to Emperor Leo VI. Again, the information in the title was accepted at face value for many years. In his monumental history of Byzantine literature, published in 1887, Karl Krumbacher (1856–1909) treated the ST as an additional work to the LT. 22 Yet from an early stage there were those who were not convinced, again mainly because the ST and the LT have such different styles and material. One suggestion was that the work might have been written by Leo’s brother and briefly reigning successor, Alexander.23 Current research is investigating the possibility that the ST was written by or under the auspices of Romanos I Lekapenos but that the attribution was changed during the reign of Constantine VII, who hated his father-in-law for his intrusion into the rights of the Macedonian dynasty. The substitution of Leo’s name was a kind of damnatio memoriae, designed to withhold from Romanos the credit for the achievements of his reign.24 Even if Romanos’s original authorship or sponsorship of the text is accepted, it seems clear that more than one author had a hand in its creation. After its initial composition, it would seem that the ST was revised and edited at some later stage before it was copied into the version that now exists.
The relatively late date of the oldest surviving manuscript and the fact that only one group of manuscripts survives, however, make it impossible to be certain how the original version of the ST would have looked. Sources of the text Much of the information given by the author of the ST is clearly derived from earlier texts. Previous Byzantine military manuals were quarried extensively, including the MS, the PS, and the LT. Moreover, as was typical of Byzantine literature of this period, the ST incorporates a large amount of material derived from ancient Greek literature produced before 200 CE, including the works of Isocrates, Onasander, Aelian Tacticus, and the work known as the Hypothesis, a Byzantine treatise consisting of excerpts from Polyaenus. It is likely too that the author of the ST used some intermediate sources that are now no longer extant, although there has been some debate on this issue. Some students of the text have envisaged two such lost sources, labelled Corpus Perditum and Tactica Perdita, while others accept only one.25 At present, the most that can be said is that parts of the ST are clearly derived from a lost source or sources but a great deal of the earlier material reworked by its author can be identified and, where this is possible, it is noted in the footnotes to the translation.26 The manuscript The Greek text of the ST is preserved in three extant manuscripts.
The oldest, Laurentianus Plut. 75.6 (hereafter L), is in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, a codex measuring 190 by 270 mm and consisting of 278 folios in total. It is a later copy of the work, most probably dating to the fourteenth or early fifteenth century, several hundred years after the ST was first composed. The earliest evidence for the existence of this manuscript dates from 1491. It was one of a number of items which the Greek émigré scholar Janus Laskaris (1444/5–1534) brought back from Corfu to Italy when he was on the second of two visits to Greece which he undertook in search of Greek manuscripts for his patron, the Florentine statesman, Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92). The manuscript did not directly go to Lorenzo’s collection, however, as it was not until 1508 that it appears in the inventory of guardians of the Laurenziana Library as number 381. It is also recorded on folio 108v of the so-called list of Hannover, which is a list of works and authors featuring in the books that Laskaris brought to Florence when he returned from his travels. It has remained in Florence ever since.27 The other two manuscripts are more recent copies. Bernensis 97, in the Swiss National Library in Bern, is a direct copy of L and dates from the sixteenth century. Parisinus ms grec 2446, in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, is in turn a direct copy of the Bernensis and dates from the seventeenth century. It is therefore L that provides the primary authority for the text. It was copied by two different scribes. The first wrote from the beginning up to the end of chapter 67, whereupon a second hand continued the work up to the end.28 Daniele Bianconi has suggested that two scribes from the circle of the Byzantine scholar Nikephoros Gregoras (c.1291–c.1360), Krateros and another known as ‘Anonymous G’, may have taken part in the creation of L and that Krateros may even have been one of the copyists of the ST. 29 Nevertheless, the exact identification of the hands which copied the ST remains elusive. L contains a number of other works besides the ST. Folios 1–71 contain medical treatises, some of which are dedicated to Emperor Constantine VII. Folios 116–24 preserve a series of military laws and martial
hymns, which both have since been edited and published.30 After that, folios 124–247 are devoted the Hippiatrica, a veterinary treatise, which was probably another of the handbooks written under the auspices of Constantine VII.31 The remaining folios (247–75) are filled with various treatises, mostly quite brief, some of which are dedicated to medicine or geography.32 The ST occupies folios 72r–116r and a table of contents (pinax) with the title of each chapter appearing on folios 72r–73v. However, the table of contents continues over to folios 73v–74v to cover not only the contents of the ST, but also those of the other two works that follow in the manuscript. That would suggest that the table of contents was not initially part of the ST, but that it was added at a later date, when the ST was included in a corpus dedicated to military matters that included all three works, and thus the pinax served as a general table of contents for the whole codex.33 L clearly does not preserve the work in its entirety as originally written. In the first place, chapters 68 to 73 and half of chapter 74 are listed in the table of contents but missing in the text. Second, in spite the fact that the second title of the treatise states that it will cover strategic deeds of ancient men in twenty-eight chapters, only twenty-seven appear in the treatise, suggesting that one chapter has been lost.34 The first scribe, whoever he was, made a note about the missing chapters in the margins of L, reporting that they were already missing from the manuscript that he had copied. He attempted to fill in some of the missing chapters in the margin of the manuscript, using a lost source. Unfortunately, in spite of the fact that the table of contents preserved the original titles, the missing chapters were filled up in the wrong order. To add to the confusion, one of the added chapters (71) does not correspond with any of the original chapters of the ST, as found in the table of contents. Also missing from all three surviving manuscripts are the illustrations. According to the author of the ST, the manual originally included two diagrams of infantry formations.35
The first one seems to have depicted an array consisting exclusively of infantry, while the second one probably illustrated a battle order in which the infantry were drawn up in a square and the cavalry was stationed inside the formation. A small figure of the second diagram is preserved in the lower right margin of folio 95r in L. It bears little resemblance to surviving diagrams in other military treatises such as the MS, so it is probably not a direct copy of the original one. More likely it was designed by one of the later copyists to clarify the guidelines found in the text and to make up for the absence of the original. The loss of the diagrams is particularly regrettable.
Editions and translations of the text The first modern scholar to draw attention to the existence of the ST was Angelo-Maria Bandini (1726–1803), the librarian of the Laurenziana. He included L and the various works preserved in it in the catalogue of the library’s manuscripts which he published in 1764–70. He did not publish the text of the ST, however, but merely described some of its contents.36 The first edition of the ST appeared in 1854 when it was included in the two-volume work of the German philologist, Hermann Köchly (1815–76). This edition was unsatisfactory in many ways. It only included a selection of the ST’s chapters (31–5, 38–9, 41–3, and 53–5) and the text was based not on L but on the later copy, Bernensis 97, to which Köchly had easy access.37 Nevertheless, for some years Köchly’s was the only available edition and in 1863 Jacques-Paul Migne (1800–75) included it in the Patrologia Graeca with the addition of a facing Latin translation.38 Subsequently three partial editions appeared. In 1887, Johannes Melber, together with the Swiss classicist Eduard Wölfflin (1831–1908), published an edition of Polyaenus. Their volume also included those chapters of the ST (76–102) which ultimately derive from Polyaenus, the text being based on L.39 In 1917, Rudolph (or Reszö) Vári included some previously unedited chapters of the ST as a sort of a critical apparatus, to accompany his edition of the LT, in order to compare and contrast the information given there. Some of his quoted sections from the ST are no more than a word or a sentence long, however.40 The last partial edition appeared in 1932, when Jean-René Vieillefond edited chapters 57 to 75 as part of his study of the work of Julius Africanus, one of the possible sources of the ST.
He also added a useful study regarding the sources and the date of the ST. 41 The first and only complete edition of the ST, based on L, was published by Alphonse Dain (1896–1964) in 1938. He included all the chapters of the manual in his edition, as well as the chapters that were added by the copyists in the margins of the manuscript. It is worth noting here that Dain was one of the most influential scholars to have shaped our knowledge of the ST and of Byzantine military manuals in general. He was the author of numerous related books on military manuals from antiquity up to the eleventh century, and investigated the thorny issues of lost works, adaptations, and interpolations. His work is also of vital importance to the study of manuscripts that preserve military treatises either as prototypes or as later copies. Although now outdated in some respects, his books and articles still remain invaluable and among the standard works of reference. A monumental article, published posthumously with Jules-Albert de Foucault, provides a synopsis of a lifetime of scholarship.42
As regards translations, some parts of the ST have been rendered into modern European languages. In 1939, Dain produced a French translation of the five chapters that the copyist of L inserted into the margins to complete the missing part of the ST and in 1994 Everett Wheeler published the first partial English translation, which included chapters 76 to 102. Wheeler’s translation was based on the text of Wölfflin and Melber rather than that of Dain but an appendix with the different readings was included.43 This book presents the first complete translation into English and it is based on Dain’s text.
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