Download PDF | Walter Emil Kaegi - Byzantine military unrest, 471-843_ An interpretation-Adolf M. Hakkert (1981).
383 Pages
FOREWORD
I began drafting some basic ideas for this book in the summer of 1962 while a graduate student in history at Harvard University. I have benefited in particular from my two years as a Fellow at the Harvard University Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and also from my subsequent stimulating visits there. I should mention my special gratitude for the encouragement by its late Director of Studies, Professor Romilly Jenkins. Any historical study of the chronological dimensions of the present one necessarily owes many thanks to the published researches of earlier scholars who are too numerous to list here.
Of equal magnitude is my debt to innumerable colleagues at many institutions who have given me assistance and advice in the course of conversations and correspondence. Without the library facilities of Dumbarton Oaks, the Joseph Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago, Widener Library of Harvard, Firestone Library of Princeton University, the Newberry Library, and the library of the University of Wisconsin, I could not have written this work. I also wish to express my appreciation to the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin at Madison, which awarded me a fellowship in 1967-1968, and the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, which granted me a Membership in 1970-1971.
Grants from the Social Sciences Division, the College, and the Center for Balkan and Slavic Studies of the University of Chicago, and from the Penrose Fund of American Philosophical Society have supported my relevant travels and manuscript expenses. I have also benefited from facilities of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society and I wish to thank its director, Professor Morris Janowitz, for making them available to me.
I have read various portions of certain chapters of this work at scholarly meetings and at different universities. I have profited from the subsequent comments, criticisms, and encouragement of my audience. I wish to thank my colleague Eric Cochrane and Professors John V. Fine, Jr., Cyril Mango, and Arnaldo Momigliano for reading and criticizing the manuscript, although I am entirely responsible for any deficiencies in it. I owe special thanks to my wife Louise, who contributed considerable editorial assistance and patience to the termination of this project. Finally, I thank Mr. A. Darryl Beck, who carefully typed the manuscript.
Walter Emil Kaegi, Jr. Chicago
INTRODUCTION
The subject of this study, Byzantine military unrest, has long fascinated scholars. Thus Du Cange, in his prefatory letter to Colbert at the beginning of his Historia Byzantina, observed: Although, to be sure, as we have said, it scarcely can be denied that distinguished men have ruled the Roman Empire, one must, even so, certainly concede that many have attained that praise for themselves not so much by merit as by the benefit of a compliant fortune; others, in turn, by robberies, fires, murders, and every kind of crime were so raised to the summit of the highest rank rather as tyrants than as those who always took life with dignity that they might have legitimate successors. For this reason since no basis of worth or birth holds forth, we read randomly that men of any sort at all have indiscriminately climbed to the throne so that even from the lowest class some are able to be counted among them.
Certainly due to such a casual succession to the Empire and by reason of that succession nothing whatever was accomplished so much as the repeated rise of various factions of nobles and internal wars. In the tumult of these wars, while they were fighting it out among themselves for the reward of their crimes, so to speak, and while they were giving heed to this one thing — how they might defend their evilly gotten authority against those like themselves — foreign princes invaded the more famous and richer provinces. Thus, finally in an unhappy end, seeing that it had formerly sat as judge over nearly all the world and its rule had long held sway, the Roman nation, almost extinguished and destroyed, passed shamefully away into the power of the barbarians.!
Charles Diehl likewise remarked that ‘‘few states have been more frequently troubled by military revolts and by the insurrections of provincial governors than was the Byzantine Empire.’”?
The Byzantinist still encounters the pejorative use of the term ‘“‘Byzantine”’ as well as allegations and questions about Byzantine conspiracies and murky conflicts. Yet within the specialty during the last three-quarters of acentury, in an effort to encourage a justifiable appreciation of positive aspects of Byzantine society and civilization, scholars have tended to avoid study of the empire’s indubitable internal violence.
Military history, moreover, has not been a fashionable subject of scholarly inquiry in recent years. Despite frequent allusions to the subject, systematic study of military intervention in the political affairs of states has only begun. Methodologies, frames of reference, and conclusions are still being formulated. Yet an understanding of warfare and military history is a prerequisite for an accurate appreciation of a state and its society. Warfare and military history are distinct subjects in themselves, not mere reflections of intellectual, social, or economic conditions and developments. In other words, warfare, strategy, and tactics as well as military institutions warrant reassessment for their own effect upon the broader course of events. Some scholars who are not Byzantinists argue for more contemporary study of the neglected dimensions of war, including the general problems of internal wars and the possibility that internal violence and threats of violence may even have some positive value for a state.?
Recent civil-military research concentrates upon the modern or contemporary period, and its scholars stress that their generalizations do not necessarily apply to the pre-modern period. Indeed, an unwritten assumption among many students of Antiquity and the Middle Ages is the uselessness of modern social science for these earlier periods. Yet extensive reading in contemporary literature on military politics and civil-military relations stimulates awareness of certain problems and topics and may help to sharpen the focus and raise useful questions for the understanding of the Byzantine Empire’s internal military condition.
In fact, some scholars of modern civil-military relations have shown interest in or adopted assumptions about the political role of the Roman army and that of the Byzantine army.‘ Yet most of them insist that their theories apply only to the modern period. This study does not constitute an attempt to fit Late Roman and Byzantine materials into any modern framework of analysis or to use modern terminology systematically to describe Byzantine civil-military relations, although it occasionally draws useful concepts from modern research.°
First, some definitions, because nomenclature presents serious problems. Some historians would refer to this state under study as ‘“‘Eastern Roman’ or “‘Late Roman’”’ in the fourth century while almost all would call it ‘““Byzantine”’ by the ninth century. There is no reason to review scholarly controversies over the appropriate term for the empire whose capital was Constantinople. The term “‘Eastern Roman”’ is used for the fourth through sixth centuries and the term ‘‘Byzantine”’ thereafter, although to emphasize continuity between Roman and Byzantine institutions the term ‘‘Romano-Byzantine”’ is occasionally used. This last term, it is hoped, will cause the reader no difficulties; ‘‘Romano-Byzantine”’ simply emphasizes a longer continuity than does “‘Byzantine.”’ Similarly, forms of military unrest include seditions or conspiracies, revolts, and the expression of grievances, real or imaginary, by officers or by soldiers, at Constantinople, in the provinces, or on the frontiers.
The terms “conspiracy” and “sedition” refer to two kinds of intervention: ‘“‘conspiracy’’ denotes the conscious combination of men, often generals or their subordinate officers, for a coup d’état or a revolt in the field (court intrigues, however, are not the primary object of study here), and ‘‘sedition” refers to a mutiny, tumult, voicing of dissension, or the threat of it by rank and file soldiers. S.E. Finer satisfactorily defines “‘military intervention in politics’ as “the armed forces’ constrained substitution of their own policies and/or their persons, for those of the recognised civilian authorities.’’®
The primary sources employ the terms otdo.c and tugavvic for “insurrection” or “‘revolt,”’ although tugavvic could have additional connotations. d&tagia or “disorder’’ is frequently used to denote a “revolt.’’ The words ovvwpooia, patoia, and éx.povAeuua are used for ‘‘conspiracy”’, dxoopta for military “‘indiscipline’’ (the opposite of which is evVxoopnta or “good discipline’). The sources do not pretend to use terminology in any technical sense; they engage in elegant variation for literary purposes. Their loose usage makes any attempt at serious content analysis dubious.
The sources for the subject are not ideal. There are no memoirs, diaries, or detailed descriptions of the background of soldiers’ seditions. The historian must work with fragmentary information gleaned from previously published chronicles, historical narratives, manuals of military tactics, speeches, and occasional letters. This investigation does not produce previously unpublished sources, but attempts to collect, organize, and analyze for the first time the available evidence from the known sources. A wide variety of literary sources contain some useful material, although none of their authors consciously intended to collect and record information on this specific subject.
Other scholars have described the relevant literary sources in various scholarly manuals; it would be tedious and unnecessary to repeat their descriptions here.’ Although such disciplines as archaeology and numismatics provide decisive evidence for many features of Byzantine history, they contribute little to the clarification of this one. The literary sources, moreover, are not easy to use. The Byzantine chroniclers, for example, tended to have only vague information about many events that occurred far from Constantinople. The subject requires the assembly of isolated references from the sources to discern general developments, continuities, and discontinuities. Massive gaps remain due to the nature of the sources.
The study of military intrigues, rivalries, conspiracies, and seditions invariably raises the problem of the accuracy of the available sources. The sources contain allegations about military plots, corruption, hasty switches of allegiances, evil motives, and occasionally, murder. These may seem strange, implausible, or exaggerated. The historian can reject or discount these statements, or accept them at face value, or he may assume the existence of a society in which people accepted the reality of malevolence, bribery, and conspiracy, even though they might compromise the external security of the empire. The authors of the Byzantine sources probably suspected and identified more such cases than really existed. They reflected the thought processes of their society.
Yet their predecessors and contemporaries had incontestably experienced some seditions, conspiracies, assassinations, and other forms of perfidy. They made inferences and acted accordingly in an environment where additional events of these types could occur. In any critique of the sources it seems prudent to accept the possibility of the existence of conspiracies and to weigh the probability in each case in the light of one’s historical judgment.
This book has as its scope the years between the assassination of Aspar, Magister Militum Praesentalis, in 471 and the termination of the second iconoclastic controversy in 843. The reasons for the choice of these chronological limits may not be evident at first. Historians do not normally consider these years as an historical unit.
In fact, they are not one for most aspects of late Roman or Byzantine history. There were, of course, many continuities with both the years prior to 471 and those that followed 843, but this is an intelligible block of time for an analysis of the course of internal military troubles. There are common features in the eastern provinces approximately from the death of Theodosius II to 602 and even beyond at least to the middle of the ninth century.
A momentum in specific kinds of military unrest developed after the end of the Theodosian dynasty in 450. Aspar’s assassination marked the end of continuous serious internal threats by Magistri Militum of barbarian origin, with the possible dubious exception of Vitalian, whose origins are obscure. The middle of the ninth century — 843 1s not a precise date to mark military institutional developments — witnessed the gradual reduction in importance of individual thematic units as participants in military unrest. In the last years of the ninth century many of the important families who rose, in place of the individual themes (military districts and their armies), to dominate internal political and military affairs, including rebellions, had already made their appearance.
Alternative chonological termini might seem preferable to other scholars, for example, 610 to 1025 or 610 to 1081, but many problems of such a span of years, often defined as the ‘“‘Middie Byzantine Period,” gain clarification only in the perspective of preceding decades. The reluctance of many scholars to combine their investigations of the seventh and eighth centuries .with researches on the fifth and sixth centuries has contributed to an unnecessary obfuscation of many topics. Likewise, late fifth- and sixth-century developments gain further clarification when their investigation does not abruptly terminate at the beginning of the seventh century. This study attempts to identify some long-term continuities and discontinuities, across traditional limits of periodization. It traces the emergence of provincial military unrest at the end of the Early Byzantine Period (330-610), its apex in the seventh and eighth centuries, and its subsidence in the course of the ninth century.
No previous general scholarly work on Byzantine military unrest exists, except for a short monograph by D. Xanalatos. Some of his observations are useful, but a more detailed study is necessary, especially in the light of more recent evidence and scholarly literature.’ A. Christophilopoulou provides specialized investigation of the role of the armies in.the proclamation of new emperors, but she does not attempt to relate it to other forms of military unrest.’ Generalizations about the politics of the Byzantine army abound in works on Byzantine history, but very few reflect any serious investigation of the available data.
Some of the principal unfounded assumptions about the political conduct of the Byzantine armies are: 1) the role of Germanic soldiers in the armies was very modest after their massacre in 400; 2) sixth-century revolts arose primarily from Justinian’s expeditionary campaigns and were not typical of earlier years; 3) the revolt that | overthrew Emperor Maurice in 602 resulted mainly from the bad intentions of Phocas and from the specific circumstances of 602; 4) seventh-century rebellions were unimportant or patternless between 602 and 695; 5) the so-called ‘“Twenty Years of Anarchy” from 695 to 717 arose from unique problems of those years; 6) it was the large size of the original thematic armies, their districts, and their bureaucratic apparatuses that made possible and even caused their rebellions against the government; 7) reduction in the size of themes would have terminated military revolts; 8) the Byzantine armies were politically and religiously monolithic within a region; 9) armies, especially the ones that were stationed in Asia, played an active and possibly decisive role in the iconoclastic crises; and 10) changes in Byzantine military structure always took place from the top down, following the rigid imperial hierarchy of the notitiae; therefore changes that occurred in the lower ranks must have been the result of initiatives taken by someone in authority at Constantinople.
The decision to attempt a description of military unrest over aspan of almost four hundred years presumes that there are some logical links and some continuities in developments. At first sight, some rebellions may appear to be isolated events, yet each of them contains both recurrent and unique features. The challenge to the researcher is to fit these instances into a larger, sometimes developmental perspective without forcing the evidence. This task includes the identification and discussion of those problems which proved to be temporary and soluble and those which proved to be intractable and recurring. Some facts may seem insignificant in isolation, but their recurrence can signify a hitherto unsuspected importance. The present state of the sources does not permit clarification of every aspect of Byzantine military unrest or of the character and evolution of the Byzantine military forces. In such cases, it is preferable to acknowledge the absence of conclusive evidence, and perhaps to cite several alternative hypotheses, rather than to attempt to choose and to insist upon one single inconclusive explanation.
Although any author employs some working assumptions in his analysis of the Byzantine army, this is not an attempt to trace and to outline administrative hierarchies, numbers, finances, or the chronological evolution of specific military institutions, however important these topics may be. Many controversial problems remain despite extensive research by eminent scholars on the Notitia Dignitatum, the Magistri Militum, the exarchates, and the military themes.!° However, most of the conclusions of this investigation do not rest upon one particular point of view or another regarding the chronology of these or other specific military institutions.
The investigation of how the army actually behaved during crises provides information about the army itself. In addition to examining the specific topic of military unrest, this study may incidentally provide information about the actual working of the army which amplifies and occasionally modifies traditional views of Byzantine military organisation. The Byzantine army revealed its character not solely in its hierarchical structure but also by its performance in crises; its aberrations and unrest explain something about its nature. This work is not a narrative or chronological account of seditions, coups d’état, and conspiracies, but rather it is an analysis of the growth, causes, and the variation in such unrest over the years. Of course the study of military unrest requires reference to narrative events, because such incidents constituted the actual instances of open unrest. Analysis must examine something and in this case it is instances of unrest taken largely from the narrative history of the Byzantine Empire.
Other forms of institutional history may require little recourse to narrative events, but military unrest, especially in the absence of diaries, confidential letters, and memoirs, cannot be studied satisfactorily without reference to events as a basis for analysis. Some of these narrative events may be well known. In such cases, this account restricts itself to the minimum necessary for comprehension by readers. In other cases, such as the Balkan background to the mutiny that resulted in the overthrow of Emperor Maurice, the reinterpretation of the sequence of events requires a fuller investigation. The usual procedure in this work is to provide a description of the relevant events so that the reader will be familiar with the historical background and then to proceed to the analysis. The object of these researches is not the publication of another narrative of the internal and external history of the Byzantine Empire. Yet it is a measure of the importance of the army in events that there may seem to be danger of such confusion. Military unrest is so central in Byzantine history that its study has implications for the interpretation of some of the principal lines of the empire’s history.
An understanding of Byzantine military unrest is essential for an dccurate knowledge of Byzantine history. The prerequisite to this understanding includes investigation of how external events, contingencies, the location of frontiers, and the manner of stationing troops changed and sometimes intensified the problem of military intervention. It is not so much a study of how specific conspiracies began as how they spread beyond a small number of individual conspirators to embrace the empire as a whole. Conspiracies could be successful, whether of military or civilian personnel, only in so far as various military units joined or at least acquiesced in such actions. Hans-Georg Beck’s remarkable study of “Byzantinisches Gefolgschaftswesen,” although extremely useful for a study of vocabulary and problems of social mobility, commences only with the beginning of the ninth century; yet the problem is much older.!! A fuller understanding depends upon investigation of the earlier background and genesis of the problem, without contradicting the conclusions of Beck.
Not every aspect of internal Byzantine military problems receives full analysis in this study. The special problems of Byzantine Italy, for example, lie outside of its scope. The principal focus for the seventh through mid-ninth centuries is upon the thematic armies, who constituted the most important military units within the empire, not upon the imperial guard units at Constantinople (Excubitors, Scholae, and other constituents of the tagmata) or upon the special ethnic forces such as the Mardaites. These units are not without significance, but they deserve detailed special investigation, which would become excessive and unwieldy in this work.
The Byzantine navy has been the subject of extensive research, most notably, the masterly monograph of Ahrweiler;'? there is no reason to reexamine it here. The navy had no particular role in much of the military unrest of the late fifth and sixth centuries. From the seventh through the middle of the ninth centuries, the role of the navy is comprehensible not in isolation but only in terms of the broader problem of the relationship between the concentration of masses of soldiers and the likelihood of outbreaks of unrest. That is, maritime forces tended to become involved in military revolts only if large numbers were temporarily concentrated on board ships, forming a large body that could swiftly change allegiance and then hope to strike effectively against Constantinople.
Additional obstacles to the investigation of Byzantine military unrest are the definition of differences between civil and military spheres and assessment of the role of earlier Roman precedents. First, it is difficult to distinguish ‘“‘civil’” and ‘‘military’’ in Late Antiquity when these categories were becoming more mixed in function even though their respective responsibilities were allegedly being separated.'> This is even more true for the Middle Byzantine Period and the so-called “theme system,” one of whose most distinctive features, according to many scholars, was the combination of civil and military powers.'4 No Byzantine treatise or written constitution explicitly defines the relationship of the army to the nonmilitary spheres of government.
Secondly, the discussion must bear in mind that many Eastern Roman or Byzantine problems of military unrest had their origins, or at least their precedents, in the Roman Republic and Empire, which repeatedly faced the problem of how to promote and protect Roman interests without creating an army sufficiently large to threaten the existing government as well. According to tradition, ever since the early Republic Rome had experienced difficulties arising from the ability of soldiers to exert pressure on the government, which needed military manpower. Byzantium inherited from Rome this tradition and historical record of seditions, civil wars, ambitious and rebellious generals, and violent usurpations of the imperial throne. Hence, there was no reason for: the Byzantines to assume alternative patterns of military conduct. There simply was no past norm of soldiers’ political passivity. The Excerpta de insidiis of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus bears witness to that Byzantine perspective on the Roman past. |
The politics of the Roman army may have some implications for the understanding of Byzantine military unrest. Many scholars agree that the Roman legionaries were usually politically indifferent.!> In the Roman imperial period, a distinctive characteristic of military revolts was the tendency of specific legions to oppose, sometimes through diplomacy and sometimes through violence, each other’s candidates for the imperial throne.'® Historians of the early empire, for example, Plutarch, Cassius Dio, and Tacitus, provided a negative image of soldiers’ intelligence and their motives for rebellions. Subsequent generations in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire inherited this hostile picture. It is difficult to assess the effect of such negative views upon authors or governmental policy-makers in the years after the middle of the fifth century. Probably little public sympathy existed for the interests or the wishes of the soldiers and their officers. Such closed attitudes themselves may have exacerbated relations between the government and its soldiers.!”
Despite its length, this study is basically an interpretation that has all of the inherent features of selectivity of an essay. The subject is a very old one which attracted the occasional notice of writers in Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Modern Period, as well as in contemporary times; however, for various reasons, it never received intensive investigation. No scholarly consensus developed on the character and causes of Byzantine military unrest. While this study will not and probably cannot satisfy all scholars of late Antiquity and Byzantium, perhaps it will at least state some of the problems, open the way for further investigations, and provide at least some better understanding of the dimensions and inherent difficulties in examining the Byzantine armies’ often troubled relations with each other and with their government.
However valid these observations are for the late fifth through ninth centuries, they do not necessarily explain military relations with the imperial government in the ensuing centuries, when officers and soldiers were far from mute. The subject assumes some other distinctive characteristics in those years, which would require the writing of one or more additional volumes to begin to analyze.
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