Download PDF | (Warfare in History) Georgios Theotokis - The Norman Campaigns in the Balkans, 1081-1108-Boydell Press (2014).
280 Pages
Acknowledgements
This book is the outcome of laborious research and study that have dominated the best part of the last five years. These years have been, without any doubt, the most tiring and stressful of my life, and I recall the words of my mentor, who said to me once, full of kind honesty, that ‘academic research is not good for the soul’. But while writing these lines and looking back to what I have achieved thus far, I can only say that all of this was worth it! Being a part of the British – or shall I say, Scottish – educational system has taught me a great deal, both as a researcher and a person.
I owe my mentors, Matthew Strickland and Marilyn Dunn, a great debt of gratitude for their helpful guidance, their smiles and encouragement. I sincerely hope I will not let them down! I would like to thank the academic and administrative staff of the Department of History of the University of Glasgow and the Scottish Centre for War Studies, the staff of the Glasgow University Library and the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame, for providing me with an ideal working environment. Special thanks are owed to Matthew Bennett and Caroline Palmer for encouraging this young researcher to publish his work. Also, I am grateful to Ioannis and Serdar for the very relaxing “wine-nights”, which I hope I did not ruin with my complaints about work. Finally, this work is dedicated wholeheartedly to my parents for their endless encouragement and support throughout my career.
Introduction Here lies the Guiscard, the terror of the world. From the City, the king of the Italians and Germans he hurled. Neither Parthians, Arabs, nor the army of Macedon could Alexius free, Only flight: for Venice could prevail neither flight nor the sea.1 One of the most fascinating episodes of European history is the story of the small band of Norman pilgrims who, in the year 1000 (according to one account), took part in the siege of the Italian city of Salerno against the marauding Arabs of the Tyrrhenian Sea, who were demanding an annual payment from the inhabitants of the city. Ironically, they liked what they found there and they decided to tell their comrades back home about the land of Apulia; a ‘land flowing with milk and honey and so many good things’.2
They returned in the following decades to find employment in the armies of all political entities in the region, along with ample opportunities to quench their thirst for money, land and – according to the so-called Norman myth propagated by contemporary Norman chroniclers – fame, as warriors of great martial valour in the fields of battle. Setting aside the romanticised story of ‘soldiers of fortune’, what could be said of the actual geo-political significance of their establishment in the Mediterranean? The Norman expansion in eleventh-century Europe was a movement of enormous historical importance, which saw men and women from the duchy of Normandy settling in England, Apulia, Calabria, Sicily and the principality of Antioch. The Norman establishment in the south is particularly interesting, because it represents the story of a few hundred mercenaries who managed to subdue local Lombard princes, drive out Byzantine and Muslim rulers who had ruled the areas for centuries, establish a principality in the Middle East during the turbulent period of the crusades and begin the process of unifying a political entity that would later develop into the kingdom of Sicily.
Indeed, it was the Norman conquest that transformed a peripheral region of the Mediterranean and a frontier area between the Byzantine East, the Muslim South and the Latin West into a dominant political structure that encompassed the entire southern Italian peninsula and the island of Sicily, and which was to endure for some seven centuries, until 1816. By the middle of the thirteenth century the region had witnessed an ethnographical, cultural and religious transformation prompted by the immigration of Latin Christians into Calabria, Apulia and Sicily, which fundamentally changed southern Italy and Sicily into a Latin kingdom. It would be no exaggeration to claim that none of this would have taken place without the Norman conquest. Yet this process of transformation was slower than modern scholars have perhaps recognised. In fact, in the first decades of the eleventh century one cannot speak of a Norman conquest of Italian territories per se, but rather a gradual, unstable and uncertain process of infiltration by mercenaries, who acted as auxiliary units to the armies of Lombard rebels, Muslim emirs, Byzantine catepans and German emperors. There are three key dates for the Norman expansion in the south.
In the year 1041, twelve Norman captains, so called by William of Apulia, and their followers established themselves in one of the most strategic towns in mainland Apulia, an event with major long-term consequences for the status quo in the region. This strategic move was preceded by the investment of a certain Rainulf, a man who would become the greatest of all the lords of Campania and a member of the local Lombard aristocracy, as an imperial vassal in the fortified town of Aversa by the German emperor Conrad II in May 1038. Throughout this period, from their establishment at Melfi (1041/2) to the battle at Civitate (1053), the Norman counts of Melfi systematically conquered large areas of Apulia from the Byzantines.
Although the latter regained control of key coastal cities like Bari and Otranto and tried to win over the local Lombard communities by giving out tax exemptions, by 1047 almost all of northern and western Apulia belonged to the Normans. The greatest opportunity for the Byzantines and the papacy to stop this systematic erosion of their territories presented itself in 1053 with one of the most crucial confrontations in medieval Italian history. Leo IX’s coalition army was defeated at Civitate. Apart from the obvious political consequences this had on all the political powers of southern Italy, it also opened the way to the Normans for further conquests in all directions. Calabria and large parts of mainland Apulia had been conquered by the end of the decade, and in 1061 Robert Guiscard and his brother invaded Sicily in a major amphibious operation with unparalleled consequences for the future military operations of the Normans in Sicily and the Adriatic.
Nevertheless, what sealed the fate of the Normans in Italy and proved to the world that these people from the north of the Alps had come to stay was the conquest in 1071 of the city of Bari, the capital of Byzantine Lombardy and the last bastion of Byzantine authority in the region. In 1081, Robert Guiscard was free to launch his most ambitious military operation to date, the invasion of Illyria, and challenge the authority of God’s representative on Earth, the Byzantine emperor. Four years later, on the sandy and beautiful beaches of the Ionian island of Cephalonia, named after him as Fiskardo, the duke was struck by a violent fever – probably malaria – and died on 17 July, putting an end to one of the most pressing periods of external aggression the Byzantine Empire had faced for centuries. By 1085, Robert Guiscard was one of the most powerful and famous warlords in Christendom, controlling a pope, and having humiliated one emperor and defeated – and nearly killed – another in battle.
Popes and emperors alike courted his support and alliance, while his armies could threaten the heirs to Charlemagne and Constantine.3 It was not for another twenty years that the duke’s ambitious son Bohemond would launch another expedition in the Balkans, this time masking his campaign as a crusade, which would see the same protagonists confronting each other again in the same place but with an entirely different outcome. The first contacts between Normans and Byzantines can be traced to the second decade of the eleventh century and the battle at Cannae (1018). The Normans participated in this battle as an elite cavalry unit in a rebel Lombard army that faced the locally raised militia units of the Byzantine strategos (general). In the period before the battle of Civitate, the Normans were mere auxiliary units (bands of elite mercenaries hired by the highest bidder), numbering just a few hundred.
According to the sources of the period, which point out the presence of elite imperial units from the mainland (such as the Varangian Guard), the Normans faced the Byzantine army three times in 1041, when the rebel Lombard-Norman army repeatedly routed the catepan’s armies in northern Apulia. It was a band of these units – a few-hundred-strong according to the sources – that had taken part in Byzantium’s expedition to Sicily in order to expel the Kalbite Muslims in 1038, an undertaking which dragged on for three years until the general in command, the notorious George Maniaces, rebelled and pronounced himself emperor before embarking on his invasion of the Balkans. Contacts between the Normans and the Byzantines in the middle of the century were not confined to Italy. The 1040s were the decade that saw the arrival in large numbers of the first Frankish mercenaries in the Byzantine capital, in 1047.
These were all primarily cavalry units, fighting in their usual Frankish manner of mounting a frontal cavalry charge against the enemy, a battle tactic that had been well known in France for several decades as well as in Byzantium, according to the writings of Leo VI in his Taktika. Their main operational role, judging by the evidence provided by the chroniclers, was the manning of key towns and fortresses in strategic border areas in both the Balkans and Asia Minor. Famous officers included Hervé, Robert Crispin and Roussel of Bailleuil, all of them being active mostly in north-eastern Asia Minor between the 1050s and the 1080s, campaigning either with or without units of the imperial army.
In addition, the German regiment of the Nemitzi was present at Manzikert (Malazgirt) (1071), while Anglo-Saxon mercenaries gradually replaced the Scandinavian element in the Varangian Guard in the 1080s to 1090s. The Byzantine army was an institution that constantly evolved throughout its history and was a worthy successor to the vast mechanism set up by the Romans. What is indeed truly remarkable, however, is the degree of adaptability that characterised the army as an institution, along with the open-minded attitude of its officers and the tactics they applied in the battlefield. Certain military manuals like Maurice’s Strategikon, Leo VI’s Taktika, the Praecepta Militaria of Nicephorus Phocas, the Taktika of Nicephorus Uranus and the Strategikon of Cecaumenus offer us a thorough insight into the way the Byzantine officers thought and how they faced their enemies in each operational theatre. From the eighth century they had set up two distinct but mutually supportive mechanisms, the thematic armies which were clearly defensive in their role and whose main objective was to intercept and harass any invading army, and the tagmata, which were clearly professional units trained to deliver the final blow to the enemy in pitched battle.
Fundamental changes in the structure and organisation of the Byzantine army, however, took place in the decades preceding the disaster at Manzikert in 1071. The old thematic and tagmatic units, composed of indigenous troops that had formed the backbone of the army’s structure for centuries, were largely replaced by mercenaries, large bodies of paid troops of any ethnic background employed for long-term military service, like the Varangian Guard (largely consisting of Anglo-Saxons after 1081), the German Nemitzi and several Frankish regiments. These fundamental changes in the structure and organisation of the Byzantine army, which had already taken shape by the year Alexius Comnenus rose to the throne, along with the economic and political collapse after decades of civil conflicts and barbarian invasions both in the Balkans (Pechenegs) and in Asia Minor (Seljuk Turks), had completely paralysed the imperial army.
Such was the state of disarray that one finds the following comment by the princess Anna Comnena on the army her father was gathering against the Seljuk and Norman threats in the spring of 1081: ‘Turkish infiltration had scattered the eastern armies in all directions and the Turks were in almost complete control of all the districts between the Black Sea and the Hellespont, the Syrian and Aegean waters’.4 The basic argument, however, is that the army that Alexius deployed against the Normans in 1108 was different in both structure and composition from that which Romanus IV Diogenes had gathered for his Turkish campaigns that culminated in Manzikert or from the rabble that was beaten at Dyrrhachium (modern Durrës) ten years later.
This book aims to bring to the forefront a rather neglected aspect of the military history of this period in the Mediterranean: the comparative study of two different military cultures and the way in which each reacted and adapted to the strategy and battle tactics of the other in the operational theatre of the Balkans between the years 1081 and 1108. Hence the topic encompasses the military organisation, the general concepts of war, the strategy and tactics and the way each of these cultures viewed its enemies as warriors, as well as how each perceived itself. The most crucial point is to establish how far this prolonged confrontation in the battlefields of Dyrrhachium, Ioannina and Thessaly led to changes or adaptations in their practice of warfare. Can it be said that certain cultures undertook more tactical changes than others, and if so, what are the deeper reasons behind this phenomenon? How can we explain, for example, Alexius Comnenus’ decision to fight a pitched battle in 1081, while choosing to impose a blockade on the Norman army twenty-six years later? Why did Bohemond not see through his enemy’s tactics, letting his army fall into a trap? The study of the Norman expansion in Italy and the Balkans also facilitates an in-depth examination of Norman strategy in each operational theatre of war (namely Italy, Sicily and Illyria) and question whether it can be characterised as Vegetian.5 In relation to this issue, separate questions arise about the importance of military handbooks, such as Leo VI’s Taktika and Nicephorus Phocas’ Praecepta Militaria, for the Byzantine military establishment of the eleventh century and whether any of them were available to Byzantine commanders of this period, such as Alexius Comnenus.
What sort of information about their enemies did these manuals provide to the Byzantine officers? What do they reveal about the place of literacy in the Byzantine command structure, the training of the officer class and professionalism? Do the manuals eventually become archaic, valued more as literary pieces rather than actual handbooks?
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