Download PDF | George T. Dennis - Three Byzantine Military Treatises (Dumbarton Oaks Texts 9_ Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 25) (1985).
389 Pages
PREFACE
The people whom we call Byzantines are generally regarded as having been preoccupied with religion and rhetoric, and we expect this to be re- flected in the books which they read and which they wrote. They were, in- deed, deeply interested in theology and in classical Greek literature, as well as in other things. But for a thousand years their primary concern was with survival and security, and it must be admitted that, considering the times in which they lived and the adversaries they faced, they managed remarkably well.
They did not, however, rely on rhetorical flourishes to drive the wild Pechenegs away or to repel an Arab razzia. It was their practical diplomatic and military skills that preserved the empire and their civilization. While always striving for peace, they knew they had to be prepared for war, and, when it came, they were determined to wage it as effectively as possible.
For, just as the ancient Romans whose name they perpetuated, the Byzan- tines were an eminently practical people. Sure proof of this are their hand- books of diplomacy and tactics that have come down to us, unfortunately all too few. The three treatises presented here reflect the practical concerns of sol- diers entrusted with the tasks of going on campaign and defending the fron- tiers. The first. The Anonymous Byzantine Treatise on Strategy, seems to have been composed by a retired army engineer about the middle of the sixth century-a prosperous period and, in general, one of success on the battlefield.
This booklet is more systematically organized and more theo retical than the others. The writer is familiar with the military authorities of antiquity and cites passages from their writings, yet he has obviously been in combat and knows from experience how to construct fortifications and siege machinery.
His compilation is an interesting mix of theory and practice. The second and third treatises were composed toward the end of the tenth century, also a period of prosperity and military successes. Both are brief and to the point, containing little of theory. The first of these. Skir mishing, deals with the details of border warfare in the mountains of eastern Anatolia and was written by a man with years of experience in such fighting .
The other, which I have titled Campaign Organization and Tactics, concen- trates on the progress of an army with the emperor himself in command and its setting up camp in hostile territory, namely, in Bulgaria. Numbers, de- tails, and precise measurements are provided by the author, who had ob- viously participated in such expeditions. In reading the more formal literature of the Byzantines with its often stilted and artificial prose we can see the Byzantines themselves only darkly, in a glass, "a distorted mirror."
These three treatises, however, written in a more down-to-earth language, introduce us to real people-the retired officer with his collection of books on strategy, the hardened veteran from the mountains far from the imperial capital, the efficient administrator who sees to every detail.
They tell us of soldiers that are more interested in farm- ing and of others that are harassed by tax collectors. While explaining about tactics and weaponry, these writings also provide valuable information about Byzantine life and institutions, especially in the provinces. Not only do they discuss the practical measures taken to defend the empire, but they give us an insight into what motivated the men that stood guard on its borders.
These treatises, in short, help us understand how the Byzantine Empire and its citizens survived so long and, in doing that, kept so much of what is basic to our own civilization from perishing. Each of the treatises is composed in a distinctive style and approaches its subject from a different perspective. Although each by itself is perhaps too short to fill a printed volume, the three comprise a characteristically By- zantine book on tactics, and they are found together in the same series of manuscripts. A list of abbreviations and one of signs follow this preface. Each treatise is then presented with its own introduction.
The text and appa- ratus are accompanied by an English translation with a few notes. In producing this book I was not alone. A scholar is never alone. I have been aided by many I have never met-Graux, Köchly, Rüstow, Vári, Kulakovskij, Hase, Dain, Spaulding. Higgins, Erck. In return, 1 can only hope that my own efforts may be of some help to those who come after.
In the meantine let me express my gratitude to those whose assistance has been more immediate. My thanks go first to frene Vaslef, librarian at Dum- barton Oaks, for first apprising me of Erck's work on the Anonymous and urging me to complete it. That it and the other treatises were completed and improved my thanks are due to Peter Topping. Alexander Kazhdan. John Duffy, and Frances Kianka. For consistent and prompt assistance I must also thank the staff at Dumbarton Oaks and at the Mullen Library of the Catholic University of America. I would never have identified most of the locations in the second treatise without the kind help of Robert Edwards. My thanks are also due to Michael Dechert for his generosity in taking time to draw most of the diagrams given below.
I am grateful that much of my research was done at Dumbarton Oaks during the tenure of Giles Constable as its director. In uncounted ways he made it a place in which scholarship could truly prosper and move forward. We are all in his debt. Finally, to all my colleagues and confreres who have supported me in one way or another my thanks. Washington, D.C. May 1984 George T. Dennis, S.J.
THE ANONYMOUS BYZANTINE TREATISE ON STRATEGY INTRODUCTION
Treatises on the science and art of waging war, on strategy and tactics, were being written in Greek since at least the fourth century before our era. Some were composed by experienced battlefield commanders, others by theoreticians, arm- chair generals. Their books were copied, excerpted, and adapted through late antiq- uity. Partly in this tradition and partly as something new, the sixth century produced its own corpus of military writings, beginning with the pompous phrases of Ur- bikios and concluding with the more practical instructions offered by Maurice. About the middle of the century a book of modest proportions, professing to treat of the whole art of war, was published.
It is here published again, accompanied by an English translation. In the manuscript which preserves most of the text, codex Mediceo-Lauren- tianus graecus 55, 4 (= M), the initial page of the treatise is missing. As a result, we do not know the name of the author or the title he gave to his work. It was com- posed according to a logical plan, beginning with some general observations about the body politic and quickly arriving at the part the author thought most deserving of his attention, the military, or strategy.
This provided the first editors of this treatise, H. Köchly and W. Rüstow, with a title for the work: Peri strategikes, de re strategica. In lieu of a name, they and subsequent scholars have had to refer to its author as an "Anonymous Byzantine" Since Köchly and Rüstow published the work in 1855, along with an introduction and some notes, not much else has ap peared about it in print. In the 1930s, however, two Americans, one a doctoral student in Classics and the other a colonel in the United States Army, independently devoted some time and energy to studying this treatise, the first preparing a new edition of the Greek text and the other an English translation. It seems that neither ever learned of the other's work.
Theodore H. Erck completed a critical edition of the work with an introduc- tion as his doctoral dissertation under the direction of W. A. Oldfather at the Univer- sity of Illinois in 1937. Entitled Anonymi Byzantini Peri Strategikes (hereafter, Erck), it exists only in typewritten form and totals ninety-one pages." Colonel, later General, Oliver Lyman Spaulding, Jr., began his study of the treatise while on active service with the field artillery in several western states, and completed it about 1935 while professor of military science at Harvard University.
It too exists only in typescript, although it was intended, along with his translation of Maurice's Strategikon, for publication. After a very brief introduction, he presents his English translation alongside the Köchly-Rüstow text in parallel columns. This is followed by seventeen pages of notes, making a total of 129 typed pages. Both of these works, it must be clear, have greatly facilitated the preparation of the present edition and translation.
Although he was dealing with a faulty Greek text, Spaulding generally seems to have had a good grasp of both the language and the material. His translation, however, is a very loose one and should be used with caution. But his rendering of certain words and phrases is excellent, and some of it has been adopted in this translation. For reasons to be given below, the Greek text presented by Erck is also excel- lent, and is certainly a vast improvement over the one put together by Köchly and Rüstow (hereafter, K-R). Although Erck's typed text is not without a few errors and omissions, it is basically the same as the text presented below.
Points of disagree- ment are indicated in the apparatus. Composition of the Treatise In their introduction Köchly and Rüstow established that the treatise was com posed during the sixth century, more precisely and "with the fullest certainty." in the reign of Justinian (527-65), and probably during the latter part of his reign (K-R, 37). This conclusion, which has been generally accepted by scholars, is based on internal evidence. Archery, for example, plays a prominent role in the work.
Then, there is "our emperor," who has been stirring up his enemies against one another, which could easily refer to Justinian (6, 14-15; references are to chap- ter and line of the present edition). The comments about the celebration of a tri- umph (3, 90-91) may well have to do with that of Belisarius in 534, although sev- eral other triumphs were held in that period.
The description of what Belisarius himself was accustomed to do, that is, ravaging the countryside before a more powerful enemy (33, 30), sounds as though the writer was recalling recent events he had witnessed or heard about. Whether the verb in the sentence was originally in the present or the imperfect tense does not substantially alter the meaning. Opinions have varied slightly about the author, whose name, of course, is not known. A. Dain, while conceding some originality and contact with the realities of military life, places him among the theoreticians, "stratèges en chambre." V. Kučma thinks that the author was a military engineer and praises the originality of his plan and his success in carrying it out.
While admitting that some elements have been borrowed, he considers the treatise to be unique in Greco-Roman-Byzantine military literature. It is a good mix of abstract theories and practical recommenda- tions. The treatise is, in his view, "a work of very high quality, composed by a contemporary of Justinian, a Byzantine of the middle level, socially, intellectually, and professionally."*
Presumably he was also a Christian, but, apart from one men- tion of the Apostles (3, 11), there is nothing specifically Christian in his writing. Spaulding (p. 2) believes he may have been a staff officer, perhaps an engineer. "On fortification and field engineering he is sound and practical. He speaks with confi- dence and authority, as one who has seen war, but not quite in the tone of a com- mander of troops." Erck finds the sections on tactics more theoretical and derived from classical writers. But he admits that the author must have had some practical military experience, such as crossing streams under fire and pitching camp.
Most probably, according to Erck (pp. 3-4), he was "a veteran army man who in his later years turned to writing." His book appears to have been intended for the ordinary, educated citizen. and, while abounding in definitions and military terminology, much of it probably obsolete, it is composed in uncomplicated and matter-of-fact language. In his dis sertation Erck succinctly describes the work (p. 4) "His treatise is a well planned. completely thought out piece of work. He made a detailed outline of the topics to be discussed and treated each in its proper place, carefully introducing each separate part to show its relation to the whole, and recapitulating at its close.
The whole he prefaced with an elaborate introduction which defines statecraft as a whole and neatly, if artificially, classifies, all of the elements of the state, and then passes from the general to that particular branch of statecraft which seems most important to him, namely strategike." The treatise is divided into two parts (5, 1-5): defensive strategy and offen- sive strategy. Under the first heading Chapter 6 enumerates six topics to be dis- cussed.
The first three are treated in Chapters 7 to 13, while the last three appear to be missing. Chapter 14 begins, as Erck notes, without the author's usual summary and transition. In it he treats of tactics, which would belong to the second part, offensive strategy. Perhaps some sections have been lost from the text. The treatise moves along in an orderly fashion to Chapter 32. From this chapter to the end the transition passages are missing, and the treatment is unexpectedly brief. Köchly- Rüstow suggest, rightly, in Erck's view, that these chapters represent an epitome and were not part of the original text. The final chapters (44-47) on archery seem out of place, and there is no proper ending to the whole work."
The Manuscripts Why did Erck believe that a new edition of the treatise was necessary? "A comparison of the Köchly-Rüstow text with the manuscript from which it was made showed that these scholars had been almost unbelievably careless in their examina- tion of the manuscript, and that they had misread it in literally several hundred places" (p. 5). The present editor found slightly less than two hundred such mis- readings of the manuscript by K-R, but Erck's basic charge is certainly valid. The manuscript on which Köchly and Rüstow based their text was the codex Parisinus graecus 2522 ( P), a fifteenth-century copy of the Laurentian manu- script (M), to be discussed below.
Even if the two scholars had been more conscien- tious in reading and transcribing the Parisian manuscript, their edition would still be a poor one, for it would not have utilized the earlier and better manuscripts. A Dain, in studying the history of the text of Aelian the Tactician, showed clearly that there were three principal manuscript traditions, the "authentic," the "interpolated," and the one on which the writings of I co VI were based. Subse- quent research on the textual history of the Strategikon of Maurice confirmed Dain's analysis" The main corpus for corpora) of classical and Byzantine military writ ings is found, with a few exceptions, in the same series of manuscripts. The Anony mous fits into the same general pattern as Aelian, Maurice, and other such writings, with some important differences.
The first, "authentic," tradition is represented by the codex Mediceo-Lauren- tianus graecus 55, 4 (M; L in Erck's nomenclature). It is the most important and complete collection of Greek strategists, copied under the direction of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus sometime before 959, and has been the subject of several detailed studies. The Anonymous is found on fols. 104-130. The title page, as noted, including the author's introductory remarks, and the last chapter are missing. The recapitulation at the beginning of Chapter 4 makes it clear that the missing part of the first chapter defined politeia or politike and started to list its components, and was probably not very long.
The text, written in a clear minus- cule, is otherwise in good condition. The second tradition, "interpolated," in Dain's terminology, was, in tracing the textual history of Maurice's Strategikon, represented by three very closely re- lated manuscripts, designated in the edition as VNP." The first, codex Vaticanus graecus 1164 (V), a clearly written book which can be dated to around the year 1020, has been severely mutilated. Only three folios of the Anonymous remain: 173-173, 175-176. In editing the Strategikon, N stood for the codex Neapolitanus graecus 284 (III-C-26). Originally this formed part of one parchment book with the codex Scorialensis graecus 281 (Y-III-II) (=S). This manuscript in the Escorial consists of 308 folios with works of ancient and Byzantine tacticians.
The incomplete text of the Anonymous is found on fols. 101-111. The manuscript can probably best be dated to the third or fourth decade of the eleventh century, and is almost certainly a copy of V. The third manuscript in the family (Parisinus graecus 2442, P) can be traced to the same scriptorium, that of Ephrem in Constantinople, at about the same time as V. It too is only part of what had been one large manuscript together with the codex Barberinmanus graecus II 97 (276) (B). It is in the latter that the incomplete text of the Anonymous is found on fols 81-91
The VSB text for much of the Anonymous, Chapters 7 to 16, does not repre- sent the original text, but is a summary or paraphrase. From Chapters 33 to 47 the full text, at least in SB, is given These three manuscripts, VSB, clearly derive from a common exemplar S is, as mentioned, a copy of VB contains far more errors than the other two, so that it is reasonable to postulate one or more copies (w) be tween it and the exemplar. As in the case of Maurice's Strategikon, the relationship between these manuscripts can be sketched as follows.
The third recension found by Dain, the one used by Leo VI which, designated as A, was important in reconstituting the text of Maurice, has not preserved the Anonymous." In preparing the text of the Strategikon, it was noted that one other manuscript was of some importance, although it did not fit clearly into the tradition.
This was the codex Ambrosianus graecus B 119 sup. (139) (= A), which contains a number of military treatises and was written about the year 959. In several instances the readings and diagrams found in this manuscript were more accurate than those in any of the others. Yet it was essentially a paraphrase of the Strategikon in tenth- century Greek.
It also contains paraphrases of other authors which appear in M. But it does not do so for the Anonymous. Rather, A presents the same version of the text as M, and not a paraphrase. Although A has been gravely mutilated, enough re- mains (fols. 8-21) to prove, as Erck has done (pp. 10-14), that A and M are closely related. Each has passages omitted in the other, and it is clear that neither was copied from the other. Erck believes that "A represents merely a less corrupt tradition of the text than L [M]." After drawing up a list of differences between the two, he shows that in more than two-thirds of the cases A has the better reading. He concludes that they are two branches of the same tradition, with M containing a larger number of scribal errors and A generally being a better copy of the text. Probably A and M were copied from the same manuscript, or at least collateral ones."
Erck thinks that the marginal comment on Hannibal in M (18. 48), which he finds flippant and not in the author's style, must be an interpolation, and he postu- lates at least one manuscript between M and the point of departure from the com- mon tradition with A. There are no clear errors stemming from the misreading of uncial script, so that their common parent (or grandparent) must have been written in minuscule. Later copies need not detain us.
The Paris. gr. 2522 (P), on which the K-R text was based, is a fairly exact copy of M. Also copied from Mare Vossianus gr. 34 of the sixteenth century and Barberin. gr. 59 of the seventeenth. There are a few sixteenth-century copies of A: Ambrosian, gr. C265 inf. (905), Marcian. gr. X1 306 (coll. 976. 11. and Chapters 31-32 copied in the cod Sinaiticus gr. 1889 and at-tributed to Emperor Maurice. The many copies of VSB have been listed by R. Vieillefond."
The Present Edition For the reasons given above, the present text is based on A; for the sections missing in A, it is based on M, and for the last chapter, which is not in M. on S. Sometimes the differences between A and M are insignificant, and one cannot be preferred to the other. In such cases this edition has not followed a consistent pat- tern. Alternate readings, in any event, are given in the apparatus. The numbering of the chapters is taken from M or supplied by the editor.
They are numbered incorrectly in A, and not at all in VSB or in P (it did not seem neces- sary to note this in the apparatus each time). Some chapter titles and other phrases, missing in the manuscripts, have been supplied from the body of the text or else- where by one of the editors, past or present. While Erck's criticism of K-R is justi- fied, some of their readings and emendations are good and have been retained. Their errors are generally not listed, as they would unduly clutter the apparatus.
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