Download PDF | (History of warfare 118) Theotokis, Georgios_ Yıldız, Aysel - A military history of the Mediterranean Sea aspects of war, diplomacy and military elites (2018).
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Notes on Contributors
Stephen Bennett is a PhD candidate working under Tom Asbridge at Queen Mary University of London on North West European participation in the Third Crusade. He is a graduate of Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and was made Diplomado de Estado Mayor by the Spanish Command and Staff College in 2004. His most recent publication was, ‘The Battle of Arsuf/Arsur, A Reappraisal of the Charge of the Hospitallers’, The Military Orders: Culture and Conflict in the Mediterranean World, Volume 6.1, ed. J. Schenk and M. Carr (Abingdon, 2017), pp. 44-53.
Stathis Birtachas received his PhD from the History Department of the Ionian University (Corfu) with a thesis entitled ‘Paolo Sarpi and the Greek Orthodox Subjects of the Venetian Republic between Venice and Rome’. He is author of Society, Culture and Government in the Venetian Maritime State: The case of Cyprus (Thessaloniki: Vanias, 2011). He is currently Assistant Professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he teaches courses in the History of Italy and of the Venetian Dominion in the eastern Mediterranean.
Cornel Bontea is a PhD candidate at the University of Montréal. His main area of expertise is the history of the crusades, more specifically the crusades after the fall of Acre (1291). His PhD research focuses on the period between the loss of the Holy Land (1291) and the Nicopolis campaign (1396). It examines the strategies and tactics of the Western propagandists in the fourteenth century in their effort to continue the crusading movement in the eastern Mediterranean and the Holy Land and it offers a unique perspective on the understanding of the crusading theory and the actual campaigns of the fourteenth century.
Wayne H. Bowen is Professor of History and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Central Florida. Bowen’s five books on Spanish history focus on major conflicts, from the wars against the Ottomans to Spain during the American Civil War and World War II. His secondary area is the Middle East, with three books and several articles on Saudi Arabia and the Ottoman Empire. Bowen’s current research is on the Protestant Reformation in the Spanish Habsburg Empire and a comparative history of the late Spanish and Ottoman Empires. He received his MA and PhD in History from Northwestern University
Lilia Campana is an Instructional Assistant Professor in the Department of Visualization, Texas A&M University. She completed her MA (2010), PhD (2014), and Postdoctoral tenure (2015) at the Nautical Archaeology Program, Texas A&M University. She is currently the recipient of the American Institute of Archeology (A.I.A.) Richard J. Steffy Fellowship in Nautical Archaeology and Ship Design. Her primary research interests and fields of expertise include nautical ar - chaeology and seafaring of the Mediterranean; shipbuilding technology; ship design and naval architecture; maritime history from the Classical period to the Early Modern period; military and naval history of Europe; and shipbuilding manuscripts and naval treatises.
Papadamou Chrysovalantis is a PhD candidate in History, Department of History and Archaeology, University of Cyprus. He is a research assistant in the Department of History. Is specializing in the Venetian history of Cyprus and for the Cypriot in Venice at the 16th-17th century. The title of his thesis is Cypriot in Venice after the venetian-ottoman war in Cyprus (1570/71). For three years he was research-scholar at the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice.
Raffaele D’Amato currently affiliated with Ferrara University, Laboratory of the Danubian provinces of the Roman Empire, in Italy, is a historian and experienced archaeologist specializing in material culture of Rome and Byzantium, especially on the field of military matters. He is the author of numerous articles and monographs on the material culture of Byzantium. He has taught at Fatih University in Istanbul and earned a research grant from TUBITAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) for the research project: “Traces of Byzantium’s Army: from Constantinople to Pontus”.
Elina Gugliuzzo is a researcher and teaches Early Modern History at the University Pegaso (Naples, Italy). She is member of the European Society of Environmental History and of the European Association for Urban History. Recent publications: Economic and Social Systems in the Early Modern Age Seaports: Malta, Messina, Barcelona, and Ottoman Maritime Policy, The Edwin Mellen Press, U.S.A., 2015; La piaga delle locuste. Ambiente e società nel Mediterraneo d’età moderna, Naples, 2014; Building A Sense Of Belonging: the Foundation of Valletta in Malta, in M. Delbeke – M. Schraven (eds.), Foundation, Dedication and Consecration in Early Modern Europe, Brill, Leiden 2011; Etre esclave à Malte àl’époque moderne, in Captifs et captivitée en Méditerranée à l’époque moderne, “Cahiers de la Méditerranée”, n. 87, 2013.
Nikolaos S. Kanellopoulos holds a PhD (with distinction) in the field of Byzantine military history, an MSc in History and Philosophy of Sciences and Technology and an MSc in Guided Weapon Systems. He is a scientific specialist on Military History with the Hellenic Army Academy. He has presented and published various papers on late Byzantine military history, medieval warfare and the Greek War of Independence. His research interests include issues of Western-Byzantine interaction on the military field, military tactics and armament, ethics of war and peace in the medieval context as well as the military confrontations during the Greek War of Independence.
Savvas Kyriakidis is a research associate at the University of Johannesburg and a research fellow at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (Koç University). He received his PhD from the University of Birmingham. He has been a research fellow at New Europe College in Bucharest and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. He has taught Byzantine history at the Open University of Cyprus and at Sabancı University. His research focuses on the military history of the Byzantine empire. His main publication is, Warfare in Late Byzantium, 1204- 1453 (Brill: Leiden 2011).
Tilemachos Lounghis earned his PhD from the Sorbonne University (1972). For many years he was the head of the research sector at the Institute of Byzantine Research in Athens, and he has written many books in several languages (English, French, German, Greek), over 130 papers in academic journals (in the above languages and in Russian), various popular articles on Byzantium and the Medieval History of Europe. Following his retirement in 2012, he remains active academically, dealing with a Byzantine History information repository at the Institute of Byzantine Research, while he is the general editor of a multi-volume collection of essays entitled Byzantium – History and Civilization.
Alan Murray studied Ancient, Medieval and Modern History and German Language and Literature at the University of St Andrews. After completing his MA, he taught English at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. He returned to St Andrews to undertake research and wrote his doctoral thesis on the origins of the nobility of the kingdom of Jerusalem, 1099-1131. He joined the International Medieval Bibliography at Leeds in 1988. He has since become Editorial Director of the project and Senior Lecturer in Medieval Studies at Leeds University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a regular member of the Baltische Historische Kommission. He also belongs to the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, the Oswald von Wolkenstein-Gesellschaft and the Scottish Place-Names Society.
Jacopo Pessina is a PhD candidate in Early Modern History at the University of Pisa. He is interested in the fifteenth- and the sixteenth-century military history, with special reference to the military history of the republics of Lucca and Siena, and the relationship between war and the state.
Philip Rance studied History and Classics at the University of St Andrews, where he was awarded his PhD for a thesis on Late Roman military literature. He has taught ancient and medieval history and Greek language and literature at universities in the United Kingdom and Germany, and held senior research fellowships at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Koç University Istanbul, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel and Freie Universität Berlin, where he is a Research Associate. He has published widely on Late Roman and Byzantine warfare and military culture, and Greek, Roman and Byzantine military literature, its manuscript tradition and reception.
Georgios Theotokis PhD History (2010, University of Glasgow), is historian specialising in the military history of eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He has published numerous articles and monographs on the history of conflict and warfare in Europe and the Mediterranean in the Medieval and early Modern periods. His first monograph was on the Norman Campaigns in the Balkans 1081-1108 (2014), while his second book on the Byzantine Military Tactics in Syria in the 10th century will be out in the summer of 2018. He has taught in Turkish and Greek Universities; he is currently teaching at the University of Athens.
Iason-Eleftherios Tzouriadis recently completed his thesis (2016) at Leeds University, titled “The Typology and Use of Staff Weapons in Western Europe c.1400 -1550”. He specializes in the study of late medieval and early modern arms and armour, representation of combat and violence, matters of typology and research, and aspects of historical European martial arts. Other research interests include symbolism in art, soldier imagery, and the history of Islay distilleries.
Ian Wilson is a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. His thesis focuses on the treatment of the vanquished in Outremer under the supervision of Professor Jonathan Phillips. Ian had formally studied Ancient and Medieval History at the University of Sheffield before entering a career in the City of London. Finally returning to his first love of history, he obtained an MA in Crusader Studies. His wider interests include warrior mentalities, concepts of masculinity, perceptions of cowardice and the impact of culture on war.
Aysel Yıldız PhD History (2008, Sabancı University). Specialization in late Ottoman history and palaeography, with a special focus on political and military history and social movements. She is the editor of the book titled Asiler ve Gaziler: Kabakçı Mustafa Risalesi (2007) and the author of Crisis and Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire: The Downfall of a Sultan in the Age of Revolution (2017). She is also the co-editor of War and Conflict in the Mediterrenean: A Collection of Papers, with Raffaele D’Amato, Abdülmennan Altıntaş and Georgios Theotokis (2017) .
Introduction: War, Warfare, and the Mediterranean Military History
Military history is a branch of history that focuses on the core element of war, the battle itself – on military tactics, strategies, armament and the conduct of military operations – what we may call ‘battle narratives’. But within the last two generations, military history has grown up to be much more than a look into the ‘art’ or ‘science’ of war. According to the eminent military historian Stephen Morillo A broad definition of military history ... includes an historical study in which military personnel of all sorts, warfare (the way in which conflicts are actually fought on land, sea, and in the air), military institutions, and their various intersections with politics, economics, society, nature, and culture form the focus or topic of the work.1
Thus, a military historian should focus on three main contexts: (a) the political-institutional context that covers the relation between the political and the military institutions within a state and to what degree an army could be used as an instrument of politics; (b) the socio-economic context, an area that includes the impact of war on societies (economic productivity, logistics, recruitment, technology etc.) and that of societies on war, and (c) the cultural context that shows the interaction of warrior values with the cultural values of societies in general (glorification or condemnation of warrior values through epic poems, folk songs and tales etc.).2 The present volume focuses on the military history of a specific region and period – the post-Roman Mediterranean military history until the early modern period.
The Mediterranean has attracted the imagination of modern historians as the epicentre of great political entities like the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans, Venetians, and the Spanish and so on. However, it seems that the Sea was always on the margins of historical inquiry between monographs on the histories of Europe, the Middle-East (itself a very outdated term) and North Africa. That was until the publication of the famous 2-volume work by F. Braudel in 1949 (first publication) that profoundly shaped the way of understanding of how societies living around the Mediterranean interacted in a single period of history, offering what another great historian has coined it “a horizontal history of the Mediterranean.”3
This volume aims to offer a rather vertical history of war in the Mediterranean from the early Middle Ages to the early Modern period, putting the emphasis on the changing face of several of war’s aspects and contexts over time. As Braudel points to the introduction of his seventh chapter of the Mediterranean: I cannot allow myself to neglect the history of warfare [of this region], a powerful and persistent undercurrent of human life. During the fifty years with which we are concerned [1550-1600], war punctuated the year with its rhythms, opening and closing gates of time. Even when the fighting was over, it exerted a hidden pressure, surviving underground.4 Yet, despite the profound impact of war on the lives of people living around the Mediterranean Sea, he is the only one to have devoted a part of his sizeable monograph to war, its evolution and impact on the Mediterranean societies.
Alas, it is clear the Mediterranean’s real strength lay in Braudel’s understanding of the landscape of the Mediterranean, and of important characteristics of the Mediterranean Sea itself – its winds and currents – what we may call the ‘ecologizing approach’ to history – that shaped what was happening within its boundaries. Subsequently, Horden and Purcell, in their pioneering work about the agrarian history of the lands bordering the Mediterranean, a work which assumes that a history of the Mediterranean should include land bordering the sea at a significant depth, highlighted two principal ways to explain the Mediterranean unity: the – already mentioned – ‘ecologizing approach’ that focuses on the common physical and climatic characteristics of the Sea and its surrounding hinterlands, and the ‘interactionist approach’ that bases its arguments on the ease of communications.5
The former describes the basis of the European economy and diet grounded on the cultivation of vitis vinifera and olea europea, the vines and olive-trees that had provided the region with its unity and distinctiveness for millennia. The climate of the region, with its hot and dry summers and mild rainy winters is another famous feature, which can be supplemented by the effect of the climate on the sea and navigation, the recurring patterns of the Mediterranean coastlands with its physical peculiarities, and its distinctive vegetation.6 The contrast with the Continental world of dense hardwood, heavy and wet land, colder winters and milder and wet summers and an economy dominated by serial production cannot be more pronounced.7
The latter approach is, rather, self-explanatory and assumes that, what historians call the ‘Mediterranean unity,’ came as a result of the centrality of the Sea to communications. Travelling by sea from West to East and from the North to the South, despite the obvious dangers of sea-travelling that even bewilder modern travellers, was infinitely easier, safer and – more importantly – faster than land travel. Civilizations like the Greek, Egyptian, Phoenician and the Roman turned their proximity to the Sea into an essential condition for their economic and political expansion, being in close contact with the Mesopotamian civilizations and their ancient trade routes to Asia.
Medieval civilizations like the Byzantine (Eastern Roman), Arab, Venetian, Ottoman and the Spanish tried to emulate their ancient counterparts with varying degrees of success; it is noteworthy that Rome was the last superpower to fully dominate the entire Mediterranean Sea and Justinian’s wars of ‘Reconquest’ fully comply to the dictates of the Roman imperial ideology of dominance over the oikoumene (the known world).
The sea is everything it is said to be: it provides unity, transport, the means of exchange and intercourse, if man is prepared to make an effort and pay a price. But it has also been the great divider, the obstacle that had to be overcome.8 Following Braudel’s comments on the difficulties that navigators had to tackle during their travels in the Mediterranean, John Pryor has laid the emphasis on the limitations posed by the winds and currents prevalent in the Sea which, in combination with the limits in naval technology, profoundly affected the history of the region. In his enormously valuable study that was first published in 1988, John Pryor convincingly argued that the direction of prevailing winds from the West to East, the dangers of summer breezes blowing from the coastal mountains, summer storms and sea currents moving clockwise, these are just some of the natural phenomena that can make sea-travel in the Mediterranean Sea highly unpredictable.9
Ships of all sizes and shapes were also vulnerable to geographical conditions because their range and sailing capacity were severely affected by technological limitations. Until the sixteenth century and the development of the carrack and the Iberian galleon, galleys were simply not designed for long travels in open waters and against the prevailing winds; they rather had to navigate based on coastal observation, thus having to follow specific coastal routes. Indeed, naval strategy dictated the establishment and defence of naval ports used as bases that would allow a state to protect its trade-routes and project its economic power and military force.10 Ultimately, the only way to control the seas was to control strategic points in its periphery.
In fact, the best way for a modern historian to grasp the strategic significance for the empires of the Mediterranean of these trading posts and military bases in the coasts and islands of the Aegean, Ionian, Adriatic, Tyrrhenian Seas and the coasts of southern Anatolia is to superimpose a map showing the trade routes in the Mediterranean with one showing the sites of major naval conflicts; they are a match.11 Keeping all these general definitions and questions in mind, the present volume focuses on a specific region and period – the post-Roman Mediterranean until the early Modern period. Our purpose should not be considered to be an attempt to minimize the importance of the Roman Empire, but rather to reconsider the changing face of warfare in the Mediterranean in the aforementioned period.
In fact, the legacy of Rome was still one of the most unifying elements that connected the historical traditions of the Byzantine, Islamic and Western European worlds.12 The basic characteristic of post-Roman Mediterranean is the shattering of the political unity of the Mediterranean basin which had been established under the rule of Octavian. Despite the continuing Roman legacy in the back ground, some new elements entered into the already complicated Mediterranean scene after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The pastoral nomads and institutionalization of Christianity as well as the rise of Islam offered new challenges. During the disintegration of the Roman Empire, the eastern and western parts of the Mediterranean gradually detached from each other.13 During the Middle Ages, with the migrations of the central Asian pastoral nomads, the Mediterranean world has been introduced to the nomadic warfare.
As pastoral nomads and horse archers, their encounters with the Byzantines, Persians and the Crusaders were different in terms of weaponry and battle tactics. The interactions between these different worlds always made the societies and states more ready to adopt, evolve as well as import new strategy and technology, producing in the end hybrid institutions and tactics. As warfare was an integral part of the period under study, Dominique Valérian comments that during the Middle Ages, the Mediterranean became a frontier between ‘Islam, Greek and Latin Christendom, although no power was hegemonic.’14 Indeed, wars of the period were to some extent ‘confessional struggles’, especially between Islam and Christianity, best manifested in the ‘holy coalition’ wars like the Crusades.
Thus, spiritual aspects of warfare became more pronounced. Yet it is misleading to think that there was a sharp line between material and spiritual rewards in the parties involved in holy wars.15 Plunder and booty were as important as well.16 During the Medieval and early Modern period, the region hosted powerful centralized bureaucratic empires, with the bulk of their income coming from an agrarian-based economy. Trans-Mediterranean international trade allowed these polities to keep standing armies and fleets. Thus, the degree of these empires ability to control the trade became an integral part of their strategies and policies, aggressive or defensive – depending on the conjunctures. Sea and the land that surrounds it are interrelated in this geography. City-states, states and empires were not the sole historical actors in the Mediterranean basin: human elements in warfare form a crucial part of the military history of the region.
For Rhoads Murphey, it was the human elements together with the natural conditions constituted two unpredictable variables of warfare17 (also underlined by Murray and Kyriakidis in this volume). Human elements may include the slaves, war captives, spies, tradesmen, and pilgrims. Both professional and non-professional groups were employed by these states and as military elites were much more influential in organization, provisioning and formulating strategies, they appear in the field as active commanders, strategists, theoreticians, and administrators. The mixed human elements, devoid of ethnic and religious differences, also strongly suggest the common aspects of the Mediterranean that support the notion of the ‘Mediterranean unity’.
The mercenary troops could be recruited from different ethnic groupssuch as (stradiots and cappelletti mounted troops, Catalans) in the service of various states from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Even the ordinary soldiery and officer ranks of the janissary army of the Ottomans, until the mid-seventeenth century, came from the non-Muslim Ottoman populations. Mercenary troops in the service of the Venetians introduced into Italy and the West a mixture of Byzantine, Slav, Albanian, and Ottoman unorthodox tactics and methods of light cavalry warfare. (See the focus of Birtachas’ paper). Provincial human elements were also important part of the period, as exemplified by the urban militia forces in Luca, Pavia or the Papal state, where commandership belonged to the local elites of these city-states but still provided a chance for social mobility to the lower classes seeking some sort of privileges – tax exemption or representation in the council meetings. (See Jacoppo Pessina’s paper).
The Focus and Scope of the Present Volume
The present volume hopes to place war within the political, socio-economic and cultural contexts mentioned at the beginning of this introduction. It aims to examine the mutual influence and interaction of war with societies and to study the effects of war on societies in general by bringing the cultural analysis of wars and warriors to the front stage. It is planned thematically in order to pinpoint different aspects of the Mediterranean military history over time. Part 1 of the present volume focuses on naval warfare in the centuries that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire and up to the Fourth Crusade.
This was dominated by two main categories of navies with two rather distinct strategies:18 first there was the centrally organized, funded and – logistically – maintained navies that had as their strategic task to defend the state’s outposts and commercial activity in a role described as the ‘policeman’ of the seas. It is apparent that these fleets would have been the most technologically advanced of the age and their tactical aim would have been to sink enemy ships; the Byzantine dominates this category. In sharp contrast to that we have the navies of predatory nations like the Vikings consisting of fleets that are generated out of the socio-economic circumstances of the times, having no official state control or support and their tactical aim was to capture enemy ships, with raiding being their main strategic goal. The navies of the Arabs and Italian city-states, dominated by merchant oligarchies, were hybrid of these two categories, as economic reasons dictated the capture – rather than destruction – of enemy shipping.
It is only after the thirteenth century and with the continuing growth of commercial networks and output that the technology and strategic goals of merchant and war fleets changed to a more aggressive and centrally organized and directed naval activity, as the examples of the Venetians, the Ottomans and the Portuguese amply demonstrate. In his article “The Byzantine War Navy and the West, fifth to twelfth centuries,” Tilemachos Lounghis insists on the three successive administrative reforms operated on the Byzantine naval forces which achieved to adapt various units and tactics (offensive and defensive) to necessities emerging each time; he does not deal at all with the ‘technical’ weaponry of Byzantine naval warfare (e g. the so-called Greek Fire, something tiresome in every aspect), but mainly with the composition and tasks of the naval squadrons throughout the centuries, down to 1204.
The author tries to define the meaning of the ‘Byzantine Southern Front’ that is a straight line from the Southern coast of Anatolia to Sicily through Crete during the so-called ‘Dark Centuries’ and puts forward the view that a purely and officially Constantinopolitan fleet did not exist at all prior to the accession of the Macedonian Dynasty (867). This institution accompanied by some local ‘appendixes’, and not any more the former squadrons such as the former Kibyrrhaeotae and Sicily, was to last to the 4th Crusade.
The difference between the Constantinopolitan fleet under the Macedonians and that under the Comnenian emperors consisted in the possibility to set sail to the West. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the maritime power of the Republic of Venice was seriously threatened by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I (r. 1520-1566) in the East, and by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (r. 1519- 1556) in the West. In order to regain its naval power in the Mediterranean, the Republic of Venice strongly encouraged Venetian shipwrights to submit new designs for war galleys. The undisputed founder and champion of this naval program was not a skilled shipwright but a professor of Greek language and literature named Vettor Fausto (1490-1546).
In 1529, Fausto built a quinqueremis (quinquereme) whose design, he claimed, was based upon the quinqueremis “used by the Romans during their wars” and that he had derived the shipbuilding proportions “from the most ancient Greek manuscripts.” Lilia Campana’s study, The Defence of the Venetian dominio da mar in the Sixteenth Century: Ship Design, Naval Architecture, and the Naval Career of Vettor Fausto’s Quinquereme,” examines unpublished archival documents in order to illuminate the technical features and the naval career of Fausto’s quinquereme. With the eastern Mediterranean passing to the control of the Ottomans in the early sixteenth century, an issue that has captured the attention of historians is the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the Mediterranean world. Eurocentric and Orientalist scholars had introduced the idea of an East-West technological and cultural divergence that supposedly occurred around the mid-fifteenth century. In the same period, the growing menace to the Christian states by way of the new naval power of the Ottoman Empire overshadows all other conflicts.
This has been presented as a collision between two religions but it was a conflict between an expanding political entity and others whose powers were declining, and a conflict with an important economic element. The Ottoman Empire has consistently been regarded as a place apart, inextricably divided from the West by differences in culture and religion. A perception of its militarism, its tyranny, and its pervasive exoticism has led historians to measure the Ottoman world against a western standard and find it lacking. Elina Gugliuzzo addresses this problem in her study of the Mediterranean ‘imperial history’ and argues that without inclusion of the Ottoman Empire it would be impossible to study it appropriately. The aim of Elina Gugliuzzo’s ‘Sea Power in the early age Mediterranean’ is to undermine this enduring realm and to show how the Ottoman Empire was actually a fundamental part of the Mediterranean world offering an efficient Navy, recreating and extending the imperial heritage of Byzantium, allowing for considerable cultural and religious diversity, and promoting trade and reform projects.
With the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the East and Spain in the West, both powers extended their conquests to sea, coming into conflict with each other over North Africa, Italy, and Mediterranean islands. While the cataclysmic 1571 naval battle at Lepanto is well-known, war and stalemate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries turned to treaties and collaboration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wayne Bowen’s ‘Conflict and Collaboration: The Spanish and Ottoman Empires in the Mediterranean, 1453-1923’ argues that, not only were there striking similarities in the trajectories of Ottoman and Spanish navies, but also active efforts by both states to foster cooperation with the other, as a potential factor mitigating against the dominance of France, Britain, Russia and Austria. Naval, diplomatic and economic cooperation be - tween Spain and the Ottoman Empire did not succeed in this objective, but its development provides perspective on the relative autonomy of these minor powers in the Mediterranean during these centuries. Most historiography on these two empires focused either on the Hapsburg-Ottoman struggle for su - premacy at sea and on land. After Lepanto, however, the stories of the Spanish and the Turks diverge in historical writing. Spain’s story revolves around the Atlantic World, while the Ottomans appear most frequently in the Balkans, and later in wars against Russia and Austria. The contribution of this paper is to bring the Spanish and Ottoman Empires into the same historical narrative, as parallel states and dynasties forging a tenuous bond across the Mediterranean with former enemies. Part 2 deals with the issue of visual art and artistic representation of weaponry as historical evidence taken from Byzantine and post-Byzantine art. It has often been pointed out that Byzantine art has been stylised and conventional and highly infused with Classical models.19 This approach has often led historians to dismiss representations of equipment in Byzantine art as unrealistic and full of archaic and obsolete elements.20 And even when these representations were, indeed, depicting the reality of their period, then one has to tackle another problem, namely whether these figures were girded in field armour or ceremonial armour.21 Raffaele D’Amato will present and evaluate the unique speciments of frescoes representing scenes from the childhood and life of Jesus Christ that were discovered in the Coptic Christian village of Deir Abou Hennis at the beginning of the twentieth century, in an attempt to reconstruct and better understand the military lifestyle and material culture in LateAntique Roman Egypt. D’Amato argues that the figures in the Deir Abou Hennis frescoes, rather than being the conventional depictions of the impressions of the painters that were bound by certain artistic stereotypes, they were accurate and realistic representations of military men in full costume and gear and they present a milestone in the military iconography of the Late-Antique soldier in Egypt shortly before the Arab expansion in the region.
Georgios Theotokis traces the history of a, rather unusual, weapon that could have been found in the arsenal of a Byzantine soldier before the tenth century. Although the lasso had gained its notoriety thanks to a popular fourth century description of a Goth warrior by Ammianus Marcellinus, its use by nomadic and sedentary populations is going back for several millennia and its geographical spread can be traced from the Black Sea and the Urals to Transoxania and China. The problem is, however, that very little has been mentioned thus far in contemporary bibliography about its place and value in the Eastern Roman armies and their panoply. In his ‘Σῶκος: an unusual Byzantine weapon,’ Theotokis scrutinizes a variety of sources ranging from military treatises and histories, epic poems from the Byzantine, Iranian and Turkish folklore tradition, manuscript miniatures, and mosaic and fresco representations, in an attempt to track down the origin and evolution of the lasso in the eastern Mediterranean and its use by or against Byzantine soldiers from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries. The author clearly demonstrates that the last effective mentioning of the use of a lasso by Byzantine soldiers comes with Leo VI’s Taktika (early tenth century) and attempts to give an answer why this weapon is not mentioned as a necessary apparel of an Imperial cavalryman in the period that followed the Byzantine expansion of the tenth century. For centuries the Venetian Empire and its dominions of Corfu and Crete had been the cultural bridge between the East and the West, places where the humanities no doubt flourished to such an extent that changed the face of European civilization forever. Iason Tzouriadis’ “Post-Byzantine Art and Western Influences in Military Iconography: The Case of Staff Weapons in the Work of Michael Damaskenos” explores the western influences on the military equipment – staff weapons in particular – that is depicted in the works of Michael Damaskenos. He is a sixteenth century artist and a major representative of the Cretan School of post-Byzantine painting that laid the foundation for the fusion of the conservative Byzantine artistic forms with Western stylistic elements. Tzouriadis’ paper focuses on the, rather unusual for the Byzantine standards of painting, depiction of staff weapons – and especially the halberd – that constitute a unique and complicated area of iconographical research. Through the examination of a number of Damascenos’ paintings, the author considers how the artist’s personal experiences and personal journeys affected the type of weapons he chose to paint throughout his career in Crete, Corfu and Venice, and offers some fresh perspectives on how to approach post-byzantine art when investigating western influences in works that depict arms and armour. Part 3 shifts the set and scope of our attention to the strategy of the Crusades movement. The Crusades were unique enterprises, not only in terms of ideology and politics, but also regarding the manner in which they were organized and funded and the magnitude of the undertaking and its appeal in the hearts of Christian Europeans. As R.C. Smail pointed out in his monumental work on Crusader warfare: In Syria the Franks encountered military problems, both strategic and tactical, which imposed caution and restraint... Conquests and settlement involved domination of the land and its inhabitants, and to be continuously effective such domination needed to be based on castles and walled towns. The acquisition or successful defence of strong places was the highest prize of warfare, beside which success in battle was of secondary importance.22 Since the Latins in the Levant could not possibly have held any aspirations of complete dominance over Syria and Egypt, it is obvious that their principal strategic objective in the region was land, as it was land that formed the basis for the administrative and military function of the Crusader Principalities. Thus, regional strategies would involve campaigns of expansion in a disputed area and the safeguarding of communications between the Mediterranean ports in the region and the Latin inland posts and cities. Effective control of land lay in the possession of fortified towns and castles, and successful resistance to invasion meant the preservation of the strong places even if the invading army was ravaging the surrounding countryside that fed the local population. But no town or castle could resist a besieging force indefinitely without a relieving army expected to secure the area and help the besieged. However, securing the area did not necessarily imply the taking of the field against the invaders but rather the continuous harassment of its units so that it is forced to withdraw due to logistical constraints. As any battle carries the risk of defeat, and with the military manuals of the previous centuries (including Vegetius) strictly forbidding the recourse to it unless it is the last option, the Latins in the Levant were facing an additional disadvantage – lack of numbers and the immense difficulty in keeping up with new recruits from Europe. Any defeat could be potentially disastrous for a state but in the East, where the Latins were a thorn in a hostile environment. As the aftermath of Hattin in 1187 amply demonstrates, a victory in the field could only mean the beginning of a systematic attack on enemy walled cities and fortresses, which highlights once more their strategic significance to the region of the Middle-East.
The four articles that make up this section on strategy and command tackle several debates in modern scholarship about strategic and tactical concepts in the region of the eastern Mediterranean between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, from siege warfare and logistics, to individual strategic vision and command in the field. In the first contribution, Alan Murray, in his “The Middle Ground: The Passage of Crusade Armies to the Holy Land by Land and Sea (1096-1204)”, focuses on the logistical problems facing the Crusaders who travelled to the Middle East and the complex issues relating to the choice of route, whether by land or sea, and the factors that directly or indirectly affected the decision-makers of the time. What prompted the kings, dukes and the rest of the pilgrims to travel through the Balkans and Constantinople, or rather to avoid Asia Minor altogether for a different ride via Italy and Cyprus? Murray identifies a significant change of strategy regarding the passage of the Crusader armies through southern Europe at the end of the twelfth century and scrutinizes the deeper reasons behind it while explaining whether any amphibious operation during the time of the First Crusade would have been feasible for the naval technology and organization of the Italian fleets of the time. With the focus of the Crusaders after 1201 having been fixed on Egypt and with the conditions for a naval expedition in the eastern Mediterranean being far more favourable than one century before, Cornel Bontea investigates the tactical military thinking of the fourteenth century theorists against the Mamluks after the Fall of Acre (1291), that marked the end of the Latin presence in the Levant. In “the theory of the passagium particulare: a commercial blockade of the Mediterranean Sea in the early fourteenth century?” the author explores the tactical and conceptual ideas of the crusade theorists of the early fourteenth century and focuses on the implementation of the main Latin goal after 1291 which was the weakening of Egypt before undertaking any expedition against the Mamluks. Bontea delves into the meaning and use of the terms passagium generale and passagium particulare, with the latter being – in essence – a commercial blockade of the Mediterranean, and argues that the fourteenth century strategists that visualised any offensive action against the Muslims of Egypt, their approach was highly optimistic and hardly feasible considering the logistics of the era. The period between 1174 and 1187 has been appraised by historians as one of political and military debacles, coloured largely by the defeat at the Horns of Hattin which was seen as a military inevitability. In particular, Guy of Lusignan, king consort of Jerusalem, has been largely depicted – by contemporary and modern historians alike – as an ineffectual monarch, incompetent military commander, and arrogant fool. Portrayals of the debacle at Hattin in 1187 and subsequent loss of the majority of the Kingdom of Jerusalem seemingly confirms his unsuitability for command. By a careful re-examination of the primary sources, Stephen Bennett re-evaluates the events surrounding the Battle of Acre on 4th October 1189, in an attempt to provide a fresh perspective of King Guy’s strategy in the early stages of the Third Crusade and to revisit his abilities as a general. In his ‘Faith and Authority: Guy of Lusignan at the battle of Acre (4th October 1189)’, Bennett argues that the evidence from the primary sources suggests that Guy displayed a broader strategic vision, as well as greater tactical skill than previously acknowledged. The author brilliantly contrasts the leadership of Guy and Saladin in the days leading up to the battle of Acre, highlighting the strategic attributes of Guy as the epitome of a medieval commander who managed to maintain the strategic advantage over both Saladin and his rival, Conrad of Montferrat. The military history of the Latin East is full of spectacular sieges that have attracted the attention of historians due to the rich insight they provide on the technicalities of siege warfare of the period. The traditional image of crusader sieges is one of extreme savagery, unrestrained by any customary practice. However, we need to bear in mind whether modern historians are drawing too heavily on these, so-called, ‘exemplar sieges’ and they are omitting the lesser sieges and those instigated by the Muslim leaders. Is siege warfare in the Latin East really that brutal as it has been portrayed to-date? Ian Wilson’s “By the Sword or by an Oath: Siege Warfare in the Latin East 1097–1131” offers a challenging view of the traditional interpretation of Latin siege warfare: What emerges from Wilson’s observations is that siege warfare in Outremer was less intensive than the view projected by traditional historiography. The author examines numerous cases that demonstrate the Franks’ willingness to explore diplomatic moves, if they reduced the risks of conducting a siege. And, as the example of Zengi shows, this was also true for the Muslim forces fighting the Franks in the Levant. In fact, the problem was not in the willingness in granting terms but in their implementation because of the dearth of trust and poor discipline. In this environment, martial prowess remained important but a man’s word was of equal importance. Part 4 of the volume narrows the scope of our enquiry into Mediterranean warfare by examining the military treatises in Byzantium. The so-called Strategika or Taktika are literary works that contained constitutions and treatises of military nature, which have been compiled by the author through personal experience or through oral tradition and other literary works of the past. These works greatly proliferated in the tenth century, when the Byzantines embarked on their conquests in the East and the Balkans, but they largely disappear thereafter.23 This kind of military literature is one of the fields in which cultural continuity between the Graeco-Roman world and Byzantium is more apparent.24 We should also bear in mind that these manuals were a conscious adaptation to the geopolitical realities of the day and they encouraged improvisation in the battlefield rather than simply passing on obsolete battle-tactics.25 Originating in a long-term project to prepare a full critical edition of Ouranos’ Taktika, Philip Rance’s paper explores the subsequent and more obscure history of the Strategika in the Late Byzantine period (c.1050-c.1450). Rance’s paper attempts to address for the first time the difficult question of the Late Byzantine readership of military literature, as reflected in evidence for aristocratic education and literary culture and in what can be inferred from manuscript production and ownership. In this context the paper introduces some hitherto unexploited manuscripts in the Topkapı Palace Library (TSMK G.İ. 19 and 36). It is hoped that insights offered here might have a wider relevance to military corpora of other cultures, such as Arabic and Turkish texts, which have been much less studied than their Byzantine counterparts. Despite the proliferation of military treatises that characterises tenth century Byzantium, providing historians with a wealth of information on strategy and tactics based on experience and the study of past knowledge, experts and enthusiasts of the later Byzantine period following the Comnenian revival are seriously constrained by the conspicuous absence of such works for the next two and a half centuries. The contribution by N. Kanellopoulos offers a new perspective on the military writings of Theodore I Palaiologos, second born son of Andronikos II and Iolanda of Montferrat and nephew of the marquis of Montferrat Giovanni I (1292-1305). It was Theodore’s specific intention for his treatise to be used as a repository of knowledge and experience on how to confront the Empire’s enemies, gathered through years of experience in the battlefields. Kanellopoulos’ chapter attempts to amend Aldo Settia’s established view that Theodore’s “Les Enseignements ou Ordenances pour un seigneur qui a guerres et grans gouvernements a faire” (1326) reflects the reality of war in Italy during the first decades of the fourteenth century. The author rather highlights the influence of the Eastern – mainly Byzantine – style of warfare on the writings of Theodore Montferrat and the numerous similarities that can be traced between the eastern and western ‘cultures of war.’ In the same mindset of scrutinizing the value of works written by high officials of the Late Byzantine army, Savvas Kyriakides provides an assessment of the Histories of John Kantakouzenos – a narrative for the period 1320-1362 – as a source of military history. Although Kantakouzenos was an important eyewitness of the military operations he described in his work, as he held the office of megas domestikos of the Imperial Army for over two decades, his objectivity is hampered by political ambitions. According to the author, Kantakouzenos’ aim was to explain his role in the civil wars and conflicts between cliques of the social elite in the middle of the fourteenth century. Kyriakides’ investigation examines Kantakouzenos’ accounts of military operations and his views about warfare. It also assesses his knowledge of military tactics and explains the factors that shaped his descriptions of military conflicts, mainly his personal agenda and the extent to which he is consciously trying to adhere to established precepts which can be found in military manuals.
The Final Section of This Volume, Part 5 ‘Military Roles within Society
The stradiots (stradioti), mercenary light cavalry corps of Greek, Albanian and Slav origin, were recruited by the Republic of Venice from the First OttomanVenetian War (1463-79) to the end of the eighteenth century. During the seventeenth century we find them even as cappelletti, who offer their services to garrisons and camps of the Venetian hinterland and Dalmatia. Furthermore, starting from the War of Gradisca (1615-17) the Serenissima initiated the recruitment of mercenary groups of ‘Greek’ infantry (compagnie or milizie greche). Stathis Birtachas’ paper investigates the reasons and methods of recruitment of the aforementioned mercenary companies, their martial skills and tactics, including a number of fresh perspectives regarding their particular ethnic, social and cultural identity. A fundamental aspect of warfare in any period of time was intelligence by which, according to Clausewitz, “we mean every sort of information about the enemy and his country – the basis, in short, of our own plans and operations.”26
Correct and accurate intelligence-gathering on broad issues such as economics, political assessments, military capabilities and intentions of foreign nations amount to what we now call strategic intelligence. Intelligence about the enemy could be procured in two ways, by reconnaissance (or tactical intelligence), or by espionage, when disguised or hidden agents were operating in secret in enemy territory to collect information about the enemy! Papadamou’s paper considers the role of spies in the strategic – for the Venetian Empire – island of Corfu during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Papadamou investigates a possible conspiracy movement and a series of unedited cases of espionage that took place in the island of Corfu during the building of new fortifications by the Repubblica di San Marco between 1576 and 1588-9. The author surveys a number of points regarding their ‘espionage activities’: their recruitment methods, their social and ethnic background and their points of embarkation, their methods of collecting intelligence, their ‘intelligence tricks,’ their intelligence network in the island of Corfu and how developed it was during this period of conflict in the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. Finally, the author considers the counter-intelligence mechanisms set up by the Venetian authorities in Corfu to defend against the activities of their regional adversaries, the Ottomans and the Spanish. Jacopo Pessina’s paper analyzes the social composition of the militia officers of the Republic of Lucca’s outlying areas during the second half of the sixteenth century in order to understand the degree to which their economic power may have influenced the appointment of those militias’ rank and file. The idea that until the 1630s the non-urban militias were composed of the poorest people, motivated to enlist in order to obtain privileges, has been proved as without solid foundation. Using the fiscal archival sources, the data analysis highlights the fact that the appointment of militia officers took into account not only the families’ material wealth, but also their socio-political influence and kinship relations. Pessina’s paper contributes to the academic debate in two ways. First, it presents the case of a Italian republican micro State’s provincial elite, on which there are no studies. Second, he will show that, already by the sixteenth century, the militia mirrored the provincial social structure and helped to consolidate the power of the elites. The officers were members of the richest and most influential local families, or at least they had close relationships with them. Aysel Yıldız’s paper, on the other hand, directs our attention to another important military corps of the late Medieval and early modern period, surviving from fourteenth century to 1826 to be replaced by more Westernized models. Similar the European counterparts, the bulk of the European military system was composed of field-based cavalry forces (tımarlı sipahi). Yet, the revenues from the Mediterranean and other international trade networks allowed the Ottoman rulers to keep a standing and cash-paid army, namely the janissary corps. Until the mid-seventeenth century, the recruitment to these corps depended the levy of non-Muslim boys (the so-called devshirme system), with the purpose of creating a rootless, ‘socially dead’ soldiery completely dependent and obedient to the sultan. Their military training in the palace was also accompanied with a process of Turkification and Islamization, after which they would be ready to serve in bureaucratic, administrative and military duties. The issue of whether the janissaries were military slaves or not is beyond the scope of this paper, but the system was indeed one of the rare and creative military institutions of the early modern period. More interestingly, despite prolific studies on the janissary corps, no systematic survey has so far been conducted on the command system of the corps.27 Therefore, Yıldız’s work aims at filling this important gap in the available literature. Therefore, it is a prosopographic study of an elite military group, the commanders of the famous janissary army of the Ottoman Empire. She argues that the study of the janissary ağas provides many insights not only to the military but also the political history of the Ottoman Empire. During the course of its long history, the promotion patterns of the janissary ağas changed substantially and vital changes occurred especially between the periods of 1515- 1603, 1603-1704 and 1704-1826. During the first period, the janissary ağas were exclusively recruited from the palace members and their chances of promotion to higher positions were greater, while during the second period the professionalization and institutionalization had became important with greater independence from the person of the Sultan. In the final period, promotions of the ağas to higher ad - ministrative positions decreased sharply. The bureaucratization of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of the modernization (especially in the military field) process made the janissary ağas almost a marginal group within the state apparatus.
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