Download PDF | (Warfare and History) John F. Haldon - Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World 560-1204-Routledge (1999).
400 Pages
Preface and acknowledgements
Many friends and colleagues have contributed, directly or indirectly, to the present volume. Through discussion, advice, bibliographical assistance, reading sections of the draft manuscript and countless other ways they have enriched my own perspective on the history of the Byzantine world and on how warfare fits into the pattern of human social and cultural life. It would be invidious to name one or two and to omit others, and so I shall name no names at all.
But I hope that those who have the patience, or the interest, or both, to read what follows might recognize the traces of their own contribution, and derive some benefit from what I have written. I do want to thank explicitly the members of staff and postgraduate students in my own university department, however, not only for their intellectual input, which was usually far greater than they imagined—given that most of them have only a limited interest in the subject of this book—but also for their patience.
Their support and their expertise have been invaluable. A note on transliterations All technical terms and titles (e.g. strategos, tourmarches, thema etc.) have been transliterated directly from their Greek or Latin forms with as few changes as possible: thus drouggarios rather than droungarios, which is neither Latin nor Greek. To avoid overly complicating the text, however, macrons on Greek long vowels are omitted (thus not tourmarches or strategos). Names of people and places are slightly more problematic. For those which have well-known and standardised English equivalents, such as Constantine or Constantinople, I have retained them. Otherwise I have tended for the most part to use Greek forms where they would normally so appear in the sources: thus Kaisareia rather than Caesarea (although this rule does not work so well for the Balkans, where both Latin and Greek forms are commonly found and used).
I likewise use the Byzantine Greek forms for the names of administrative districts or provinces, the latinized or anglicized version for regions in general e.g. Kappadokia for the Byzantine kleisourachia or thema; but Cappadocia for the area as a whole. John Haldon Birmingham September 1998
Introduction
The term “Byzantine empire” refers to the eastern Roman empire from the end of the “late Roman” period in the eastern and central Mediterranean/ Balkan region (from the sixth century, therefore) to the fifteenth century, that is to say, from the time when a distinctively East Roman political formation began to evolve with the recognition of the cultural divisions between “Greek East” and “Latin West” in the empire’s political structure, to the fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453 at the hands of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II “Fatih”, “the Conqueror”.
And although within this long period there were many substantial transformations, the elements of structural continuity are marked enough to permit such a broad chronological definition. “Byzantine” should be understood as the convenient label which it is—a shorthand for “medieval East Roman”, for the Byzantines referred to themselves as Romaioi or Romans, a term which subsumed at once their identity as Orthodox Christians, the Chosen People who, in the eyes of God, had succeeded to the place of the Jews from the time of Christ; and as Romans, the inheritors of a world empire protected and guided by God.
From the point of view of the medieval observer, the artificial chronological divisions imposed by modern historians, sometimes for perfectly valid reasons, upon Byzantine history are quite meaningless; and even from the perspective of the modern specialist historian, the divide between late Roman (i.e. up to the later sixth century) and Byzantine (from the early seventh century) serves, as often as not, to obscure the fact that continuity in every respect—socio-economic, political, institutional and ideological—was the norm.1
Interest in the history and culture of Byzantium can be traced back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the expanding power of the Ottoman empire encouraged closer familiarity with the history of the regions which it had swallowed up, the better to understand how to oppose what appeared to central and western European political and religious leaders to be an apparently irresistible advance. “Modern” Byzantine studies, informed by new andmore rigorous methods of source criticism and analysis than had been employed by previous commentators, can be said to have begun in western Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, partly an offshoot of classical and late ancient history and philology, partly the result of a renewed interest in the history of Europe and the Near East after the “decline and fall” of the Roman empire and the subsequent fate of the eastern churches and the Hellenic peoples.2 Yet the history of Byzantine military organization and warfare is in many respects still a relatively underdeveloped field.
This reflects to a degree the complexity, and also the sparseness, of relevant source material (although there are plenty of narrative accounts of battles and campaigns); but it is also the result of a certain romanticism, typified in the otherwise valuable early analysis of Sir Charles Oman’s The Art of War in the Middle Ages, whereby the Byzantines are portrayed as noble victims of an impossible strategic situation, forced constantly to defend their beleaguered empire—a bastion of Christendom and classical culture—against wave after wave of barbarian or infidel. This is perhaps to caricature the words and ideas of these historians to a degree, and in the pioneering Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der politischen Geschichte of the German military historian Hans Delbrück, the empire’s longevity was ascribed predominantly not to purely military but rather geopolitical factors. But even Delbrück devoted only 12 pages to Byzantine warfare and military organization. Nevertheless, the notion of Byzantium as a beleaguered bulwark, which still informs some popular writing on the history of that empire, is in fact an attitude which takes its inspiration from the ideas of the Byzantines themselves.
There are few modern treatments of the relationship between Byzantine society, its armies and warfare, and fewer still in English. We have already mentioned the works of Oman and Delbrück (the latter available in a modern English translation based upon the second edition published in Berlin in 19233 ), which deal primarily with military organization and tactics. In French, Ferdinand Lot’s L’Art militaire et les armées au moyen age en Europe et dans le Proche Orient (Paris, 1946) has a still useful, but very old-fashioned, chapter on the Byzantine armies. A number of other writers, both in the field of Byzantine and medieval history, and in that of military history more particularly, have devoted sections or chapters to the armies of the Byzantine period. Many of these are factually inaccurate, however, and present a highly idealized, if not romanticized, picture founded on somewhat simplistic views of Byzantine society and state organization.4
Modern works are more reliable and based on up-to-date research, but still treat the army en passant, and in relation to society and the state as a whole hardly at all.5 Works devoted entirely to the army are rare. Many articles have been written in the last twenty years or so dealing with various aspects of Byzantine military administration, weaponry and military technology, strategy, and the interface between armies and politics. Numerous articles on these and related topics by contemporary scholars will be found in the bibliography of this volume. But no one has yet undertaken a general survey either of the history of east Roman military development from the beginning—the latersixth century in this case— or of the relationship between army, society and warfare in general.6
Two recent monographs have appeared on the subject. Mark Bartusis produced in 1992 a survey and analysis of the history of the late Byzantine army from the thirteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries, a subject which has been more or less entirely neglected in the literature referred to above. In 1995 Warren Treadgold also published a book, covering the period from the third to the eleventh centuries, dealing with late Roman and Byzantine military organization, especially tactical structure, pay and numbers.7 Between them, these two books should have filled the gap in the material available to both the general as well as the more specialist reader. Treadgold’s book deals only with the technical issues mentioned and ignores the issue of how the army fits into society in general, while Bartusis’ study necessarily assumes a great deal about the situation prior to its starting point so that the developments which preceded those discussed are—understandably—barely mentioned.
Only one scholar has made even the slightest attempt, in monograph form, to relate the army over the longer term to the day-to-day politics of Byzantine state and society. In his study of Byzantine military unrest published in 1981, Walter E.Kaegi essayed a survey of the history of Byzantine military intervention in “politics” in the broadest sense, relating the rebellions and mutinies of the armies at different times over the period from the fifth to the ninth centuries to their conditions of service, the wider political and social situation within the empire, and to the relations pertaining between the East Roman state and its neighbours. Although there are criticisms to be made, this was, and remains, a pioneering work which has contributed a great deal to raising the profile of the study of the Byzantine army in its social and political context.8
There thus remains a great deal to be done, most particularly in respect of the study of the effects of warfare and military demands upon the state and society of the Byzantine empire, particularly in relation to the experiences of the vast mass of the ordinary population of the empire.9 A short monograph such as this, which attempts to set these various aspects of a series of very complex problems in their context, cannot hope to arrive at all the answers, still less to convince every reader that the answers which are suggested, or the overall interpretation which does eventually emerge, is necessarily the best or the only one which the evidence can bear. But the hope is that, by the end of the volume, those problems will at the least have been clearly stated and a plausible sketch of the relations between Byzantine society, its military organization and the effects upon them of warfare will have been developed.
The relationship between soldiers as individuals and the wider society of which they are a part, as well as that between armies, which represent the coercive arm of an organized state, and both “civil society” and the rest of the state apparatus itself, is rarely straightforward. Tensions always exist between the army in its purely military role (however that may be defined in each specificculture), for example, and the army as a focus of social opinions and people of different regional loyalties and traditions. The approach we adopt to such issues depends on what structural significance we attach to the army in the state and society: which elements of the army played what roles in politics, and where in the pattern of relationships of social power are they to be situated at different times?
How did the state organize such things as the recruitment and payment, the equipping and supplying of its soldiers, and in which social strata or regional groups were they located? Indeed, should we define what sort of state we are talking about before we can begin such a discussion? How was the term “soldier” understood in a society in which there were quite clearly both technical and everyday usages, reflected in the employment of the word for soldier to mean different things in different contexts? Closely associated with such questions are issues of normative roles and behaviour. How did people in East Roman or Byzantine society regard soldiers of differing status and function? How did they respond to them under different sorts of conditions—were there different responses during periods of warfare and fighting in contrast to periods of peace, and if so, is this picture also affected by location in respect of such fighting—do those far from the areas affected have different responses and views to those more directly involved (as we might, perhaps, expect)?
What legal status did soldiers of all types have in respect of their position in regard to the state and in respect of civil society at large, and how did this affect attitudes to soldiers and warfare? Then again, how did the political ideology of the state in question fit soldiers into its scheme of things, and in particular to what extent did early Christian views on violence affect later Byzantine attitudes? And how did soldiers use this ideological system at different times, to whose advantage did they act and with what intention? What was the self-perception of soldiers, and to what extent was there a difference, for example, between the views of officers and those of their men (and if there was a real difference between the two groups), between fighters and logistics staff, or across time, as the social origins of soldiers changed?
These are difficult questions under the best of conditions, and the documentary and other evidence for them in the Byzantine world, in which the majority of the “ordinary” population were illiterate or almost so, renders them even more difficult, so that we must exploit a vast range of materials which have no obvious connection with the themes of our examination for relevant information and insights. I will also be looking at the technical aspects of warfare—questions of siege techniques, the management of strategy and tactical issues, the problems of logistics which face all armies, and issues of supplying mounts, pack-animals, transportation of provisions and materials and so forth. These are not separate matters—on the contrary, they are integrally connected with the first set of concerns, for the extraction of surplus wealth in one form or another directly impacted, materially and ideologically, upon the producing population, the state administrative apparatus and the political structure of the empire.
Apart from the chronicle literature and historiography of the period, which contains a great deal of relevant information—narrative accounts of battles and campaigns, occasionally by eyewitnesses or those who had spoken with or had access to eyewitnesses and their reports—there are several classes of evidence for military administration and organization. Lead seals provide a particularly rich source of information for the administrative structures of the Byzantine state, since from the seventh until the eleventh centuries especially most officials, even quite humble ones, had a seal bearing their name and/or their title(s) and rank which they attached to official documents or correspondence.
Equally important are the semi-official lists of precedence of the ninth and tenth centuries, drawn up by palace officers to determine who sat where at imperial receptions, and including fairly elaborate descriptions of the various administrative departments of central and provincial administration. In addition, we possess important information regarding the army from Arab geographers’ descriptions of the Byzantine empire, and in particular from a series of Byzantine treatises, from the sixth to the eleventh centuries, dealing with warfare on land and at sea, and military and naval organization. Problems of reliability, sources of information and related issues in connection with the former group of sources (in particular the Arab geographers) affect all these types of evidence, of course, and these will be dealt with as appropriate in the discussion which follows.
Among the more important texts from the latter tradition are two from the middle and later sixth century: an anonymous treatise on strategy and the Strategikon ascribed to the emperor Maurice (582–602) although probably written by one of his generals; and a cluster of texts from the late ninth and tenth centuries: the so-called Tactica ascribed to the emperor Leo VI (886–912); a mid-tenth-century treatise known as the Sylloge taktikon (“collection of tacticians”); the treatise on skirmishing or guerrilla tactics, written in the 950s or 960s by a close associate of the Phocas clan and the emperor Nikephros II (963–9); an anonymous treatise on campaign organization dating probably from the reign of John I Tzimiskes (969–76) or Basil II (976– 1025); the so-called Praecepta militaria (“military precepts”) ascribed to Nikephros II; the Tactica of one of Basil II’s most eminent officers, the general Nikephros Ouranos. In addition, there are a series of treatises dealing with siege warfare or artillery, in particular the treatise on artillery ascribed to Hero of Byzantium (mid-tenth century), and an anonymous mid-tenth-century text on siege warfare. In addition, specialist texts deal with naval warfare, although these are especially suspect in respect of the technical information they purvey.
There are also a number of minor treatises dealing with military expeditions. The relationship between these texts, and several others not mentioned here, is complex and is still the subject of discussion. In particular, the tendency to copy or borrow material from ancient, Hellenistic and Roman writers such as Aeneas, Arrian, Polybius and many others; together with the frequent misunderstanding and garbled rendering of technical details which the original texts contained, makes the Byzantine treatises particularly treacherous sources at times.10 Such specialist texts are not extant after the eleventh century,although there is evidence that some may have been compiled. An exception is the treatise written by Theodore Palaiologos, Marquis of Montferrat (he was the second son of the emperor Andronikos II and Yolante-Irene of Montferrat), originally in Greek but translated into Latin in the 1320s and then into French under the title Enseignemens et ordenances pour un seigneur qui a des guerres et grans gouvernemens a faire (“instructions and ordinances for a Lord who has wars to fight and government to exercise”). But this deals primarily with the western tradition and rarely offers specific insights into eastern warfare as such.
There are many other types of written source material, of course. Theological writings, the letters of churchmen or monks, even the acts of church councils provide valuable insights into attitudes towards warfare, fighting, the role and status of soldiers and so on. And although such sources have little to say about the attitudes of most Byzantines in town and country, hagiography—the writing of saints’ lives—provides some help in redressing the balance. Hagiographical and related writings for the sixth to the tenth centuries—the period during which a relatively high degree of originality can be found—represent a particularly important source, since they can reflect popular and unofficial views and attitudes in a way less open to works which are conceived as belonging to the genre of historiography and chronography. Saints’ lives and related collections of miracles have regularly been used by historians to shed light on Byzantine society and institutions as well as beliefs and everyday life.
But they are also a dangerous source, since they are always informed by a clear ideological programme—representing the saint or chief character in the best possible light, encouraging the reader or listener to imitate the piety and spiritual purity of the protagonists as far as they were able, and imbued in consequence with sets of values, implicit and explicit, which invariably meant the introduction of a strongly interpretative element by the writer or compiler. Hagiographies were a widely used type of literature, read by both individuals and groups as well as listened to by even larger numbers of people—in churches or monasteries, for example. Nevertheless, used with caution, they can be of great value in helping to answer some of the questions in which we are interested in this volume.11
The evidence of archaeology has been crucial, of course, in respect of our knowledge of Byzantine fortifications and defensive technology;12 but—in contrast to its role in the history of western military technology—it has played thus far only a minimal role in helping us to trace the history and evolution of Byzantine weaponry and defensive military equipment. This is in great contrast, of course, to the situation with regard to the Roman armies before the fourth and fifth centuries, although enough late Roman material from the western, Balkan and eastern frontier regions has been recovered to give some idea of the situation at the beginning of the period with which this volume is concerned.13 The reasons for this unfortunate situation with respect to the period after the sixth century in particular are many, not the least of which is the probable misrecognition of artefacts found on excavated sites as belonging to othercultures, or their accidental destruction. In addition, no battlefield excavations have been carried out and few warriors’ graves or interments have been located which are clearly Byzantine.
Remarkably few military artefacts— swords or blades of any sort, arrowheads, shield bosses, buckles, pieces of armour or helmets—can be firmly identified as “Byzantine” for the period after the sixth century in Asia Minor or the southern Balkans. The result is that Byzantine weapons technology has to be reconstructed almost entirely on the basis of literary accounts of often dubious, or at least problematic, reliability, illustrations in manuscripts, frescoes or mosaics, or relief carving in stone, all of which media again bring problems of stylization and archetype with them. Only recently, indeed, has a monograph dealing with the subject of personal arms and armour been published, and this manages with only minimal reference to archaeological documentation.14 It should be apparent from the foregoing that students of Byzantine military equipment, as well as those of the relationship between Byzantine society and warfare in general, face a difficult task in respect of the sources at their disposal.
The latter issues are further complicated, however, by the Byzantines’ own attitudes to warfare and fighting, for there existed a substantial difference between the various “official” views sanctioned by church and imperial ideology, and those of soldiers as well as of ordinary people—peasant farmers, merchants or townsfolk. Equally, and perhaps more importantly, the grounds on which the Byzantines based their views of warfare are somewhat more complex than those commonly ascribed to them, and this very complexity has sometimes led to the most crude misunderstanding of Byzantine attitudes. Even quite recently, a commentator on the Crusades could write “In the Greek Orthodox Church of the Byzantine empire war was always regarded as unchristian…
The Byzantines preferred to use mercenaries in their wars rather than allow Greek Christians themselves to fight.” The absurdity of such views will become apparent in Chapter 1. 15 For the Byzantines themselves had their notions of their position in the order of things, a political morality which was expressed in the writings of emperors and members of the social and cultural elite, and which gave expression to two facets of the Byzantine world view: on the one hand, the way they wanted to see themselves; and on the other, the way they wanted others to see them and, through seeing them, to be persuaded of the “correctness” of Byzantine political claims to be the true heirs of imperial Rome.
Military handbooks compiled by literati or by active or retired generals or field-officers, contributed to, and indeed are partly responsible for, the formation of such notions in which the Byzantines—the true heirs of imperial Rome in their eyes (and at first, at any rate, in the eyes of most others in western Europe, at least until the later eighth century)—stood for Christendom against the chaos and disorder of barbarian or non-believer. There has thus evolved a consensus to the effect that the Byzantines (or at least, the political and governing elite) appear to have disliked fighting wars. If they could possibly avoid warfare, even at thecost of paying subsidies to foes who might (and usually did) claim such subsidies as “tribute” from an inferior power, they tended to do so. Byzantine rulers preferred to use craft, intelligence, wiles, bribery, ideological blackmail and countless other devices rather than commit themselves to set battles or even warlike confrontations of any sort. Even in warfare, the predominant tendency is for armies to proceed with the utmost caution.
Now although there is a substantial element of truth to this view so expressed, the reasons for the Byzantine attitude were not merely a reflection of Christian beliefs and an innate dislike of warfare and violence—Byzantine soldiers, officers and governments could be as bloodthirsty, aggressive and merciless as any of their various enemies at different times, and there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate the point. While religious convictions and motives certainly account for the mode through which this pacific ideology was expressed, what really determined its centrality in the Byzantine perspective was the strategic situation of the empire, a situation noted and commented upon, and not envied, by outside observers such as the papal legate Liudprand of Cremona in the tenth century.16 The nature of the relationship between Byzantine theoretical expressions of their views of warfare and the realities of strategical and logistical demands is one element which can help us understand more precisely what role warfare played in the Byzantine mind, and how it affected attitudes and practice, from the simple soldier in the field to the general or the emperor himself.
The Christian Roman state—from the fourth and fifth centuries and on through the period of transformation in the seventh and eighth centuries—was structured as a hierarchy of administrative levels: at the top was the emperor, understood to be God’s representative, surrounded by a palatine and household apparatus, the centre of imperial government and administration. Civil and fiscal government was delegated until the middle of the seventh century from the emperor to the praetorian prefects, whose prefectures were the largest territorial circumscriptions in the state; each prefecture was further divided into dioecesae or dioceses, which had a predominantly fiscal aspect; and each diocese was divided into provinciae or provinces, territorial units of fiscal and judicial administration.
These were further divided into self-governing poleis or civitates, the cities, each with its territorium or hinterland (which might be more or less extensive, according to geographical, demographic and other factors).17 The church and the theological system it represented (from the late fourth century the official religion of the Roman state and, probably by the mid-sixth century, the majority religion within the empire) played a central role in the economy of the Roman world—it was a major landowner—as well as in imperial politics, in influencing the moral and ethical system of the Roman world, and in directing imperial religious policy. Emperors were inextricably involved in the conflicts generated by theological disagreements, given the prevailing view that the emperor was chosen by God, that he had tobe Orthodox (the definition of which was, however, debated at times), and that his role was to defend the interests of Orthodoxy and the Roman, i.e. Christian, oikoumene (the inhabited, civilized—Roman—world). The political implications were such that heresy was treated in effect as treason, and opposition to the (orthodox) emperor could effectively be treated as heresy.
The late Roman state was thus a complex bureaucracy, rooted in and imposed upon a series of overlapping social formations or regional “societies”: it is important to stress this since, although the state and the church and their complex administrative structures acted as a unifying force, local society and culture in the Balkans was rather different from that of central and southern Asia Minor, which was in turn very different from that of the eastern Anatolian regions. But all these local subsystems were structured by essentially the same social relations of production—the ways in which wealth was produced, distributed and consumed—across the whole central and east Mediterranean and Balkan world. Social and political tensions were exacerbated by religious divisions, local economic conditions, imperial politics and the burden placed upon the taxpaying population as a result of the state’s needs in respect of its administrative apparatus and, in particular, its armies. This was not a static society, nor even at times was it particularly stable. From the seventh century until the eleventh the rise of a new social-administrative elite, closely connected with the state and the army, can be traced, which evolves eventually into a real aristocracy of birth.
This development is accompanied by changes in the relationship between different types of peasant producer and the state, and in the social and economic status of the former, as well as between the state as represented by the “power elite” at Constantinople and the various elements of the social elite upon which it depended for its position. Byzantine social relations are thus very dynamic, and the army, the state’s military administrative structures, soldiers and warfare are crucial to their development. War and the need to wage it, the organizational constraints it imposes, its effects on society and economy as well as its ideological justification and the debates it engenders, are always a radical force for social and political transformation. However unpleasant the effects of war, it is an undeniable fact of human history that war has been on many occasions and in many different historical contexts a powerful stimulus both to technological innovation and social and political change.18
This is not necessarily to argue that, because war has been a necessary element in human social evolution, it must continue to be so—although that point of view has been defended; and it is certainly not to suggest that violence and aggression are, by themselves, a fundamental element in the human biogenetic inheritance.19 On the other hand, it does suggest that the crucial role of war and its concomitants cannot be ignored in the history of any culture. Byzantium is no exception. Indeed, in many respects the history of the Byzantine state (as of most states, perhaps) is also the history of its ability successfully to defend itself and to organize for war, forits military organization was central both to the inflection of its social relations in general as well as to the ways in which the central government extracted and redistributed the resources available to it, whether in the form of agricultural produce or money taxes on agriculture and trade.
This is obvious already from the later third and early fourth centuries, when the administrative and military reorganizations undertaken by the emperors Diocletian (284–305) and Constantine I (312–37) produced a militarization of even civil elements of the state apparatus, insofar as military grades and titles came to be awarded to officials within fiscal and related departments of the central government, and a military vocabulary permeated day-to-day governmental practice and language.20 But it is just as obvious, if not more so, from the seventh century, when the much-reduced eastern Roman empire had to fight for its existence against an array of external foes who were able to extract a fearful price for survival in terms of economic dislocation and political-ideological disarray. Military organization and the ability to wage war are intimately connected with the question of the extent and nature of state power.
The degree to which the government is able to monopolize coercive force is crucial to the extent of the control exercised by the central political power over the resources necessary to its continued existence. Thus armies and those who comprise them—both leaders and rank-and-file—necessarily play a crucial role in the functioning of states, and an understanding of their workings can provide essential information about the way in which a particular state, within the constraints of the social relations in which it is rooted, evolves. At the same time, the nature and structure of the relations between the centre and its bureaucracy and administrative apparatus, and that between the latter and the social-economic elites of the society as a whole, play an important part in determining both how soldiers and the military are situated in the social order of things, and how the state actually maintains them.
Although itself a focus of debate and controversy, I will employ the term “state” to refer simply to a more-or-less territorially unified political entity, with a “centre” from which a ruler or ruling group exercises political authority, and which has generated administrative structures and power relationships which facilitate its maintenance over more than a single generation.21 States evolve institutional structures (fiscal and military, for example) which establish their own sets of roles and discourses, divorced from the practices of “ordinary” society. States thus generate specialist sets of institutions and generally create their own civil, judicial and military administrative castes or groups, which can survive only by maintaining control over the appropriation and distribution of surplus wealth and by promoting the continued existence of the political, social and economic relations which are perceived as necessary to their own continued existence.
From the point of view of maintaining armies, the means by which the state is able to appropriate, allocate and distribute or redistribute resources ultimately determine both the internal limits and the reach of state power on the one hand, and the effectiveness of the central authority in respect of its foreign policies on the other. But the ways in which states exercise power and authority vary enormously along a scale which alternates between two extremes: at one end, power can be concentrated at and exercised from the centre, through the ruler and an administration which remains under close and effective central supervision even in the provinces; at the other, state power may be diffused through an economically and sometimes politically independent elite (usually in the form of a nobility or magnate group), with a consequent parcelling out of surplus distribution, and the attendant danger that the state or rulers lose effective power over the resources necessary to their own continued existence. Most of these features are evident, at one stage of its history or another, in the structure and evolution of the East Roman state. In the late Roman and Byzantine empire, while the state always succeeded in maintaining at least a nominal control over its fiscal resources, there is a gradual movement from one pole to the other across the period from the seventh to the fifteenth century.
During the seventh and eighth centuries, the state seems able to have exercised a fairly powerful grip over its fiscal base and the resources of the empire in general. As a new social-political elite evolved, to become politically active as well as socially self-aware during the ninth— eleventh centuries, however, so the state—as represented by the abstract concept of a political entity on the one hand, and by the power-elite which actually controls government on the other—was obliged to recognize the reality of the power of elements in society which constituted in effect an alternative focus of political and economic authority and a demand for resources. What is significant from a structural perspective is thus the contradiction between the interests of the state, whose leading personnel had come by the early tenth century to be almost entirely recruited from this dominant social elite, and the interests of the members of this same elite as representatives of their clans and families and as landlords in their own right.
The problem was resolved temporarily through the seizure of state power by one of the magnate families, whose first representative, the emperor Alexios I, was able through an astute use of inter-clan marriage alliances and the parcelling out of key state positions to members of the aristocracy to stabilize the state, maximize resource extraction to the advantage of the central government and the emperor’s long-term internal and foreign political strategies, and reassert central authority and control. But this dynastic politics—which also involved the empire in similar political alliances with members of the western aristocracy—eventually broke down and, following the Fourth Crusade, resulted in the establishment on what turned out to be a permanent basis of a single imperial family at Constantinople—the Palaiologos family—the victory of a purely hereditary and dynastic succession, and the progressive fragmentation and decentralization of political authority as the emperors handed out imperial positions and resources on a permanent basis to members of other aristocratic clans. An imperial administration continued to exist and to function and the efficient bureaucracy of former centuries continued to lead a shadowy existence. The government was increasingly unable to pay its way; and since the maintenance of military forces was expensive, it was increasingly less able to defend its territory or its internal policies.
Private retinues played a significant role in all this, of course, so that the power of the Byzantine state was eventually effectively overshadowed, not simply by the strength of its political neighbours, but by that of some of the magnates within its territory, a point illustrated by the history of the civil conflicts which engulfed the empire in the fourteenth century in particular. Under such conditions, of course, the state could not hope to survive long, and it was primarily by virtue of the near-impregnable walls of Constantinople itself that it survived the first 50 years of the fifteenth century. It is the opening phase of this process which provides the context for the later evolution of military organization as well as attitudes to warfare in the East Roman world, and which explains at least partially the ability of this beleaguered remnant of the Roman state to survive into the late medieval world.
In the chapters which follow I will examine in succession each of the key areas raised in this introduction: the physical, social and economic context in which Byzantine military organization and warfare are to be understood, the army and soldiers in society, the administrative and logistical structures which supported it, the interaction between military and non-military aspects of the state, as well as the technology of warfare in the Byzantine world. I have not been able to devote space to the organization of the armies of the empire’s enemies which, since weapons and tactics in particular are always directly influenced by one’s foes, will perhaps be found to be a disadvantage at certain points.
But this was in order to avoid expanding the book even further, and perhaps also overburdening the reader, while the military structures and warfare of the empire’s Arab and Frankish enemies and allies has been dealt with by other scholars, some in the present series. This book does not represent, strictly speaking, a “polemological” analysis of Byzantine social and state forms: that remains a task, of much greater breadth, for the future.22 But I hope nevertheless to have shed some light, and from a slightly different angle than that normally adopted, on the history of the Byzantine state and society as a whole.
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