Download PDF | MILITARY DIASPORAS Building of Empire in the Middle East and Europe (550 BCE-1500 CE) Edited by Georg Christ, Patrick Sanger, and Mike Carr, Routledge, 2023.
416 Pages
MILITARY DIASPORAS
Military Diasporas proposes a new research approach to analyze the role of foreign military personnel as composite and partly imagined para-ethnic groups.
These groups not only buttressed a state or empire’s military might but crucially connected, policed, and administered (parts of) realms as a transcultural and transimperial class while representing the polity’s universal or at least cosmopolitan aspirations at court or on diplomatic and military missions. Case studies of foreign militaries with a focus on their diasporic elements include the Achaemenid Empire, Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Roman Empire in the ancient world.
These are followed by chapters on the Sassanid and Islamic occupation of Egypt, Byzantium, and the Latin Aegean (Catalan Company) to Iberian Christian noblemen serving North African Islamic rulers, Mamluks, and Italian Stradiots, followed by chapters on military diasporas in Hungary, the Teutonic Order including the Sword Brethren, and the Swiss military. The volume thus covers a broad band of military diasporic experiences and highlights aspects of their role in the building of state and empire from Antiquity to the late Middle Ages and from Persia via Egypt to the Baltic.
With a broad chronological and geographic range, this volume is the ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in the history of war and warfare from Antiquity to the sixteenth century.
Georg Christ is a senior lecturer in medieval and early modern history at the University of Manchester, UK, and a general staff officer in the Swiss Army. His work focuses on relations between Venice and the Mamluk Empire including the role of diasporas in transmediterranean connectivity.
Patrick Sanger is professor of ancient history at the Westfalische WilhelmsUniversitat Miinster, Germany. His research focuses on the administrative, legal, and social history of the Hellenistic and Roman world with a specific interest in
Egypt and in migration and integration issues.
Mike Carr is a lecturer in late medieval history at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a leading specialist on the history of papal trade policies and crusading in the late medieval Mediterranean.
PREFACE
This book is the late fruit of an international workshop on military diasporas held in Heidelberg in autumn 2013. It concentrated on military groups and organizations and their political, economic, and cultural impact on the building, defending, shaping, toppling, and connecting of empires.’ The workshop, the fourth in a series of workshops on trans-European diasporas in the pre-modern period,* showed that military groups were particularly interesting examples of diasporic communities because of their considerable potential to mobilize, transfer, and project personnel and capital between regions and empires.
The workshop, however, shaped its own questions as well and made us think more about the role of military diasporas in imperial politics, including courts, and state formation more generally. The book approaches the theme in a transcultural perspective bringing together studies of military diasporic groups in Europe and the Middle East produced by scholars from different disciplinary and national backgrounds. We thank the DAAD/MOB for the generous support of this project, the Central European University and in particular Professor Katalin Szende for their excellent cooperation, the Universitat Heidelberg, and especially Professors Julia Burkhardt-Dticker and Andrea Jordens for hosting and organizing the workshop. We also thank the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, who provided critical but extremely rigorous and helpful feedback that, so we hope, significantly improved this volume. Finally, we would like to thank Mareike Stanke for her editorial support. All remaining errors and shortcomings are ours.
We are sad that Jacob Klingner, who generously supported and encouraged this book project when first offered to De Gruyter, is no longer with us to see its completion, and we are grateful to Routledge and, in particular, Izzy Voice and Laura Pilsworth to step in and see through the publication of this volume in aspirit of ever collegial efficiency and friendly support even in the face of longer and longer delays.
INTRODUCTION
Military Diasporas and Diasporic Groups as Engines of Empire: An Introductory Research Agenda Georg Christ and Patrick Sadnger' Pre-modern Military diasporic groups were crucial to boost the military potential of a ruler or polity, thus enabling state formation and empire building. This might seem paradoxical as we associate the modern state with the nation state (whereby state and empire cannot be distinguished sharply) and national militaries.2 The soldiers engineering empire, however, were often and to varying degrees foreign and diasporic.
Military diasporas are here defined as ethnically defined groups of soldiers serving far away from their place of origin but typically retaining some links to it. These groups not only fought wars but also policed, represented, and administered states/empires and contributed crucially to a trans-local cultural framework of rule. Their foreign status helped to keep them apart from local particular interests and made them a suitable projector of the ruler’s or central governing agency’s will. Serving in secondary roles as administrators or policemen, either after returning home or retired in their land of service, diasporic and transnational soldiers continued to shape polities by controlling, securing, and challenging both the state/empire and local polities. Thus they significantly intervened in the formation of atomized and submissive populations in which the modern state is rooted.*
Foreign” in the context of pre-modern empires should not be misunderstood as necessarily meaning “from outside the empire”, which—in the case of a universal empire—would be strictly speaking impossible. If the empire has more limited aspirations (e.g. to rule over an ecumene), it might make sense to distinguish between militaries from within versus those from beyond a “limes”, but the constitutive element of a diasporic group in our understanding can only be relative foreignness, that is a palpable feeling of being foreign to the area of operation and separated from the place of origin regardless of its formal political affiliation. Historically, the term diaspora indeed means trans-imperial rather than inter-imperial dispersion of an ethnicity, e.g. the Jewish diaspora within the Roman Empire.
Before giving an overview of the contributions in this volume, we will illustrate how the continuous importance of military diasporas has been overshadowed by the modern equation of nation state and national military service, discuss the state of research regarding foreign military groups, define military diasporas/ as well as diasporic groups, and detail the proposed explanatory framework.
Problem: The Anomaly of National Service
While hardly denied or unknown, diasporic militaries’ contribution to state and empire formation has not been considered explicitly. The reason might be that a diasporic focus somewhat goes against the narrative of the nation state as a national project carried out by soldiers of this very nation. Private military firms of the likes of Blackwater or Executive Outcome are seen as much as an aberration as the French Foreign Legion is seen as an exception. The connection between nation state and military, however, is a relatively recent and hardly ever fully completed development. It began tentatively in the seventeenth century with a move towards bringing the foreign troops “home” followed by eighteenth-century militia systems, the Prussian recruitment cantons and a first attempt at conscription in Russia in 1705.4
It became more radical with the French Revolution’s military expansion. The levée en masse of 1793, culminating in the general conscription of 1799, seemed to produce a congruence of nation-state-military, although only the 18—25 year-old men were affected by it as French-citizen-soldiers.> Most European states followed suit and militaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thus were characterized by similar phenomena of mass mobilization/conscription and linking of civic rights and military service.° Yet the full use of the population fit for military service was neither always practical nor desirable. There was strong parliamentary resistance against the Prussian military reforms aiming at a better use of conscription 1858-1862. Also, the subsequent 2nd German Reich (Empire) was reluctant to use the full potential of its manpower due to concerns that it would not be able to recruit enough sufficiently qualified officer trainees to deal with the armed masses.’ The solution of beefing an army’s ranks with officers from abroad, however, was increasingly barred in national armies.
Because of the clear link between German nation building and military build-up in the 2nd Empire, the more diasporic Prussian military-cultural legacy is sometimes—paradoxically—linked to nationalist and national social militarism. This is telling: The Prussian concept of serving a non-national dynastic state and hence a diasporic military not tied to a nation but a somewhat abstract state and the king had become unfamiliar to the twentieth-century observer. More importantly, the victors of World War Two drew on the concept of the nation state themselves.* Focusing on the obvious connection between militarism and nationalism more generally was undesirable. By linking Nazi Germany to a specific “Prussian militarism”, however, the more troubling discussion about the nation state’s inherent militarism could be postponed.’ The militaries remained national and the idea of a transnational European Defence Community was rejected in 1950 under fierce resistance against a supranational military command and the idea of joining ranks with the former foe."”
The steadfast adherence to the doctrine of the nation state and its national military thus prevented and continues to hinder alternative military structures for Europe. European defence cooperation around the European Defence Agency, the Common European Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), and, in particular, the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) is very limited and European military structures are weak (EU battle groups, EGF, EBCGA or FRONTEX). Defence remains essentially the remit and responsibility of the member states, while NATO, somewhat contradictorily, is accepted as a transnational institution ultimately responsible for the defence of Europe.'' NATO’s clear commitment to national armies as building blocks of cooperation might go some way in explaining this seeming contradiction.
Increasingly, however, these Western national armies are less national in their composition. Conscription or national service has been abandoned with a nationalized social contract moving from serving the nation to being served by the national welfare state in exchange for permanent war-style taxation.'* Therefore, many allegedly national militaries, due to recruitment problems, are becoming increasingly multi-national, although this is not properly acknowledged. Not only do the US armed forces increasingly include foreigners but so do many European militaries.!? Regardless of the percentage of non-national service personnel, armies are becoming more diasporic. Even the Swiss Army, which is still based on the national service model excluding non-citizens from its ranks, is in many ways a multi-ethnic force: A great number of soldiers are not Swiss-born and have a mother tongue that is not a national language.'* Also, the opponents faced by many Western militaries e.g. in Afghanistan, Iraq, North Africa, or domestically are increasingly diasporic and not serving a nation state but a religion, a leader, an idea.'°
It seems that politicians find it difficult to acknowledge that, if not the nation state, certainly the national military has widely ceased to exist. Considering European demographic developments combined with the reluctance of many “old” Europeans to do military service, it might be timely to consider whether, perhaps, a European armed force open to non-Europeans, including trans-Mediterranean immigrants, lies ahead of us—distantly mirroring the late Roman army. A look at the late Roman army or the multi-ethnic, -lingual, and -religious militaries of Frederick the Great’s Prussia or of the AustroHungarian Empire or more remote examples of non-national, composite and multi-ethnic armies might thus be instructive to overcome the impasse of national-military thinking: We should analyze former armed forces in their transnational compositions.
Yet the prevalent national-military thinking tends to essentialize soldiers both to their supposed and official ethnicity and to their role as soldiers, i.e. fighters. Soldiers, however, were more than that as they became part of a diasporic network: Grouped primarily but not exclusively with their co-locals they joined composite armies of various kinds and at various distances from their place of origin. In these composite forces, they formed multiple links with local populations and other military diasporic groups. They thus not only administered power manu militari but contributed to state/empire and nation building projects in other ways too. As foreign, allochthonous groups they protected rulers as bodyguards, they policed local populations, they represented and symbolized the universal reach of the regime at court and on embassies. They projected state/imperial power from the centre to the various parts of the realm as administrators in state/imperial bureaucracies, which were increasingly detached from traditional tribal or local powerbases. Meanwhile, they could also influence their homelands by tying them in multiple ways to emerging states/empires. Furthermore, military diasporas could boost their homelands’ economic and fiscal base as well as their military potential while stabilizing social and economic structures: It drained the land of excess young men and thus allowed for a controlled social mobility while generating income for the respective polity and middlemen élite that facilitated this military service, which in turn stabilized oligarchic governmental structures."
State of Research
The state of research on military diasporas is quickly narrated. Diaspora studies are a wide and fairly established field that produces not only a continuous stream of studies on the classic three “big” diasporas: The Jewish, the Greek, and the Armenian but also on Chinese, Tibetan, Italian, Pakistani, Indian and many more diasporas. Indeed, the term has proliferated to such an extent that Rogers Brubaker rightly questioned its analytical value in his seminal essay “The ‘diaspora’ diaspora”’.'’ Military diasporas, however, have hardly been studied, at least not under this heading. One of the very few references found is in Chang’s study on Yunnanese in Thailand, which emphasizes the need to study this phenomenon.'® Even if the term appears, it is rarely with reference to a diaspora studies’ explanatory framework."? The only military diaspora explicitly called so, seems to be the Irish military diaspora.”°
This is not to say that military diasporas and diasporic groups (for this distinction, see below) have not been considered from the perspective of military and political history. Erik-Jan Ziircher’s edited volume on military labour, for instance, is path-breaking for our purpose, although limited to the period post1500.7! Typically, military diasporic groups are addressed as mercenaries, a focus which already becomes evident when looking at the Ancient World. Nubanda Mardune entered the service of Sargon of Akkad as captain of the Amories in the twenty-fourth century BCE.” The famous Nubian archers served the Egyptian Old, Middle and New Kingdom armies (third—second millennium BCE). Cretan mercenaries might or might not be identified as one of King David’s two bodyguards (the Cherethites and Pelethites, c. 1000 BCE).
Greece and the neighbouring Aegean region were homelands par excellence of diasporic mercenaries. As early as in the Archaic and Classical periods (eight— fourth century BCE), we encounter groups of Hellenic soldiers who left the Greek cultural zone and sought their fortune in the service of Middle Eastern rulers.** In the course of the campaigns of Alexander the Great (334-324 BCE), a Macedonian-Greek army (combining the Greek heavy infantry, i.e. the phalanx formation, with cavalry units) conquered the Middle Eastern kingdoms. In the settlements and cities that were established in Alexander’s huge empire and—after his death in 323 BCE—in the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Diadochi (Alexander’s generals and successors) from the end of the fourth to the first century BCE, allochthonous mercenaries or professional soldiers played a dominant role and (former) military men formed a major part of the new GrecoMacedonian ruling élite.*° Indeed, the recruitment of diasporic mercenaries
undoubtedly reached its peak in this “axial” period,*® marking an essential feature of Hellenism that distinguishes this era from the preceding classical period and its formative warrior protagonists, the citizen-soldiers of the Greek cities or poleis. The mass deployment of mercenaries of different ethnicities was a decisive component in transforming the Greek world of individual poleis and their power struggles into a more “global” structure of imperial kingdoms. Military diasporic groups hailed from foreign realms or specific regions within the kingdom and some of them were strategically resettled within the realm to stabilize Diadochi rule.”
Mobility and migration also characterized the Roman army, which, however, never operated on a large scale with foreign troops (which were usually only temporarily recruited for specific operations). In republican times, its permanent (infantry) core was formed as a citizen militia. It transformed into a standing army consisting of imperial subjects as professional soldiers at the beginning of the imperial period, thus abandoning the militia system.** With its élite troops, the heavily armed infantry legions of Roman citizens, Rome conquered a vast territory, which in imperial times (starting at the end of the first century BCE) stretched from Britain to the Middle East (defeating the afore-mentioned Hellenistic kingdoms), and, thus, united the shores of the Mediterranean into a single empire. Stationed in camps of varying sizes, Roman soldiers were spread across this huge empire in order to guarantee its internal security and protect its external borders. These patterns of dissemination and mobility—including the settlements of retired soldiers first from Italy than with the expansion of the recruitment base from the entire empire—created a network of Roman diasporic groups across the empire. As Roman “cultural agents” in the provinces and on the peripheries of the empire they—through processes of transculturation (see below)—contributed significantly to the formation of a common Roman imperial culture (whose emergence is not to be seen as contradictory or antithetical but rather complementary to an ongoing ethnic identity).
To support the legions, the Roman army increasingly made use of foreign soldiers. During republican times, namely, from the end of the third/beginning of the second century BCE, its deficiency in cavalry and light-armed special forces was compensated by ethnic contingents of Cretan archers and Balearic slingers or Gallic and Iberian horsemen. Such auxiliary troops (auxilia) were recruited on a regular basis, starting with the reign of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, among the peregrini, the freeborn inhabitants of the Roman provinces without Roman citizenship. The importance of the auxilia for imperial politics cannot be overestimated. After the troop reductions at the beginning of Augustan rule, they became an integral part of the standing army and represented a welcome and necessary addition to the Roman formations both quantitatively and qualitatively.
They allowed a relatively unproblematic doubling and, at the same time, an enhancement of the Roman military potential, especially regarding cavalry (ala) and ballistic support, whereby auxiliary troops retained (at least initially) their specific weaponry and fighting style (e.g. the Syrian archers) and thus widened the range of armament and tactics.”” At the same time, the deployment of the auxilia relieved the state treasury since less funds were required for their upkeep compared to the more expensive legions. As far as security policy was concerned, the enlistment of the auxilia, which was mainly carried out by force under Augustus, was an effective means of weakening regions of the empire that had just been pacified or conquered by withdrawing the segment of the population most capable of armed resistance and stationing them in other parts of the empire. This policy was initially reflected in the ethnic homogeneity of the individual auxilia units, whose soldiers originated from a certain tribe or region and thus can be considered diasporic groups. The homogeneity of auxilia, however, changed fundamentally during the imperial period. Persistent geographical separation from their former homelands and a shift to local recruitment to supplement the units increasingly diversified their ethnic composition. The social objective behind the creation of the auxilia and their actual effect on the imperial population can be subsumed under the catchword “Romanization” (in the sense of transculturation). Through the Roman auwxilia, the peregrini were offered an Opportunity to participate in the imperial project and to become familiar with the Roman way of life and the Latin language. At the end of their service, the auxiliary soldiers were granted Roman citizenship so that their male descendants could serve in the legions.*°
Until the end of the imperial period, the Roman army thus included diasporic groups but without including contingents from beyond the imperial borders, i.e. so-called barbarians.*! This would only change in Late Antiquity (where the distinction between legions and auxilia had become obsolete after emperor Caracalla’s Constitutio Antoniniana, which granted Roman citizenship to the peregrini in 212 CE). In the fourth and fifth centuries, the military leadership of the Western Roman Empire had to ensure that a Roman field army remained operational under internal and external pressure**; Aetius was the latest in aline of Roman generals who mustered barbarian contingents (most prominently Goths and Huns) into the army to gain the upper-hand in the power struggles of the late Roman Empire.*’ Especially the western part of the Roman Empire, whose borders were under stronger pressure than those in the east, had to rely to a large extent on recruits from beyond its borders.** For it became increasingly difficult to find recruits among the Roman population—probably not because of a general unwillingness to fight but rather because large areas of the empire lay desolate due to devastation and population decline. The manpower problem was also tackled by the integration of German foederati. This raised the “symbiosis” between the Western Roman Empire and the Germanic tribes to a new, albeit dangerous, level. The foederati were given a closed settlement area on Roman soil to secure the imperial border under their own leaders. Thus virtually independent diasporic groups or foreign allies had been created on Roman territory. This development contributed massively to the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, which culminated in its fall commonly associated with the year 476. The Eastern Roman Empire by contrast was much more stable in its administrative and military structures. Even so, the Sasanians—the last Persian empire before the rise of Islam—conquered the provinces of the Orient in the second and third quarters of the seventh century. Although the lost territories could be reconquered by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (610-641), they were then definitely lost in the Arab invasion that began in the 30s of the seventh century.**
Diasporic militaries have been studied with regard to mercenaries in medieval Western Europe, notably in the edited volume Mercenaries and Paid Men by John France, which provides a good overview of the state of research on, often ethnically defined, mercenary groups.*° The general literature emphasizes an alleged shift from feudal retinues to mercenary armies.*” Military obligations, be they owed to the fleet in coastal areas or to the prince’s feudal cavalry inland, could be fulfilled by sending a representative or by direct monetary payment. This, then, led to the rise of mercenary armies financed by this very tax revenue. The classical argument was that money replaced feudal allegiance as the driver for military service: Werner Sombart argued military leaders were among the first capitalistic entrepreneurs in pre-modern Europe.** It should not be overlooked, however, that monetary payment also played an important role in financing feudal retinues. Moreover, mercenaries continued to be imbedded in webs of allegiances. Even the Renaissance Italian condottieri did not serve merely for money. Rather, family allegiance, feudal ties, and regional affiliation played a crucial role in their decision whom to serve.*?
Various pre-modern ethnic mercenary groups have been extensively researched: Vikings,*” Brabangons and other Flemish mercenaries in England in the twelfth century,‘' Normans hiring Welsh and other foreign mercenaries,” the Varangian Guard in Byzantium,” or the Swiss.** Occasionally mentioned are Genoese, Pisan, and Muslim sailors serving Christian rulers such as the Angevins but also the Ottomans.
The military orders have no doubt received the most attention, although they have not been systematically studied as military diasporic communities (for instance, with regard to the different langues (“tongues” i.e. nations) of the Hospitallers). Military orders indeed were characterized by a multi-national dynamic somewhat akin to current European institutions, marked by power struggles between ethnic groups stifling the organizations’ effectiveness while providing a platform for transnational communication. Military orders also mobilized and transferred considerable amounts of capital and personnel and maintained a constant flow of money, goods, personnel, and knowledge between their eastern possessions and Europe. At the same time, they ruled over lands, which often intersected with trade routes from East to West and South to North and became involved in the respective trade.*°
The Egyptian Mamluk and the Turkish-Ottoman military diasporas were entangled with mercantile networks and the respective diasporic groups controlling the supply of slave soldiers and providing the necessary resources to fund them.‘” Yet how these links along with shared ideals and codes of conduct might have provided a common denominator among officially opposed military diasporas (such as Mamluks and Hospitallers) remains to be studied. It might help to explain the co-habitation of Cyprus or Rhodes and Mamluk Egypt in the fifteenth century,** but also why diasporic military élites remained separate from their subjects, be it in Egypt, Syria, or Rhodes.”
More attention has been given to early modern ethnic regiments, for instance, the Irish in the service of Catholic rulers (France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire) but also of the Stuart king Charles IH although not from a deliberately diasporic perspective. Studies emphasize the importance of their Catholic confession for the Irish and how it could top monetary incentives or personal-dynastic allegiances. Nevertheless, they were sometimes suspected to plot with fellow British, i.e. Scottish soldiers.°° Similarly, the well-studied Swiss units serving various European rulers were recruited from Protestant and Catholic cantons depending on the ruler’s confession. In France, however, Swiss of both confessions served, and there was a meta-confessional Swiss allegiance. The service contracts thus stipulated that Swiss units could not be sent into battle against other Swiss.°! The Scottish military diaspora of the early modern period has been studied, e.g. by Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean.*” A biography of Marshal Schomberg by Michael Glozier, as well as his collection of essays edited with David Onnekink focus on Huguenot soldiering.®*’ Huguenots were important in spreading the latest military knowledge and modernizing armies. They thus contributed significantly to state formation by drawing on their experience in the more advanced French army before being dispersed from France and taking service abroad.**
For the modern and contemporary periods (which are not the focus of this book), we find a few studies on Sudanese, Fijian, and Ghurka soldiers.*° A plethora of literature of varying quality deals with the French Foreign Legion, for which diasporic groups are constitutive to the point of jeopardizing overall cohesion, cf. the so-called Spaniards’ indiscipline of 1840 or the high-jacking of a train by German legionnaires in 1908. British legionnaires’ preference to serve in the para regiment, by contrast, seems to be seen as a boost to morale and
56 “Transnational soldiers”*’ have also been noted in Russian and
combat power. Austro-Hungarian armed forces. International volunteers have been studied for the Italian Risorgimento,** the Balkan Wars, and the Russian and the Spanish Civil Wars.*” National socialist Germany attempted to recruit a multi-ethnic volunteer force against “Communism”, and Jewish and non-Jewish foreign volunteers fought in the Israeli-Arab wars, while transnational mercenaries were also employed in various (post-)colonial conflicts.°” Yet the closest to an application of a conceptual framework lent from diaspora studies is an application of the concept of diasporic intersection to the US military serving the nation abroad and the problems related to their coming back “home”.°! So we see, once again, that while there are many studies on ethnic or migrating militaries, these have
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rarely been studied as diasporic groups.
Questions and Explanatory Framework
This book seeks to address this lacuna by analyzing various ethnic and para-ethnic military groups as military diasporas. We define military diasporas as groups of combatants with a shared ethnic (or “imagined”, para-ethnic)® background serving in foreign lands that were more or less far removed from their place of origin—regardless of whether they formally belonged to the same state/empire or not. Typically these diasporas thereby served rulers or governments of another ethnicity—if they were not ruling themselves, such as, for instance, the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria or serving higher authorities such as God, the idea of the Islamic umma or the Church/the Pope. In military diasporas, we suggest, ethnic categories will typically matter for the identity politics of the group and the land of origin will remain important in the imagination or as a place of recruitment and return. We distinguish between military diasporas and single military diasporic groups, although the former term—where appropriate (e.g. in Andrade’s piece)—can stand in for both, i.e., for the single diasporic groups of the same ethnic moniker in different places as well as for the respective diaspora of x or y they are collectively forming consisting of these diasporic groups zl, z2, and z3. We thus suggest a broader but also more nuanced definition of diaspora than William Safran: Groups dispersed abroad from a homeland centre, to which they yearn to return while remaining separate from the host society.®* This latter definition suits ethno-religious diasporas such as the Jewish or Armenian that had no, or very limited, control over their “homeland”. For military diasporas, this was not always the case. Their military strength could preserve a status of relative political independence of their homeland e.g. in the case of the Swiss, and thus significantly impact state formation and empire building not only in the countries of service but also at home. Still, the homeland is part also of the military diasporas’ identities while they are serving abroad, but it is different from the spiritual yearning for Jerusalem, and in many cases, return is not only a dream but also a reality (for those surviving however traumatized, wounded, and maimed they may have been).
Why should one use the term diaspora at all? Has it not become completely meaningless in its wider and wider circles of applications and with its programmatic undertones?®? Would “mercenary” not be a suitable and already familiar alternative for the topic at hand?°° While, traditionally, mercenaries are defined as troops foreign and paid, Stephen Morillo shows that this equation is misleading. There are not only paid non-diasporic troops (such as many contemporary Western armies) but also diasporic troops which, although typically paid, were not in it for that pay so much as for other reasons, such as political power in the case of the Mamluks in Egypt, or an ideologically motivated enterprise/career such as Crusade (military orders) or jihad (ghazis).°7 Migrant soldier, however, is too unspecific and de-emphasizes both the prospects of more permanent resettlement in the country of service and the ties between the latter and the homeland. Military transhumance (used in Christ/Weltert’s chapter) would again focus on the migratory element and especially seasonal and recurring patterns, which (although crucial) are only a marginal part of the diasporic experience. Finally, ethnonyms used as autonyms, i.e. “Swiss” or “Scots”, can reify national identity and overshadow the fact that groups, in fact, were of more transnational composition than their name might suggest. The diasporic framework shall thus help to critically interrogate such categories with regard to processes of group formation and identity construction within a context of transimperial connectivity and transculturation affecting and being facilitated by such military groups.
It is thus for lack of a suitable alternative that we recur to “diaspora” unless the reader prefers “allochthonous military group operating under a (para-)ethnic group identity”. Regardless of the terminology, we propose to explore to which extent the comparative focus on such groups and the methodological combination of diaspora studies and military history can help exploring social cohesion, allegiance, identity, and motivations in pre-modern militaries, the tension fields within which they operated and their contribution to processes of empire building/state formation. Furthermore, we want to explore possible allegiances and connections that could be negotiated by foreign military personnel between homeland and land of service and the respective liege lords. It helps to foreground foreign soldiers’ role beyond their core military function in policing, representing, and administrating state/empire. Thereby we ought to pay attention to processes of transculturation, i.e. how deculturation and acculturation intermingled, were embraced, endured but also resisted. This resulted in transcultural modes of adaptation between the place of origin and land of service enabling transcultural and thus thick and flexible transregional and -imperial connectivities. We argue that such a diasporic focus will shed light on and foster a more holistic understanding of pre-modern militaries. It highlights how military diasporic groups were crucial elements of state formation while creating and maintaining—among other things—links between polities horizontally and vertically (or, anachronistically speaking, internally and diplomatically).
State/empire building involves violent processes to extract resources and to control/monopolize violence and power. It requires a reliable force to project military might from the governing centre to the polity’s parts and to safeguard its centre of gravity (ruler, capital). It needs to be both loyal to the centre and apart from its opponents; the recipients of violence. There are different options of how to generate such forces capable of projecting military or administrative power while remaining loyal to the dispatching ruler or administration. One is to form a transimperial élite from scratch, e.g. by recruiting children into closed institutions where they can be educated (de-cultured and then ac-cultured) into this role, such as the Janissaries, Mamluks, or, ideally, members of (military) orders®*; another option is to rely on a domestic powerbase (Hausmacht: Family, clan, tribe, or town). While the latter option, according to the fourteenth-century North African historian Ibn Khaldiin, prevails in the funding phases of empires/states, the former dominates subsequently.” A third option is a variant of the first: The recruitment of diasporic military groups either as slaves or mercenaries/professional soldiers, whereby their foreignness keeps them separate from the targeted population while they gain access to the ruling (military) élite. Thinking of an alternative voluntary, bottom-up process of state formation/empire building, even such spontaneous political upscaling, as for instance, observable in medieval Italian communes, can lead to locked contests for power between different factions as carriers of bottom-up military power. The cities thus often resorted to recruiting a podestd or signore from outside, who first relied on his Hausmacht but then increasingly on diasporic groups to recruit an allochthonous mercenary police force to maintain law and order and break factional stalemates.””
In either case, these enforcers needed to be uprooted from their original context. In compensation for lost traditional (family, tribal) support, employing rulers tied these relatively isolated military diasporic groups to their person and thus enhanced and protected personal and dynastic power. The soldiers’ new homeland was the ruler’s household. Responding only and directly to the ruler, they could serve as a force tipping the power balance amidst factional fights in the latter’s favour. This impacted on their armament and military organization. Often they were used in a Praetorian (close personal protection and thus infantry role) and/or policing, power projecting, and civil/tax enforcement role (light/ heavy cavalry). Their new point of reference being courtly politics, there was a strong incentive to take an active part in it. Hence, military diasporas, while summoned for the protection of rulers and their empires, could become the most dangerous threat to them. A further challenge in the employment of diasporic groups was that their ethnic or para-ethnic bonding fostered solidarity across the wider diaspora, i.e. groups of the same ethnic identity serving different rulers, which on the up-side provided links across lines of conflict.
Military diasporas also enabled rulers to upscale their armed forces by extending and differentiating their recruitment base. Departing from a model where a prince drew on his own land’s military potential (feudal retinue for heavy cavalry and rural militias for infantry), the size of the armed forces would be limited by the size of the population. The trend towards exempting populations from military service in exchange for financial contributions restricted the recruitment base furthermore. Yet rich princes could compensate by tapping into the military resources of other lands, typically those characterized by surplus population and conditions of scarcity. Such “marginal” lands could export mercenaries, e.g. densely populated Flanders (twelfth century) or the Swiss Alps (esp. from the fourteenth century onwards).”! Diasporic soldiers were thus an important element of population relocation in the context of state formation and empire building. They not only projected power but also unleashed a broader dynamic of drawing diverse populations (both geographically and socially) into imperial/state projects of acculturation, transculturation, and thus cultural homogenization.
In order to appreciate the importance of military diasporic groups, we propose the following questions:
1. How diasporic was a military diasporic group? I.e. was the ethnic eponym or autonym merely a moniker of corporate identity” or did it reflect a deeper affiliation with a homeland and its diaspora? How mono-ethnic were ethnically identified diasporic groups? What, by contrast, was the role of ethnicity in officially non-ethnic military diasporic groups (such as Mamluks, Janissaries, ghilmadn, members of military orders)?
2. What was the military edge, the speciality of this group in terms of tactics, armament and equipment? The Swiss infantry, for instance, developed a particular style of dealing with heavy cavalry attacks, which made them an attractive asset on European battlefields of the late fifteenth century. Other examples would include the German Landsknechte, the Gascon infantry, the stradioti (Albanian) light cavalry, etc.—some of which are analyzed in the following chapters. Out of these regional contingents evolved different military specialities that soon were not the prerogative of ethnic specialists anymore. This was, for instance, the case with the, originally Polish, lancers or the, originally Hungarian, Hussars that, while retaining distinctive “ethnic” dress, were recruited domestically. The originally Swiss speciality of the long pike became commonplace in many infantry units including the Spanish Tercios, which increasingly recruited internationally, e.g. in Italy.”* The specific equipment, armament, and tactics of diasporic units were an asset for the employers as their tactics, at first, came as a nasty surprise to enemies not accustomed to them. Yet even after this surprise element had worn off and their ethnic character had become increasingly blurred, they continued to exist as part of the force-mix of increasingly diversified and bigger armed forces. Thus, they complemented the hard-core military capabilities such as heavy cavalry in the Middle Ages, heavy infantry in antiquity or line infantry in the early modern period. To what extent did such ethnic and tactical diversification require a stronger investment in training of military élites to ensure effective joint-strike capability and interoperability between the different corps?
3. How did a priori territorial militias,” typically associated with a local context and being particularly effective in it, become military diasporic contingents removed from their context and thus suitable as enforcers of central power? To which extent does this also apply to noble contingents (including non-nobles in auxiliary roles), although they might acculturate more easily based on shared élite status??? In other words how did military diasporas transform through but also facilitate processes of acculturation, deculturation and transculturation?”°
4. How, and to what extent, was a diasporic group integrated into the wider military/police apparatus and culture of the host society?’? To what extent did armed bodies such as standing armies but also navies, police corps, and bureaucracies tend to be diasporic? What were the implications with regard to professionalization/diversification, centralization, build-up/upscaling of such bodies, and, hence, state formation and empire building both in the places of service and at “home”? How did it affect demographics and social structures both of the host and home societies? How did diasporic solidarities shape military communities in contrast or parallel to professional collegiality within and across different armed forces? Were soldiers primarily part of the ruler’s “family”, a multi-ethnic military, or part of their overarching respective (e.g. Cretan, Flemish, Genoese, Swiss, Irish) diasporas? What was the role of meta-ethnic, e.g. confessional, allegiances? The other trait of their esprit de corps arguably was military-technical professionalism that could transcend diasporic allegiance or even constitute a new diasporic, in this case multi-ethnic, military allegiance. Professionals on both sides of conflict lines developed a shared identity, which was arguably strongest in technical branches such as the navy, engineering, and artillery (or among pilots in the modern period). These relatively small élites would be characterized by strong transnational and -imperial connectivities, in the early modern period also by shared readings and to an extent languages, and high mobility between enemy lines, e.g. Orban, the renegade master of Ottoman artillery at the siege of Constantinople (1453).7°
Overview
The sketches presented here reflect the research foci of the participants in the project. While we succeeded in extending the breath of the volume by adding further contributions (Klinkott, Andrade, Jaspert, Loiseau, Whelan, Carr/ Grant), we unfortunately did not succeed mustering contributions on the Hospitallers, Templars, Janissaries, and the early modern Scottish and Irish military diasporas. It also would be desirable to consider diasporic elements in the Viking expansion, Spanish Tercios or French and northern European diasporic militaries, among others.
Nevertheless, combining studies of Persian, Mediterranean, and European military diasporas from antiquity to the late Middle Ages, we provide a first glance at military diasporas in the longue durée. The essays will explore military diasporas with a particular focus on state formation/empire-building on the macro and micro level, i.e. in the securing and defending of empires as well as in courtly politics, while also considering—where appropriate—the “transimperial” (or rather inter-imperial) mobility of diasporic groups and their contribution to the linking of states/empires.
The volume proceeds in a roughly chronological order. Hilmar Klinkott explores ethnic militaries in the Achaemenid Empire. He examines two groups of potential military diasporas—ethnically defined (non-Persian) troops on the one hand and Persian contingents on the other—and confronts the findings with the world view of the kings.
Patrick Sanger examines the military diaspora in Hellenistic Egypt ruled by the Ptolemaic dynasty between 323 and 30 BC (when Egypt was incorporated into the Roman Empire) through papyrological evidence. After Alexander the Great had occupied Egypt in 332 BC, civilians and soldiers from the Greekspeaking world came to Egypt and were grouped according to ethnic categories. Of these, the cleruchs, the members of the regular army of the Ptolemies, and the mercenaries or professional soldiers, are investigated: While the cleruchs present themselves as preservers of a (Common) Greek cultural identity, mercenaries/ professional soldiers seem to express an ethnic identity (e.g. Boeotian, Cretan, Jewish). Most prominent among the latter are the politeumata, administrative units based on (semi-autonomous) ethnic communities of mercenaries/professional soldiers, with which the Ptolemies may have intended to create an integrative (urban) counterpart to the cleruchic settlements based on individual land grants.
Nathanael Andrade discusses Syrian military diasporas in the Roman Imperial period (27 BC-AD 284). He establishes the types of Syrian practices that can be considered diasporic and argues that there were military diasporas of Syrians but not an integrated Syrian military diaspora. Andrade scrutinizes how Syrian diasporic traits were reconfigured as unit traditions, appropriated and redefined by military and civilian networks of non-Syrians, or integrated into local municipal cultures.
The next two articles investigate military diasporas in Late Antiquity. Mariana Bodnaruk’s case study focuses on the political and social role of the Roman generals (magistri militum) Stilicho, Constantius III, and Aetius, who made their careers in the second half of the fourth and the first half of the fifth centuries. Based on the epigraphic evidence of Late Antique Rome, she illuminates a decisive turning point in Roman history: The fate of the empire relied more and more on the generals’ ability to raise or command troops that were not genuinely “Roman” but diasporic; foederati recruited from outside and settled within the Roman Empire.
Lajos Berkes studies the Persian/Sasanian and Islamic occupation of Egypt in the first half of the seventh century. Drawing on papyri, Berkes analyzes how the new masters conquered and ruled Egypt addressing administrative continuities and discontinuities. He points out that Persians and Arabs relied heavily on the local structures of the former Byzantine administration. Furthermore, it can be noticed that the Persian and Arabic occupying forces tended to separate themselves from the indigenous population as, for instance, evidenced by the foundation of Fustat, a separate new city in the vicinity of the Roman military camp of Babylon.
The second part of the book is devoted to the Medieval Mediterranean. It opens with a study of Byzantine military diasporas during the Komnenoi revolt of 1081 by Roman Shliakhtin based on the Alexiad by Anna Komnena. Against the backdrop of economic growth and military defeat (Manzikert 1071), diasporic mercenary units grew in importance. Military groups hailed from Scandinavia and Rus (serving in the Varangian guard), but included also Pechenegs (Hungarian light cavalry), “Franks” (garrison troops), and “Iberians” (guarding the eastern provinces of the Empire), thus mirroring the routes of trade connecting Byzantium with the wider world. Although these diasporas raised concerns, they were a necessity both in internal contests for power and for the defence of the empire.
Mike Carr and Alasdair Grant explore another military diaspora in the Byzantine realm: The Catalan company as a diasporic group based on a common homeland and patron saint: Saint George. The integration of the Catalans into the officially universal Byzantine realm did not pose problems per se (cf. Klinkott for an earlier period) and was achieved by investing the leaders with titles and thus including them into the courtly taxonomy. Yet ethnic differentiation did seem to play a pivotal role in the Catalan company’s rule of their territorial base, the Duchy of Athens, where the Catalan and wider Latin ruling élite treated Greeks as second-class citizens if not slaves.
Nikolas Jaspert explores Christian alcayts mercenaries serving Muslim rulers in Medieval North Africa and al-Andalus. Focusing on the question of affiliation across the confessional divide, Jaspert analyzes to which extent they remained loyal to their former feudal overlords without jeopardizing their new allegiance to their Muslim employers. Their diasporic status and Christian faith seemed not to have negatively affected their “embeddedness” into the Muslim host society but enabled them to serve the ruler in matters delicate in terms of Islamic law such as collection of (non-canonical) taxes and thus might have given them a competitive edge.
Julien Loiseau analyzes diasporic military groups in the Mamluk sultanate. The Mamluks, as “slave” soldiers imported from beyond the Black Sea, manned not only the core of the heavy cavalry and thus the backbone of the armed forces of Egypt and Syria but also its military-administrative élite including the ruling dynasty. The first generations of Turkic Mamluks were part of the much wider Turkic military diaspora serving in armed forces across the Islamic world. As a first diasporic transformation, Mongol horsemen were cautiously integrated into the Mamluk force, then the Circassians rose to power. The Ottoman conquest of Syria and Egypt cut short the third transformation: Europeans (and Africans), who came to serve in the Mamluk army.
Nicholas C. J. Pappas describes a much-underexplored military diaspora: The stradioti as a double-diasporic Albano-Greek military community. He describes how the expansion of Ottoman power in south-eastern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries compelled this former Byzantine soldiery to find refuge and new employment. They became a light cavalry force in the Greek holdings of the Venetian realm but also in Naples, Sicily, and all over central Europe and thus part of most European armies’ force-mix as lancers/uhlans. Their competitive edge was their light armament, their hit-and-run tactics, and the low cost of their pay and equipment compared to heavy cavalry. Pappas highlights how their military prowess gave them particular prestige, which allowed them to successfully lobby for often-discriminated Greek diasporic communities.
The third part of the book will look at military diasporas in central Europe. Laszlo Veszprémy studies military diasporas in the kingdom of Hungary in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He explores the light-cavalry auxiliaries such as the Pechenegs, Székelys, and Cumans through contemporary chronicles, in which they were described with contempt—probably because they were seen as representatives of old tactics by the Hungarian military élite, which by this time had adopted a mainstream European heavy cavalry role. Teutonic and Hospitaller knights also operated in Hungary but in a heavy cavalry role.
Christopher Mielke analyzes the role of medieval queens in shaping military diasporas. After appreciating the diplomatic importance of their’ retinues, he focuses on the political role of dynastic marriages and finally the relationship between royal women, crusaders, and military orders. Mielke outlines the declining importance of knights in the queens’ retinues and of troops supporting the policy of a “foreign” king outside their homeland as a result of a dynastic marriage and partly explains this development by the growing importance of dowries given in cash or supplies.
Verena Schenk zu Schweinsberg is dealing with the Schwertbriiderorden (Order of the Brethren of the Sword) in thirteenth century Livonia. Based on the “Livonian Rhymed Chronicle” (Livldndische Reimchronik), an extensive vernacular source written within the Order, Schenk analyzes how the isolated military order, in competition with missionaries and bishops and in need of constant crusade to justify its existence, developed an almost symbiotic relationship with its enemies, who are described in a remarkably respectful way thus blurring the lines between friend and foe; Christian and heathen.
Mark Whelan explores how the diasporic character of the Teutonic Order (closely linked to the above-mentioned Schwertbriiderorden) shaped its rule in Prussia. Whelan focuses on the order’s ability to transplant the technologies and techniques of their native German lands to Prussia. He shows how enduring links with the knights’ homelands were crucial for the running of the order, not least by replenishing the order’s ranks from the principal recruiting grounds in Franconia and Swabia.
Anna Katharina Weltert and Georg Christ explore Swiss militaries abroad focusing on the Cold Winter Expedition of 1511. The campaign was rather exceptional: It was not an infantry-only mercenary contingent but a Swiss expeditionary force. The expedition is analyzed using a methodological framework of mercenary service ranging from cantonal contingents within the framework of a military alliance to unregulated individual service. The authors argue that the campaign showed the limits of independent Swiss military power projection hampered by both the cantons’ unwillingness to shoulder the necessary costs but also distrust and conflicts of interest. Thus, the Swiss tended to renounce on independent military power projection, to accept the auxiliary military diasporic role carved out for them by the big powers, and to enter into respective alliances, e.g. with France.
Outlook: Towards a Diasporic Deconstruction of the National Military
The present volume provides a range of studies both temporally and geographically tied together by the overarching focus on the diasporic element in military groups. Many promising lines of enquiry emerged and were pursued, while many more remain to be explored including Vikings, Flemish mercenaries, other military orders, Croats, “Cossacks”, Genoese and other Italian military including naval specialists, diasporic groups in Spanish imperial forces, Greek sailors (some of them “colonial” subjects) in the Venetian navy, or other Islamic diasporic militaries such as janissaries and Abbasid ghilmdn slave soldiers.
A military diasporic focus can also foster a conversation between diverged disciplines, namely diaspora studies and military history. This enables us to rethink foreign militaries’ contribution to state/empire formation. For state formation is not only the result of autochthonous military-fiscal build-up but very much of the movement of people and their skills first needed to enable a polity to secure and control regions, to administer them, and to extract taxes. While mainstream military history tends to overlook that some military forces, such as heavy cavalry in the late Middle Ages, served frequently in the tax enforcement role,” economic and political history focus less on the military build-up that was not only the result but also the pre-condition for forming centralized fiscal-military states. This volume seeks to shed light on some of these blind spots but can only be a modest beginning.
While the term military diaspora focuses on connectedness between soldiers of similar origin and ethnic affiliation in different armies, the concept of a military diasporic group targets the respective groups in their local contexts. Thus we can explore the importance and handling of ethnic eponyms in the management of group identity. Diasporic militaries often were sought out not only because they were foreign or apart but also because of their specific military skills and their strong esprit de corps rooted in common origin and ethnicity. They thus contributed to a division of labour and specialization in the military, transfer of military technology and respective professionalization but also to numerically increased armies, which were crucial in the context of medieval and especially early modern wars of expansion.
It becomes clear that military diasporas crucially contributed to the rise and maintenance of standing armies that are hence marked by what we might call the diasporic-nationalist paradox of modern armies: An increasingly transcultural, homogenized military culture, characterized by similar mind-sets, codes of conduct, ranks, customs, language, structures, armament, tactics, and even uniforms, coexists with the powerful deployment of national narratives and imaginaries that emphasize the respective army’s supposed uniqueness setting it apart from its (essentially identical) foe. Even this emphasis on national ideology is, of course, a shared feature of this overarching military “transculture” that serves also to suppress, to “de-culture” the force’s very own soldiers’ natural group feelings based on common origin or (tribal) ethnicity and to replace them with a homogenized, overarching “national” identity shared across the armed forces binding the thus atomized soldiers directly to the military apparatus.
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