Warfare, State And Society In The Byzantine World 565-1204

John Haldon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000159226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World is the first comprehensive study of warfare and the Byzantine world from the sixth to the twelfth century.
The book examines Byzantine attitudes to warfare, the effects of war on society and culture, and the relations between the soldiers, their leaders and society. The communications, logistics, resources and manpower capabilities of the Byzantine Empire are explored to set warfare in its geographical as well as historical context. In addition to the strategic and tactical evolution of the army, this book analyses the army in campaign and in battle, and its attitudes to violence in the context of the Byzantine Orthodox Church.
The Byzantine Empire has an enduring fascination for all those who study it, and Warfare, State and Society is a colourful study of the central importance of warfare within it.

CHAPTER ONE

Fighting for peace: attitudes to warfare in Byzantium

Warfare and the Christian Roman empire: the problem

Since God has put in our hands the imperial authority… we believe that there is nothing higher or greater that we can do than to govern in judgement and justice…and that thus we may be crowned by His almighty hand with victory over our enemies (which is a thing more precious and honourable than the diadem which we wear) and thus there may be peace …,¹

This passage, taken from the introduction to the Ecloga of the emperors Leo III and Constantine V, issued in 741, admirably sums up the key elements in the East Roman attitude to warfare, which was seen as undesirable but at the same time justified in order to maintain order and achieve peace. But the evidence for eastern Roman or Byzantine attitudes to warfare and fighting contains a number of ambiguities and paradoxes. Such ambiguities have existed throughout the history of cultures dominated by Christianity. Some of these societies have developed a reputation for being more warlike or more peace-loving than others, however – both in the eyes of their contemporaries as well as in those of the modern commentator. Western medieval society gave the former impression to others when it was involved in warlike confrontation with them (as during the Crusading period, for example), and Byzantium is placed usually in the second category. In this chapter, we will look at the ways in which early Christian ideas about warfare evolved in the later Roman and the medieval East Roman world, to produce the peculiarly Byzantine attitude to war which permitted western Crusaders and others, as well as some modern commentators, to caricature them as cowardly and effete.

Christianity has never developed formally an ideological obligation to wage war against “infidels” presented in the terms of Christian theology, even if, at times and on an ad hoc basis, individuals have spoken and acted as though such a justification could be made. Indeed, the thirteenth canon of St Basil expressly advised those who engaged in warfare to abstain from communion. So how did medieval East Roman Christians confront the issue of warfare and killing?

Early Christian thinkers had evolved a number of objections to warfare in general, and more especially to serving in the armies of the pagan Roman emperors. Humane considerations obviously played a crucial role in this respect, but the Christians’ attitude to the state was the key issue. Although there were some notable exceptions, Christians did not, on the whole, believe that the Roman state represented the rule of the Antichrist; on the contrary, it was felt that the existence of the state was a necessary element for the expansion of Christian belief – St Luke had himself noted the coincidence between the Pax Augusti and the consolidation of imperial power on the one hand, and the birth of Christ on the other. This coincidence came to play a key role in later medieval, especially eastern Christian, apocalyptic writings, and lay at the heart of the Christian belief that, once the state had become a Christian empire (after the late fourth century), it was the Roman people, representing Orthodoxy and the rule of order against the rule of chaos and barbarism, which had achieved the status of the Chosen People, replacing the Jews who had murdered the Saviour. But Christians in the era before the “conversion” of Constantine could not serve two masters – Christ and the Roman state – especially when the latter was on occasion actively hostile to their beliefs or their very existence. Indeed, the liturgy of the period before the Peace of the Church and the Edict of Toleration issued by Constantine I in 313 forbade soldiers who wished to become Christians to take life, whether under orders or not.²

Such views were well summarized by the Christian apologist Origen, writing in the third century, who argued that Christians formed another sort of army which, rather than fighting in wars for the emperor, prayed for the success of the state which made possible their continued existence and the expansion of their community. This was, of course, a compromise, particularly in view of the fact that Origen’s ideas were developed in response to the criticisms of Christian communities and pacifism made by the pagan Celsus, who suggested that Christians needed to support the earthly empire against its barbarian foes if only in order to ensure their own continued survival (arguments not dissimilar to those directed against Protestant pacifist sects in North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). And, although a hard-line position did continue to have adherents throughout the medieval period, especially among ascetics and in monastic circles, such a compromise nevertheless signalled the end of a serious mass opposition or hostility to either the state or its military undertakings.³

Origen’s views in this respect echoed the attitudes of many Christians, who had to carry on their ordinary lives in what was potentially a hostile political or cultural environment. Pragmatic considerations carried the day. One of Origen’s key ideas was that conversion of barbarians outside the empire would end the need for war altogether; until that happened, of course, fighting and warfare, and therefore the need to maintain armies, were a necessary evil. While this did not mean that Christians could fight for the empire with a clear conscience, the evidence does suggest that by the end of the third century AD there was a substantial number of Christians in the ranks of the imperial armies. The existence of a small Christian church in the Roman military base at Doura Europos on the eastern frontier, dated to the period AD 193–235 approximately, has been invoked as good support for this, and the fact that Christian worship was tolerated, possibly even encouraged, by the military command.⁴ Such pragmatism could not banish conflicts of interest, of course: service in the army involved acceptance of the emperor cult – the emperor as a god – and a whole range of pagan traditions and rituals, so that the annals of early Christianity, especially in the third century, are littered with tales of persecution and martyrdom as individual recruits refused to carry out the appropriate ceremonial and ritual observances.⁵

The adoption of Christianity by the emperor Constantine I, however, and the reformulation of imperial political ideology which followed, radically altered this situation. To begin with, the Christianization of the ruler cult resolved one of the most intractable problems: an earthly emperor chosen by God to lead the (Christian) Roman people was clearly acceptable where an emperor credited with divine power and authority had not been. And from this time two distinct perspectives in respect of Christian attitudes to warfare and military service evolve. An officially promulgated and supported view on the one hand encouraged support for the state, as personified by the orthodox emperor, and all its undertakings. The council of Arles, convened in 314–150 immediately after Constantine I’s victory over his last (pagan) opponent in 312 and the Edict of Milan of 313 – clearly permitted Christians to join the army, although there is some doubt as to the interpretation of the passage dealing with conscientious objectors (that they should be excommunicated as deserters). Leading churchmen in the fourth century, such as Athanasius, archbishop of Alexandria, and Ambrosius, bishop of Milan, announced that it was praiseworthy for a Christian to take up arms against the enemies of the state; St Augustine defended a similar position, although all expressed the hope that violent conflict could be avoided and that bloodshed would not be necessary.⁶ As the central government became increasingly, and eventually exclusively, Christian, such a point of view culminated during the last years of the century in the prohibition on non-Christians serving in the imperial armies at all!⁷

This line of reasoning left military service up to individual choice. But there remained a strong minority opposition to Christian involvement in bloodshed of any kind, which developed the argument outlined a century earlier by Origen. Many churchmen expressed their doubts about participation in military activities involving the taking of life – Paulinus of Nola and Basil of Caesarea both repeated and strengthened reservations expressed by others – and at the end of the fourth century, Pope Siricius could condemn those who served in the army and prohibit them from later taking up holy orders. But Basil’s reservations allowed for a defensive war and the taking of life when threatened by robbers or hostile invasion, while in his thirteenth canon his penalty was restricted to a three-year period of exclusion from the church:

Our Fathers did not consider killing in war as murder because, in my view, they forgave those who defended wisdom and piety. Nevertheless, it is perhaps good to advise them [i.e. those who kill in war] to abstain from communion for three years, since their hands are unclean.

And in spite of the intellectual commitment and rhetorical vigour with which such views were often expressed, they do not appear to have reflected mass opinion, either among the ordinary population or among the state elite. While condemning murder, for example, Athanasius of Alexandria accepted not only that those who killed in war had acted lawfully, but that their actions brought honour and distinction upon them. Indeed, it can be said that the accommodation reached during and after the reign of Constantine I between the old, pagan emperor cult, and its newly Christianized form rendered the discussion for the most part academic. This is especially clear in later discussions of Basil’s thirteenth canon for, as canonists of the twelfth century noted, its rigorous application would mean that most active soldiers would be permanently excluded from communion. That this was clearly not the case is admitted both by the canonists in their commentaries, and is also evident in the presence in Byzantine armies of clergy, the holding of services before battle and to bless the insignia, and indeed the presence of religious symbols and images of great potency.⁸

Soldiers now became, not servants of an oppressive pagan empire, but fighters for the faith and defenders of Orthodoxy, at least in theory. Soldiers were fully accepted members of the Christian community who had a recognized and indeed worthy role to play. Liturgical prayers evolved from the fourth and fifth centuries in which the military role of the emperors and the need for soldiers to defend the faith were specifically recognized: “Shelter their [the emperors’] heads on the day of battle, strengthen their arm,…subjugate to them all the barbarian peoples who desire war, confer upon them deep and lasting peace” is an illustrative example from a fifth-century liturgical text. But this did not, of course, mean that warfare and the killing of enemies were in themselves intrinsically to be praised or regarded as in some way deserving of a particular spiritual reward. Quite the reverse, for however much Christians were able to justify warfare, whether from a defensive need (to preserve Orthodoxy, for example) or in what we would see as an offensive context (to recover “lost” Roman territory from non-Christian or barbarian or heretic, still judged as defensive action) killing remained (and continues to remain) a necessary evil from the Christian standpoint. This is such a strong tradition within Christian culture, indeed, that even in the modern highly secularized world of advanced technological warfare, western strategists, military theorists and anthropologists or sociologists of war point to the need still felt to justify warmaking in terms established by this pre–medieval moral-ethical context.⁹

Warfare and the question of “Holy War”

One of the questions which has intrigued scholars in this respect has been that of the supposed absence of a theory of “holy war” in Byzantium. No concept of holy war comparable to that familiar from Islam nor again of the just war similar to that enunciated before, during and after the Crusades in western Europe, ever evolved in Byzantium. The waging of war against unbelievers is, of course, only one – and in Islamic theory not the most important – of four ways to fulfil the duty of jihâd, which signifies the struggle to propagate Islam by the heart (i.e. inner struggle), the tongue, the hand (i.e. by upholding good against evil) and the sword: the latter is waged in order to gain effective control over societies so that they may be administered in accordance with the principles of Islam. Those who died in the course of this struggle for the faith were understood immediately to be brought to paradise.¹⁰ Nothing approaching this complex and multi-faceted notion was generated by Christianity.

The answer to the question, “did the Byzantines have a concept of holy war?” depends, of course, on the way in which the question is framed and what is understood by the term “holy war”. As we will see, reducing the terms of the debate to a crude opposition between the western Crusade and Islamic jihâd hardly assists in the appreciation of the much more complex reality of Byzantine attitudes and practice.¹¹

In spite of the reservations expressed by a number of Christian thinkers, the view that warfare – however regrettable – in a just cause was acceptable became widespread, partly, of course, because from a pragmatic standpoint the Roman state, whatever faith it professed, had to defend its territorial integrity against aggression. So some rationalization of the need to fight was inevitable. Eusabius of Caesarea, the Christian apologist for Constantine I whose intellectual influence in this respect played a key role in the compromise between pagan and Christian attitudes to the empire, the emperor and the imperial cult, expressed a view which can indeed be understood to represent warfare with the aim of promoting the new imperial faith as a type of holy war.¹² The symbol of the Cross appeared both in imperial propaganda and, more significantly, among the insignia of the imperial armies; the Christian labarum and the chirho symbol – seen in a vision by Constantine himself before his victory over Galerius in 312 – was carried by the standard-bearers of the legions, as well as appearing on imperial coins and in association with images or busts of the emperors. Warfare waged against the enemies of the empire was now warfare to defend or extend the religion favoured by the emperor and, from the time of Theodosius I, the official religion of the state as such. Enemies of the empire could be portrayed as enemies of Christianity, against whom warfare was entirely justified, indeed necessary if the True Faith were to fulfil the destiny inhering in divine providence. To a degree, therefore, warfare of the Christian Roman empire against its enemies and those who threatened it, and therefore God’s empire on earth, was holy war. That this was a paradox within Christian attitudes to warfare is clear, but pragmatic considerations made a solution essential.

Throughout its history and the many wars it had to fight – given the strategic and geopolitical situation it occupied discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 below – religious motifs played a key role in the ideological struggles waged by the empire. During the later sixth century, and on numerous occasions thereafter, religious images were taken with the armies on their campaigns, designed to ensure divine support for the expedition and to encourage the soldiers against their non-Christian foe. Most famous was the image of Christ “not made by human hand”, the so-called Camuliana image, used by imperial commanders in the eastern wars in the 570s and after.¹³ Other such palladia were placed above city gates as a symbol of the protection afforded by the figure depicted – at Alexandria, Kaisareia in Palestine, Antioch and Constantinople, for example.¹⁴

This religious element was especially the case when the rulers of neighbouring hostile peoples or states actively persecuted the Christian communities within their territories, and the wars with the Persians were frequently presented both to the soldiers of the Roman armies and to the wider populace in the light of a struggle between Christianity and the forces of evil.¹⁵ The war that broke out between the Romans and Persians in 421 was directly associated with Zoroastrian persecution of Christians in Persia (although the hostility of some Christian leaders in Persia to Zoroastrian worship had certainly inflamed the situation), and was presented by contemporary and later Roman commentators as a just war to defend Christians from pagan attack. Christian refugees from Persian oppression inflamed opinion i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Abbreviations of journals and collections
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 Fighting for peace: attitudes to warfare in Byzantium
• 2 Warfare and the East Roman state: geography and strategy
• 3 Protect and survive: a brief history of East Roman strategic arrangements
• 4 Organizing for war: the administration of military structures
• 5 The army at war: campaigns
• 6 The army at war: combat
• 7 Warfare and society
• Warfare and society in Byzantium: some concluding remarks
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index