The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire

Edward N. Luttwak

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780674255647
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In this book, the distinguished writer Edward N. Luttwak presents the grand strategy of the eastern Roman empire we know as Byzantine, which lasted more than twice as long as the more familiar western Roman empire, eight hundred years by the shortest definition. This extraordinary endurance is all the more remarkable because the Byzantine empire was favored neither by geography nor by military preponderance. Yet it was the western empire that dissolved during the fifth century.The Byzantine empire so greatly outlasted its western counterpart because its rulers were able to adapt strategically to diminished circumstances, by devising new ways of coping with successive enemies. It relied less on military strength and more on persuasion—to recruit allies, dissuade threatening neighbors, and manipulate potential enemies into attacking one another instead. Even when the Byzantines fought—which they often did with great skill—they were less inclined to destroy their enemies than to contain them, for they were aware that today's enemies could be tomorrow's allies. Born in the fifth century when the formidable threat of Attila's Huns were deflected with a minimum of force, Byzantine strategy continued to be refined over the centuries, incidentally leaving for us several fascinating guidebooks to statecraft and war. The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire is a broad, interpretive account of Byzantine strategy, intelligence, and diplomacy over the course of eight centuries that will appeal to scholars, classicists, military history buffs, and professional soldiers.

PART THREE

The Byzantine Art of War

In organizing and training their forces, in devising their tactics and operational methods, in evaluating their strategic choices, the Byzantines were informed by an entire military culture rooted in ancient Greece and the earlier Roman empire, but increasingly of their own making, and sharply different.

As successive layers were added from the fifth century onward, this distinctive culture was preserved and transmitted, as cultures always are, in all sorts of ways, by institutions, by customs, by norms, and by word of mouth, but most durably by the written word. Ancient Greek military texts were duly honored, and there were some Roman writings, but the Byzantines increasingly relied on their own growing body of military literature, which included detailed handbooks. We do not have any veritable Roman field manuals, that is, guidebooks written by experienced soldiers for the use of soldiers, but we do have several Byzantine manuals of evident practical value; each is examined in what follows, and not all their recommendations are entirely obsolete.

The most direct benefit of this accumulated military culture was to broaden the repertoire of Byzantine armies and navies, endowing them with a greater variety of tactics, operational schemes, and practiced stratagems than any of their opponents could command. Sometimes this enabled Byzantine forces to surprise and overwhelm their enemies by employing tactics or methods or stratagems or weapons entirely unknown to them. More often the benefit derived from this military culture was of a more subtle order, adding an advantage that was marginal rather than overwhelming—but then it is also true that it was by small margins that the empire survived its worst crises.

More important in its consequences than any number of cunning stratagems was the distinctive Byzantine concept of war and peace, which evolved by the end of the sixth century into the veritable “operational code” defined in this book’s Conclusion. Its starting point was the impossibility of decisive victory—the very aim of warfare for the earlier Romans as for Napoleon, Clausewitz, and their emulators till this day, though with waning conviction, perhaps. The Byzantine concept was thus a revolutionary reversal. Its powerful implications are manifest in what the Byzantines did, in what actually happened, and sometimes in what Byzantine voices reportedly said, but they emerge more clearly and more fully in the varied texts of their military literature.

Byzantine military commanders were not intellectuals. On the whole, they were probably less educated than the ordinary soldiers of the Roman army in its better years, judging by its voluminous record keeping and the personal letters and varied writings that have survived on papyrus and bark. In the later sixth century, at any rate, we can presume from the finest of Byzantine military handbooks, the Strategikon attributed to the emperor Maurikios, that illiteracy was the norm even in fairly senior field ranks, because the author writes that merarchs should be “prudent, practical, experienced, and, if possible, able to read and write. This is especially important for the commander of the center meros, . . . who has to, if it becomes necessary, take over all the duties of the [strategos, the commander].”¹ A merarch could command as many as seven thousand cavalrymen—one-third of the entire field army envisaged by the author, the equivalent of a modern brigadier general in charge of a small division or large brigade battle group. And of three envisaged merarchs, one would be the hypostrategos, the under-general, or very literally the lieutenant general (“placeholder”) of the commander of the entire field army. Yet the author does not even insist on literacy but merely recommends it: “if possible.” Literacy must have been rare indeed among cavalry officers.

One likely reason was that the late sixth-century Byzantine cavalry described by the author, which owed so much to the methods of the steppe nomads, fought alongside mercenary mounted archers, the “Huns” much mentioned by Prokopios. They were probably Onogurs or other Turkic warriors rather than descendants of Attila’s few Huns, and they were certainly recruited into regular Byzantine units as well. During the endless wars of Justinian, the illiterate ways of the steppe warriors are likely to have shaped the army’s camp culture and the army itself, from which cavalry officers were necessarily promoted—for young gentlemen sent from literate Constantinople were unlikely to be successful in commanding semi-wild horsemen.

Ostensibly, their Roman predecessors had done just that in the rank of praefectus alae of the auxiliary cavalry, the first stage of a public career in the equestrian class; but the officers actually recorded in that rank were not young gentlemen mostly, but rather veteran centurions or native chiefs.² It may be noted parenthetically that in European armies until 1914, cavalry officers, and especially Hussars and other light cavalry, were generally less educated than their colleagues of the infantry and certainly of the artillery, and that may have been true in the sixth century also.

The prevailing illiteracy would explain very well why the author of the Strategikon is so meticulous in listing the nomenclature of units and ranks, and in specifying the different command phrases required by the tactics he explains—many of them still in Latin rather than Greek. When illiterates repeat words they hear from other illiterates, especially in a language they do not know, over time most of those words are transformed beyond recognition, retaining their operative meaning only within the in-group but not beyond it, with the lively possibility of disastrous misunderstandings when officers transfer from unit to unit.

Illiteracy among officers also explains why the author justifies his book by writing: “Those who assume the command of the troops do not understand even the most obvious matters and run into all sorts of difficulties.”

But war is a collective enterprise. If one literate commander remembered a clever stratagem, or a training procedure, he had once encountered in his reading, it could be applied by an entire army of illiterates.

CHAPTER 10

The Classical Inheritance

Illiteracy among cavalry officers did not prevent the study, dissemination, and retention of entire repertoires of tactics originally learned from books. That indeed was an important comparative advantage of the Byzantines, whose own military literature was more useful than the earlier Roman, as far as we know, including lost texts by Cato, Celsus, Frontinus—whose Strategemata survives—and Paternus. Successive Byzantine military manuals followed one another, some mere recapitulations of earlier works going all the way back to Greek antiquity, starting with Aeneas Tacticus, who wrote before 346 BCE, but others were undoubtedly original works.¹

By contrast, the only surviving Roman military textbook, “The Summary of Military Matters” by Vegetius, was written by a scholar of antiquarian bent with no military experience at the very end of the fourth century or in the early fifth century—when not much of the Roman army was left.² Unlike his Mulomedicina, a veterinary manual full of practical advice, Vegetius’s military epitome offers exhortations and noble examples of ancient glories alongside tactical prescriptions and instructions that are sometimes impractical and often inconsistent, because the Roman army presented in the book is a collage of earlier realities duly identified as such, some current realities, and what the author wished were true of the contemporary Roman army. Sometimes Vegetius copied a text too far.

On archery training, for example, Vegetius first offers rather useless generic advice, incidentally revealing no awareness of the significance of the composite reflex bow, by then already widely introduced:

About a third or a quarter of recruits, who prove to have more aptitude, should be trained constantly . . . using wooden bows and mock arrows. Instructors should be chosen for this training who are experts.³

Clearly Vegetius was not an expert, because it is foolish to train with weak wooden bows for combat with powerfully resistant composite bows. On the contrary, it was a fundamental Roman rule to use extra-heavy shields, swords, and javelins for training, to ease at least the physical effort of combat. If anything, training bows would have to be even more resistant to prepare men for combat.

Other surviving Latin texts on military matters are not useless, but they are not systematic military manuals either. The Strategemata of Sextus Julius Frontinus, as he himself explains, is not a work of strategy—he enjoins the reader to differentiate between “strategy” (strategikon, in Greek in the text) and “stratagem” (strategematon); his own work is a compilation of exemplary episodes of tenacious, courageous, innovative, clever, cunning, and deceptive leadership in war.⁴ Divided into four books, on stratagems (starting with “On Concealing One’s Plans”), on the conduct of battle, on siege operations, and a final fourth book on principles of war rather than stratagems, the examples are well chosen and well presented—one does see how modern military commanders might still benefit from reading the text. Book II on battle leadership offers a number of interesting stratagems under its headings: “On Choosing the Time for Battle,” “On Choosing the Place of Battle,” “On the Disposition of Troops for Battle,” “On Creating Panic in the Enemy’s Ranks,” “On Ambushes,” “On Letting the Enemy Escape, lest, Brought to Bay, He Renew the Battle in Desperation” (a much-valued principle of eighteenth-century warfare with its “golden bridges,” easy escape routes deliberately left unguarded)—and eight more, ending with “On Retreating.”

Of particular interest for the light they shed on the Roman, and in this case also the Byzantine, military mentality are the quotations that Frontinus chose for the seventh and last section of Book IV dedicated to military maxims. Some were taken from the “memorable deeds and sayings” of Valerius Maximus from which the very word derives. They show that there was no desire to emulate the compulsive boldness of Alexander the Great, enormously admired though he was. Julius Caesar is plausibly quoted as saying that “he followed the same counsel towards the enemy as did many doctors when dealing with physical ailments, namely, that of conquering the foe by hunger (through sieges) rather than by steel.”⁵

The successful first-century commander Domitius Corbulo is likewise quoted as saying that the dolabra (a combination pick-axe tool) “was the weapon with which to beat the enemy.” The next maxim reinforces the point:

Lucius Paulus [Lucius Aemilius Paulus Macedonicus, 229–160 BCE] used to say that a general ought to be an old man in character, meaning thereby that moderate counsels should be followed.

As does the fourth:

When people said of Scipio Africanus that he lacked aggressiveness, he is reported to have answered: “My mother gave birth to a general (imperatorem), not to a warrior (bellatorem).”

Bellatorem being the word for a wild fighter as opposed to a soldier, miles.

And the fifth:

When a Teuton challenged Gaius Marius [the consul and military reformer, 157–86 BCE] and called upon him to come forth, Marius answered that, if the man was desirous of death, he could end his life with a halter.

Not coincidentally, Frontinus was himself successful in war as legionary commander and military governor (legatus) in warlike Britain from the year 74 CE, where he subdued the dangerous Silures of Wales and constructed the Via Julia highway, whose traces may still be seen in Monmouthshire. Much later, in 97, the emperor placed him in charge of all the aqueducts of Rome, and his very precise description of how they worked (De Aquis Urbis Romae) is wonderfully instructive. Unfortunately his tactical manual, or Art of War, has not survived, and Frontinus himself indicates that there were no other comparable works in the Rome of his day, a most revealing absence: “since I alone of those interested in military science (militaris scientiam) have undertaken to reduce its rules to [a] system.”⁶

The second-century literary lawyer Polyaenus from Bithynia in western Anatolia dedicated his Strategika in Greek—about stratagems and not strategy, in spite of the title—to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus on the occasion of their war against Arsacid Persia or Parthia that started in 161. He was currying favor—probably hoping for a well-paid sinecure such as the one that Hadrian had granted to prolific Plutarch. To that end, Polyaenus claimed Macedonian ancestry: “I, a Macedonian who has inherited the ability to conquer the Persians in war, want to do my part at the present critical time.”⁷

The examples selected by Polyaenus are drawn in part from proper classical texts about early times and the petty warfare of the Greek cities of the classic age, already several centuries old by then, in part from the Hellenistic age preserving some historical data and detail otherwise unrecorded, and in part from Roman history down to Julius Caesar, all with a definite emphasis on tricks rather than other forms of ingenuity.

It is not an inspiring work. It seems certain that Polyaenus had no military experience—there are none of its characteristic signs—even if he did write a lost work on tactics, as the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia Suda indicates.⁸ But some Byzantines valued Polyaenus very highly. He was commended by the learned Constantine Porphyrogennetos as a valuable source of historical information and by the successful general Nikephoros Ouranos for his stratagems; he was repeatedly paraphrased with or without emendations, and also excerpted. In the new edition of Polyaenus, two of these efforts are translated, the ninth-century Excerta Polyaeni and the tenth-century Strategemata, wrongly attributed to the emperor Leo, which forms the latter part (sections 76–102) of the work published as Sylloge Tacticorum.

It can even be said that both are more useful than the original work, in part because the selections do favor the better material, and in part because the anecdotes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• I The Invention of Byzantine Strategy
• II Byzantine Diplomacy: The Myth and the Methods
• III The Byzantine Art of War
• Conclusion: Grand Strategy and the Byzantine “Operational Code”
• Appendix: Was Strategy Feasible in Byzantine Times?
• Emperors from Constantine I to Constantine XI
• Glossary
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index of Names
• General Index