Everyday Life in Byzantium Page 12

  The shortage of men even made itself felt in the imperial bodyguard, more especially during the ninth century when it was decided to expand the force to include four regiments of cavalry as well as two of infantry. As a result many more mercenaries than formerly had to be admitted into this select corps. The vast majority were recruited either among Russo-Varangians or Anglo-Saxons. Men in these picked units were called hetairii and with the other scholarii they generally accompanied the emperors on their campaigns in Thrace and Bithynia. Their arms consisted of spears, swords and shields; many wore chain mail during a battle. However, in the tenth century many Byzantines evaded military service, which had been made compulsory, by paying a tax exempting them from doing so, and the size of the army fell to 140,000 men. Whenever an emperor more interested in intellectual matters, such as Psellus’ pupil and friend Michael VII (1071-8), came to the throne recruitment fell off and the army tended to be neglected. Great military achievements induced a sense of false security which encouraged the spread of pacifism and led civilians to scorn the army. When that happened the nation invariably paid heavily for its carelessness, for Byzantium’s existence depended upon the efficiency of her army. During the four centuries when the Empire was at its most powerful the army was well cared for. In the eleventh century Constantine VIII set aside the equivalent of £1 million to pay the 14,459 men stationed in Crete. At the time a corporal was paid the equivalent of £360 a year, a lieutenant £720, a captain £1,080 and a general could earn as much as £14,500. The army was then at its most efficient, its sense of duty at its keenest, and its devotion to the nation fully to be relied on.

  THE ARMY AND NAVY

  39 David, armed for battle in contemporary equipment

  The men who contended against such formidable enemies as the Persians, Franks, Saracens and Turks were, like the Romans before them, very well equipped. This may well help to explain why their uniforms and weapons did not greatly change during the 1,000 years of Byzantium’s existence. In his book on tactics Leo VI remarked with justifiable pride that each of his cavalrymen was provided with a pointed steel helm and that both he and his mount were protected either by scale armour, coat of mail, or by leather surcoats lined with metal disks. The armour was of a different type from that used in western Europe late in the Middle Ages, for whereas the latter was made of sheet metal and covered the whole of the knight’s body, Byzantine protective wear was generally made of metal particles which were either sewn one to another or stitched on to a garment made of fabric or leather. Yet the use of sheet armour was not unknown to Byzantium, for from quite an early date soldiers wore plated corselets and greaves reaching to their knees. The men who attempted in the eleventh century to depose Constantine IX Monomachus are described as wearing solid metal breastplates. In addition the Byzantines wore mail gauntlets, steel shoes and metal spurs. However, when going into battle the earlier emperors had worn Roman military dress, together with stockings and high boots studded with pearls in the oriental manner.

  Officers going into battle wore woollen surcoats beneath their mail shirts and steel frontlets. These shirts were dyed in the colours of their regiment, for each regiment possessed its own specific colour and distinctive uniform—refinements which were unknown in western Europe till the sixteenth century. In summer the surcoat was made of a lighter material than the winter garment, and in wet weather a linen coat replaced the surcoats. Men in the ranks were armed with bows and arrows, daggers, spears, lances and javelins. They carried their arrows in holders suspended from the right sides of their waist and swords, often double-edged, from the left. Since their helms were not fitted with visors they also carried small metal shields to protect their faces. The regiments of javelin throwers, the heavy cavalry units used primarily in the East, as well as the light mounted archers, all wore chain mail and were armed with spears, battle-axes, swords and shields. Their horses were also protected by chain mail. The archers, whether mounted or on foot, made use of a windsock kite to help them in assessing the force and direction of the wind, enabling them to regulate the speed and angle of their shots according to prevailing conditions. The windsock was often shaped as or decorated with the figure of a fierce dragon and was generally made of silk, features of eastern origin, which confirm the view that the Romans acquired the device from the Sarmatian nomads who had themselves adopted it from the Parthians.

  40 Romano-Byzantine battle-axe

  41 A light cavalry unit assaults a town

  The Byzantines attacked advancing shield to shield, howling as they did so. Their shouts included the slogan given to them as their war-cry by their army chaplains; it consisted of the words, ‘The Cross has conquered!’ The men were accompanied in their assault both by their chaplains and also by a special body of exhorters; men of both groups encouraged the soldiers by their words, songs, recitations and appeals. The advance was led by the regimental standard-bearers holding aloft the Roman vexillum or standard and banners of good fortune; the soldiers followed using their battle-axes, iron broadswords, bows, lances, spears, javelins, daggers and stone-throwers; the latter were worked by a complicated system of ropes. When assaulting a fortress they made use of movable scaling towers. These were mounted on wheels or rollers and are believed to have been used first at the siege of Jerusalem. Bridging material and ramming devices were used in conjunction with the scaling towers; the rammers were mounted into wooden frames, and a force of 60 men wearing protective leather clothing was needed to work each one. When necessary, engineers were called in to mine the besieged citadel. It was largely in order to contain the repeated and increasingly dangerous series of attacks launched by the Arabs in the seventh century that the Byzantines contrived their most potent weapon. Known to the contemporary world as ‘Greek fire’ it may be regarded as the forerunner of the grenade; it was made up of several ingredients which included sulphur and saltpetre and was evolved in the year 717 by Gallicanus of Heliopolis. The final product, encased in a pottery grenade, was hurled at the enemy from a catapult. It proved signally effective, and in the navy’s hands put an end to the Arab offensive. Again in the ninth century, when Russian Varangians started threatening Byzantium’s security, Greek scientists improved upon the invention so that it was once more used successfully against the invaders. Greek fire was manufactured in Constantinople, and the method of its production was a closely guarded secret. Unfortunately for the Byzantines it was superseded in the fourteenth century by the invention of gunpowder and the cannon. It is a pitiful measure of Byzantium’s decline that, when mortally threatened by the Ottoman Turks, the emperor and his advisers failed to appreciate the importance of the new weapon, which is thought to have been successfully used as early as 1356 at the battle of Crecy. When offered for sale to the Byzantines it was refused on the grounds that the price asked for it was too high. They would have been wiser to have paid it, for the angry munition-maker took his patent to the Ottoman sultan, enabling the Turks to pound the walls of Constantinople with cannon balls throughout the fateful siege in the spring of 1453, when the beleaguered city finally fell to Sultan Mehmet.

  Though most of the country’s munition factories were established in Constantinople and Salonica, some were concentrated in the provinces. The most important of these were situated in regions rich in mineral deposits. Thus Nicomedia, which could conveniently draw on the minerals to be found on Mount Olympus, became noted for its shields and swords. Caesarea, which could obtain the necessary metals from the Anti-Tauris, became, together with such minor places as Sardis, the main centre for the production of armour. Excellent lances and spears were made in Ieropolis in Cilicia, where most of the workshops producing uniforms were also situated; others were established along the north-western coast of Asia Minor.

  When setting out on a major campaign the army moved off accompanied by baggage trains carrying its food supplies, spare clothing and equipment, as well as by its medical units and corps of engineers. A regiment’s baggage train was made up of 350 waggons
each carrying, in addition to its load, an axe, a sword and cooking utensils. Every sixteenth man in it rode a pack horse so that each baggage train consisted of 175 mounted men as well as 2,800 un-mounted ones, who either rode on the waggons or walked beside them. At night the pack horses were driven into a circle and the waggons were drawn up around them. Then the engineers took over, protecting the encampment by digging a ditch round it. The medical units which accompanied the army were split into small groups; each consisted of a surgeon, eight stretcher-bearers and numerous orderlies. Horses provided with special saddles were used to transport the wounded and field baths were always available to minister to the wants both of the ailing and the fit. Priests were attached to all regiments and had many duties to perform. It fell to them to mark the start and end of each day by holding a service which was attended by everybody in the unit; it was also their duty to give spiritual comfort to the men, whom they often advised to address their prayers to military saints, such as St Michael or St Theodore Stratelites.

  Scouts and spies were used to obtain advance information on enemy troop movements. A rare instance of carelessness in 1071 proved extremely costly to Emperor Romanus Lecapenus: when leading a large army against the Seljukid Turks, he omitted to send scouts ahead of his men, with the result that his entire force was trapped and defeated by the Seljuks at Manzikert and he himself was taken prisoner. Generally, however, the Byzantine intelligence service was both well run and fully used. Until the tenth century many emperors personally led their armies into battle, the sight of their personal standards encouraging the men. When on campaign the emperors were accompanied by heralds and large retinues of retainers; they travelled with a great deal of baggage, taking an enormous number of objects of great value with them. An emperor’s tent was always of exceptional size and magnificence; it was furnished with costly rugs and precious vessels, and presented as valuable a prize as it was impressive to behold. Yet on numerous occasions the army and the imperial bodyguard failed to prevent its capture by an enemy eager for booty. When Romanus III (1028-34) was defeated by the Arabs he fled, leaving behind him, according to Psellus, ‘a tent filled with necklaces, bracelets, diadems, pearls and precious stones’. Some two centuries earlier the Bulgar Khan, Krum, found £4½ million of army pay abandoned in the camp which he captured. Prisoners were seldom put to death; men in the ranks were used as slaves whilst those of distinction were released on payment of a ransom; when negotiations were in progress it was customary to give and to hold hostages as a guarantee of good faith.

  Messengers were used to carry news from the battlefield to the capital, but their number was not great and soldiers returning from the front were expected to inform the people of the situation there. Had the army been in better heart in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Turks might never have reached the Asiatic shore of the Marmora, whence they were able to pound Constantinople’s defences; but the army’s vitality had steadily declined from the eleventh century onwards. This had to some extent resulted from the falling off of Armenian and Isaurian recruits, a decline which was in its turn caused by the gradual break-up of themes following the loss of much valuable land, first to the Seljukid and then to the Ottoman Turks, and also by its sale to great landowners anxious to increase the size of their already huge estates. In 1096, after the arrival and departure of the First Crusade, Alexius I Comnenus attempted to stem the rot in the army and to restore its strength by calling on the population as a whole to provide material and labour for building bridges and ships, and also demanding them to furnish troops on the move with free board, lodging and transport. These measures made the army exceedingly unpopular among civilians, at the very time when recruiting was becoming increasingly difficult. Once again, as in earlier times, mercenaries had to be employed in great numbers and at ever-increasing cost to the state. In the twelfth century a desperate step was taken by the government; in order to attract officers into the service it was decided to make soldiering lucrative by granting them estates on conditional grants. The system, known as the pronoia, had been used as a reward for civilians. The holder of a pronoia estate generally held it for life. Even though he could not bequeath it at death, so long as he held it both the land and the peasants living on it and working it were inalienably his; his peasants paid all their dues and taxes to him, yet he paid none to the state; his right both to the sums he levied from his peasants and to the income he derived from his estate made him a rich man. In exchange, however, the holder of a military pronoia was expected to serve in the army, to appear in it fully equipped and mounted, and accompanied as well by a number of soldiers. The concession did not have the desired effect and, under Michael VIII (1259-82), as an additional inducement, the military pronoia was made heritable, a decision which had the unexpected, yet surely foreseeable effect of keeping landowners in their estates since the concession made it unnecessary for them to strive to increase their incomes. As a result, by the thirteenth century virtually the entire aristocracy was exempted from paying the land tax and a military career had come to be considered unattractive. Soldiers became so unpopular among civilians, that from then until about 1354, even though both private and Church-owned estates were subject to compulsory recruitment, the army was largely made up of mercenaries, pronoia-holders purchasing exemption from serving in it. The salaries of the mercenaries drained the state coffers. In desperation Andronicus II (1282-1328) imposed even heavier taxes on the civilian population while reducing the size of the army to that of a token force; he limited the cavalry to 3,000 men, 2,000 of whom were stationed in Europe and a mere 1,000 left to confront the Turks in Asia. No wonder then that the Ottomans found much to encourage them to maintain their pressure on the Byzantines and that the latter were in no position to stem their advance.

  The Byzantine navy was always small in size, yet it played a vital part in defending the country, more than once saving it from enemy invasions whilst also helping to make the merchant fleet master of the Mediterranean, at least until the expansion of the Venetian and Genoese mercantile navies altered the balance of power there. The role of the Byzantine navy became especially important with the rise of the Arabs; by 698 it was therefore not only a powerful arm of the fighting services, but its political strength was such that it could depose Emperor Leontius and, with the help of the Greens, replace him by an admiral of the fleet. Yet when the Arabian navy declined, the Byzantine was permitted to deteriorate, and when it had done so its weakness was used as an excuse to reduce the sailors’ pay, bringing it to a lower level than that in force in the army. In the ninth century a drungarius, or admiral of the fleet, occupied a lower position in the order of precedence than all the military strategi, but in the tenth century, as a result of the growing threat of the Kievan Varangians, he ranked next in importance to the domesticus of the military scholae and thus took precedence over all other military and naval commanders. The commander-in-chief of the navy was the strategus of the carabisiani.

  Little detailed information is as yet available concerning the ships used by the Byzantines, but sub-marine archaeology may well in time supplement our knowledge. They called their warships dromonds; of these the direma appears to have been the vessel most widely used. It varied in size, needing 100-300 men to man it. The faster birema closely resembled a galleon. Smaller and faster ships were used in support of the larger ones, signalling by flags or lights which were the usual means of communication between ships passing at sea or sailing in convoy.

  42 Boat builders at work

  It had from the start proved more difficult to raise the recruits needed by the navy than it was for the army. In 690, under Justinian II, sailors were in such short supply that the emperor decided to transfer the Christian tribe of the Mardaites from their homes in northern Syria to the shores of the Peloponnese, Cephalonia and Epirus, so as to enrol its menfolk into the navy. In return the conscripts were granted the same benefits as those offered to soldiers serving in the frontier zones, that is to say they were a
ble to become theme-holders, but once again, as in the case of the army’s frontier force and the regular troops, a distinction was drawn between the imperial fleet and the naval themes. Thus the imperial fleet remained based on Constantinople, but the naval themes which were eventually extended to Asia Minor, the south-western coastal zones, southern Asia Minor and most of Greece were nevertheless often called upon to provide men for the imperial fleet. In the eleventh century, after peace had been concluded with Kievan Russia, the navy was allowed to decline. It was never to recover from the setback it suffered then and was therefore never able to compete successfully against the Genoese and Venetian fleets. On regaining his throne in 1261 Michael VIII gave the Genoese the district of Galata to live in in Constantinople, together with the right to use the Straits; this proved an invaluable concession since it delivered the Black Sea trade into Genoese hands. His successor, Andronicus II, believed that he could rely on Genoese promises; he therefore decided to reduce the navy to 20 triremes, the role of which was to be largely ceremonial. Byzantium’s naval vessels were dismantled and hundreds of sailors found themselves obliged to choose between forsaking their calling in favour of some other means of livelihood, seeking employment in the Turkish navy or joining a pirate vessel. Many preferred the last two of these alternatives to giving up the sea, even though it meant that they would be called upon to take up arms against their fellow-countrymen and Christians. Pirates had always menaced shipping in the Mediterranean; when the Byzantines were able to capture them they sent them to a special security prison situated on an island; escape from it was so difficult that Michael V (1041-2) banished his uncle John to it, fearing that that intriguing courtier might escape from any other place of exile to conspire against him.