Serving Byzantium's Emperors by Dimitris Krallis

Author:Dimitris Krallis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030045258
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Army Makes You Roman

In the late 1060s when Attaleiates first served as army judge under Romanos Diogenes, numerous foreigners fought in the ranks of Romanía’s armies. Attaleiates’ contemporaries did not always welcome their presence. The retired general Kekaumenos , who wrote less than a decade later, in fact explains that while foreigners should be used, they should not be offered positions surpassing those of the Romans. Ironically, Kekaumenos’ Romanitas was of recent issue. 25 Like a hyphenated American, he proudly touted his ancestors’ non-Roman origins in his peculiar work on strategy, life, politics, and survival among the Romans. Attaleiates, unlike Kekaumenos , held rather liberal, if at times contradictory, opinions regarding the use of foreign troops. His writing, in fact, indicates that he may well have represented the more openly integrationist side of a debate regarding the role of newcomers in the army and by extension the Roman body politic.

Our scholarly response to the empire’s use of foreign mercenaries has been more or less negative. The twentieth century was marked by total wars during which nations clashed on the world scene and shed blood for the defense of their territories. The armies deployed in those conflicts were made up of citizen recruits in the tradition of the French revolution. In a time of nationalism, the use of mercenaries spoke of corruption, placid patriotism, and lack of dedication to the homeland. Alternatively, mercenaries reminded a war-weary academia of colonial enterprises. Even early in the twenty-first century, the rise of Blackwater’s private armies, with their world reach and lucrative Pentagon contracts makes it hard to approach the issue in unbiased fashion. While the twentieth century may indeed be partly responsible for this attitude, we may have to look back to the eighteenth century and Edward Gibbon, a founding father of modern Byzantinism, for the original connection between mercenaries and corruption. A consummate classicist writing at a time when England’s mercenary regiments were about to face America’s citizen militias, Gibbon saw mercenaries as the beginning of Rome’s decline. The virtuous republic collapsed under the weight of its prosperity, when wealthy Romans lost interest in the defense of the realm, relegating the task to a class of professional soldiers. The noble citizen soldier was therefore replaced by the cold-blooded killer that was the mercenary, the idealistic and patriotic defender of the republic by the supporter of despotism.

With these ideas dominant in our historical subconscious Byzantinists have looked at the eleventh century as an era echoing more or less the failures of the late republic . Success corrupted the ascetic warrior ideal of Nikephoros I Phokas and Basileios II . Mercenaries replaced the peasant-warriors of the themes, foreigners, with no connection to the land took over the defenses of the realm from the sturdy patriots, who had braved the Islamic onslaught of the seventh and eighth centuries. This is indeed a comfortable romantic idea, in accordance with modern notions of patriotism and ethnic purity. It is perhaps not surprising that it has little to do with what Romans thought about this issue in the Middle Ages.

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