Walter Emil Kaegi, Jr.

Some Thoughts on Byzantine Military Strategy

© Hellenic College Press, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1983

 

Page 18

Of course, there were many reasons for the Byzantines following such a passive strategy after their crushing defeats at the hands of the Arabs in the 630s and early 640s, including the small size and shattered morale and cohesiveness of the remaining Byzantine manpower. It was dangerous to risk one more time what little remained of it.

It is evident from reading the Strategikon of Maurice that by A.D. 600 Byzantium had developed strategic and tactical doctrines out of her Graeco-Roman heritage of military writings and from her military experiences in the sixth-century wars against the Vandals, Ostrogoths, and Persians. Techniques and military assumptions that were in use by A.D. 600 remained, with modifications to suit new ethnic foes, until and beyond Byzantium's collapse against the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century.

A critical element was a readiness to exploit uncertainties while minimizing one's own casualties, preferring a combination of artifices, diplomacy, delay, dissimulation, sowing dissension, corruption, and above all, employing caution and the indirect approach to warfare, in an effort to reduce risk and gambling to a minimum in warfare. The greatest weakness of these techniques of ruses, deception, clever strategems, and commitment to war of slow attrition was the development of excessive overconfidence and intellectualism in military operations. The result was an underestimation of basic underlying forces, such as the role of numbers, in the outcome of war.

Byzantine strategic thought did not emerge ex nihilo. It was a continuation, often a conscious imitation and adaptation of formal Greek strategical writings that stretched as far back as Aeneas Tacticus, if not earlier, and of works on strategy and stratagems written by Greeks in the Roman period or by Romans who adapted and translated and paraphrased Greek strategic writings, for the most part.

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