Walter Emil Kaegi, Jr.

Some Thoughts on Byzantine Military Strategy

© Hellenic College Press, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1983

 

Page 21

This is not a Byzantine text on Byzantine-Arab warfare of the tenth century in Anatolia, and it is not (as the word javelins indicates) from any other Byzantine strategic manual of the Middle Byzantine Period. It is from Onasander, a Greek strategist, who wrote in the first century A.D., but was widely recopied and was presumably read by would-be strategists in the Middle Byzantine Period. The evidence for the debt of Byzantine strategists to earlier Greek strategists can be demonstrated by other copious parallels in extant texts, well documented by some of the editors of these texts, and by the explicit reference in such authors as John Lydos in the middle of the sixth century, who includes in his list of strategists such authors as Aelian, Arrian, Aeneas, and Onasander. But the Byzantine strategists' debt to which I refer is the counsel to seek to avoid the risks of battle except under the most favorable circumstances, and to use every conceivable non-military device to improve the likelihood of accomplishing one's purposes with the minimum of losses. Therefore, the crafty techniques that Crusaders later hated and despised and which some modern Byzantinists and twentieth-century military experts, including Basil Liddell-Hart and Herman Kahn, extol in Byzantine attitudes to the practices of warfare, did not suddenly appear in the seventh, ninth, or tenth centuries. The corpus of Greek strategic literature, in addition to its inclusion of detailed discussion of how to wage battle successfully, also included a group of instructions about how to avoid battle and how to maximize military gains with a minimum of fighting.

These counsels, including how to sow dissension among one's enemies, the role of treachery and plots and factional alignments in creating decisive turns or opportunities for military success, were a continuity; an inheritance from the Greek strategists of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. They represent a genuine strand of continuity of Hellenic thought and tradition in the Byzantine thought-world. As the Byzantine Empire's external military crisis and man-power crisis intensified in the late sixth and seventh centuries, it was natural for men to look for military advice to the often very outdated existing manuals of strategy, stratagems, and tactics that had proven successful long before. Thus the extensive resort to craft, cunning, and indirect warfare, with the aim of winning without risking much decisive bloody combat, typified in the Italian campaigns of Belisarios, in much of the wisdom of the anonymous strategists of the sixth century, and the Strategikon of Maurice, is not an anachronistic return by an adaptation of very old Greek strategists' counsel about avoiding pitched battle to the austere realities of the sixth and early seventh centuries. Such was essential to the very frame of reference of strategists when compilers and generals consulted them in the sixth and seventh centuries in the search for solutions to the empire's dilemmas.

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