Walter Emil Kaegi, Jr.

Some Thoughts on Byzantine Military Strategy

© Hellenic College Press, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1983

 

Page 22

The continuity in Hellenic strategic thinking was not merely in its specific borrowings of injunctions and details of maneuvers, but in attitudes of caution, prudence, cunning, and awareness of one's own limitations and of the possibility of risk and the random role of accidents in decisive combat; in short, in ways of thinking about waging war.

It is incorrect, while stressing the neglected Byzantine debt to earlier Greek military literature for the proclivity to or inspiration for warfare of delay, stratagems, and craft, to depreciate the distinctiveness of Byzantine strategies and tactics, especially those that scholars discern in the middle of the seventh century and later. But there has been neglect of earlier Greek strategic thought's contribution to and continuity with Byzantine military thought. After all, Clausewitz noted, in Vom Kriege, that principles of war are simple, that what is difficult is their implementation.

The general ideas about how to wage effective warfare while minimizing risks and casualities though mastery of timing and craft and subversion and indirect attack were already available in the extant corpus of strategic writings. The challenge for the Byzantines in the military crises and conditions of diminished material and human resources of the seventh century and later was to adapt those precedents and principles to specific new conditions in a world with some changing military technologies.

The conviction that there was utility in using the mind to devise cunning stratagems, ruses, and techniques of war to wage war effectively yet cheaply was a two-edged inheritance from antiquity. It encouraged an admirable proclivity to use one's head in thinking about war, yet it also many times created a dangerous even disastrous over-confidence in the ability of the strategist to offset, through cleverness, quantitatively and perhaps also qualitatively superior material and human resources and power.

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