Walter Emil Kaegi, Jr.

Some Thoughts on Byzantine Military Strategy

© Hellenic College Press, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1983

 

Page 23

It is probable that the longevity of the Byzantine Empire owes very much to its adoption of a cautious military strategy that avoided bloody and risky pitched battles. Such battles did occur, but the tendency and prevailing policy was to try to avoid them. Byzantium missed many opportunities because of the adoption of this cautious military strategy. Yet her resources of man-power and materials were finite and the parsimonious and calculating employment of them in the late sixth through most of the eleventh centuries helped to reduce the chances of some gamble resulting in a total military catastrophe or the dissolution of the empire.

Risk minimization had its rewards; Byzantium assumed that the unknown exerted great effects upon the course and outcome of war. Therefore, she strove, even in an era of low lethality of weapons, for a multifaceted defensive strategy that did not rely exclusively on military force, but also on diplomacy, prudence, superior use of intelligence, and the exploitation of the enemy's weaknesses.

Several distinctive features of strategy in the modern world are absent from Byzantine strategic texts and from Byzantine historians' description of strategy and tactics. The early modern appreciation of the need for the general ideally to possess the coup d'oeil, the ability to discern at a glance the principal strategic features of a situation or piece of land -- heavily emphasized in military literature between the middle of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries -- is missing. Similarly, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' emphasis -- sever since the campaigns of Napoleon -- on the principle of concentration of force, is not evident. Byzantine strategists would not necessarily have disagreed, I think, with it in principle, but would not have given it the emphasis that it received between 1800 and 1945.

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