Walter Emil Kaegi, Jr.

Some Thoughts on Byzantine Military Strategy

© Hellenic College Press, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1983

 

Page 8

The mode of warfare that already was evident in the reign of Justinian was to be the dominant form of Byzantine warfare for more than five hundred years. It did not originate in the reign of Justinian. The inconclusive warfare on the eastern frontier with the Persians in the fifth and sixth centuries was an immediate precedent, and probably also a front where soldiers and generals gained some valuable experience in the kind of warfare that later prevailed in Italy in the 540s. But there were much older precedents in Greek manuals of warfare from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, about which more will be said later.

Instead of decisive combat, the norm was slow and crafty war of attrition, Ermattungskrieg , as Hans Delbrueck aptly described it, in contrast to Niederwerfungskrieg; war of annihilation. [7]

[7. Hans Delbrueck, Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der po litischen Geschichte (Berlin 1900) 2:399-401.]

Procopios identified Belisarios with the conduct of craftiness and attrition when he stated that the Ostrogothic King Totila "wanted to come to a straightforward decision by battle with them [the Byzantines] on a plain rather than to struggle by means of wiles and clever contrivances." [8]

[8. Procopios. Bella 7.8.11.]

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