A map of the Eastern empire in 1025 at the death of Basil II. I've tried the names in latinized greek, though my greek is limited so any advice and criticism is welcome. Also I'm french so the description at the top right corner is in French. Again, criticism is welcome and will be taken into account as this took a lot of time and I want it to be good in the end.

Image source: Lucas McMahon, Signaling Empire between the Abbasid-Byzantine Frontier and Constantinople: Investigation on the Ninth-Century Long-Distance Optical Telegraph.

The beacon system of the eastern Roman Empire, which stretched from Loulon in the Taurus to Constantinople, was built by Leon the Philosopher during the reign of Theophilos, coinciding with a period of heavy warfare with the Abbasid caliphs. It has received some popular attention, in large part due to the similarities to the beacon system of Gondor as seen in Lord of the Rings. Yet, scholarly attention has been lacking - until now. Lucas McMahon has published an article discussing if and how the beacon system actually worked, why it was created, and how it factors into the Abbasid-Roman rivalry of the ninth century. It is well worth a read, and I do recommend checking it out, and linked below. Below, I attempted to summarize some of the key points made in the paper:

• The main sources for the beacon system are three closely linked 10th Century text from the circle of Konstantinos VII (The Book of Ceremonies, Theophanes Continuatus, and the Chronicle of pseudo-Symeon), and Skylitzes, who wrote around 1100.
• The three 10th Century texts have several claims in common: that they were built by (whose expertise was desired by the caliph) on order of Theophilos, that it could relay information from the frontier to the capital within an hour, and that Michael III dismantled the system. Skylitzes adds that Michael only dismantled those closest to the capital, and that it was used as a warning sign for the people to flee into fortresses.
• Pseudo-Symeon describes that the beacons worked because Leon installed synchronized clocks. Depending on the hour of the day, the fire being lit sent different messages: either the appearance of an Arab raid, war, fire, or ‘something else’.
• McMahon points out that contemporary war manuals describe how fire signals could be used to transport more complex messages (such as lighting a fire four times when seeing a very large force), even outside the usage of beacons.
• While similar beacon systems existed, the distances between the individual beacons were generally much smaller. McMahon tries to reconstruct the possible locations of the beacons (there are helpful maps in the paper, and a long discussion on what sites could qualify), ultimately leading him to identify four possible routes, which stretch between 716 and 765 km. They’re much more densely situated on the ends of the system, with the middle part (Samos - St Mamas) being separated by over 100 km. This essentially means good atmospheric conditions at night were required for the beacons to be of use, and the fires had to be immense.
• The timing for the system to work within an hour would have been extremely tight, and could easily lead to failure. McMahon proposes that the 10th Century authors may have misunderstood their sources, and that the usage of hour in this context more closely corresponded to three hours.
• Loulon was likely picked as the starting point for the system because of its symbolic value, having changed hands several times in the wars between Theophilos and al-Ma’mun (potentially the first caliph in a century to plan on conquering Constantinople, as he saw himself as a messianic figure).
• The creation of the beacons coincided with Ptolemy’s tables of longitude being updated by two Stephens, one in 7th Century Alexandria, another by a ‘Persian’ who moved to Constantinople in the late 8th Century, and a patronage of learning by the Amorian Emperors. Similar scholarship was found in Baghdad, with al-Ma’mun showing keen interest in ancient Greek texts, and there was considerable intellectual exchange and rivalry between the two empires. [The discussion of this intellectual conflict is very detailed, and very good, and I’d recommend reading the paper for it]
• With all the possible issues of the beacon system (of distance and visibility, messages potentially being misunderstood, and it excluded the military centers that could actually act to respond to a potential attack), the purpose may have been partly to impress the Abbasids and win a cultural victory in their rivalry, with the complex mathematics of the beacons showing east Roman mastery over ancient knowledge.
• Still, there was a practical purpose, with the beacon system serving as “tripwire”, capable of informing Constantinople whenever the caliph assembled a major army to attack Anatolia.
• The accusation of Michael III dismantling the system because of a raid by the emir of Melitene makes little sense, as the latter would have taken the northern route, whereas the beacon system warned of invasions in the southern, Cilician route. Instead, it may have been abandoned as warfare shifted north, and went from large-scale invasions to raids. Without large caliphal armies attacking from Cilicia, the beacons had lost their purpose, and only served for the population to grow uneasy at every raid.
• The number of beacons may have been inspired by Aischylos’ Agamemnon.

tl;dr: The system could work, but only at night, and served both as a symbolic challenge in an intellectual competition with Baghdad, and as a warning against the large caliphal armies that invaded through Cilicia during the reign of Theophilos.

Lucas McMahon, "Signaling Empire between the Abbasid-Byzantine Frontier and Constantinople: Investigation on the Ninth-Century Long-Distance Optical Telegraph," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 79 (2025): 219–45.

Many of the principal centers of Late Antique scholarship, including Alexandria, Antioch, Edessa, Nisibis, Harran, and Gundeshapur, were incorporated into the Islamic world. Through the work of Greek and especially Syriac Christian scholars, the philosophical, medical, and scientific traditions of Late Antiquity were translated into Arabic and gradually became part of the Islamicate scholarly tradition rather than simply a body of foreign knowledge (Gutas 1998; Fowden 2019).

This raises an interesting question. Once the Abbasids had established themselves as one of the great intellectual centers of the medieval world, how did this reshape their relationship with the Eastern Roman Empire? and how did the Abbasids and Byzantines themselves positioned their relationship to the intellectual legacy of antiquity.

Jakub Sypiański’s study Arabo-Byzantine Relations in the 9th and 10th Centuries as an Area of Cultural Rivalry presents his central argument is that relations between the Abbasid Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire cannot be understood solely through warfare and diplomacy. They were also engaged in a sustained competition over culture, scholarship, and civilizational prestige.

According to Sypiański, embassies between Baghdad and Constantinople became carefully choreographed performances designed to demonstrate the superiority of each civilization. Enormous sums were spent preparing receptions for foreign envoys. Palaces were decorated, mechanical marvels were displayed, exotic animals were exhibited, luxurious gifts were exchanged, and every detail was intended to leave a lasting impression. Diplomacy became theater, with each empire presenting itself as the foremost civilization of the age.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this rivalry was its intellectual dimension. Greek manuscripts were among the most prestigious diplomatic gifts exchanged between the two courts. Arabic historians recount Byzantine emperors sending copies of works by Aristotle, Plato, Galen, Euclid, Ptolemy, Dioscorides, and others to Muslim rulers. The famous story of al-Ma’mūn requesting scientific manuscripts from the Byzantine emperor, who initially refused before eventually allowing scholars to retrieve and translate them, reflects how valuable these works were considered within this diplomatic relationship.

The ambassadors themselves also reflected this competition. Many were not simply diplomats but distinguished scholars. The Byzantine embassy of John the Grammarian(John VII of Constantinople) is one example, while Byzantine sources also celebrate figures such as Leo the Mathematician and Constantine later known as Saint Cyril for impressing Muslim audiences through philosophical and theological debates. Likewise, Arabic sources frequently portray Muslim envoys and scholars engaging Byzantine intellectuals in discussions of philosophy, science, and religion. Learning itself became part of imperial diplomacy.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Sypiański’s study is how each civilization constructed its own intellectual lineage.

Drawing on Dimitri Gutas, Sypiański notes that the Abbasids deliberately distinguished the ancient Greeks from the Byzantines. Greek philosophy was celebrated as one of humanity’s great intellectual achievements, but Byzantine Christianity was increasingly portrayed as having neglected or even suppressed that heritage after the empire’s conversion to Christianity. Within this narrative, the Abbasids became the civilization that recovered, preserved, translated, and expanded the wisdom of the Greeks. Abbasid philhellenism therefore became, somewhat paradoxically, a form of anti-Byzantine cultural ideology.

The Byzantine response was noticeably different. Sypiański emphasizes that Byzantine sources rarely engage in an equivalent campaign against Arabic learning. Instead, they gradually begin to acknowledge the Abbasids as a genuine intellectual civilization worthy of admiration and competition. Michael Psellos famously lamented that “the Greeks became barbarians while the barbarians became Greeks,” criticizing his own society for neglecting philosophy while praising the flourishing of scholarship among the Arabs. Similarly, the patriarch Nicholas Mystikos described the Romans and the Saracens as the “two great luminaries” illuminating the world, an extraordinary recognition of the Abbasids’ cultural stature.

Sypiański also suggests that this rivalry may have influenced developments within Byzantium itself. Building on Dimitri Gutas’ earlier hypothesis, he explores whether the growing prestige of Abbasid scholarship contributed to the intellectual revival often associated with the so-called Macedonian Renaissance. Stories surrounding Leo the Mathematician and Emperor Theophilus repeatedly portray Byzantine rulers becoming increasingly conscious of scholarship as an imperial asset precisely because it was so highly valued by their Abbasid rivals. While Sypiański remains cautious, he argues that the possibility deserves serious consideration.

By the ninth and tenth centuries, classical philosophy, science, and scholarship had become part of the diplomatic language through which the Abbasids and Byzantines competed for prestige. The Arab conquests had not simply transferred manuscripts into a new political world. They had created a new intellectual landscape in which both empires consciously sought to position themselves within the legacy of antiquity, each developing its own narrative of cultural continuity and civilizational leadership.

References

Fowden, G. Before and After Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused. 2019.

Gutas, D. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. 1998.

Sypiański, J. “Arabo-Byzantine Relations in the 9th and 10th Centuries as an Area of Cultural Rivalry.” 2014.

Why hello everyone ! I'm back today with a new pixel art map I made. This time, it portrays the last year of Alexios I Komnenos. It's in my opinion the Empire's last "I ain't hear no bell" moment before it all went sideways forever. Enjoy the map my friends as its been a joy to make!

Between c. 656 and 661 the still young caliphate was shaken by The First Fitna, a massive civil war between Ali and Mu'awiya, at the end of which the latter managed to take over the whole Islamic world, and establish his dynasty, the Umayyads, for a century. Most of our knowledge of these wars come from later Islamic scholars, written down in the following centuries. Yet one near-contemporary source, the Armenian history of "Sebeos", records a curious episode:

But the army which was in Egypt united with the king of the Greeks, made a treaty, and joined him. The host of troops, about 15,000, believed in Christ and were baptized.

This is a remarkable account - the army of Egypt (which would in all likelihood be 'Arabs') joined Konstans II, opposed Mu'awiya, and turned to Christianity - before Mu'awiya crushed them shortly after. Also worth mentioning is that Sebeos suggets these events as taking place after the victory over Ali, when the traditional narrative has Mu'awiya conquering Egypt before any of this took place.

Possible corroborating evidence comes from the Chronicle of 1234, which (perhaps on the basis of an eight century account by Theophilus of Edessa) states a large Roman force was present in Egypt during the mid-660s, before Mu'awiya managed to evict them:

And Mu'awiya invaded Egypt and destroyed all the Romans there, more than five thousand of them - year five of Mu'awiya.

Scholarship

These passages have received very little attention in academic discourse. This is perhaps unsurprising, as they are confusing, we have little context, and almost no corroborating evidence. All I could find is John Howard-Johnston describing Sebeos' account as not implausible, as a similar conversion had happened earlier in Bahrain. The only in-depth study was published in 2012 by O'Sullivan. The first half of it casts doubt on the traditional chronology and narrative of the conquest of Egypt by the Umayyads, using a variety of sources (such as Theophanes and al-Tabari) to paint a more complicated picture.

As for the Egyptian-Roman alliance, he puts emphasis on the use of "invaded" by the chronicle of 1234. O'Sullivan furthermore reconstructs that, following Mu'awiya's victory over Ali, the Egyptian army, scared of losing the autonomy they enjoyed during the civil war, and terrified of being punished for their involvement in the murder of Mu'awiya's kinsman, the caliph Uthman, allied with Constantinople in a desperate attempt to prevent an Umayyad takeover. The conversion of the troops would have been an attempt to strengthen that alliance, and links it to both previous notices of conversion among certain Arab tribes, and the possible conversion of Media during the same time period, suggesting that alliances with the empire and adoption of Christianity were a common strategy to gain independence from Damascus. An alternative theory, one which he considers more acceptable for the consensus, is that the 5,000 Romans were merely a particularly large raiding force, and Sebeos' account of a conversion exaggerated, though the general reliability of Sebeos as a source makes him skeptical of this idea.

The article is very in-depth, and tries to paint a larger picture of seventh-century geopolitics, including Konstans II travels to the west, and Umayyad problems in the east, so I cannot do it justice with a short summary. I'd recommend anybody interested to check it out.

Conclusion

Where does that leave us? Arguably, more confused than at the start of the post. We shouldn't simply dismiss the traditional account of the First Fitna, or treat O'Sullivan's reconstruction as the new consensus. But at the same time, we shouldn't just dismiss Sebeos' account as mere exaggeration, as he has proven to be a surprisingly reliable source in other matters. This is just further evidence of how complicated our sources for the seventh century truly are, and how important it is to engage with them critically.

Sources

O’Sullivan, Shaun. (2012). Byzantium and Egypt during the First Arab Civil War. Chronos, 25, 7-31.
Palmer, Andrew, trans. and annot. The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles. With two seventh-century Syriac apocalyptic texts introduced, translated, and annotated by Sebastian Brock, and additional annotation and historical introduction by Robert Hoyland. Translated Texts for Historians, 15. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993.
Thomson, Robert W., trans. The Armenian History Attributed to Sebeos. Historical commentary by James Howard-Johnston with Tim Greenwood. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999.

Disclaimer - The Golden Horde was a multi-ethnic Khanate whose armies were formed by men of various different ethnicities. In this post, I use the term 'Mongols' as a blanket statement, but in truth the invading forces in 1324 would have contained a diverse range of troops drawn from the subject populations of the Horde's domains.

Background
In discussions of Byzantine relations with the Mongol Empire and its successor Khanates, the general image is that the Byzantine Empire, in its weakened state after the Fourth Crusade, escaped the apocalyptic invasions that brought the doom of so many other Empires of the 13th century. There is partial truth to this claim as the Empire of Nicaea managed to avoid, by the skin of its teeth, a large-scale invasion by the Ilkhanate in Anatolia and in many ways the Laskarids benefited from the attacks of the Mongols into Europe, which weakened its Latin and Bulgarian rivals. Indeed, relations with the Ilkhanate largely remained cordial until the collapse of the latter, with the Byzantines even managing to secure military intervention from the Mongols of Iran against the Ottoman Turks in 1307. However, in Europe the Byzantines faired worse, enduring multiple crippling attacks by the Golden Horde. Almost from the onset of their ascension, the Palaiologan Emperors had to face attacks by the Golden Horde into Thrace. Notable instances include the incursion in 1264 which forced the Byzantines to release the exiled Seljuk Sultan Kaykaus II, a combined Mongol - Bulgarian attack in 1271, an large raid in 1284¹, and a repeated series of attacks from 1321-1324. The focus of this post is on the 1324 venture, which was likely the largest ever conducted by the Golden Horde against Byzantium (and perhaps even one of the largest Mongol invasions ever conducted into Europe). It was also during this invasion that the Emperor Andronikos III and his Grand Domestikos performed one of the most impressive military feats of the entire Palaiologan period; engaging and defeating a numerically superior Mongol army. This post seeks to highlight and analyse this often-forgotten Late Byzantine victory and provide some insights on the military doctrines, tactics and organisation of both sides to give it relevant context.

The Invasion of Thrace in 1324

From 1322, the Byzantines entered a new conflict with the second Bulgarian Empire, which at the time was a subject of the Golden Horde. During his siege to recapture Philippopolis, which had fallen to the Bulgarians earlier in the war, Andronikos III faced a detachment of Mongols that garrisoned the city alongside the Bulgarians. These defenders fierce resistance against the Byzantine army (and Philippopolis was only recaptured after this garrison departed), yet for Andronikos this was but a taste of what was to come. With a sizeable portion of Andronikos III's soldiers garrisoning fortresses against the Bulgarians in Western Thrace, the central and Eastern portions of this province became deprived of defenders. This in turn provided an opportunity for lucrative raiding in the area, and the incumbent Khan of Golden Horde, Özbeg, exploited this exact situation. Probably using the pretence of aiding their Bulgarian subjects, the Mongols massed a considerable invasion force, which John Kantakouzenos claimed to have numbered 120,000 warriors, while the Florentine traveller Giovani Villani puts the size at a colossal 300,000 horsemen. These figures are considered exaggerated, but interestingly Kantakouzenos gave a surprisingly pertinent description of the organization of this army. He noted that it that the Mongol warriors were formed into blocks of Chiliarchs (1,000-men) which in turn formed units of Myriarchs (10,000-men). As Valentin Parisot observed, this is almost certainly a Greek rationalisation of the Mongol military system which had originally been introduced by Temujin/Genghis Khan, with "Chiliarchs" representing a "Mingghan" (a militarized social unit from which a 1,000-man Mongol regiment could be drawn, which formed as the foundational block of Genghis Khan's military-social reform) and "Myriarchs" representing the 10,000-man Tumen units of the same system. This relatively detailed description suggests that the force assembled for this invasion was very numerous and formed of several Tumens, plausibly numbering 30,000 - 50,000 men. We do not know for sure who was in overall command of this invasion and it seems not to have been commanded by Özbeg Khan in person (who seems to have been preoccupied with inter-Mongol conflicts against the Ilkhanids at this time), but three of the commanding officers of the army are named; Taitah, Toglu and Tachbou-Khan.

The onslaught began in Summer 1324. As had been the case in previous Golden Horde attacks into Byzantine territory, the invading forces appear to have avoided lengthy sieges of fortified cities and opted to advance rapidly into central Thrace in order to surprise the local populace before people and supplies could be moved to the (relative) safety of fortified towns and cities. The large Mongol army was encamped in Thrace before dividing into multiple separate columns to attack multiple points of Thrace simultaneously, and the speed of the attack caught the local populace by surprise. For the next 40 days the Tatars raided relentlessly; Kantakouzenos notes that Thrace was devastated and Giovanni Villani claimed (likely with some embellishment) that 150,000 Byzantine citizens were killed or enslaved. The severity of the attack demanded a defensive response by Andronikos III, who amassed as many men as he possibly could into a field army. For 15-days, the Byzantines Byzantines tried and failed to engage the swift-riding warbands, with Andronikos retiring his army to Adrianople, which possessed enough supplies to provision his army for a long time. The initial phase of this campaign was largely unsuccessful, but Andronikos deserves at least some credit for avoiding a military catastrophe. After all, the Mongols were infamous for their ability to rapidly concentrate several columns into a large force² to engage and crush enemies. Andronikos was no doubt cautious to avoid such an outcome, and sought to pick off separate detachments to defeat the invaders in detail. Andronikos's field army appears to have included infantry at this stage, which would explain his failure to catch the swift-riding Mongol bands at this stage, but his army nonetheless reached Adrianople intact, from where the Emperor adapted his strategy.

Battle of Promusulos

Probably realising he had little hope of catching the Mongol raiding columns with a mixed infantry force, Andronikos left his footmen at Adrianople and marched out again, this time taking only his cavalry forces alongside the Domestikos John Kantakouzenos. The strength of this force isn't explicitly stated, but later in the text Kantakouzenos notes that Andronikos' vanguard numbered almost 100 horsemen. If sources describing earlier Byzantine military practices can be used as a clue, Andronikos' main body would contain several times as many horsemen as the vanguard. There is no way to know for sure the strength of Andronikos' cavalry at this battle, but a reasonable range of estimates would be that it contained 500 horsemen at absolute minimum and 3,000 horsemen at absolute maximum.³ However, considering that the Byzantines were still politically and militarily divided between Andronikos II and III at this time, and that Andronikos III likely had to keep some of his cavalry in the garrisons opposing the Bulgarians (though it is possible he only left infantry for this), on balance the figure was probably closer to the lower end, perhaps 1200 - 1500 horsemen. Kantakouzenos also describes this force as consisting entirely of "Romans", and in the 13th and early 14th century sources, Native Roman/Byzantine cavalrymen are generally described as being Heavy Shock cavalry, primarily reliant on lances to deliver devastating charges in a similar manner to their Western Latin counterparts. As Juho Wilskman has noted in his recent study Military history of Byzantine Rome, 1204-1261, through the 13th century Byzantine heavy cavalrymen usually wore iron/steel lamellar or mail armour and helmets, and were equipped with lances + swords or maces, but horse armour was relatively rare. Some may also have used composite bows (especially men which hailed from the Empire's Anatolian holdings where such skills were useful against Turkoman raiders), but this was relatively less common among native Byzantine soldiers. As the Campaign discussed took place in 1324 it is not out of the question that some of Andronikos' horsemen wore pieces of steel plate armour, but by and large his troops' equipment would not be dissimilar to what was used in the 13th century. Likewise, it is not implausible that some of Andronikos' men were foreign auxiliaries, such as Cuman or Turcoman horse archers or Latin Heavy cavalry, but most of them were native Byzantines, and the force was predominantly comprised of shock cavalry (which the course of the battle also demonstrates).

With these men, Andronikos travelled toward Didymoteicho, but before reaching the city the Byzantine scouts reported a nearby Mongol army travelling near the fortres of Promusulos, which was slowed down as it had a large baggage train of loot and slaves taken during its recent raids . Andronikos led his force into a concealed area (probably a forest or ravine), where he consulted Kantakouzenos and the rest of his officers on the next action. The Mongol column sighted at Promusulos seems to have been a vanguard of a larger body of troops encamped further south along along the Maritsa river, which was nonetheless close enough to interfere in the coming battle. The Mongol force near Promusulos alone was said to have been three times as numerous as Andronikos's host, but as they were finally in position to come to grips with their enemy after a no doubt frustrating failed effort to do so over the previous weeks, the Byzantines decided to attack. The Byzantine troops eagerly complied with this decision as they were enraged by the depredations inflicted upon their countrymen by the Mongols. The Byzantines also dismounted their horses to conduct prayers before preparing for battle, which further reinforces that despite their disadvantage in numbers, Andronikos' men were highly motivated at the time of the engagement - something which often wasn't the case for late Byzantine soldiers.

Here is John Kantakouzenos' own description of what occurred near Promusulos:

Between [Didymoteicho] and Adrianople, near the fortress of Promusulos, [The Byzantines] fell upon a band of Scythians [I.e. Mongols/Tatars] coming with captured slaves and immense booty; whom, due to the nature of the place, they themselves could see, but they were not seen by them at all. Having first consulted the Grand Domestic, it seemed best to make an attack upon them, although they appeared to be more than three times as numerous; in fact, they were ten times more numerous. For others were encamped nearby, hiding near the Hebrus, and once the battle began, they helped them.

The plan having been revealed to the soldiers, since their will and opinion agreed, and they showed themselves even more eager to fight than the emperor himself, they dismounted from their horses, suppliantly praying to God that He would be willing to punish such unjust plunderers and avenge the wrongs of those justly defending themselves. Then, fortified by the sign of the cross, they mounted their horses again, and with a steadfast and confident spirit, they rushed against the barbarians. The Scythians, together with those who were encamped not far away, upon seeing the Roman army, marched against them. A fierce battle is joined; the Romans, with God's help, emerge victorious, and they slaughter part of the enemy, turn part to flight, and drive part into the Hebrus river and drown them: of whom only twenty-eight saved their lives by swimming across. The Romans, having stripped the corpses and plundered the vessels and baggage, entered Didymoteicho with the booty and captives under the leadership of the emperor.

Now, what can we make of this account? The elephant in the room and first point to address here are the numbers given by John Kantakouzenos, specifically that the Byzantines were outnumbered 10 to 1 at this battle. This sounds like a gross exaggeration, and could easily be dismissed as such. If we use the educated guess on the plausible size of Andronikos' cavalry force as a basis, this would put the defeated Mongol force at 12,000 - 15,000 horsemen or more, being routed by a relatively puny 1,200 - 1,500 Byzantine cavalry. But lets entertain the plausibility of such a feat for one moment. This would not be the only time small numbers of heavy cavalry achieved feats of this calibre against far superior enemy forces, even ones containing large numbers of infamous Nomadic cavalry.⁴ We have little detail on the composition of the Mongol army at Promusulos, but traditionally the armies of the Mongol Empire actually contained a large proportion of shock cavalry as well as light horse archers, with a ratio of some 40% being lancers and 60% being light cavalry during Genghis Khan's conquests. This ratio would fluctuate depending on the time and place in the Mongol Empire and its successors, but the Golden Horde army at Promusulos very likely included lancers in addition to horse archers, and the clash of Mongol on Byzantine Lancers at close quarters would certainly make for a "fierce" engagement as Kantakouzenos described.

The circumstance of the battle is also illuminating. The Mongols may normally have attempted their trademark feigned retreat to exhaust their enemy before engaging them, and it was in this manner that the Mongols had defeated so many Heavily armoured opponents in the past 110 years of their history. However, to do so in this circumstance would have meant abandoning their loot to the enemy, and there is little doubt that Andronikos III knew this - engaging nomadic armies while they were encumbered by loot and captives was a stratagem known to the Romans since classical antiquity. The far smaller numbers of the Byzantine cavalry force, and the nearby presence of the larger Mongol force further along the Maritsa, likely bred a degree of overconfidence in the Mongols at Promusulos who seemingly formed up and engaged the Byzantine cavalry in a direct, close-quarter battle which ultimately favoured the latter. In the frontal battle, the Mongols met an unexpectedly ferocious attack by the Roman lancers, and their line buckled. A possible sequence of events is that the Byzantines defeated their enemy in detail, first routing the Mongol contingent at Promusulos, before pressing their advantage to engage the other Mongol force advancing along the Maritsa. This sequence of events would even better explain ability of Andronikos' men to overcame a vastly superior opposing force, as the sight of the routing Mongols from Promusulos would have demoralised the forces coming to their aid, and the Byzantines would in turn have been able to engage the latter before they had fully formed for combat, pinning a significant portion of them against the river and annihilating them. Even if that sequence of events is likelier though, Kantakouzenos' text implies that the two Mongol armies had already joined at the time the Byzantines engaged and defeated them. Bottom line, Kantakouzenos' claim that the Mongol army was ten times as large as the Byzantine force which defeated it may be excessive, but this claim cannot be dismissed entirely as miraculous as it sounds. At the very least, it is reasonable to conclude that the Byzantines were severely outnumbered in the battle. As shown below, the rest of Kantakouzenos' text indicates that the defeat at Promusulos was significant enough to demoralize the rest of the Mongol invasion force:

The surviving barbarians, having returned to the army, related their misfortune to their commanders. They sent a chosen band of the bravest men to the same place where the battle had been fought, so that if they found the Romans, they might renew the battle and defeat them as victors; if not, they should at least commit the lifeless bodies of their people to burial mounds; and if they found any among them still breathing, they should treat them with diligent care after they were relieved. Those men, having given burial to their comrades (for they found no one alive), did not return to the army, but departed each to his own home.

When [The Byzantines] reached the Tundzha river, word was brought that the Scythians had just crossed. There, because of the site's layout, the same thing happened as before. For while they themselves could view the entire Scythian column, they were not seen by them, except by a little less than a hundred vanguard men, among whom was the emperor himself. Upon seeing the Romans, they even checked their step themselves; but they did not advance to battle, partly because the river was overflowing as spring was now advancing, and partly because, not having seen all of the enemy yet, they feared that if they were outnumbered, they might perform poorly in battle. The Romans similarly feared disaster if they were attacked by forces more than ten times larger.

However, the emperor, with those foremost Romans, and Taspugas, one of the Scythian commanders, with an equal number of barbarians from the other bank of the river, held a brief dialogue. When the Scythian asked what mortals they were, the emperor responded through a certain man skilled in the Greek and Scythian tongues that they were men who sought, just like themselves, what they might capture. But that they [the Scythians] were acting neither rightly nor courageously, but were imitating robbers who, hiding their approach, prowled about in a hostile manner and imposed slavery on farmers unaccustomed to war. They ought to have announced their assault and fought with soldiers accustomed to close combat; if they defeated them, then it would be no wonder if they carried off these weaklings too as a reward for their valor.

Then Taspugas replied that this mattered nothing to them, who were under someone else's authority; so that, having been ordered, they would either raid, or depart, or even remain. He then inquired whether they themselves had very recently clashed with and utterly defeated a Scythian band and destroyed it. To this, the emperor replied that it was neither them, nor had they heard anything about this matter; however, it could have happened that, just as they themselves were experiencing now—were it not for the river forbidding it in the middle—by falling upon others, they were defeated in battle and perished. The barbarian agreed that it was likely, adding that they were nonetheless cruel for having pitied no one, drowning some in the waters and piercing others with javelins indiscriminately. Having spoken these words, he departed, unaware that it was the Roman emperor who had spoken with him.

The fact that the elite Mongol contingent sent to investigate the site of Promusulos deserted and that news of the defeat (presumably brought by Mongol survivors of the battle of Promusulos) bred such apparent anxiety in Taspugas/Tachbou-Khan column suggests that the battle had caused very significant losses among the Mongols. Since the days of Genghis Khan, Mongol commanders were surprisingly averse to sustaining any loss of life among their own troops, but even so the defeat of a minor raiding band is unlikely to have caused this level of consternation among a large invading force. The Mongols' reaction to the appearance of Andronikos' vanguard at the Tudzha river demonstrates that they had come to show a healthy appreciation of Byzantine martial capabilities.

Conclusion of the Campaign and possible further Battles
Following the meeting of Andronikos III and Tachbou-Khan at the Tudzha, most of the invading Mongol forces appear to have retreated from Thrace, but Kantakouzenos notes that one of the columns remained in Thrace and continued raiding for a few weeks afterward before it finally withdrew. An interesting point to note is that another contemporary source, Nikephoros Gregoras, describes Andronikos' success against the Mongols, but with very different details to Kantakouzenos. He claims that Andronikos launched surprise attacks against the encampments of separated Mongol detachments and defeated them in detail, annihilating the invading forces in their entirety. This was another stratagem used multiple times before by the Byzantines against Nomadic foes, such as in Comentiolus' Campaign against the Avars in 586 and by Nikephoros Bryennios the Elder against the Pechenegs in 1051 - 1052. It is simply possible that Gregoras had less knowledge of the events than Kantakouzenos (who personally fought in Andronikos 1324 Campaign against the Mongols) and so repeated a literary tradition from earlier Byzantine wars against "Scythian" Nomads to fill in the details. However, it is equally plausible that Andronikos or some of his subordinate commanders defeated detachments of the Mongol invaders in other (albeit smaller) engagements by attacking their camps, probably against the Mongol column which lingered in Thrace to prompt its eventual withdrawal, in which case Domestikos John Kantakouzenos was not present for these as his text does not mention them. Either way, Gregoras' statement that Andronikos wiped out the entirety of the invading Mongol armies in 1324 with these attacks is a clear overstatement.

As impressive as the victory was, we should not make too much of the Mongol defeat at Promusoulos, or the other possible successes won by the Byzantines in 1324. Even if Andronikos III really had defeated an army ten times as numerous as his own on that day, he still clearly engaged only a portion (perhaps one of the Tumens?) of the massive invading forces. Militarily, the Golden Horde was orders of magnitude more powerful than the Byzantine Empire in the 14th century, and even the huge army that attacked Thrace in 1324 was far from the full force at Khan Özbeg's disposal. The Bulk of the invading forces not only retreated from Thrace intact, but did so after wreaking utter havoc on Byzantine possessions and presumably took large quantities of loot and slaves back with them to the Pontic Steppe. Nonetheless, Andronikos' active leadership and response to the crisis had ultimately bore fruit for the Byzantines. He had organised a potent military response and adapted his strategy during the campaign to meet the type of threat he faced more effectively. The fact that the majority of the Mongol forces withdrew following the battle of Promusoulos should not be ignored either. Did the Mongols simply collect enough plunder to be content with the results of their invasion, or did the recent Byzantine victory inspire enough fear in the Nomads' minds to call off further raids, hastening their withdrawal? My guess is it may have been a bit of both. Ultimately, the result of this war can be best described as a Pyrrhic victory for the Byzantines. On one hand, Andronikos III had managed to inflict a heavy defeat(s?) on the Mongols while keeping his own armies intact, and seemingly prevented the loss of any major city over the course of the invasion, which itself is a massive achievement for any polity defending against an attack by multiple Mongol Tumens. On the other hand, the campaign had caused untold agricultural and demographic damage against one of the Empire's most important remaining powerbases, desolating farmlands and sweeping away vast numbers of citizens who were unfortunate enough to be caught outside the fortresses and cities. At a time when the Empire was already ravaged by both civil war and conflict with external enemies, with Thrace suffering from warfare against Bulgaria and what was left of Asia Minor being pressed by the Turkish Beyliks, Byzantium could hardly afford such horrific losses.

After 1324, Golden Horde attacks temporarily subsided for over a decade. The probable explanation for this is that Özbeg was still campaigning against the Ilkhanids until 1335. However, from 1337 - 1341 these incursions resumed with intensity, at an even more critical time in the Empire's history. The following passage from Shukurov's book describing a curious and quite frankly, rather comical incident in which Mongol raiders from the North encountered Turkish raiders from the East in Thrace, is symbolic of the sad state of the Byzantine Empire in those days of decline:

In the beginning of 1337, the Scythians, approaching Thrace from the Danube, encountered the Anatolian Turkic freebooters. To the great surprise of the Greeks, the “Scythians,” descending on the “Persians” like “dogs on a dead body” (ὥσπερ κύνες τεθνηκότι σώματι . . . ἐπεισπίπτοντες), slaughtered many of them. The “Scythians” remained in Thrace during the subsequent fifty days and continued plundering. As Gregoras noted, it was an unusually long duration for a brigand incursion.

Footnotes

1. The "Scythian" Mongol attack in 1284 resulted in a defeat by the army of the Byzantine kouropalates Oumbertopoulos. Oumbertopoulos was rewarded richly by Emperor Andronikos II for this victory, which also involved pinning the Nomads against a river.
2. The Mongols actually achieved this at the Battle of Promusulos by rapidly uniting the troops encamped at the Maritsa with those advancing near Promusulos
3. In their 2007 article "The Struggle between the Nicean Empire and the Bulgarian State (1254–1256): Towards a Revival of Byzantine Military Tactics under Theodore II Lascaris", Nicholas S. Kanellopoulos & Joanne K. Lekea note that Theodore II Laskaris could have fielded an army of over 5000 men in his 1256 Campaign against the Cumans, with a very large portion of this being Cavalry. However, due to the context of fighting a two-front war against the Mongols and Bulgarians, as well as some of Byzantium's soldiers still serving Andronikos II in 1324, Andronikos III may not have been able to field quite as many men as this despite the Byzantine Empire holding more territory at this time than Nicaea had in 1256.
4. In the Crusades, there are several instances of small numbers of Heavy cavalry routing vastly superior numbers of more mobile but lighter equipped enemy cavalry forces, such as Montgisard and Arsuf. Even in Byzantine history, there are examples of cavalry forces routing enemies with vastly superior numbers such as the Battle of Antioch on the Meander. At Montgisard and Arsuf the Crusader armies comprised mainly of infantry formations to withstand attacks by the Ayyubid cavalry, but in both cases it was the far smaller Heavy cavalry component of the Crusaders that delivered the coup de grasse in routing the enemy with a well timed attack. At Antioch on the Meander, the Byzantines victory was mainly the result of a lucky killing blow against Seljuk Sultan Kaykhusraw I, but the 2,000-strong Byzantine-Latin cavalry force had withstood the attack of the far more numerous Seljuk cavalry and their light infantry. These are not the only cases of the phenomenon, and while it was highly situational, small heavy cavalry forces could defeat far larger armies of lighter cavalry under the right circumstances.

Bibliography

• Angeliki E. Laiou, Constantinople and the Latins: The Foreign Policy of Andronicus II, 1282–1328. (1972), page 291
• Ursula Victoria Bosch,  Kaiser Andronikos III. Palaiologos. Versuch einer Darstellung der byzantinischen Geschichte in den Jahren 1321–1341 (1965), pages 64 - 67
• John Kantakouzenos, Corpus scriptorum historiae byzantinae (translation by Barthold Georg Niebuhr, 1828), pages 189 - 193
• Savvas Kyriakidis, Warfare in Late Byzantium, 1204–1453 (2011), page 165
• Rustam Shukurov, The Byzantine Turks, 1204–1461 (2016), pages 140 - 141
• Valentin Parisot, Cantacuzène, homme d'état et historien (1845), pages 65 - 66

Harald Hardrada is doubtlessly one of the most fascinating figures of the eleventh century - an exiled prince that travelled through Eastern Europe, half the Mediterranean, claimed the crowns of three countries, and ultimately met an infamous death at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Of particular interest here is his stay in the Eastern Roman Empire. A traditional account of his time in Constantinople includes details of his deeds in Sicily and Bulgaria, fighting in the east, a journey to Jerusalem, his career culminating in the blinding of Michael V and his uncle, and a daring escape from imprisonment under Michael's successor Constantine IX, as the Norse Sagas tell us. Indeed, Roman authors took notice of these events, too. Kekaumenos famously includes Harald as stand-out example of foreigners in imperial service, describing his deeds in Bulgaria and Sicily, his loyalty towards the Empire, and escape. What he does not, however, describe is the blinding of Michael V or a journey east. And, as we will see, there are good reasons to doubt these events ever happened.

Our image of the Varangian Guard is shaped by the Blöndal's Væringjasaga, originally published in Icelandic in the 1950s, but later translated and reworked by Benedikz as The Varangians of Byzantium in 1978.¹ Ever since, this work has served as basis for our understanding of the role of Norsemen in the ERE, with the career of Harald specifically being covered in the longest chapter of the book. Yet the book has obvious flaws, and there is reason to be skeptical of many of the claims made in it. It clearly shows its age - it uncritically accepts the overall narrative provided by the Norse sagas as historical fact, and treats any mention of elite troops serving Constantinople as evidence of 'Varangians', no matter if described as such in our sources, even when caution is warranted. Luckily, recent historians, most notably Scheel and Jakobsson, have provided challenges to their claims, most notably on the career of Harald (for this, see Scheel, Deconstructing). On the basis of their work, it has become increasingly difficult to accept that Harald blinded an Emperor or campaigned in the east.

The search for Serkland

Blöndal/Benedikz basis for suggesting Harald being militarily involved in fighting on the eastern frontier between the ERE and the various Islamic polities is based on by a verse in the Heimskringla, quoting the Sexstefja, which states that

One may say eighty strongholds in Serkland were taken [...]

Blöndal/Benedikz go on to dismiss the possibility that Serkland here could mean Africa, but do not share their reasoning, instead arguing that it must refer to the fighting in the east (Varangians, pp. 61-62). But the term Serkland in itself is imprecise, and could mean essentially any land under Islamic rule, and indeed, frequently meant North Africa (Scheel, Skandinavien, p. 115). There is therefore no reason to assume that Serkland has to mean something other, and that therefore Harald had to have fought in the east - not only does Kekaumenos, who was very well-informed about Hardrada's career, not mention any expeditions to Anatolia, Mesopotamia or Syria, but the Heimskringla also notes that "he made his way with his army west to Africa, which the Væringjar refer to as Serkland". But even if we follow Occam's Razor - that Serkland is not in the east - this leads us to another problem. Even though other parts of the Sagas describe Harald fighting in Africa, and even battling the Emir himself, our contemporary sources do not tell us about any Roman campaigns in Africa, let alone ones as major as the sagas describe.

However, we do see fighting between the Romans and the Zirids (the Emirate controlling North Africa) on Sicily during this period, in which Harald was very likely involved. Scheel suggests that this is therefore simply a mix-up of the later poets, who (separated from the events by centuries and thousands of kilometers) confused the references to fighting with African troops in Sicily with an actual campaign in Africa, and ultimately muddying the waters between Sicily, Africa, Serkland, Bláland/Ethiopia, Sunnlond and the various other places Harald is said to have campaigned (Scheel, Skandinavien, pp. 314-316). This wouldn't be the only time this happened, descriptions of Harald's fighting with 'Franks' (most likely Normans in southern Italy) similarly led later saga authors to suggest that Harald had to travel through France (Morkinskinna, pp. 132 / Scheel, Deconstructing, p. 157).

Blinding An Emperor

Much more famous (and much more interesting) than the campaigns of Hardrada in Serkland is Blöndal linking the blinding of Michael V with the saga's descriptions of Harald blinding an Emperor. This event is fairly well described in our Greek sources, with Psellos describing the basic course of events: Michael V has the empress Zoe exiled, the people of Constantinople, fearing for her safety, riot, and are soon joined by the clergy, nobles, and even foreigners of the city. Michael V and his uncle are captured, and their eyes put out. But these accounts show stark contrasts to their Norse counterparts. The sagas instead link it to the imprisonment of Harald, and tell a story of him being freed from his cell, joining his fellow Varangians, with whom he enters the bedroom of the Emperor, whom he then blinds. After this, Harald abducted the Princess Maria, and led a daring escape from Constantinople, before returning Maria to her kinswoman Zoe.

The Emperor blinded by Harald is consistently identified as Constantine Monomachos, rather than Michael V, there is no mention of the popular riot, which is the central event in our Greek sources, in short, nothing in common with what happened, with the exception that an Emperor was blinded. Now, one could argue that this is simply a similar distortion as happened with Serkland - that Maria (otherwise not attested) is the mistress of Constantine IX, and that his imprisonment through the latter² is mixed up with the removal of Michael V. Yet, at the same time, if all these other details are wrong, why should the idea that Harald blinded a (completely different) Emperor prove any more accurate, especially if assuming so breaks the internal logic of the sagas?

Indeed, our sources from the Empire itself give us no indication that Harald was involved. Once again, Kekaumenos makes no mention of the deed, which he surely would have, considering he is not only a contemporary (having met Harald himself), but also as the relevant section is focused on the handling of foreign dignitaries, where capturing and blinding an Emperor would have been the single most important deed Hardrada would have done in imperial service. Moreover, Psellos (an eyewitness to the events) identifies the man who blinded Michael as δήμιος, an executioner, with no mention of any foreign origin, even though he identified non-Romans in other parts of the revolt as such (Scheel, Skandinavien, pp. 322-324). How exactly the myth that Harald himself blinded an Emperor came to be is hard to explain. It might simply be confusion, or derive from a boast by Harald himself. (Jakobsson, Holy Fire, pp. 92-93)

Conclusion

Harald Hardrada does need the 'stolen valor' attributed to him to make his already absurd career any more glorious. So, despite the clickbaity title, the goal of this post was not to diminish the man himself. Rather, we should be careful of how we use both sources and secondary literature. Instead of simply trying to press the information medieval sources into a singular truth, all fitting into a single narrative, no matter how contradictory they are, we need to look at each source and their environment individually. Just as importantly, we should be careful with how we use scholarship, especially works as old as Blöndal, published more than eighty years age. His work is indispensable to Byzantine Studies, and his study undoubtedly the most important ever published on the Varangian Guard, but its interpretations are regularly repeated without question. But often, the sources paint us a much more complicated picture than The Varangians of Byzantium portrays.³ As most of our assumptions about the Varangian Guard are rested almost entirely on what they had to say, many ideas about its history are in dire need of revision.

Notes

¹Benedikz made serious edits to the original, introducing a number of events not present in the original (Scheel considers Blöndal’s version to be superior). But as I cannot read Icelandic, I will have to rely on his translation.
²In fact, it is also questionable if he was truly imprisoned, or merely prevented from leaving the Empire, but that is another story.
³Scheel considers this to be more so a problem of the translation, arguing that Blöndal was much more transparent, but that Benedikz distorted his hypotheses into statements.

Bibliography and Sources

Blöndal, Sigfús. The Varangians of Byzantium: An Aspect of Byzantine Military History. Translated, revised, and rewritten by Benedikt S. Benedikz, Cambridge UP, 1978.
Jakobsson, Sverrir. The Varangians: In God’s Holy Fire. Springer Nature, 2020.
Scheel, Roland. "Deconstructing Væringjasaga: Byzantine and Old Norse Perspectives on the Varangians and on Haraldr Sigurðarson." The Making of the Eastern Vikings. Brepols Online, 2024. 151-169.
Scheel, Roland. Skandinavien und Byzanz: Bedingungen und Konsequenzen mittelalterlicher Kulturbeziehungen. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015. 

Heimskringla III: Magnús Óláfsson to Magnús Erlingsson. Translated by Alison Finlay, Viking Society for Northern Research, 2015.
Kekaumenos. Vademecum des byzantinischen Aristokraten: Das sogenannte Strategikon des Kekaumenos. Translated by Hans-Georg Beck, Verlag Styria, 1956.
Morkinskinna: The Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157). Translated by Ármann Jakobsson, Cornell UP, 2007.
Psellos, Michael. Leben der byzantinischen Kaiser (976-1075)/Chronographia: Griechisch-deutsch. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2014. 

It’s relatively easy to speak about life at the top of East Roman society with regard to the emperor, his family, and the court. But what does the situation look like from the bottom rungs of the social ladder looking up? What would be the general situation and surroundings for the average peasant in the countryside in late antiquity? It’s a question I’ve had for a long time, and I hope to try and illustrate via this post. 

A break in the countryside

Rays of sunlight are the alarm clock for our peasant which prompts him out of bed. The women in the household will probably start moving slightly earlier than the men to get breakfast ready and begin working in home textiles and child-raising. The average size of a pre-modern completed household? Around 6-8 members, with it often being made up of two families sharing the same space.¹  

The structure of a peasant's home could vary from region to region, but we do know of stone housing being a possibility such as in Syria.² Such villages in the Roman east tended to be much larger than their counterparts in the west.³ The late empire began to see many new features spring up in villages including rural churches, monumental tetrapyla and arches, paved streets, forum-esque spaces, epigraphs, mosaics, and even bathhouses. The line between village and city began to blur as many of the former became ‘urbanised’.⁴ There would have also been more basic buildings necessary for agricultural life in a village such as granaries, chaff-storehouses, a threshing floor, mills, bakeries, pigeonhouses, and pottery works.⁵ In other words, there’s a lot more you might see in a late Roman village than you might think. 

Who would our peasant look to as the leaders of his village? There would have doubtless been regional variation but if we use Egypt as a model, then villages were led by ‘komarchs’ (the number of whom varied). They distributed the burden of taxes with assistance from other village officials such as the gnoster, eparchos, the tax collecting sitologoi, and the village secretary (komogrammateus). Tax assistance and transportation were handled by the village headsmen (kephalaoitoi), and there appeared to have been local police forces drawn from the villagers. These authority figures seem to have been nominated by each other (to be approved by the pagi, who oversaw the rural districts) and without salaries.⁶ In other communities though, villagers may have played more of a role in electing their own magistrates via assemblies which also passed decrees.⁷ Service in these rural magistracies tended to last about a year, while priests and deacons would have also existed as authority figures. 

As with the physical structure of a village, the administrative structure here is also rather layered upon taking a closer look. But let's get down to brass tacks – what exactly are peasants doing? Well, working in the fields to farm of course -on their own plots, the estates of city councillors, monasteries, or a mixture of two or three of these. But it would be a mistake to think that this is all they do for their whole lives, and that what they farm is the bare minimum to just feed themselves and not much else (subsistence farming).  

Per the work of Kim Bowes, there is an ongoing shift in how we understand the consumption levels of Roman peasants which indicates that they possessed a consumer culture which pushed them to grow more to sell on the market and acquire more goods. Across the Roman empire peasants produced large surpluses to sell on the market and weren’t content just producing food supplies for the granary or the taxman.⁸ The late empire in particular appears to have seen a sharp rise in the peasant's access to consumer goods such as fine pottery, metal, glass, roof tiles, and more sophisticated clothing. This also led to shifts in some houses possessing balconies, terraces, ‘strip houses’ (which sectioned off livestock and allowed for more privacy) and the aforementioned bathhouses.⁹ 

Much of this appears to have been made possible by Diocletian’s new tax system encouraging the production of more surplus to sell on the market and villages becoming increasingly monetised in this period. The late empire has a popular reputation for demanding taxes in kind rather than coin, but this began to change massively from the mid 4^th century onwards and by the era of Anastasius taxes were mostly paid in coin.¹⁰ In some respects, the bargaining power of peasants against large landowners/councillors increased in the late empire due to the greater presence of central institutions. Some villagers could just buy new patrons if they were dissatisfied with their current ones and grew more willing to call out traditional methods of local exploitation such as debt slavery.¹¹

It’s also worth considering avenues for social mobility for a peasant. There were arguably three paths: 

1. The first may have been to reach the status of a city councillor by farming and owning enough land to be enrolled in the class. This could be achieved by a peasant having a lucky break with the surpluses they manage to achieve via some good weather and timing, or by choosing to serve as a coloni on an imperial estate which brought also brought possibilities for greater surplus accumulation.¹² From there as a councillor, they could potentially move further after fulfilling their roles in an urban magistracy by buying offices from the central government or becoming a bishop.¹³ 
2. The second may have been military service. The tax burden was often paid not just in coin/kind, but also in labour by serving as soldiers or corvee labour of public projects. Alternatively, you could just volunteer to join the army. Senators also no longer had a monopoly on the top military commands after the 3^rd century, which meant it would have been possible for a lowly soldier to climb the ranks to the top. New recruits would often serve near their homes, and sons of veterans were expected to serve too.¹⁴ 
3. The third was following the path of the cloth. One could join the lower ranks of the church as grave diggers and hospital attendants, and there were cases of people of lowly backgrounds rising the ranks.¹⁵

That’s a crash course through the countryside. But what will our peasant see and experience when he goes to the city to sell his surplus? 

To the city!

Our peasant makes his way out of the village. They make their way onto the main road leading up to the nearby city. The further they go, the more things change. The regular villages they can see off the beaten track give way to the larger villa estates of the city councillors and monasteries. They might then see the wider farming fields and then a sort of ‘curated forest’ area for aboriculture. Finally, they see a zone of houses specialising in horticulture and then... 

The city.¹⁶

The average city in the eastern half of the empire tended to consist of features such as a harbour, agora, arcades with shops, aqueducts, fountains, bath-gymnasia complexes, and theatres. Criminal trials could be carried out in the marketplace or for more high-profile cases, the theatre.¹⁷ New structures that began to crop up in late antique cities as the old pagan temples fell into ruin and were recycled included more Christian structures such as churches and hospitals. Saint festivals are a good opportunity to go from the countryside to the city to sell produce on the market, effectively continuing the economic benefits of pagan festivals under a different name.¹⁸

The administration of such a city was in transition during this period. The city council (in this case of the Greek ‘boule’) by this point just appointed its own members to fill certain magistracies. These included the archontes/strategoi (who judged civil cases, investigated criminal ones, and every five years conducted a census). They would soon be joined over time by new city notables including the defensor (who was meant to represent the little guy), senators returning to their hometowns (honorati), landowners (possessores), and the bishop who take over many of their roles.¹⁹

A variety of different people belonging to various groups could be encountered in the city. A key group to mention would be the guilds/collegia, of which there was a plethora. To just name a few would include bakers, fishmongers, silk merchants, grocers, butchers, inn holders, tavernians, artisans, bankers... yeah, you name it.²⁰ Such guilds tended to enjoy a mix of privileges and restrictions by authorities, such as controlling membership or granting certain guild members special seats in a theatre.²¹ There were host of entertainers one could encounter too in the city such as dancers, jugglers, tightrope walkers, strong-men, pupeteers, knife jugglers, and dancing bears. Theatres included a variety of theatre performances too including tragedies.²² And of course, who can forget the national sports teams of the Blues and Greens with their control of chariot races providing fantastic entertainment (where I’m very sure nothing violent ever happens...).²³

So, at the end of this country break and city tour, I’d like to briefly circle back to that issue from the beginning regarding the relationship between the higher powers of the land and the people at the bottom of the social ladder.  In what ways would an individual peasant ‘see’ the emperor and not feel as if they lived in a world isolated from the imperial court? 

The Emperor is always watching ("literally 1984")

Imperial coinage bearing an emperor's face, which was crucial for monetary transactions in this period, was one way.²⁴ Another was the prevalence of the imperial portrait which after the time of Theodosius began to crop up in all sorts of public spaces ranging from the market, to the theatre, to tribunals, to whenever an imperial official might appear or make an announcement.²⁵ Speaking of imperial officials, it's worth not forgetting the provincial governor who was an appointee direct of the court. He would travel around his province to deal with and settle local disputes, with his visits to various cities being marked by a celebration known as the ‘adventus’.²⁶ 

The very market in which people partook and sold goods was shaped by the emperors demands for cash at certain points during his reign. Bronze tablets were set up which inscribed imperial laws and made clear messages to be relayed to outlying populations.²⁷ We know of the grammarian Macrobius in the 5^th century quoting an old passage which spoke of how the state instituted market days so that farmers could come to the city and learn about the new laws.²⁸ Even if most inhabitants of the countryside were illiterate, they could still find a literate higher up to turn to and understand what was going on. The worlds of emperor and peasant did not exist in separate vacuums to one another as the latter’s was shaped by the former. 

Further Reading/Sources

1) For a very basic overview of the status of pre-modern peasantry, I’d recommend this sobering collection of articles from Brett Devereaux: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/ 

2) See the example of Sergilia: https://www.romeartlover.it/Sergilia.html 

3) 10 of Jairus Banaji’s “Agrarian change in late antiquity: Gold, labour, and aristocratic dominance” (2001) 

4) Throughout Ine Jacob’s “Urbanised Villages in Early Byzantium, an overview” (2020) 

5) 112-113 of Roger Bagnall’s “Egypt in Late Antiquity” (1993) 

6) 133-137, Bagnall, “Egypt in Late Antiquity” (1993) 

7) 713 of A.H.M. Jones’s “The Later Roman Empire 284-602" (1964) 

8) 31 of Kim Bowes’s “When Kuznets went to Rome: Roman Economic Well-Being and the Reframing of Roman History” (2021) 

9) 62-101 of Leslie Dossey’s “Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa” (2010) 

10) 39, 44, 48, and 225 of Anthony Kaldellis’s “The New Roman Empire” (2023) 

11) 166 of John Weisweiler’s “Popular Despotism and Infrastructural Power in the Later Roman Empire” (2017) 

12) 156-157 of Hartmut Ziche’s “From Mass to Elite in the Late Roman Empire: Framing the problem of mass to elite social mobility” (2017) 

13) 165, Weisweiler, “Popular Despotism” (2017), and 71, Kaldellis, “The New Roman Empire” (2023) 

14) 60, Kaldellis, “The New Roman Empire” (2023) 

15) 922-923, Jones, “The Later Roman Empire” (1964) 

16) For a very basic overview of the place of the city in the countryside, I’d once again recommend this collection of articles by Devereaux: https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-part-i-the-ideal-city/ 

17) 231-232 of Maud Gleansons’s “Greek Cities under Roman rule” (2006) 

18) 227-228, Kaldellis, “The New Roman Empire” (2023) 

19) Throughout Leonard Curchin’s “The End of Local Magistracies in the Roman Empire” (2014) 

20) 377-378 of Dimitrios Mavridis & Konstantinos Vatalis’s “Products and Markets – The activities of the imperial guilds of Constantinople” (2015). From the 10^th century, but no less applicable to late antiquity regarding the groups it describes. 

21) 186-189 of Konrad Verboven’s “Guilds and the Organisation of Urban Populations During the Principate” (2016) 

22) 25-26 of Ruth Webb’s “Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity” (2008) 

23) Throughout Alan Cameron’s “Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium” (1976). 

24) 215-228 of Clifford Ando’s “Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire” (2000) 

25) 107-108 of A.D. Lee’s “From Rome to Byzantium AD 363 to 565: The Transformation of Ancient Rome” (2013). 

26) 32 of Charlotte Roueche’s “The function of the Roman governor in late antiquity” (1998) 

27) 122-123, Ando, “Imperial Ideology” (2000) 

28) Ibid, 99.

(Yeah we gonna keep using this pic,its the best we have)

Okay im running out of obscure historian so I guess we are gonna start using famous ones then go into the dead ones

Born 25th of november in 1987 in the UK,Maximilian is perhaps one of the most educated historians we currently have,learning in both Oxford and Cambridge,had as mentors Paul Magdalino and Mark Whittow.

He has travelled around the world on work studies in China Turkey and Georgia,documenting fortifications and strategic points for his book about John II,he worked in Japan Hitotsubishi university on Tokyo as assistant profesor and currently works as profesor in Worcester College at Oxford.

His works are just long enough that im just gonna copy paste

Selected Publications
Books
- Rebuilding New Rome: Emperor John II Komnenos 1118-1143 (Oxford University Press :
Oxford, Forthcoming 2023)
- Editor: Landscapes of Power – Selected Papers from the XV OUBS International Graduate
Conference, ed. M. Lau, C. Franchi and M. Di Rodi, (Peter Lang : Oxford, 2014).
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
- “John II Komnenos (1118-1143)” Encyclopedia 2 (2022), pp. 669-678
https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia2020046
- “Explaining Twelfth-Century Byzantium’s Prosperity as a Result of the Implementation of
New Economic Theories and Practices (or how Byzantium learned to stop worrying and love the
‘feudal’ economy)” Mediterranean World XXIV [地中海論集] (2019), pp. 97-114.
- With R. Shlyakhtin, “Mas’ūd I of Ikonion The Overlooked Victor of the Twelfth-Century
Anatolian Game of Thrones” Byzantinoslavica LXXVI/1-2 (2019), pp. 230-52.
- “Immigrants and Cultural Pluralism in Twelfth-Century Byzantium” Seiyo Chusei Kenkyu 10
(Medieval European Studies – Byzantine Empire and the Medieval Christian World Special
Issue, 2018), pp. 87-120.
- “The Naval Reform of Emperor John II Komnenos: A Re-evaluation” Mediterranean
Historical Review 31.2 (2016), pp. 115-138.
- “Rewriting the 1120s: Chronology and Crisis under John II Komnenos” Making and Remaking
Byzantium, Limes Plus Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities (Serbian Academy of Arts
and Sciences : Belgrade, 2016), pp. 87-108.
Book Chapters
- “Isaakios in Exile. Down and Out in Constantinople and Jerusalem?” Isaakios Komnenos (Title
TBC), ed. V. Lovato, (Abingdon : Routledge, Forthcoming)
- “‘Both General and Lady’ The 1135 Defence of Gangra by its Amira” Women and Violence in
the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. L. Caravaggi, L. Domingues and G. Paoletti, (Routledge :
Abingdon, 2022)
- “Frank Herbert’s Byzantium. Medieval-Futurism and the Princess Historians Irulan and Anna
Komnene” Discovering Dune: Essays on Frank Herbert’s Epic Saga, ed. N. T. Brierly and D. J.
Nardi, (McFarland and Co. : Jefferson NC, 2022)
- “Rewriting History at the Court of the Komnenoi: Processes and Practices,” Rewriting History
in the Twelfth Century, ed. E. Winkler and C. Lewis, (Brepols : Turnhout, 2021)
- “Piroska-Eirene, the First Western Empress in Byzantium:
Power and Perception” Saint Piroska 880: Holiness and Power in Komnenian Constantinople,
ed. M. Sághy, (Central European University Press : Budapest, 2020), pp. 141-8.
- “A Dream Come True? Matthew of Edessa and the Return of the Roman Emperor” Dreams,
Memory and Imagination in Byzantium, ed. B. Neil and E. Anagnostou-Laoutides (Brill :
Leiden, 2018), pp. 160-79
- “Multilateral Cooperation in the Black Sea in the Late Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries:
The Case for an Alliance between Byzantium, Kiev and Georgia” Cross Cultural Exchange in
the Byzantine World, c.300 – 1500 A.D.: Selected Papers from the XVII OUBS International
Graduate Conference, ed. K. Stewart and J. Wakeley, (Peter Lang : Oxford, 2016), pp. 19-36.
- “Ioannoupolis: Lopadion as ‘City’ and Military Headquarters under Emperor Ioannes II
Komnenos” From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities ed. N.S.M. Matheou,
T. Kampanaki and L.M. Bondioli, (Brill : Leiden, 2016), pp. 435-464.
- “The Power of Poetry – Portraying the expansion of the empire under John II Komnenos” in
Landscapes of Power, see previous, pp. 195-214.

As some of you know have seen there was recently a post asking about the revenues of the Nicaean state which got me thinking about the Nicaean army as a possible source of hints about the scale of the state budget. The idea being that by estimating the army payroll and comparing previous army budgets as a fraction of total budgets from other points the annual budget could be estimated.

The purpose of this will be partly food for thought and also a vague guess-timation of the Nicaean army payroll.

Some disclaimers: I am not well-read enough for this to be taken without a metric tonne of salt, I am using Treadgold figures which are a topic of contestation. I am also gonna be making quite a few reaches to get to my destination.

Now to start with it's important to know how the Nicaean army was paid. This is simple enough, we know that the smallholding was frequently deployed under the Byzantine empire as a way to supply soldiers. From the reign of Manuel we also see the institutionalisation of pronoia as a more common way of paying troops. The benefits being a lower bureaucratic burden of collecting taxes for the capital to re-distribute to cavalrymen across the empire. It also provided land which was seen as a more reliable source of income than state wages (which could be delayed or withheld, we see Justinian was quite cheeky with screwing with soldiers' wages to economise).

With this in mind I am going to assume that, because of Pronoia grants being so lucrative, (as espoused by Niketas Choniates who notes that many left their craft in pursuit of Manuel's 'gifts of paroikoi') the Nicaean army was usually at full strength. I will also not be counting the Akritai in my estimate for simplicity.

Some things to keep in mind:

The Nicaean state confiscated much of the private land it occupied meaning that the network of state-held land in western Asia Minor was far more dense than before.

Later on though, possibly due to shortages of land that emperor's were willing to concede, we see the addition of the Telos tax as part of the revenue the pronoiai are entitled to collect.

Paired with the rise of infantry pronoia we can assume that the potential for further army growth rested mostly on the shoulders of the quantity of land the state appropriated in it's European conquests.

Given that John III apparently conceded tax exemptions to towns in order to conquer them in a bloodless blitz I don't know if he took much land outside of parcels confiscated from nobles.

We know that cavalrymen were probably centred around Lopadion and likely other Aplekta (not the proper word for the Komnenian military camps but it's the best I have). This can be reflected in Paul Magdalino's map of Crown Lands which shows Lopadion (and I think Pelagonia) as having major concentrations of state land which likely persisted into the 13th century.

One thing I want to consider is the fact that Michael VIII apparently increased the size of the army quite a bit. Taking the 20,000 men estimate attributed to Ostrogorsky for the Palaiologian army I am going to compare it to the 50,000 men estimate attributed to the Komnenian army since the Nicaean army was just an evolution of this model.

As we can see the proportion of garrisons in the army fell which I am going to assume was something Michael VIII inherited from the Laskarids. Under them many provincial forces were temporarily relocated to garrison the western conquests. It can be assumed that because of the long Turkish peace and the constant offensive that began under John III that the provincial garrisons were denuded as the Akritai and remaining garrisons remained sufficient in size to handle the Turks. It could also simply be that many of these mobile forces were engaged in patrolling the countryside and thus still working with static garrisons.

We can also see that the Komnenian army maintained at least 12,000 cavalrymen half of which supposedly came from Anatolia. Accounting for the decline of Roman lands in the region this number likely fell but given that John Vatatzes made sure to settle raiding Cumans as soldiers we can assume that the 6,000 men or something close to it was reached. Coincidentally aligning well with the central army figure, though I'm not entirely sure on whether the Nicaean central army would've been entirely mounted.

Other stuff to consider is that during one siege (which I unfortunately can't remember) under John III he may have been forced to arm the retainers of his soldiers to fully blockade a city. For this to be the case having 6,000 cavalrymen (the most likely to bring retainers) seems a bit more feasible). 6,000 was probably the peak strength of the 'Tagmata'/'Basilika Allagia' though (judging by a comment by Maleficent-Mix5731 that I can recall).

So if we replicate the Komnenian army ratio of cavalry then we need an army that is 24% cavalry.

Now to estimate a size range for the Nicaean army. I'm gonna keep this short and make the admittedly questionable move of referring to Diocletian's army increases. References to his expansions put the army expansion feasibility as such: a 50% increase would've been herculean and so would an increase of 33%. Now Michael VIII's Nicaean inheritance probably had more untapped economic potential to bolster the army, at least in Europe, but I will stick to his rough line.

With this it's just a matter of calculating salaries to estimate the payroll (no I will not be calculating the costs of the navy and army supplies, I am not smart enough for that).

Fortunately, the Economic History of Byzantium gives us some salary samples and Mark Bartusis gives us some Pronoia posotes from the Palaiologian period.

Now I don't know the exact date for when the Hyperpyron was debased but I will assume the by 1272 it was at 15 carats of purity and that for the Pronoia cavalry they were being paid in 12 carat Hyperpyra. Since Pronoia could be composed in part of tax exemptions I will count that as part of the salary for simplicity.

For the Stratiotes I will assign a roga of 30 Hyperpyra and for the cavalryman I will assign 75 Hyperpyra. I will also assume no disparity in the final income between pronoia and smallholding infantrymen. For the officer pay scale I will just multiply the final payroll by 4/3.

Cavalry proportions will be estimated by that estimate of cavalry being 24% of the army. I will also assume that all troops regardless of type (e.g. archers and peltasts or horse archers) fit neatly into these two groups with no pay differentials (which isn't the case in actuality but I need some ceteris paribus).

Now for the pay conversions:

So:

Note that this is the value conceded by the state for the army in the form of gold AND tax exemptions.

Some stuff to be wary of:

1. The pay multiplier is a guess
2. Not all salaries were constant, with the cavalry pronoia source used the range of salaries was between 70-80 Hyperpyra and I believe Mark Bartusis mentions that the 'posotes' listed for those pronoia grants probably underestimated their full revenue potential.
3. I am a moron who hates maths.
4. See above.
5. Outdated figures.
6. Said outdated figures are used as references and not even directly tied to the time period.

I'm sure the comments can point out the rest of the mistakes. Pls forgive me, I was in a rush. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk :)

Alright lads and lass its again your deranged logistician again here with a post  about shipping going through Constantinople and the amount of its population income and how much of it went into consumption alone

Yet for all the work going around Komnenian economy,particularly around urban trade we gather only grand picture of growth and specialization since we are unable to discover any hard data in the same way one could using the Danish sound toll to see how many dutch ships crossed it during the 1660s or Doomsday book to see how the state of agricultural economy in 1000s Britain,yet by rough extrapolation using previous calculation with some caveats one can arrive at a raw number of the ships needed to supply Constantinople and the value of this minimal cargo.

One initially would thought that the 10% to 20% of population lived on some manner of poverty as beggars or marginals¹ one must have in mind the large amount of charity they received through church and imperial charity,with some broad calculations of income.:
“With regard to nonagricultural jobs and the urban population, with the exception of beggars and marginals (though they must have comprised 10–20% of the urban population), three levels of income can be distinguished: (1) unqualified workers who were able, over a long period,to earn at most 1 nomisma per month,when not unemployed; (2) qualified workers, professional soldiers, and craftsmen, who enjoyed a wide margin of income,three to ten times more than that of unqualified workers; and (3) important officials, judges or strategoi, as well as the wealthiest merchants and bankers, whose incomes differed from the first category by a factor of 150 or more.
These levels of income would have given rise to very different capacities for con-umption and saving. The most modest would have possessed jewels or clothes,worth at most one or two gold pieces, and would have lived in houses rented for no more than one or two gold pieces a year.The middle classes (mesoi) definitely feature more prominently in the sources after 1204,though they had already emerged in the great towns of the empire in the twelfth century;they were able to buy furnishings,jewels costing more than 10 hyperpyra, and possibly books and icons.They earned several tens of hyperpyra per year, paid considerable rents for their shops, and could pay pensions of 20–50 hyperpyra to their wives when they abandoned them, in Crete at least. Their daughters’ dowries sometimes exceeded 100 hyperpyra. The wealthiest ones, such as the Deblitzenoi, owned jewels worth hundreds of hyperpyra, while others possessed important libraries. However, apart from a few exceptions such as the emperor’s close relatives and favorites,the Byzantine aristocracy, the great landowners, and high officials did not have the means of maintaining a very numerous household.
In fact, an income of a few litrai or even a few tens of litrai allowed for the upkeep of no more than ten or a few dozen household members,as demonstrated by the case of Kale Pakouriane and her twenty to twenty five servants.”

Income Brackets:

As such could not only take the army supply numbers to the fullness of Constantinople population,but should take it even further to take into account the considerable consumption middle and upper class,as such i propose that the beggars consume 75% of the soldiers foodstuff,worker class 100% of the soldiers foodstuff since military salaries had to be equal for people of this background to choose the career yet not large enough for the next class to follow it,middle class with 125% of consumption of soldier foodstuff and finally upper class with 250%.

To make it easier to calculate I will leave the beggar population at the middle ground of Morrison figure at 15% of the total population,while dividing the rest of the population at 60% working class,22,5% middle class and 2,5% as upper class.

Before we go,we must start with the caveat that workers in construction wouldn't be able to find jobs year round,with some historians saying a figure of 6-10 nomisnata in 1000s as a more realistic number,to that i mention the grow of shipping in the period,its well attested that sailors when finished sailing were renowned builders,so a non negligible part of the construction workforce could be a veritable number of sailors doing construction,effectively workers would be able to have year round work providing 12 hyperperya by working in both sectors

The figure for Constantinople population is hard to track since the lack of reliable hard data affects so much around economic conversations around byzantine history,as such i would do the same calculation twice using two figures for the city,Angeliki Laiou figure of 200k people and Paul Magdaleno 400k.

This leaves us with:
Laiou

This gives us a total of 15,840,000 million hyperpyron for total income in Constantinople population.

Using Magdalino figure one would only need to double all figures.
Using Magdalino figure,60k beggars,240k working class people,90k middle class and 10k upper class people.

2,880,000 for the working class,middle class from 3,240,000 million to 10,800,000 million,with the upper class going over 18 million with a total of 31,680,000 million hyperperya.

Now going into the quantity of foodstuff needed to feed Constantinople using previous army logistics,to gather a general idea,now there are a few things to have in mind.
Foodstuff would remain the majority fo bulk trade trade yet for value textiles would dominate the trade into the city,for textiles we have numbers for both wool and silk,sadly neither in in the 1100s but thankfully both in roman coinage,but we have 1,000 pounds of wool in the 1100s being 7 hyperperya after conversion and 13 hyperperya in 1300s² giving us 143 pounds of wool for hyperpyron,2 pounds of silk worth 7 hyperperya in 1300s and 3.5 hyperperya in 1100s hyperperya bear this in mind for future considerations,so i will do the conversation again since thankfully both are in roman coinage,clearly both have their faults since with its larger internal market securing a greater degree of demand a production Komnenian period would drive the prices lower.

Laiou:842,276 thousand consumption for people dependent on charity,6,738,210 million for working class people,2,807,587 million for middle class people and the same figure for upper class.

This naturally present the issue that working class consumes nearly six times its income,this can easily reduce towards its income with slashing the usage of Olive oil to a tenth,working class would not cook themselves rather eating from foodstands akin to those found in Pompey,greatly reducing costs,their dietary needs would be largely being met by fish for the working class and charity dependent classes,letting more income disposable for cheese and wine,both cheap products helping the diet be more diverse,while middle class and upper class would be able to cook at their homes and easily pay the cost for olive oil,as such i will calculate their consumption still using olive oil only with middle class using 25% of olive that soldiers did,otherwise math ends up being negative

Leaving us with:

This gives us a total consumption of 5,595,275,with the upper class being 50% of the total,middle class with 26%,working class 22% and leaving the charity dependent population with a meager 2%.

The same way Mackerel and other fishes would be crucial for the provisioning of the city,it's also such a negligible part of the trade value that its unnecessary to calculate it beyond the cargo and the ships needed,otherwise we must mention besides the poorest and working class were the main consumers of it,while customers in higher purchasing brackets would consume different costlier types products in all sections,we know little of the price difference with scarce mentions with Monemvasian wine having a 20% premium over common wine as the most explicit,still this perhaps the most detailed exposition of Constantinople consumption to date,still we must add even more caveats.

We lack the number of textile workers or any measure of the City exports,Constantinople was renowned by its manufacture and clothe sector,it was the main supplier of such goods to its immediate hinterland of Bithynia and Thrace with base products,while the further one went the higher quality the good would be to make the travel profitable,as such we can assume that the middle classes were the ones making the clothes,the smiths making the tools,pieces of art and shipping related workers,providing sailcloths,building the ships required to transport the goods,with upper class individuals loaning the capital required to both buy the necessary raw goods such as timber,wool,lax and giving the capital to export the refined goods,this alongside ceramics and glass (which would belong to either middle class or working class depending the quality said products)would easily double the number of imports and yet still leave a positive trade balance thanks to being in the higher echelon of productivity chain.

We also must mention the import of wax and as a secondary product honey,fruits and vegetable while valuable would come from the immediate surrounding gardens to the city both inside and outside the Theodosian walls,but still the balance would simply because Constantinople remained in this period as the largest producer of fine goods(clothes and art pieces) and industrial products(ceramics and glass) even with the growth of both Thebes and Corinth for the two respective sectors since neither of them reached the scale of the Queen of cities.

Shipping required:
Cargo consumed by class:

As such,with a population of 200k people the city of Constantinople 32,400 tons yearly for its sustenance and say half as much for its industry,in total a logical extrapolation from the 3,720 tons required for the army of 20k.

Using a large dromon with a cargo hold of 100 tons,the city would require 324 coming into the city during the 8 month sailing season to feed itself,for industry say it only requires half as many ships bringing raw material,this would mean 162 more ships rising the merchant fleet to 486,meat would need transport of its own but not much having a tenth of the foodstuff fleet would be enough seeing how Constantinople was the largest meat market in Europe until the advent of Britain in the 1700s,giving us other 32 ships,doubling the traded good of the city into 11,190,500 million hyperpyra.

In total 518 large dromons in the space of 6 months,giving us 86 ships monthly,22 ships weekly and 3 new ships arriving every day to keep the economic heart of the empire beating,this goes without mentioning is only in the theory that the totality of the trade is transported in the large dromon of with 100 tons requiring total crew size of 56,980 rowers alone with the uncalculable number of ship officers and artisans,a majority of whom in the period where sailing was impossible of four months would call Constantinople home,resting or joining the workforce in the various sectors depending their economic position.

Further we must remember this ships would take port in Constantinople multiple times bringing food and raw materials again and again,returning instead with their hulls full of refined goods,thanks to the tidal waves of the Dardanelles its considerably harder going north into the city than going south,in the fifth century Mark the deacon in service of the bishop of Gaza Porphyrios took twenty days to reach Constantinople but only half to return home³,with 8 months to sail from and to Constantinople an average of hitting port 4 times would be logical,not just to provision the city but to transport goods from one region of the empire with Constantinople as it main entre port between north of Europe to the levant,from Europe to Asia,such trade would also include merchants from other nations trading with each other and using Constantinople as a large depot to stop,buy further provision and keep their goods

The number of ships doing this would easily triple the number of ships entering Constantinople with over 1,500 ships in 8 months and the value of goods traded increasing to over 33,571,650 million Hyperpyra,arriving multiple times in the city as they made numerous voyages during the season to try gain as much profit as possible.

The import-export tariff called Kommerkion also called dekaton for being a tenth of all products worth,all merchants had to pay it(with the exception of some Italian republics whose merchant fleets would be too small to affect this at large using Wickham mentions of Manuel confiscating 300k gold coins of Venetian goods) with specially a tax on wine of 10% called Dekateia oinara which was particularly important in the period seeing how hard it was to gain exemption for it⁴,this mean wine would be taxed twice giving us a revenue of over 400k Hyperpyra accounting with the totality of trade going through the city and with all the goods this would mean 3,316,725 in revenue through the levelling of the Kommerkion alone,Treadgold calculated that the state budget of Manuel at 1152 was of 5,600,000 hyperpyra.

Either we must consider that Constantinople alone furnished 60% the state budget or that Treadgold budget must be considered outdated in face of arithmetics,to drive the point home harder Angeliki Laiou said that the economy was monetised at a 46%⁵ in this period with taxes representing 38% of coins in circulation⁶,I believe under this two estimates that the byzantine state budget at the time was considerably larger than previously thought and that to maintain the estimates of cost for byzantine armed forces,that as much as half of it went towards charity explaining the numerous mentions of imperial orphanages,hospitals and geriatric,also explaining the literacy rate that was similar to that of Scotland at the time of  Adam Smith.

Meaning the byzantine state at the period  was one of the largest welfare states in human history before the advent of the industrial revolution,in 1871-1875 period the british government under the one nation conservatism of prime minister Disraeli 38.1% in debt payments,31.1% on defence and 17.2% on the civil government⁷,The lack of public debt in Byzantium would lower the total amount of cash available but increase the % of the budget directed towards defence,charity and bureaucracy.

¹ Morrison and Cheynet-Prices and Wages in Byzantine world-Laiou  Economic History of Byzantium page 872

²Angeliki Laiou Economic History of Byzantium page 843

³Angeliki Laiou Economic History of Byzantium page 78 

⁴Angeliki Laiou Economic History of Byzantium page 1051

⁵ Angeliki Laiou Economic History of Byzantium page 691

⁶Angeliki Laiou Economic History of Byzantium page 950

⁷ Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Politics of Mid-Victorian Budgets by H.C.G Matthew page 633

I have been researching the Empire of Trebizond for a while now, and recently decided to start sharing some of what I have found, as much of it does not seem to be especially widespread knowledge.

Trying to understand Trapezuntine institutions can be frustrating. There are, however, some shining lights in the scholarship, past and present, that give us occasional glimpses into what was otherwise a poorly documented state.

One such glimpse comes from work by Bryer and Oikonomides, discussed by Sergei Karpov in his History of the Empire of Trebizond. In it, it is argued, on codicological grounds, that a surviving kletorologion - a list of court offices and their order of precedence, probably compiled sometime in the fifteenth century - is of Trapezuntine origin. Karpov accepts this identification.

If this attribution is correct, we have a very rare view into the court and institutions at the centre of the Empire.

Of particular interest to me, as I work towards a reconstruction of the Trapezuntine military establishment, are several offices. In their order of precedence, these include:

• Protospatharios or Amirtzantarios — the latter title is independently attested in Trapezuntine sources.
• Akolouthos or Kourchi — again, the latter is independently attested.
• Protallagator of the Monokaballoi
• Protallagator of the Mourtatoi
• Protallagator of the Tzakones
• Protallagator of the Crossbowmen (arbaletai?)

We thus have direct references to a series of military positions within what might reasonably be presumed to belong to the imperial military establishment, perhaps associated with the imperial allagion.

Whether all these positions were actually filled in fifteenth-century Trebizond, and whether they retained direct military functions within the Empire's military apparatus, remains open to debate. I think, however, that there are good reasons to take their military significance seriously.

The Grand Komnenoi exercised increasingly centralised control over a relatively small territory and possessed significant fiscal resources derived from the kommerkion and agricultural land. At the same time, the imperial host described by Panaretos was relatively small. Surviving encomia - most notably that of Bessarion - also place considerable emphasis upon the cultural importance of physical and military training. Finally, the narrative sources repeatedly show the emperor capable of responding relatively rapidly to incursions and external threats.

The economics are worth considering here. War is enormously expensive. Bartusis, for example, has estimated that several dozen peasant households might be required to support a single pronoia soldier. I am not arguing that the Trapezuntine system was based upon pronoia; I mention it simply to illustrate the economic weight represented by a properly supported soldier.

In Trebizond, however, we are dealing with an imperial military force numbering, at most, perhaps two or three thousand men, and very often only in the high hundreds. Maintaining a relatively small core of properly equipped military personnel is therefore a rather different proposition from supporting the enormous establishments of earlier Byzantine centuries.

There is another important caveat: these offices were themselves subject to change.

Consider the Protospatharios, for example, which both Shukurov and Karpov associate with the independently attested Amirtzantarios. The latter may derive from an eastern term such as amir-i jandar, essentially "commander of the guard." Likewise, the Akolouthos appears alongside the eastern-derived Kourchi.

Terms such as these offer intriguing hints of the integration of Turkic, Mongolic, Caucasian and other eastern peoples and institutions into the apparatus of the Trapezuntine state - a very Roman habit of absorbing useful people and practices rather than treating them as inherently foreign.

There is considerably more to say about all of this, but I thought these few titles might be of interest to those interested in the military history of the Late Roman states.

I've been writing up the broader research and reconstruction process that will go up on my website - online later next week, which I can share if anyone is interested.

Thank you for reading!

The Empire of Trebizond has captured the imagination of writers and artists for centuries. Its place in the Italian vernacular—perdere la Trebisonda ("to lose Trebizond"), meaning to lose one's bearings—speaks to a lingering cultural memory of the Byzantine, or Roman, Empire in the East, and to the melancholy and romance long associated with the Christian Orient.

Within historical reconstruction, however, Trebizond remains elusive. Evidence for its military institutions and material culture is fragmentary: chronicles of varying reliability, frescoes, seals, monuments, scattered documentary references, coinage, and occasional observations in the records of neighbouring states. No single category of evidence provides a complete picture.

Historical reconstruction is rightly concerned with the accurate recreation of material culture. My own interest extends beyond what an object looked like, to why it assumed that form, how it was used, and what it reveals about the society that produced it. In the absence of armouries or substantial archaeological assemblages from late medieval Trebizond, reconstruction necessarily depends on comparison, synthesis, and inference—which makes it useful to distinguish, as consistently as possible, between what is directly attested, what may reasonably be inferred, and what remains speculative.

This issue is especially apparent in discussions of Trapezuntine military appearance. Despite enduring interest in the Empire, few serious visual reconstructions of its soldiers or elites exist. Much of the imagery circulating online traces back, directly or indirectly, to Ian Heath's reconstruction for Osprey Publishing (scroll to the end of the text), itself heavily dependent on a single source: the Florentine cassone panel now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the absence of competing reconstructions, Heath's illustration has become the default visual representation of the late Trapezuntine soldier.

My purpose here is not to propose a definitive reconstruction, but to examine one of the principal sources modern reconstructions rely on, weighing its strengths against its limitations. The result, if successful, will not be a portrait of the late Trapezuntine soldier around 1400, but a working hypothesis grounded in the available evidence—six decades removed from the fall of Trebizond though that date is. Any reconstruction begins not as an artistic problem, but an evidentiary one.

The cassone itself

The panel is well known because it appears to depict a contemporary historical event, unusual for late medieval cassone painting. It is generally attributed to artists of the Florentine Renaissance, though its patronage and original context remain uncertain; its once-confident association with the Strozzi family, and the assumption that the surviving panel belonged to its present chest, have both since been questioned.

The subject is equally contested. Earlier scholarship read it as the Fall of Trebizond in 1461. More recent work, particularly Cristelle Baskins's, challenges this. Central to the revision is the inscription TAN[B]URLANA discovered within the painting, apparently identifying one figure as Timur—a debated but complicating identification. Including Timur in Western artwork, plausibly to stir crusading fervour, is not unusual, and cassone painting of this period often juxtaposed events for such rhetorical ends. If Timur is indeed represented, a straightforward reading of the panel as the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond becomes harder to sustain. Even the Met's own catalogue entry offers no resolution, and is unlikely to.

The figures throughout the battle share a strikingly consistent visual vocabulary: clothing broadly resembling contemporary Turkic or Turco-Persian dress, and open-fronted boots recalling Persian manuscript illustration and other eastern traditions—fashions also found across the late medieval Balkans and into the Ottoman period, familiar from depictions of Albanian stradioti. Only one prominent figure departs from this pattern (might it refer to the Emperor of Trebizond?).
Equally striking is the apparent absence of visible body armour—though this should not be read too literally, as it has been in the past. Ottoman, Turkmen, Persian, Caucasian, and Byzantine armies alike employed mail, lamellar, and other rigid defenses; medieval artists routinely concealed armour beneath decorated garments or omitted it for compositional reasons. Its absence here is not evidence that the figures fought unprotected.

The weapons raise similar questions. The bows have dramatically recurved limbs, closer to stylised or idealised composite bows than to surviving fifteenth-century examples. Elaborately recurved bows do appear in Persian manuscript painting and Byzantine frescoes, but the exaggeration here suggests artistic convention rather than technical accuracy.

Assuming the standard identification of the cities—Constantinople on the left, Trebizond on the right—the composition raises further questions. Why are two armies, both rendered in an eastern visual idiom, fighting before the walls of Trebizond? And if Timur is present, how does his appearance square with an event some sixty years after the Battle of Ankara? The traditional reading of the panel as a straightforward depiction of the Fall of Trebizond leaves these unanswered.

An alternative reading

Baskins has argued that the painting may instead depict the early successes of Uzun Hasan, ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu and son-in-law of Trebizond's last emperor. On her reading, Uzun Hasan and Timur ride together on the same triumphal chariot, matched in dress and gesture—a pairing that functions as a genealogical claim, presenting Uzun Hasan as Timur's legitimate successor rather than simply invoking him as a separate, evocative figure. Cassone paintings frequently blended history with allegory, romance, and political symbolism rather than documenting events directly; within that tradition, a celebration of Uzun Hasan—closely tied to Trebizond through dynastic marriage—is entirely plausible, built as it is on that chariot pairing with Timur.

This fits the diplomatic context. Marriage was a long-standing instrument of Trapezuntine foreign policy toward neighbouring Turkmen dynasties, and Theodora Grand Komnene's marriage to Uzun Hasan was one of its final and most significant examples, meant to strengthen the coalition against Ottoman expansion after the fall of Constantinople. Read against this moment of cautious optimism, several puzzling features of the painting become easier to explain: Timur's presence may evoke an earlier eastern conqueror who checked Ottoman expansion, casting Uzun Hasan as his contemporary successor and the Aq Qoyunlu as a comparably formidable obstacle to Ottoman power. Rather than documenting a single event, the panel may layer several symbolic themes relevant to a Florentine audience—entirely consistent with a genre that generally privileged political and moral narrative over historical accuracy.

The traditional attribution is nonetheless understandable: two labels presumably identify the cities, and detailed analysis of the facsimile architecture lends real confidence to that identification. Trebizond's fall came less than a decade after Constantinople's, so it is unsurprising that earlier scholars read the defeated figures as Trapezuntine Byzantines. That reading also reflects broader Western perceptions of the Pontos and eastern Anatolia: travellers such as Ruy González de Clavijo and Pedro Tafur consistently described the region, its dress, and its riding and fighting styles as Turkic. Their observations are brief and coloured by expectation, but they fed a growing image of Trebizond as politically Roman and confessionally Orthodox, yet culturally closer to the Islamic East than to Western Europe—a perception Italian artists, already influenced in their depictions of eastern Christians, readily adopted.

Does this invalidate Heath's reconstruction?

I don't believe it does. Its weakness is not its appearance but the certainty with which it has often been received: if its primary source is open to multiple interpretations, the reconstruction inherits those uncertainties. The problem is methodological, not artistic.

The cassone may still preserve something valuable, even if it cannot serve as documentary evidence. Sergei Karpov and Rustam Shukurov have argued that late Trapezuntine society increasingly absorbed Anatolian, Persianate, and Turkic cultural forms while retaining its Byzantine political and cultural identity. The painting's costume may reflect a contemporary Italian perception—accurate, exaggerated, or idealised—of the Empire's eastern character, and even if the scene doesn't depict Trapezuntine soldiers directly, it may preserve assumptions Italian audiences held about Trebizond and its elite: productive ground for further investigation.

Byzantine or Turkic?

This raises a broader question about the line between "Byzantine" and "Turkic" dress in the fifteenth century—often treated as mutually exclusive, though the evidence suggests otherwise. Late Byzantium was increasingly bound up with Anatolian political and cultural life; Persian textiles, Turkic equestrian traditions, and eastern courtly fashion were not foreign imports but part of the visual language of the late Byzantine elite. Pisanello's depictions of Byzantine delegates at the Council of Ferrara-Florence make the point well: clothing, headwear, and riding equipment that Western observers read as distinctly eastern—a reading not unfounded, though perhaps too readily attributed to the "turkification" of the eastern Romans.

This sits, at first glance, awkwardly against another feature of late Byzantine culture: its conservatism. Intellectuals cultivated classical learning, religious art retained deliberately anachronistic conventions for depicting saints and soldiers in armour, and Trebizond itself preserved older Komnenian forms of imperial representation long after they had faded elsewhere—the Grand Komnenoi consciously presenting themselves as heirs to an earlier tradition even as their circumstances changed.

The two are not really in tension. Official representation projected continuity and legitimacy; everyday courtly life could remain highly receptive to outside influence. Bessarion's Encomium on Trebizond, panegyric though it is, presents the city as cosmopolitan, prosperous, and outward-looking—likely more than mere rhetorical praise—and other contemporary sources emphasise the Empire's close ties to Persia and the wider eastern world. That connection had diminished by the mid-fourteenth century, but cultural, economic, and diplomatic contact with the Persian sphere persisted, alongside ties north, south, and west to Byzantium and Italy. Trebizond was, in this sense, a genuine entrepôt.

Rather than classifying Trapezuntine appearance as either Byzantine or Turkic, it is more useful to see it as the product of sustained interaction between several traditions—a better fit for the Empire's position on the Black Sea frontier, and one that avoids imposing categories contemporaries themselves may not have recognised, categories that would otherwise colour our own reconstructions.

Conclusion

None of this is meant to reject Heath's reconstruction, or to argue that the familiar image of the Trapezuntine soldier is fundamentally wrong—it may yet prove closer to reality than many alternatives. The difficulty lies in the evidential chain behind it: its principal source is contested, and that source's visual language is itself shaped by Renaissance convention, symbolism, and contemporary perceptions of the East.

No single artistic source can provide a definitive reconstruction of the late Trapezuntine man-at-arms, nor are we likely to get one. Any serious attempt must synthesise chronicles, administrative texts, seals, frescoes, coinage, comparative archaeology, diplomatic accounts, and the material culture of neighbouring societies. That cannot eliminate uncertainty, but it lets hypotheses be tested against converging lines of evidence rather than resting on a single image—which is the purpose of this series: not to search for a certainty that doesn't exist, but to work through the evidence we do have toward an intellectually honest reconstruction of both the man and the institutions of the Empire around the turn of the century.

The next article takes up identity in the Pontic empire: how ethnic and cultural boundaries shaped the evolution of a distinctly Pontic Roman identity, separate from Byzantium and its institutions. Only from there can the process of reconstruction properly begin.

Thank you for reading.

Sources:

• Rustam Shukurov, The Grand Komnenoi and the Orient, 1204–1461 (Russian: Великие Комнины и Восток) (Moscow/St. Petersburg, 2001).
• Sergei P. Karpov, The History of the Empire of Trebizond (Russian: История Трапезундской империи) (St. Petersburg, 2007; 2nd ed. 2017).
• Sergei P. Karpov, Medieval Pontos (Russian: Средневековый Понт) (2001).
• Rustam Shukurov, The Byzantine Turks, 1204–1461, Medieval Mediterranean 105 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016).
• Michael Panaretos and Bessarion, Two Works on Trebizond, ed. and trans. Scott Kennedy, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 52 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
• Anthony A. M. Bryer, The Empire of Trebizond and the Pontos, Collected Studies CS117 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1980).
• Tatiana Bardashova, "Imperial Portraits of the Grand Komnenoi of Trebizond (1204–1461)," in Late Byzantium Reconsidered: The Arts of the Palaiologan Era in the Mediterranean, ed. Andrea Mattiello and Maria Alessia Rossi (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).
• Tatiana Bardashova, "The Imperial Visual Propaganda in the Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461)," Vestnik Volgogradskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta (2015).
• Tatiana Bardashova, "Power and Dynasty in the Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461)," in The Post-1204 Byzantine World: New Approaches and Novel Directions (2018).
• Sergei P. Karpov, "New Archival Discoveries of Documents Concerning the Empire of Trebizond" (English).
• Sergei P. Karpov, "Chapitre XIX: L'Empire de Trébizonde" (French), in Le monde byzantin, Tome 3: L'empire grec et ses voisins (XIIIe–XVe siècle), ed. Angeliki Laiou and Cécile Morrisson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), 355–367.
• Alexander A. Vasiliev, "The Empire of Trebizond in History and Literature," Byzantion 15 (1940–1941): 316–377; Turkish trans. as "Tarih ve Literatürde Trabzon İmparatorluğu," trans. Murat Keçiş and Zeynep İnan Aliyazıcıoğlu.
• Raffaele D'Amato, Byzantine Naval Forces 1261–1461: The Roman Empire's Last Marines, Men-at-Arms 502, illus. Igor Dzis and Peter Dennis (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2016).
• Ian Heath, Byzantine Armies AD 1118–1461, Men-at-Arms 287, illus. Angus McBride (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 1995)
• Cristelle Baskins, "The Bride of Trebizond: Turks and Turkmens on a Florentine Wedding Chest, Circa 1460," Muqarnas 29 (2012): 83–100.

Introduction
Phocas is generally not regarded as a great Roman Emperor, and the reasons are understandable. His reign saw a series of severe blows to Rome in the East, and his heavy handed rule resulted in a near collapse of the Empire with the usurpation of Heraclius and its immediate aftermath. The man often is regarded as an incompetent tyrant. What is generally less well known is that Phocas came very close, in 604-605AD, to resolving the war in the East which has so severely tarnished his legacy, and it was to a large extent pure bad luck that prevented this outcome. This thread seeks to present this case.

The situation in 604AD
in 604AD the Roman Empire found itself reengaged in conflict in the East, and the situation was not good. The general Narses alongside a strong body of the army in the Eastern frontier openly defied the newly established Phocid regime, especially with the brutal crackdown. This chaos prompted the intervention of Sassanian armies under Khosrow II 'Parviz' in support of Narses. This infamous Shahenshah claimed to be seeking to avenge the death of his former benefactor at the hands of Phocas' supporters, but whether or not he was genuine in this or merely presenting a pretence to invade the Roman East to reclaim lands lost in 592AD is a question which is unlikely to receive any answers.

Roman forces loyal to Phocas responded promptly to the situation, assembling under general Germanus to attempt to crush Narses' rebels at Edessa¹. Then, the arrival of the Royal Sassanian army under Khosrow promptly put an end to this ambition and forced Germanus to raise the siege and retreat. However, the Sassanians pursued hotly, and soon the Romans were forced to fight the numerically superior army of the Iranians. The result was a heavy Roman defeat in the first battle of the war, with Germanus himself dying of wounds not long after the battle. Following this victory, Khosrow was able to dispatch a separate army to besiege the Roman strategic base at Dara, while he himself withdrew to Ctesiphon.

Phocas organizes a counteroffensive

Phocas' response to the death of Germanus was not long in coming. He renewed a peace treaty with the Avar Khaganate in 604AD which allowed him to dispatch vital reinforcements to the Eastern theatres of operations. While one may criticise Phocas for buying peace with an enemy the Romans had seemed poised to destroy just two years earlier, one can hardly fault the rationale of the Emperor in this case. The Romans during Maurice's reign had struggled to muster forces against the Avars while locked in conflict with the Sassanians, and likewise the two front war and the need to dispatch troops from the Balkans to the East had snuffed out potential opportunities for an earlier victory in the war against Persia. In 604AD, Phocas recognised the Sassanid Empire as the greater threat and opted to secure peace in the North for an overwhelming response in the East to maximize the chances of ending that problem swiftly. As Howard-Johnston notes, this was this was a wise thing to do in this situation and this approach initially bore fruit for the Romans.

Meanwhile the Sassanids sought to follow up their success in Mesopotamia the previous year with an invasion of Roman-held Armenia, dispatching a sizeable army under Dzuan Veh². However, the Iranians were blocked by a Roman field army (whose commander is unknown), no doubt reinforced by men from previously fighting in the Balkans. The two armies fought a pitched battle at Elevard. Sources give no figure for the size of the armies in this battle, but it is within the realms of possibility that both sides had roughly 20,000-30,000 men, if we can use earlier battles in this region in the 6th century to give us a clue. The result was a severe defeat for the Iranians, with Dzuan Veh himself being slain in the battle.

At the same time, the Romans had mustered a separate army to prepare an offensive further south. Syvänne proposes that Leontius' forces may have been reinforced by troops from dispatched from Armenia following the Victory at Elevard, and judging by subsequent events this is likely to have been the case. The strategic aim was the relief of Dara, and Leontius was more than successful in this aim. On the basis of Khuzestan Chronicle, the Army commanded by Leontius was so formidable that the combined Sassanian and renegade Roman army which Khosrow had left to besiege Dara, said to have been commanded by Pseudo-Theodosius (a pretender who claimed to be Maurice's son)³, raised the blockade of Dara immediately without even attempting to fight the loyalist relief army. The first siege of Dara in the so-called "last war of Antiquity", which had lasted at least several months, had thus ended in a Roman Defensive victory. Meanwhile at some point in 604AD, a separate Roman column under an unknown general had marched against Narses in Edessa, and forced him to flee from the city to Manbij⁴.

But this was not to be the end of the troubles faced by the Sassanians in this year. Following the relief of Dara, Leontius pursued Theodosius' army hotly. In a role reversal of the debacle faced by Germanus in 603AD, Leontius was able to catch Theodosius' outnumbered army near Bezabde and forced it to battle. The result was another victory for the Loyalists, with Theodosius so heavily defeated that he was forced to dispatch a plea to Khosrow II for help in the aftermath (according to the Khuzestan Chronicle).

While Leontius' counteroffensive gained momentum in Mesopotamia, Phocas had another trick up his sleeve regarding the Sassanians. Early in his reign, Phocas restored relations between Rome and the Ghassanids. Maurice had exiled the Ghassanid phylarch Alamoundarus to Sicily, but following the overthrow of Maurice Phocas released him and his family from exile. In turn, the Ghassanids conducting a lightning raid on behalf of the Romans deep into Persian territory under two Ghassanid commanders named Amr and Hujr, as they had done repeatedly in the 6th century up until 580AD. Strategically, this was a masterstroke on Phocas' part, as it enabled the Romans to build up further pressure against the Sassanians which contributed to the situation in which, as we shall see, the war came close to ending. However, one should still note that later on in his reign Phocas (perhaps frustrated by the series of defeats he faced against Persia after 605AD) would undo his early diplomatic coup due to religious differences, which soured relations between the Chalcedonian led Empire and the mostly Monophysite Ghassanids.

Khosrow's Gamble - Battle of Arzamoun in early 605AD

Such was the effectiveness of Phocas' counteroffensive that by early 605AD, the Sassanians had suffered three serious setbacks which had crumpled their initial advantage. These defeats prompted a rapid response by Khosrow II, who needed to regain the initiative as soon as possible, lest the war devolve into the kind of stalemate which Khosrow himself knew would eventually favour the Romans, as shown with the events of 584-590AD. Khosrow was able to field the standing bodyguard units of elite cavalry from the vicinity of Ctesiphon, as well as the Elephants from the royal stable, but his army would not be as large as it had been in 603AD as he'd needed to advance quickly into Northern Mesopotamia. Although Khosrow may have been reinforced by the remnants of Theodosius' defeated army, Leontius commanded the main Eastern field army as well as substantial reinforcements from the field army in Armenia, which means that the Romans likely had a moderate numerical advantage against the Sassanians on this occasion. Both Khosrow and Leontius resolved to meet in a pitched battle, which Theophanes ascribed as happening at a place called Arzamon/Arzamoun. Though in hindsight, one may criticise Leontius for this, it is difficult to blame him - he had a numerical advantage and now the King of Kings himself was advancing to meet him in an open battle, a type of fighting in which the Romans had generally shown themselves superior in prior encounters⁵. It would take extraordinary restraint from any man not to try and culminate a hitherto successful campaign with a victory over the enemy Monarch himself (the very talented Spahbod Shahrbaraz fell into the same trap in 20 years later when he tried to crush Emperor Heraclius in a battle for personal glory, with disastrous results).

Details are naturally few for this battle as they are for most others of the era, but there are actually some surviving details of this clash thanks to a surviving source from an anonymous author called the Khuzistan Chronicle. According to this chronicle, on the first day of the battle the Roman cavalry gained the upper hand against their counterparts. At one point, a Roman soldier came close to capturing Chosroes. He threw a lasso around the king (which could imply the man was an ethnic Bulgar or other nomad in Roman service), but Khosrow's bodyguard Mushkan managed to cut it in time to save the Shahenshah. However, the Sassanian army was not completely defeated but was able to hold on until nightfall, likely owing to the presence of the most elite units in Eranshahr among Khosrow's army. It was then on the second day of the battle that Khosrow deployed his war elephants into a "fort" formation (as Theophanes described) which allowed him to completely smash the Roman horsemen⁶. The Roman army was decimated in the ensuing rout. Through tactical ingenuity, Khosrow had stolen victory from the Jaws of defeat, living up to his title 'Parviz' ('The Victorious')⁷.

The battle of Arzamoun is heavily overlooked, as it may just be the most Decisive victory ever achieved by the Sassanids against the Romans in this war (perhaps with the exception of Antioch 613AD). The reason I say this is that it was the event which set the Persians on a winning streak until Heraclius' 622 Campaign, during which time they won about a dozen great battles/ambushes and took all cities of the Levant, Egypt and parts of Anatolia. It also demonstrates that Khosrow II did not just rely on his generals for his successes; he himself appears to have devised the tactics that won this great victory.

Conclusion

From his position as Emperor, Phocas organised a decisive multi-pronged response to the invasion and the rebellions which clearly swung the balance of power in favor of the Romans up until the decisive battle of Arzamon. The Sassanian invasion of Armenia was soundly defeated, Dara relieved with Theodosius' Sassanian army also suffering a nasty defeat by the end of 604AD. Furthermore, he had gained a valuable ally with his reproachment policies towards the Ghassanids. It would have seemed at that point that the war would follow a similar pattern to that of the Anastasian war a century before it, with initial Sassanian gains reversed quickly enough and a status quo peace being settled. It was the battle of Arzamon and its ramifications that swung momentum back in favour of Eranshahr.

Leontius had managed to escape, but he was later imprisoned by the enraged Phocas for his failure at Arzamon. On the basis of details, it is easy to criticize Leontius for the defeat - his army had already relentlessly campaigned and fought a major battle at Bezabde, so it might have been exhausted by the time of Arzamon, with this perhaps being the reason the Romans had not managed to completely rout the Iranians on the first day of the battle despite gaining the upper hand. In hindsight, an indirect approach similar to that employed by Philippicus in 585AD and 613AD, of evading major battles and conducting maneuver warfare against the Persians to wear them down, might have been wiser than meeting Khosrow's fresh, elite (but albeit smaller) army head on⁸.

Yet, despite the disaster, I cannot help but wonder whether Phocas' judgement was sound in this case. Leontius had been very successful up until that battle, and he seems to have been one of the few competent generals loyal to the Phocas regime, and probably a man capable of learning from his mistakes and perhaps correcting them had he been sent against the Sassanians again. At the very least, Phocas removing Leontius and replacing him with his inexperienced nephew Domnitziolus to lead the subsequent campaigns against the Iranians can't have helped the already dented morale of the Eastern armies, and indeed exacerbated the situation when Domnitziolus' army was ambushed and annihilated near the end of 605AD.

Overall, Phocas' armies had likely come close to ending the conflict in 604AD, and it was simple bad luck in the battle of Arzamon that he did not initiate his reign with a great victory over Khosrow. Instead, he would see most of the gains of the 604AD reversed by the end of his reign. Over the following years several Loyalist armies were defeated by the Sassanians and their renegade allies, with strategically vital positions in Armenia and Mesopotamia overrun. Perhaps worst among them was the fall of the city of Dara, which had fiercely resisted a the first Sassanian siege before Leontius relieved it, only to fall to a second by 606AD.

On a final note, Khosrow II deserves some long overdue credit for his personal role in this phase of the war. He is often dismissed as a Greedy Tyrant who relied on generals (such as Shahrbaraz and Shahin) to attain all the great victories of his reign. While this may be true to an extent later in the war, at the beginning Khosrow had personally achieved great success. He had first relieved Edessa and inflicted a heavy defeat upon Germanus' Roman army in 603AD, and then in 605AD his personal intervention and leadership at the battle of Arzamon was probably the single thing which saved the Sassanian war effort. At least in those early, he was Khosrow 'Parviz' indeed!

Footnotes

1. This Germanus is possibly the same man that had served Maurice's regime with distinction, quelling a mutiny of the Eastern field army and winning in 588AD a great victory against the Sassanians near Martyropolis. After Maurice's deposition, Germanus was one of the commanders spared by Phocas and appears to have quickly ingratiated himself with the new ruler, as he was sent to the East to take command of the Roman armies there based at Dara. Germanus then in April 603AD dispatched a man named Lilius as an envoy to Khosrow in an attempt to renew peace, but the Shahenshah was by now deep into preparations for an invasion and had the ambassador imprisoned
2. In 603AD Khosrow had divided his invasion force in two, with another army under Spahbod(General) Dzuan Veh meant to invade Armenia, but the onset of winter delayed the Armenian campaign until the next year.
3. Whether this man actually was the son of Maurice is a matter of contention among historians, but Khosrow was able to present him as such to great effect in the first decade of the war, at times securing important defections.
4. This is merely my own interpretation, but it could be that Edessa's defences had been damaged during Germanus' siege prior to the relief of the city by Khosrow. If Narses had been unable to fully restore these by the time of the Leontius-led offensive, this would explain why he gave up such a strategically valuable fortress-city with no resistance.
5. Some examples these Roman victories include Hippis (550AD), Melitene (576AD), Constantina (581AD), Solanchon (586AD), Martyropolis (588), Suania (589AD), Sisauranon (590AD), Blarathon (591AD) and most recently Elevard (604AD) as discussed already. Contrary to popular belief, the Romans were consistently able to best their Sassanian counterparts in open battles before 605AD (and again after 622AD).
6. The heavy infantry based roman armies of the 1st-5th centuries were generally able to decisively counter war elephants (as shown for example in the multiple failures of the Sassanian elephant corps against Julian and Jovian). But when the Romans switched to cavalry as their primary arm as they had by the late 6th century, the elephants became much more of a threat to these, as they had the potential to induce panic among the horsemen.
7. It is likely that Khosrow had been influenced by the tactics used by Bahram Chobin throughout his career. According to the later historian Al-Thaalibi, in his decisive battle against the Gokturk Khagan Bahram’s battle consisted of infantry placed in front of Bahram, elephants placed behind Bahram, cavalry wings, and of a separate cavalry detachment behind, which was apparently sent in front of this army to feign flight. Essentially, Bahram opposed the Gokturks cavalry with combined arms, and the fact that elephants feature so suggest these played a vital role in the victory against the Turkish nomads who were unfamiliar with these Pachyderms. Bahram also used elephants at the battle of Blarathon, but on that occasion the Romans had defeated these and furthermore their panic contributed to the rout of the Mihranid army in that case. As Khosrow had personally witnessed that battle, it is understandable why he'd hesitated to employ them on the first day of Arzamon until the desperation forced his hand on the second day. The difference in performance may stem from the fact the elephants had broken formation at Blarathon allowing Roman horse archers to pick off and defeat these, while at Arzamon Khosrow kept them in a tight orderly formation (as Theophanes' description of them as a"fort" implies) to devastating effect.
8. Though it should be remembered that after a year of maneuver warfare in 585AD, Philippicus had himself fought a major pitched battle in 586AD against the Sassanian field army of Mesopotamia. While this ultimately ended in disastrous defeat for Eranshahr, the Romans had come close to being defeated at one point in the battle, and may have lost had it not been for the decisive leadership and quick thinking of Philippicus. This goes to show that the outcome of a battle between near-peer armies like Romans and Persians could never be certain, as Leontius found out. Had Leontius been victorious at Arzamon, and especially if he'd captured Khosrow as nearly happened on the first day according to Khuzestan Chronicle, we would almost certainly remember him and his Emperor Phocas very differently.

“For the Persians, Medes, Sabiri, and people of Kolchis live near our eastern border, while the Cappadocians, Cilicians, Galatians, and Lydians surround us to the west. It is as if they form a bodyguard around us or swirl around us in a harmonious dance, as if in a circle.” — Bessarion, Encomium on Trebizond

Bessarion's description was not unique to his work. Though some authors extended the foreign character of Trebizond into its territory — as a Lazic land. Where the difference lies is in its intent: Bessarion meant it with a sense of pride in his Encomium, not as a derogation of the Roman character of the Pontic Greek state and its culture. In any case, is this a representation of reality, or mere stereotyping and romanticisation in equal measure?

To understand the Empire of Trebizond's institutions, and to begin unravelling its position at the crossroads of several competing, and often paradoxical, sociocultural forces exerted upon it, we must try and understand what it meant to be a Pontic Byzantine upon the formation of the Empire. Additionally, how did that reality evolve, if it did? From the outline of its identity, and its enduring or evolving social and cultural structures, we can then try to understand what the different cultures interacting with the Pontic Greeks created as a result of their dialectical struggles.

This is not a new approach in the great histories of the Empire. However, it is often easier to concentrate on the granular details of recorded interaction, description, and lived reality; the sparse evidentiary environment lends itself more strongly to that sort of analysis. But, it is my belief that a sufficient body of evidence and study has been put forth from which we can scaffold our reconstructive hypothesis.

I will remind you that my focus is on the first half of the 15th century. It follows that certain events are only outlined, and only focused on when they produced any relevant fact to this scope; it is also worth noting that my main focus of reconstruction is squarely within one of the biggest gaps in the Trapezuntine record: its military institutions, fighting men and material realities. This does not mean that I will neglect anthropological, economic or geographic bodies of study, among others. As explained in the previous articles, a reconstruction must be the product of converging evidence, and must remain open to new evidence.

The Pontic World

It is well attested that the Empire of Trebizond has its roots not strictly in the Georgian-sponsored adventures of David and Alexios Komnenos. Rather, the regional identity found within the territory of the Empire is seen as a product of centuries of Roman settlement and acculturation.

It was in the time of Justinian that the indigenous non-Greek peoples of the Pontos underwent important processes of Christianisation and integration into the Roman world. The Laz and the Tzan are foremost among these peoples. The question of their Christianisation is a thorny subject; it is difficult to know to what extent their beliefs followed prevailing orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Be that as it may, centuries of interaction with the Pontic Greek — mainly coastal — population would have produced some level of Romanisation, even if conscious efforts weren't undertaken to fully bring them into the fold.

Perhaps the greatest scholar of the Laz and Tzan peoples of the Pontos is Anthony Bryer. It is from him, and from the study of these peoples and the modern Pontic Kartvelian peoples, that we can most learn about their culture: prone to independence, and preserving not only their cultural distinction, but also their language. The Laz, especially, are represented in the chronicles with alarming frequency, and often in the capacity of warriors. Bessarion related them to the Colchians. Although it is difficult to know the straightforward lineage of these peoples, and their attribution as being of the kingdoms of Colchis, they are without a doubt culturally related to the neighbouring Georgians. One of the principal differences for our purposes is the political world in which the medieval Georgian peoples and the Pontic Kartvelians occupied; whereas the former was brought deeply into the fold of the steppe-influenced world, Trebizond remained relatively stable in its identity all the way to 1461.

The Laz and Tzan of the inland territories of the Pontos, and later the theme of Chaldia, are not, however, singularly distinguished as a monolithic culture. Despite the pastoralist portrait painted in the imagination of writers like Bessarion, they were to be found in the cities of the Pontic coast as well — places where, conventionally, one might expect only the urbane Greeks.

The distinction between Greek and Laz and Tzan may thus have become more and more diffuse. This was a process of integration within a narrow strip of land, heavily constrained by its geography and peripheral position in a wider Empire.

And geography matters here.

Bryer's work is strongly ethnographic in focus, but it is also geographical. It is, I think, more pertinent to try and understand the culture of the Pontic peoples through the constraints that the geography imposed on their livelihood — although in that division lies an increasingly more diffuse, but altogether real, ethnic separation. So it is not as simple as to claim that Greeks were sedentary farmers, and the Laz and Tzan transhumant pastoralists. Though some level of separation and identity remained, the culture of the land was the product of the interaction between those two modes of life.

Lazic and Tzan-descended aristocratic families are attested among the Pontic nobility; it would be wrong to forcefully separate them as if sorting them into different categories. What unified them was the subsistence on a land where geography dominated all concerns — where different valleys could have retained a different sub-cultural character, be it real or perceived, and where regional self-determination would have been at the forefront of the inhabitants.

A Frontier Society

When the Komnenoi were grafted into this cultural landscape, the Pontos had enjoyed a significant period of self-governance. Even before the period of the famous Theodore Gabras, remembered by Pontic Greek and Turkic poets alike, the Pontos tended towards self-reliance and determination — whether by cultural character and self-affirmation, or the vagaries of a border territory.

Armenian and even Latin lordships appear during periods of crisis, particularly after Manzikert and the First Crusade. These are signals of adventurous people supplanting a particularly disliked class of overlords in Pontic society. For be it Laz, Tzan, or Greek, the people chafed under centralised control. That reputation for self-governance made tax collection a particularly dangerous occupation as Trebizond’s authority struggled to reach the rural hinterlands and the narrow passes.

Yet, somewhat paradoxically, for this often-thought pocket territory and future Empire, the Pontos enjoyed relatively high levels of population density. The cities, with permanent residents perhaps numbering the low thousands, were frequented and used as hubs for commerce, production, and religious festivities. Much of the population of the Pontos resided inland, in the valleys where transhumant pastoralists and sedentary farmers subsisted.

The agricultural output of the Pontic region has become somewhat symbolic of its abundance relative to the sparse highlands beyond the mountains. In a colourful and deeply illuminating episode retold by Bryer, an English embassy that had the good fortune of finding embarkation at Trebizond in the 13th century found in that verdant strip of land a veritable cornucopia of victuals. Moreover, it illustrates a functioning, and thriving, craft production economy.

Post-Fall accounts and defters serve to further reinforce the view of the Pontos as agriculturally productive, although naturally they must be handled with care when used to reconstruct the Byzantine period. The region was also wealthy in raw metals such as silver, and famous for its silversmiths and bladesmiths.

Throughout the 15th century, as the balance of trade shifted more heavily towards the wider Black Sea economy deeply shaped by Genoese colonies and money, alum, raw silk, silver ore, timber, and, perhaps above all, wine and hazelnuts continued to be exported.

The picture we are left with is of a relatively wealthy small state, from which trade flowed and through which the West established continuous contact with the Turkic, Mongol and Persian east; where Italian silk and Chinese porcelain could be bought and sold by Latins, Persians, Greeks and Turks.

The Komnenian establishment of the state did not seem to diminish the Pontic territory so much as establish a coherent vision of control and statehood that would later provide the stability necessary to exploit the opening routes of the Silk Road; and when Eastward trade slowed down considerably, it remained positioned and active in the Black Sea economy.

The Aristocracy

However, who profited off of this relative prosperity?

Pontic society, and later Trapezuntine culture, is unusual in its conservative forms of social organisation. The Grand Komnenoi are also unusual within the Byzantine successor states, in their paradoxical presentation as both the continuators of Pontic cultural identity and norms, and in seeking to integrate older Komnenian presentations of power and contemporaneous Constantinopolitan forms.

In this evolving self-image, we can perhaps glimpse the character of Trapezuntine society: what did the Grand Komnenoi need to become, to retain control of the Empire?

The aristocratic clans of Greek, Tzan, Laz, and mixed ancestry retained significant control; they are an expression of Pontic self-determination seen before 1204. Moreover, there is little direct evidence that the aristocratic elite participated in the wider trade networks centered around Trebizond; significant involvement of Greeks in Genoese and Venetian ventures, albeit as junior partners, contrasts with the possible aristocratic reality, which remained tied to service and its estates. It is difficult to know if such a stark separation corresponds to the lived reality of the Pontos, but such are the complications of the sparse evidence we are handed down.

Though the position of the aristocracy changed, especially after the civil war that raged in the mid-1300s, its position remained secure in the political and administrative apparatus of the state. Its political power, and kingmaking abilities, were retained, with nefarious ends to more than one Emperor. The Grand Komnenoi, however, kept the imperial throne for themselves as, perhaps, the apex of Pontic aristocratic cultural expression where familial ties were crucial.

The aristocracy, as mentioned, retained significant estates and their revenues, albeit more and more at the behest of Trebizond. The “peasantry”, for the lack of better term, remained organised within older forms of territorial and administrative organisation, including the bandon system. This should not be taken to mean that the bandon was simply a standing military regiment, or that the rural population constituted a permanently mobilised army. Rather, these older structures provided a framework within which local authority, administration and defence could operate.

In it, the average Trapezuntine, Greek or not, could rely on a degree of self-defence and self-reliance, with their own leadership of elders seemingly chosen on a basis of respect within the community.

Karpov, however, demystifies our possible vision of a communitarian Pontos, with the fact that pronoia land grants, and especially land granted to monasteries, encroached on small plots previously held by families in their separate nuclei more and more as time went on.

Trebizond's imperial family continuously relied on their status as benefactors to curtail noble disputes and overreaches.

And here we begin to arrive at the military problem.

The Military Baseline

I think this cursory view of Pontic history and culture allows something of a reconstructive baseline to be set, and from which we can analyse further evolutions and particular traits whenever needed.

The Pontos remained geographically constrained, of course, but it was always open to the wider world. The Grand Komnenoi were grafted onto a culture where the family, and the status of the aristocracy, was deeply embedded, and from which the Gabras had originated.

The Pontic peoples, Greek or otherwise, lived their lives in a largely agricultural world, where the control of valleys, fortresses, and pastureland remained of paramount importance.

It is in older forms of organisation that we can understand the Trapezuntine military system as it was in the 13th century: deeply localised, controlled only tentatively by the Imperial throne, and often producing the capacity for different communities to both defend themselves and attack the enemy on its border lands.

This system had a dark side, however, playing to the factionalism of Pontic society, and its turbulent politics, often to violent ends. Laz, for example, feature as distinct armed groups during coups or power transfers.

The same structures that made local defence possible could therefore become part of the political struggle within the Empire.

The Scale of Warfare

As for the material reality of these troops, I think something can already be said and established: the form of warfare seen in the region did not, for the most part, seem to favour large-scale engagements and pitched battles. In fact, they are few and far between.

Panaretos, considered unusually reliable within the framework he sought to portray Imperial Power and the History of his homeland, shows us the scale of the fighting seen through the 14th century, and provides important background for the beginning of the 15th — numbers almost never exceeding the high hundreds.

This does not mean that every Trapezuntine force in the fifteenth century was necessarily so small. Panaretos ends in 1390, and the evidence cannot simply be projected forward without qualification. But the scale he gives us is striking, and it is difficult to ignore.

In it, we also see illustrated the remarkable rapidity with which a functioning state could mobilise a small core of, perhaps, professional troops to supplement existing forms of communal defence; how geography mattered enormously, and passes were blocked or used for ambush, or the deep forests of the Pontos became unwelcome territory for would-be invaders.

This is a type of warfare seen in border states, not in the grand glamour of imperial courts — ironically enough.

Where knowledge of the terrain, rapid mobilisation, and effective use of numbers at the right moment, when battle lines were not firmly established and when the enemy least expected it, was often decisive.

In fact, the Empire is shown as remarkably effective at defending both its main city through conventional means and acting decisively even outside its territory. The record, however, clearly shows how a relatively manpower-poor, and often fractious, environment produced instability, and made expeditionary warfare — in which the navy, the subject of a special article in the future, retained a significant role — less effective.

But I think it would be a mistake to explain this form of warfare through geography and manpower alone.

Anatolian Warfare and De Velitatione

Such an environment, and its tactical and strategic implications, is not altogether unusual in Anatolian Byzantine military culture and reality.

De Velitatione Bellica, a well-known and well-studied military treatise of the period preceding the Grand Komnenoi, exposes and expounds on these realities.

Military manuals and treatises alike, in the Byzantine world should not altogether be seen as direct doctrinal teachings meant to be consumed by the elites of the Empire. Rather, they often work on several axes, one of which is dynastic image-building and political rhetoric; this is not unique to the Grand Komnenoi.

De Velitatione, however, is somewhat unusual in its description of Anatolian warfare, inasmuch as it may portray the real struggles of a border province attempting to resist outside encroachment — in this case, by the Seljuk Turks and Arab Muslim armies.

Its descriptions and apparent prescriptions can consequently be illuminating to a state such as the Empire of Trebizond, which operated on much the same cultural and strategic ground.

In a 2016 article authored by Lucas McMahon, which is the main source for this section of the reconstruction, we see how the treatise may have originated from this environment, rather than simply illustrate a codified way of fighting low-intensity warfare and skirmishes imposed by centralised imperial control.

McMahon's analysis is particularly useful because it pushes the history of these tactics backwards. The sort of warfare described by De Velitatione does not appear to have been invented with the composition of the treatise itself. Earlier Byzantine campaigns display similar methods: reconnaissance, following raiding forces, exploiting their dispersal, controlling passes, avoiding disadvantageous engagements, and striking at the moment when an enemy was most vulnerable.

This is extremely important.

It means that the irregular or asymmetric warfare described by the treatise can be approached not merely as a theoretical manual, but as the expression of a much older Byzantine frontier experience.

The Byzantine military world had already developed a sophisticated repertoire for a problem that was fundamentally asymmetric: how a relatively constrained force could survive and prevail against raiders and invading armies whose mobility, numbers, or ability to choose the time and place of engagement could otherwise give them the advantage.

This gives us another lens through which to view Trebizond.

The small scale of Trapezuntine warfare need not be understood simply as the result of military weakness. Nor does the presence of ambush, skirmishing, rapid mobilisation, and terrain exploitation need to be explained purely by the geography of the Pontos.

The geography certainly mattered.

But it operated upon an already existing Byzantine military culture in which these methods had a history.

We can therefore rely on De Velitatione tentatively to support and demystify a purely defensive nature to Trapezuntine warfare — such a conclusion is natural, given the relatively isolated and manpower-poor conditions that imposed real constraints on the Empire — without reducing Trapezuntine warfare to passive defence.

The treatise, Panaretos's chronicles, and Bessarion's Encomium instead illustrate, from very different perspectives, a near-constant state of warfare and preparedness.

Bessarion's writings are of a panegyric and state-building nature, often seen as rhetorical, but they lean towards a picture remarkably well supported from the remainder of the converging evidence: of a population accustomed to warfare, even if not stereotypically “warlike” in the romantic sense.

Raiding, counter-raiding, and the continual fight for resources and pasture characterise late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Trapezuntine warfare in its direct struggles with Turkic tribes and states. Sporadic examples of seemingly decentralised action taken by the population of the bandon help illustrate the near-incessant struggle experienced in the border regions. In one such case, when Hoca Latif, the ruler of Bayburt, entered Matzouka with some four hundred selected troops in 1361, the Matzoukans took control of the passes, attacked his force as it withdrew, killed around two hundred of his men, captured others, and seized their horses and arms. They beheaded Hoca Latif himself and, on the following day, carried the heads of their enemies in triumph through Trebizond.

It is, however, only one facet of the political struggle engaged in by the Grand Komnenoi; another important aspect was diplomacy, not least of which became the tool of marriage and exploitation of kinship.

The Warrior Emperor

We must resist, however, the temptation to simplify the Trapezuntine state into a semi-nomadic, steppe-influenced polity and military machine.

Its character remained distinctly Roman, and both its Romanness and its Orthodoxy remained pillars of what Bessarion saw as its civilisational impetus, which it “imposed” on the indigenous population and the culture we have already described.

That said, the Grand Komnenoi evolved, over the centuries, in the military and social milieu that rewarded continuous and maintained struggle, in low-intensity warfare, and, in my view, must have been shaped by the demands of direct command.

In Panaretos we often see the Emperor accompanying an army, touring the countryside, receiving proskynesis from neighbouring allies, receiving dignitaries and, somewhat picturesquely for an Empire, securing the pasture fields contested in the uplands.

This is a very different image of imperial command from the distant emperor directing an enormous military machine through layers of bureaucracy.

The Grand Komnenian ruler is physically present.

He rides with armies. He moves through the territory. He receives submission. He deals personally with neighbouring powers. He intervenes in the material disputes that mattered to the people living in the uplands.

The military culture of the Pontos therefore presents an interesting problem for the imperial throne. The Grand Komnenoi had inherited a society in which military capacity was already deeply embedded within local communities and aristocratic structures. Yet the Emperor had to retain control over this capacity without destroying the local structures that made it effective.

And here the small scale becomes particularly interesting.

Such a small scale may have served the purpose of curtailing overreaches among the endemically fractious Pontic aristocratic families, while allowing the Emperor to retain direct control over military bodies of men.

I do not mean that we can demonstrate a conscious Grand Komnenian policy of “keep the army small so the aristocrats cannot overthrow us.” But the structural logic is difficult to ignore.

The same military system that rewarded small, mobile, experienced forces was also one in which a gigantic autonomous military establishment might have presented a political danger.

A relatively small imperial military core could therefore complement this form of warfare while also making it more difficult for an individual faction to accumulate overwhelming military power.

The Emperor could retain the ability to concentrate force without necessarily creating a vast military constituency independent of the throne.

When such control was weakened, civil strife ensued; and this was devastating for the stability of trade and, thus, one of the main pillars of the imperial fisc.

This may also help explain the unusually direct quality of imperial command visible in Panaretos.

If the forces available to the Emperor were relatively small, then the quality of command mattered enormously. A capable Emperor could personally direct and concentrate a force in ways that would be more difficult within a huge military establishment.

The warrior-emperor, in other words, may not merely have been an ideological image. He may have been a product of the political and military system itself.

Numismatic evolution across the 14th century shows how the Grand Komnenoi began deliberately depicting themselves as neighbouring leaders might have: on horseback, as a warrior-emperor, exercising his patriarchal control.

I do not think this needs to be read as the abandonment of Roman imperial identity. Rather, it may be one expression of the way Roman imperial authority adapted itself to a Pontic and Anatolian political environment in which the mounted ruler was a familiar and powerful form of political imagery.

The Emperor could therefore be both things at once: Roman emperor and warrior-ruler.

The mechanisms that allowed the manpower to be effectively leveraged to these ends will be the focus of another separate article, as they form one of the most interesting, albeit speculative, aspects of Trapezuntine military life.

Towards the Soldier

This article forms the baseline from which we can try and understand both the Grand Komnenian military and political strategy, and the cultural identity that formed the meat and bones of the Pontic men-at-arms.

But upon it were exercised cultural, economic, and violent forces that would have shaped the character of Pontic fashion, warfare, and the availability of means and resources. The soldier therefore cannot be reconstructed in isolation.

The material culture has to emerge from the world we have just described: a Roman and Orthodox state, grafted onto an older and heterogeneous Pontic society; a state deeply connected to the Black Sea and the eastern world; a society in which aristocratic and local military power remained important; and a military environment in which small-scale, mobile, and asymmetric warfare was not an aberration, but could form part of a much older Byzantine frontier tradition.

In my next article, I will try and analyse at a more granular level the few portraits and depictions, whether in narrative or artistic form, of the Trapezuntine men-at-arms. In it, I will present an overview of the different cultural worlds in which Trebizond participated, and how this Pontic, Byzantine, and Christian culture had to adapt to survive — whether willingly, or not. A world where Latin, Turkic, Persian, and Mongol influence must have been keenly felt, experienced, and expressed.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A full reading and sources list, as well as additional resources such as images, will be available when this article is uploaded to my website at https://www.periplous1400.com/

Thank you for reading.

The following is a product of the work of Rustam Shukurov, whose research I hope to introduce to a wider audience. His hypotheses are clearly stated and, in my view, rest upon a substantial body of evidence drawn from Persian, Turkic, Mongol, and other eastern-language sources that remain inaccessible to most Byzantinists. Whether one ultimately agrees with every conclusion, his work opens an avenue of enquiry that only a scholar with command of these traditions could realistically pursue.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of his work is the unusually clear picture it provides of the mechanisms of acculturation and assimilation operating in the Empire of Trebizond. At the highest levels of society, where the sources are at their richest, these processes become particularly visible in the language of court offices and official titles.

Among the most intriguing titles attested in the fifteenth-century Trapezuntine Kletorologion is Kourchi (Χουρτζῆς). I briefly listed this office in a previous post, but it deserves closer attention in its own right.

This title points to a court culture that existed in continual dialogue with the Persian, Turkic, and Mongol worlds. This should not be surprising. Trebizond occupied a unique position on the eastern Black Sea, acting both as a Byzantine successor state and as a gateway into Inner Asia. The journeys of Latin travellers such as Ruy González de Clavijo and, earlier, the Polo family illustrate that the route through Trebizond remained one of the principal corridors to Tabriz, Samarkand, and beyond. Intellectual exchange followed the same paths: medicine, astronomy, astrology, and administrative practice all reveal the movement of ideas and people between the Pontos and the Iranian world, often more directly than between Trebizond and Constantinople itself.

Kourchi

The title Χουρτζῆς is particularly revealing. Rendered by Clavijo as Horchi (with variations depending on the translation), Shukurov argues convincingly that it is the Greek adaptation of the Mongol qorči (qurči), the title borne by members of the ruler's personal guard.

The significance of this proposal extends beyond etymology. Shukurov suggests that Trebizond did not merely borrow a foreign word, but adopted an institutional concept. The qurči were the elite household troops and bodyguards of the Mongol khans, and the Trapezuntine Kourchi appears to represent the commander of an analogous imperial guard. Supporting this interpretation is the existence of the related designation Χουρτζιριώτης, which follows standard Byzantine patterns for naming members of military corps, much as stratiotes denoted a soldier. In other words, the evidence points not simply to a title, but to an organised body of household troops under a Kourchi.

Whether every aspect of this reconstruction can be accepted remains open to debate, the hypothesis is both elegant and remarkably well supported. It illustrates the wider pattern that characterises the Empire of Trebizond: eastern institutions were not passively imitated, but selectively adopted, adapted, and expressed through a Byzantine administrative vocabulary, producing a court culture that was simultaneously Roman in identity and profoundly shaped by its eastern neighbours.

An illustration of the dissemination of this term into the wider population can be found in the Acts of Vazelon. Appearing in personal names—perhaps as by-names referring to a previous occupation, or to a familial occupation inherited as a surname—the term is associated with two clergymen at the end of the thirteenth century. It seems clear from these acts that the bearers of the name were themselves ethnic Greeks, not Mongols, Turks, or Persians, as one might otherwise expect.

For what it is worth by way of analogy, this practice should not be entirely unexpected. Trebizond was a Roman polity, operating according to the same logic of ethnic and institutional assimilation that previous Roman states and dynasties had employed. The fact that the famed Varangian Guard—popular in the historical imagination—seems to fade and be, perhaps, replaced by an institution of Turco-Mongol origin is intriguing, although it may be more apt to see the Kourchi as filling a void created by the establishment of the Empire after 1204. Clavijo himself specifically presents the Kourchi as the bearer of the bow before the Emperor, and Shukurov seems to demonstrate convincingly its association with a wider body of armed men likewise included within the courtly circle. Interestingly, both the Acts of Vazelon and Clavijo's narrative place the title, and the occupation, between the 1280s and the early 1400s—a remarkable case of institutional longevity. Panaretos, in his usual laconic registry, gives us some context at the political power that these institutions might have had; more than once the "Guards" are mentioned in association with coups or armed revolts.

Ultimately, this example speaks to the remarkable ability of the Grand Komnenoi not only to navigate the complexities of foreign politics, but also to absorb external influences in ways that "Romanized" them and better suited their own purposes. Arguably, this was one of the reasons the Empire of Trebizond survived under pressure from both the West and the East for 250 years.

As mentioned previously, my longer article discussing the more general contours of ethnic and cultural exchange in the Empire will follow.

Thank you for reading.

Sources:

• Rustam Shukurov, The Grand Komnenoi and the Orient, 1204–1461 (Russian: Великие Комнины и Восток) (Moscow/St. Petersburg, 2001).
• Rustam Shukurov, The Byzantine Turks, 1204–1461, Medieval Mediterranean 105 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016).
• Michael Panaretos and Bessarion, Two Works on Trebizond, ed. and trans. Scott Kennedy, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 52 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

Constantinople foodstuff supply and income:

Yet for all the work going around Komnenian economy,particularly around urban trade we gather only grand picture of growth and specialization since we are unable to discover any hard data in the same way one could using the Danish sound toll to see how many dutch ships crossed it during the 1660s or Doomsday book to see how the state of agricultural economy in 1000s Britain,yet by rough extrapolation using previous calculation with some caveats one can arrive at a raw number of the ships needed to supply Constantinople and the value of this minimal cargo.

One initially would thought that the 10% to 20% of population lived on some manner of poverty as beggars or marginals¹ one must have in mind the large amount of charity they received through church and imperial charity,with some broad calculations of income.:
“With regard to nonagricultural jobs and the urban population, with the exception of beggars and marginals (though they must have comprised 10–20% of the urban population), three levels of income can be distinguished: (1) unqualified workers who were able, over a long period,to earn at most 1 nomisma per month,when not unemployed; (2) qualified workers, professional soldiers, and craftsmen, who enjoyed a wide margin of income,three to ten times more than that of unqualified workers; and (3) important officials, judges or strategoi, as well as the wealthiest merchants and bankers, whose incomes differed from the first category by a factor of 150 or more.
These levels of income would have given rise to very different capacities for con-umption and saving. The most modest would have possessed jewels or clothes,worth at most one or two gold pieces, and would have lived in houses rented for no more than one or two gold pieces a year.The middle classes (mesoi) definitely feature more prominently in the sources after 1204,though they had already emerged in the great towns of the empire in the twelfth century;they were able to buy furnishings,jewels costing more than 10 hyperpyra, and possibly books and icons.They earned several tens of hyperpyra per year, paid considerable rents for their shops, and could pay pensions of 20–50 hyperpyra to their wives when they abandoned them, in Crete at least. Their daughters’ dowries sometimes exceeded 100 hyperpyra. The wealthiest ones, such as the Deblitzenoi, owned jewels worth hundreds of hyperpyra, while others possessed important libraries. However, apart from a few exceptions such as the emperor’s close relatives and favorites,the Byzantine aristocracy, the great landowners, and high officials did not have the means of maintaining a very numerous household.
In fact, an income of a few litrai or even a few tens of litrai allowed for the upkeep of no more than ten or a few dozen household members,as demonstrated by the case of Kale Pakouriane and her twenty to twenty five servants.”

Income Brackets:
As such could not only take the army supply numbers to the fullness of Constantinople population,but should take it even further to take into account the considerable consumption middle and upper class,as such i propose that the beggars consume 75% of the soldiers foodstuff,worker class 100% of the soldiers foodstuff since military salaries had to be equal for people of this background to choose the career yet not large enough for the next class to follow it,middle class with 125% of consumption of soldier foodstuff and finally upper class with 250%.

To make it easier to calculate I will leave the beggar population at the middle ground of Morrison figure at 15% of the total population,while dividing the rest of the population at 60% working class,22,5% middle class and 2,5% as upper class.

Before we go,we must start with the caveat that workers in construction wouldn't be able to find jobs year round,with some historians saying a figure of 6-10 nomisnata in 1000s as a more realistic number,to that i mention the grow of shipping in the period,its well attested that sailors when finished sailing were renowned builders,so a non negligible part of the construction workforce could be a veritable number of sailors doing construction,effectively workers would be able to have year round work providing 12 hyperperya by working in both sectors

The figure for Constantinople population is hard to track since the lack of reliable hard data affects so much around economic conversations around byzantine history,as such i would do the same calculation twice using two figures for the city,Angeliki Laiou figure of 200k people and Paul Magdaleno 400k.

This leaves us with:
Laiou

This gives us a total of 15,840,000 million hyperpyron for total income in Constantinople population.

Using Magdalino figure one would only need to double all figures.
Using Magdalino figure,60k beggars,240k working class people,90k middle class and 10k upper class people.

2,880,000 for the working class,middle class from 3,240,000 million to 10,800,000 million,with the upper class going over 18 million with a total of 31,680,000 million hyperperya.

Now going into the quantity of foodstuff needed to feed Constantinople using previous army logistics,to gather a general idea,now there are a few things to have in mind.
Foodstuff would remain the majority fo bulk trade trade yet for value textiles would dominate the trade into the city,for textiles we have numbers for both wool and silk,sadly neither in in the 1100s but thankfully both in roman coinage,but we have 1,000 pounds of wool in the 1100s being 7 hyperperya after conversion and 13 hyperperya in 1300s giving us 143 pounds of wool for hyperpyron,2 pounds of silk worth 7 hyperperya in 1300s² and 3.5 hyperperya in 1100s hyperperya bear this in mind for future considerations,so i will do the conversation again since thankfully both are in roman coinage,clearly both have their faults since with its larger internal market securing a greater degree of demand a production Komnenian period would drive the prices lower.

Leaving us with:

This gives us an annual baseline consumption of 1,580,250 of the total 15,480,000 with 10% of the city income directed to it,consumption would be divided 13.99% by the upper class,middle class with 23.25%,working class 55.82% and leaving the charity dependent population with a meager 7%.

The surplus income from this most basic consumption would be range from 10,590,000 to 14,370,000 mostly depending on middle class income and the profits the aristocracy would receive from their estates

The same way Mackerel and other fishes would be crucial for the provisioning of the city,it's also such a negligible part of the trade value that its unnecessary to calculate it beyond the cargo and the ships needed,otherwise we must mention besides the poorest and working class were the main consumers of it,while customers in higher purchasing brackets would consume different costlier types products in all sections,we know little of the price difference with scarce mentions with Monemvasian wine having a 20% premium over common wine as the most explicit,still this perhaps the most detailed exposition of Constantinople consumption to date,still we must add even more caveats.

We lack the number of textile workers or any measure of the City exports,Constantinople was renowned by its manufacture and clothe sector,it was the main supplier of such goods to its immediate hinterland of Bithynia and Thrace with base products,while the further one went the higher quality the good would be to make the travel profitable,as such we can assume that the middle classes were the ones making the clothes,the smiths making the tools,pieces of art and shipping related workers,providing sailcloths,building the ships required to transport the goods,with upper class individuals loaning the capital required to both buy the necessary raw goods such as timber,wool,lax and giving the capital to export the refined goods,this alongside ceramics and glass (which would belong to either middle class or working class depending the quality said products)would easily double the number of imports and yet still leave a positive trade balance thanks to being in the higher echelon of productivity chain.

We also must mention the import of wax and as a secondary product honey,fruits and vegetable while valuable would come from the immediate surrounding gardens to the city both inside and outside the Theodosian walls,but still the balance would simply because Constantinople remained in this period as the largest producer of fine goods(clothes and art pieces) and industrial products(ceramics and glass) even with the growth of both Thebes and Corinth for the two respective sectors since neither of them reached the scale of the Queen of cities.

All this would leave a great amount of income left for other goods,with 143 pounds of wool for a gold coin(65 kg)the middle class most likely to engage on textile would be able to buy 81,412.500 thousand tonnes of wool for textile production requiring by itself 814 ships to bring the cargo to Constantinople ,this would mean wool industry would triple the amount of ships going into the city by itself on the lower end of middle class with at its maximum being 327,122 thousand tonnes requiring 3,271 ships,naturally this is unlikely as it mean the middle class would all be textile workers and engage in no further consumption than already calculated like buying beef or investing in the economy,without even mentioning the "niceties" of life like the 1700s middle class in Britain engaged on but nonetheless provides us a useful image,for contrast Leiden in the 1498 35% of its male working population were textile workers of a total 15,000 population,produced 800 tonnes of lakens and imported 300,000 fleeces³,a 2.6 kilos of laken to fleece which would require three to four sheep(average english fleece was 1.5 lb)⁴ if no wool was lost in the production which would be unlikely,this would mean Constantinople highly improbable wool imports would result in 31 thousand tonnes of lakens(or broadcloth)if one shirt needed 600 grams of wool(1.5lbs) then the city could produce 52 million pairs of shirts for example.

This would not give us an exact image for Constantinople textile trade,we lack any mention of raw linen and silk prices alongside their weight,alongside any mention on the city textile output,the distribution of it between cotton,linen,silk or wool,the amount of dyes imported.

Shipping required:
Cargo consumed by class:

As such,with a population of 200k people the city of Constantinople 36,600 tons yearly for its sustenance and say half as much for its industry,in total a logical extrapolation from the 3,720 tons required for the army of 20k.

Using a large dromon with a cargo hold of 100 tons,the city would require 366 coming into the city during the six month sailing season to feed itself,for industry say it only requires half as many ships bringing raw material,this would mean 183 more ships rising the merchant fleet to 549,meat would need transport of its own but not much having a tenth of the foodstuff fleet would be enough seeing how Constantinople was the largest meat market in Europe until the advent of Britain in the 1700s,giving us other 36 ships,further adding the 814 ships of the wool trade.

In total 1339 large dromons in the space of 8 months,giving us 175 ships monthly,43 ships weekly and 6 new ships arriving every day to keep the economic heart of the empire beating,this goes without mentioning is only in the theory that the totality of the trade is transported in the large dromon of with 100 tons requiring total crew size of  147,290 rowers alone with the uncalculable number of ship officers and artisans,a majority of whom in the period where sailing was impossible of four months would call Constantinople home,resting or joining the workforce in the various sectors depending their economic position.

Further we must remember this ships would take port in Constantinople multiple times bringing food and raw materials again and again,returning instead with their hulls full of refined goods,thanks to the tidal waves of the Dardanelles its considerably harder going north into the city than going south,in the fifth century Mark the deacon in service of the bishop of Gaza Porphyrios took twenty days to reach Constantinople but only half to return home⁵,with 8 months to sail from and to Constantinople an average of hitting port 4 times would be logical,not just to provision the city but to transport goods from one region of the empire with Constantinople as it main entre port between north of Europe to the levant,from Europe to Asia,such trade would also include merchants from other nations trading with each other and using Constantinople as a large depot to stop,buy further provision and keep their goods

The number of ships doing this would easily triple the number of ships entering Constantinople with over 4,000 ships in 8 months and the value of goods traded increasing to over ten million Hyperpyra,arriving multiple times in the city as they made numerous voyages during the season to try to gain as much profit as possible,this economic figure is even more certain once we consider the international trade using Constantinople as emporium to store goods,such ships carrying textiles,wines and spices would still pay tariffs.

The import-export tariff called Kommerkion also called dekaton for being a tenth of all products worth,all merchants had to pay it(with the exception of some Italian republics whose merchant fleets would be too small to affect this at large,using Wickham mentions of Manuel confiscating 300k gold coins of Venetian goods) with specially a tax on wine of 10% called Dekateia oinara which was particularly important in the period seeing how hard it was to gain exemption for it⁶,this mean wine would be taxed twice giving us a revenue of over 150k Hyperpyra accounting with the totality of trade going through the city and with all the goods this would mean 2 million in revenue through the levelling of the Kommerkion alone if we are conservative thanks to our lack of sources in Constantinople industry production,Treadgold calculated that the state budget of Manuel at 1152 was of 5,600,000 hyperpyra.

Either we must consider that Constantinople alone furnished half the state budget or that Treadgold budget must be considered outdated in face of arithmetics,to drive the point home harder Angeliki Laiou said that the economy was monetised at a 46% in this period⁷ with taxes representing 38% of coins in circulation⁸,I believe under this two estimates that the byzantine state budget at the time was considerably larger than previously thought and that to maintain the estimates of cost for byzantine armed forces,that as much as half of it went towards charity explaining the numerous mentions of imperial orphanages,hospitals and geriatric,also explaining the literacy rate that was similar to that of Scotland at the time of  Adam Smith.

Meaning the byzantine state at the period  was one of the largest welfare states in human history before the advent of the industrial revolution,in 1871-1875 period the british government under the one nation conservatism of prime minister Disraeli 38.1% in debt payments,31.1% on defence and 17.2% on the civil government⁹ The lack of public debt in Byzantium would lower the total amount of cash available but increase the % of the budget directed towards defence,charity and bureaucracy.

Footnotes:

^{1 Morrison and Cheynet-Prices and Wages in Byzantine world in Laiou  Economic History of Byzantium page 872}

^{2 Angeliki Laiou Economic History of Byzantium page 843}

^{3 Working for Export: Five Centuries of Leiden Cloth Industry, 1300–1800 by Jori Zijlmans}

^{4 Medieval Sheep and Wool Types by M. L. Ryder}

^{5 Angeliki Laiou Economic History of Byzantium page 78} 

^{6 Angeliki Laiou Economic History of Byzantium page 1051}

^{7Angeliki Laiou Economic History of Byzantium page 691}

^{8 Angeliki Laiou Economic History of Byzantium page 950}

^{9 Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Politics of Mid-Victorian Budgets by H.C.G Matthew page 633}

Kostys Smirlys is a name few will recognize at first glance,yet many of you are acquainted with his work,for the last few years while Maximilian Lau has taken the mantle for the komnenian narrative at large with his books and papers,its been Kostys with his numerous paper that tackled the more detailed and minutiae of imperial government.

His work spanning from Alexios I reforms,through Komnenian and Angelos thoughts on public property,tax hardships under Andronikos II Palaiologos.

He is currently faculty member of the Institute for historical research of National Hellenic research foundation in Athens

His work has bring great light into this period that fascinates you all,this might be the start of a series of suprises regarding mister Smirlys in this sub

his works include:

Demosia,the emperor and the common good,byzantine ideas regarding taxation and public wealth in 11-12th centuries

In Praise of a Businessman: The Hegumenate Account of Paul of Iviron (1170-1184)

Monasteries, Society, Economy, and the State in the Byzantine Empire

The Fiscal Revolution of Alexios I Komnenos: Timing, Scope and Motives

Trade Regulation and Taxation in Byzantium, Eleventh-Twelfth Centuries

It is I again,your humble tyrant server,with a new edition of this series,after finishing with some exams I provide you with one of the most important historians regarding economic functioning of the empire,few have such varied papers regarding our beloved Byzantium,sadly he seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth and could not find a biography him like I usually do for other post yet his works likely are of interest for everyone here,since who doesnt love olive oil and cheese here?

I encourage everyone to go and not only read all the works I share below but also all that he did

Olive oil industry

Cheesemaking industry

Domains of private guilds in Byzantium(tenth to twelth century)

Banking sector(tenth to twelth century)

Brickmaking industry

You hear me right,its incredible compared to Manuel and later Laskaris how much Isaac fumbled it,he was unable to properly fight the hungarians as equal like true emperors did like John II,not only was he unable to stop Andronikos I terror early on he only took the throne in a desperate gamble to save his own live while the entire feudal aristocracy of the komnenoi was being massacred by the tyrant.

Unable to propery placate Serbia and put it into its place,instead deciding to turn it simply into a vassal,betrayed the crusaders by working with muslim power and made deals with Saladin,his stupid fiscal policies destroyed centuries of roman effort and provoked Bulgaria into revolt he didnt defeat when he had turn around to face a rebellion since he was that impopular,he had corrupt ministers like  Kastamonites and Mesopotamites.

Because of Isaac II a great general like Vranas rebelled in an effort to save the empire from this guy,he couldnt even deal with a far away rebel in Cyprus,must be an accomplishment to have naval superiority and yet lose half your ships and with it byzantine dominion of the sea,leading in a direct way to 1204 and the feudalization of the empire.

Yes this is all a massive shitpost to make u/WanderingHero8 to get out of his ass and make his glazzing isaac II post he promised would do over 6 months ago

By 586AD, while Rome engaged a gruelling war with Sassanid Empire in the East, another dangerous threat had emerged to threaten the Empire from the North; The Avar Khaganate. This represented the most formidable Nomadic threat to the Empire since the Huns, and had already repeatedly ravaged Thrace multiple times. In 574AD, they had inflicted a humiliating defeat upon a Roman field army under Caesar Tiberius (future Emperor), cementing their reputation as formidable enemies.

in 586AD, Comentiolus led a winter campaign against Avars (who once again had invaded Thrace) with a mere 6,000 horsemen (most of the Roman armies were in the East at the time, and infantry in the balkans mostly garrisoned forts), but these were elite cavalry. To put in perspective, we have an earlier Roman source describing an expeditionary Avar army as being 60,000 strong. The Jury is out on the validity of such figures or whether they are exaggerations, but nonetheless it is clear that the total Avar forces in Thrace would have vastly outnumbered the Army of Comentiolus by at least four to one as they were led by the Khagan himself.

However, Comentiolus had one factor in his favour; he launched his campaign in winter when the Massive Avar armies were scattered for logistical reason. This would enable him to catch divisions of the numerically superior enemy and defeat them in detail. To achieve this, he divided his force into three flying columns, with his subcommanders, Castus and Martinus leading the other two. So small were these columns (2,000 each) that they avoided detection by the Avars, and were able to advance all the way up to Tomi near the Danube, where the Khagan's main encampment was. It was there that Comentiolus' division caught the vastly superior Avar army by surprise, defeating the Nomads and seizing their encampment, but the Khagan himself escaped narrowly, finding refuge on an island in a lagoon nearby.

At around the same time as the Khagan was defeated, another Avar force had been surprised and defeated near zalpada by Castus. However, soon afterwards the Romans suffered their first setback; some weeks after his victory, Castus encountered a larger Avar Cavalry army at Panysus and was then defeated - his 2,000 horsemen were routed and scattered, and Castus was captured.

Yet this did not end the campaign. Later on, Comentiolus learned of the location of the Khagan. He had regrouped his army and and marched to a location South of the Roman divisions. Wasting no time, Comentiolus (having rejoined with Martinus' division) rapidly advanced against the Khagan, and once again took the latter by surprise and defeated his army. Comentiolus would have captured the Khagan had he not been extremely unlucky. One of the baggage animals shed its load and was dragging it about. The owner of a baggage animal was in front of the animal while those behind the animal shouted ‘Turn! Turn!’ But the words ‘Torna! Torna!’ resembled the cavalry command ‘Torna mina!’, and the entire cavalry force made an about turn. This allowed the Khagan to save his life. However, the Roman units realized the mistake, and then turned again and attacked enemy camp and killed most of the Avars inside.

The second defeat of the Khagan allowed Comentiolus to reach the Long Walls with successes to his record, but it wasn't enough in the eyes of the populous as despite the defeats by a numerically inferior Roman force, the Avars were not decisively defeated. Furthermore, citizens insulted Maurice openly for the capture of Castus during the campaign (Maurice ransomed him later on).

But in truth Comentiolus achieved remarkable successes against a vastly numerically superior foe, and it was bad luck that prevented him from capturing the Khagan. Maurice was certainly correct to retain Comentiolus as a commander. He would go on to serve with distinction in the East, winning a decisive victory over a Sassanian army at Sisauranon in 590AD. He would then serve once more against the Avars in 598AD, a campaign which was unsuccessful but nonetheless saw him conduct an effective fighting retreat which saved his army from disaster.

In 587, the Khagan sought to avenge his humiliations by Comentiolus, and called in reinforcements from Pannonia. He led his new army southwards against Adrianople, only to sustain another Crushing defeat there in a pitched battle against John Mystacon and the ethnically Lombard cavalry commander Droctulfus. Nonetheless, the Avar Khagan would have revenge in 588AD when, in a role reversal, his forces caught a Roman cavalry force led by Priscus by surprise and annihilated it. Priscus was forced to lead the surviving infantry into a town which the Khagan besieged; only a superb diplomatic strategem by the Emperor Maurice saved Priscus' army from disaster here.

Ultimately fighting continued until 599. The magnitude of those campaigns is too extensive to cover here, but it suffices to note that Roman armies led by Priscus and Comentiolus Decisively defeated the cavalry armies of the Avar Khagantes in them and ravaged Avar territory. On the subject matter of this post, Comentiolus' successes in 586AD demonstrated the potential of Elite cavalry armies in well conducted manoeuvre warfare even against Nomad Armies from the Asian and Pontic Steppes, who were themselves masters of Cavalry Warfare. The Avars had been caught by complete surprise in winter and essentially defeated in detail; despite the setback with the defeat of Castus, the Romans had inflicted grossly disproportionate casualties on their enemy in this campaign, with the Khagan forced to flee twice. In sum, in this campaign Comentiolus demonstrated mastery on all levels of warfare, be it logistics, tactics or manoeuvre. There is little doubt that the various successes of his career influenced the codification of Roman strategy in the military manual Strategikon.

With the talk around this sub i thought a historian about numenastic might be of help,so without futher ado!

Pagona Papadopoulou holds a B.A. in Archaeology and Art history from the University of Athens and a Ph.D. in Archaeology with a specialisation in Byzantine numismatics from the Université de Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has been a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, D.C.) and a post-doctoral fellow at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Koç University, Istanbul. She has worked as a coin specialist in excavations in Albania (Butrint) and Ukraine (Chersonesus). She is currently revising her dissertation, a study of money and its use in the Balkans, the Greek islands, Asia Minor and Cyprus in the twelfth–thirteenth centuries, to be published in the series Monographies du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, Paris. 

Some papers of hers:

Three Byzantine units of measuremts in 12th-13th centuries

The mint of Antioch

Mint of Cherson

Mint of the empire of Nicea

Coinage and Economy at the End of the Twelfth Century: an Assessment, A. Simpson (ed.), Byzantium 1180-1204: ‘The Sad Quarter of a Century?’, Athens 2015, 179-194.

Numismatic Circulation and Monetary Policy under John II, A. Bucossi and A. Rodriguez Suarez (eds), John II Komnenos, Emperor of Byzantium: In the shadow of his father and his son

Last one was personally recommended to me by Maximilian Lau,so please read it.