While mercenary units of professional soldiers—whether the warrior-tribesmen of the steppe peoples or the mounted lancers of the Normans—continued to fight with order and discipline according to their own traditions and battlefield loyalties, the units of the imperial armies seem to have been neglected during the middle years of the eleventh century to the extent that, when the emperor Romanos IV set out on campaign to Syria in 1068, he had to spend some time and energy in recruiting new units and training them to fight effectively. The contemporary chronicler Michael Attaleiates paints a pitiful picture of the state of the thematic levy that was raised before the campaign of 1071, and gives the impression that much of the imperial army was militarily of little value. He states that the soldiers raised from the provinces on the basis of their traditional military obligations were quite unfitted for warfare, having been neither mustered nor having been paid or supplied with their traditional provisions for many years. The older men, who had some experience of fighting, were without mounts and equipment; the newer draftees had no experience at all and were quite without training,103 and the emperor had to mix them with the more experienced soldiers.104
The army was a mixture of regular mercenary units from the different parts of the empire and the older thematic soldiers. The “five tagmata of the West”, perhaps because they had been less neglected than their eastern counterparts, were classed by Attaleiates alongside the western mercenaries in respect of their military value.105 No mention is made of their eastern detachments, but the poor state of the eastern forces stems in part from the effects of the civil wars of 1047—8 and 1057. The distinction between the two commands was reestablished under the Komnene emperors.106
But while Mantzikert was a defeat, the campaigns of Romanes IV in the late 1060s which culminated there were by no means failures. Indeed, the account of Attaleiates, who was an eyewitness, attests to a surprising degree of discipline and competence, with regularly entrenched and fortified camps, considerable tactical order and well-organized lines of supply. This should, perhaps, not surprise us: according to Psellos, Isaac I had revived the traditions of strict discipline and tactical order which central government neglect had threatened, and his forces were both effective and successful in battle.107 It was the localized incompetence or communications failures, combined with treachery and desertion, which brought about the downfall of Romanos IV’s division at Manzikert: the campaign was a strategic failure, but tactically was hardly the disaster it has frequently been made out to be, in spite of the rhetorical flourishes of Attaleiates and others (whose description of the run-down army was intended as much as anything to shift the blame for failure onto the shoulders of the imperial predecessors of Romanos IV).108
Nevertheless, the old army was rapidly disappearing. The government of Michael VII could raise only a few hundred troops to march against Roussel de Bailleul in 1073, relying mostly on Turkish allies. By the time of Alexios I’s desperate efforts to re-establish imperial authority in the Balkans and northwest Asia Minor, his army consisted almost entirely of mercenaries, and in the sense that these fought with their own weapons and methods, albeit under Byzantine command, we may say that “Byzantine” tactics, in the sense that this term represents something particular and different from those of other peoples, died with the older imperial and thematic armies during the eleventh century. Thereafter, as is clear from the sources, the empire became much more closely integrated into the tactical world of the lands around it: Seljuk, Pecheneg or Cuman horse archers, Norman, German and “Frankish” knights, Bulgarian and Anatolian light infantry, Georgians and Alans from the Caucasus, supplemented by small contingents of imperial guards—mostly recruited from outside the empire, such as the Varangians (from the 1070s chiefly made up of Anglo-Saxons and their retinues abandoning Norman England)—this was the “Byzantine” army of the twelfth century. In spite of attempts by Alexios I and John to reestablish an indigenous army, the armies of the twelfth century were predominantly composed of non-Byzantines. Under Manuel I, the tendency to adopt western heavy cavalry tactics was further stimulated by the emperor himself, who re-equipped many indigenous units in western style and had them trained appropriately. The result was an army whose tactics were no different from any other multi-ethnic, polyglot mercenary army. Niketas Choniates notes the harangue of the commander of the imperial troops fighting against the Hungarians in 1167, who remarks that the formation, military equipment and training are the same for both sides; the difference lay in the Byzantines’ better order and tactical dispositions.109
There are no military or technical tactical treatises after the later tenth century, although the so-called Strategikon of the general Kekaumenos, penned probably in the 1080s or 1090s, reflects the tradition, if in a very generalized and anecdotal form. Byzantine tactics are “Byzantine” only insofar as they represent the fighting techniques of soldiers under Byzantine command; but the extent to which the Byzantine battle formation of the later tenth and eleventh centuries was maintained—regardless of the claim of Kekaumenos that it is superior to all others—remains unclear. What the empire did not possess— heavily armoured western knights—it hired, although there was an attempt under Manuel I to establish a small force of Roman cavalry armed and equipped in the western manner. But by the end of Manuel’s reign, although there is precious little clear evidence, Byzantine light infantry and cavalry must have been remarkably similar to their Turkish and Bulgar counterparts, while Byzantine heavy cavalry were modelled on, or hired among, western knights.110
Byzantine field dispositions in the 1070s seem still on occasion to have retained an element of the traditional East Roman order of battle. But was there any real difference between the armies of the twelfth-century emperors and their foes, except for the multi-ethnic character of their forces? Choniates describes the battle lines of Byzantine and Hungarian forces in 1167: the imperial troops were drawn up in three main divisions—right, centre and left, with a second line of flanking units behind the wings. Kinnamos distinguishes also the different units—Cumans and Turks, together with some western mercenary knights, made up one division; three Roman taxiarchies, together with archers and some heavily armed Turks and four further taxiarchies two other divisions. A further section of the battle line consisted of elite Roman, German and Turk cavalry, together with the commander-in-chief with a body of allied Serbs and the Lombard mercenary cavalry. Choniates notes that the Hungarian commander had also drawn up his force in three divisions, yet goes on to say that he did not separate the infantry from the cavalry clearly, suggesting that the imperial forces were drawn up in their squadrons and taxiarchies in the traditional manner, a point reinforced by one or two other descriptions and by the fact that John II ordered his forces by division, according to ethnicity, weaponry and so forth. A similar arrangement for the Roman forces in Cilicia in the 1160s under Andronikos Komnenos is described also, although the sources generally depict both the Roman armies and their opponents as drawn up in three divisions.111
The distinctiveness of Roman armies in the field, where this continued to be maintained, seems to have depended on the subdivision of the main divisions into separate units and companies, with the taxiarchy as the basic tactical-administrative entity, an arrangement which should have given greater tactical flexibility Anna Comnena’s accounts of her father’s battles with the Pechenegs, Cumans and Turks frequently stress the order and discipline of the Roman (including their mercenaries’) lines. When Andronikos Komnenos confronted the Cilician Armenians in 1166, in contrast, he appears to have deployed his forces in a more rigid formation, whereas the Armenian commander Thoros arranged his army in a large number of linked companies and, with the assistance of several ambuscades, put the Roman army to flight. But in general, the imperial armies appear—when the sources give any details—to have a more flexible tactical arrangement than their foes. This appears to have been the case in the 1160s still, if the historians’ accounts of engagements with the Hungarians and Turks are to be relied upon. But such arrangements clearly depended also on the skill and knowledge of the general: it is significant that the emperor Alexios gave quite explicit instructions to his generals on occasion on how to deploy the army on the field.112
There is evidence that the Byzantine infantry and cavalry dispositions which were evolved from their experience in dealing with mounted archers, both the Turks who fought for the Syrian emirates and for the caliphate in the tenth and early eleventh centuries and the Seljuks from the 1060s and afterwards, continued to be employed thereafter, and retained a certain distinctiveness. Anna Comnena describes an oblique hollow square formation adopted by Alexios, which she (and the emperor himself) claimed was quite new and designed to respond to the Turkish tactic of attacking in a series of loosely formed groups and from all sides in order to break up the enemy battle line or column. Such tactics were particularly effective against troops marching in column.113 Yet the square formation, whether on the battlefield or on the march, was in fact not new, as we have seen (see Chapter 5 above). It was in use from the middle of the tenth century at least if not before, at the end of the tenth century and into the eleventh during the reign of Basil II, and it probably continued to be employed when the situation demanded thereafter.114 It is possible that, with the destruction or melting away of the regular field and thematic armies in the period between 1071 and the early years of Alexios’ reign, it had been abandoned, simply because the empire’s forces had come to consist almost entirely of mercenaries, often under their own officers or leaders. In this case, it may be that Alexios was rediscovering (or reintroducing) something with which he might have been familiar from his youth (although he had not fought at Manzikert, he had later been entrusted with the command in the expedition against Roussel de Bailleul in 1073). That the formation worked well is suggested by the fact that it was adopted by the Crusader forces in the east thereafter, where Muslim historians commented on its effectiveness (although whether it was adopted and adapted directly from the Byzantine formation remains unclear), while Choniates’ account of the events of 1159 makes it clear that the Byzantine marching order was usually invulnerable to Turkish attack, suggesting the likelihood that Alexios’ formation continued to be employed thereafter against enemies such as the Seljuk light horse archers.115
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