Numerically weak and unable any longer to effectively guard its borders, the Byzantine army was, by the 14th century, less than a shadow of its former self The chronicler Gregoras observed that it had become the ‘laughing stock of the world’, comprised in 1329 ‘entirely of shopkeepers and artisans’ whose one aim was to run away as quickly as possible. The anonymous 14th century ‘patriot monk’ of Magnesia wrote of Byzantine armies that: ‘These were no longer the organised and well-disciplined armies of yore, but rather a rabble led by arrogant men who oppressed the people; they had forgotten their function as protectors. These leaders commanded nothing but disrespect. They were weak and effeminate in their behaviour, cowardly, stupid, licentious, insolent, dissolute, predatory, traitorous, reckless — men who pillaged the property of others and left fields, gardens, vineyards and forests desolate; men who knew only how to destroy those who were weaker than themselves’.
What there still was of the army was comprised largely of the pronoia-holdxag4 aristorcracy [dynatot) and their paroikoi or dependent peasants, plus a handful of regular troops and an ever-increasing number of
Mercenaries (see below). In addition military service was seemingly still owed by many towns and non-pronoia-holding archontes, though more and more of both these categories were exempted from these obligations as time went by. Pronoia-holders provided the officer class, but it should be noted that the chroniclers tended to use the words pronoia and sometimes economia indiscriminately both for the grants of large estates held by the aristocracy and court officials, and for the simple military holdings of the older thematic sort that each supported just one soldier. The latter type, generally called an economia, was held directly from, and ‘at the pleasure of, the government, and had been the principal means of maintaining the native element of the army since the mid-13th century. At the beginning of the 14th century, under Andronikos II (1282-1328), such grants still remained very much in use, but were declining in importance as more and more were abandoned under increasing Turkish pressure. In an effort to stem the decline these smallholdings were made hereditary in the mid-14th century, but the pronoia-system nevertheless continued to collapse as territorial losses mounted. Following the decisive defeat of the Serbs on the River Marica in 1365, one final attempt was made by John V in 1367 to strengthen the Empire’s reserve of native soldiers by the confiscation of half of all monastic lands between Constantinople and Selymbria for their conversion to pro-noiai; however, the Emperor’s will was not as strong as that of the Church, and the plan had to be abandoned. Following Vukashin’s defeat at Cernomen in 1371, however, John’s son Manuel did manage to appropriate half of the monastic estates in his own despotate of Thessalonika for this same purpose (see page 30).
The remnants of the regular army were in an equally sorry state of decline. We know that c. 1320 Andronikos II had planned to utilise part of the revenue from a severe new tax to pay for 3,000 (additional?) regular cavalry, of whom 1,000 were to be based in Bithynia and 2,000 in Macedonia and Thrace, but his intentions eventually went unfulfilled (largely because of a civil war that broke out between he and his grandson, Andronikos III). Andronikos II’s government could not even afford the maintenance of those soldiers it already employed, and we are told that they were billeted on the frontier towns, obliging the householders to provide them with food and wine, and their horses with provender, at prices fixed by a commission, for which they received recompense at increasingly irregular intervals when the soldiers were eventually paid. John VI Cantacuzene, previously the Grand Domestic (from 1321), attempted some reforms on the death of Andronikos III in 1341. He strengthened the frontier garrisons and insisted that the treasury paid them punctually, and in addition managed for a while to enforce the obligatory service of all pronoia-holders, many of whom had for some time been receiving unwarranted exemptions. Most of his reforms, however, were rendered redundant by the civil wars of 1341-56. At the beginning of the conflict his own army comprised 16 allaghia which, assuming 500 men per allaghion5, implies some 8,000 men, of whom we know many were Frankish (i. e. Western European) mercenaries. This number declined to 2,000 in 1342 as Cantacuzene’s fortunes reached a low ebb, and of these allegedly as many as 1,500 died of an epidemic contracted during the siege of Serres. He still only had 1,000 men of his own on his entry into Constantinople in 1347.
The steady decline in the number of native soldiers throughout the late-13th and early-14th centuries was compensated by a parallel increase in the size of the foreign contingents that had always been found in Byzantine armies. George Pachymeres’ contemporary chronicle even says that Andronikos II preferred foreign troops, stating that in his employ they were predominantly Gazmouloi, Cretans, Alani, Turks and Turkopouloi. Of these the Alani were deemed to be ‘the best cavalry there is in the East’, according to the Catalan chronicler Ramon Muntaner, and they were paid twice as much as the best native troops; about
16,000 of them (including their wives and families) were employed in 1301, being settled in Thrace as military colonists, but finding their Byzantine officers effeminate they soon dispersed into three separate bodies and began to pillage friend and foe alike. After the Byzantine campaigns alongside, and then against, the Catalan Company we do not hear of the Alani again (see page 27). Turks in Byzantine employ, however, progressively increased in numbers throughout the first half of the 14th century. Andronikos III and John Cantacuzene had 2,000 supplied by Umur Bey of Aydin for their Albanian campaign of 1337, and it was Umur again who led 6,000 Turks (in some 200 small ships) to support Cantacuzene in 1343, and apparently another 5,000 in 1345. After Umur’s death in 1348 Cantacuzene turned more to the Ottomans, Sultan Orkhan having already provided 5,500 men in 1346; 10,000 were provided in 1348, allegedly 20,000 in 1349 (to retake Thessalonika from the Serbs), and 10-12,000 under Orkhan’s son Suleiman Pasha in 1352; this last group defeated his rival John V’s Serbian and Bulgarian allies at Didymoteichos, for which in 1352 Suleiman was given as a reward the fortress of Tzympe, which he had captured, near Gallipoli, the first permanent Ottoman possession in Europe, Gallipoli itself being captured by them the next year after an
Earthquake. During the same civil wars Empress Anna (Anne of Savoy, John V’s mother) received 6,000 Turks from Saruhan of Magnesia in 1346, Doukas wrongly describing this contingent as 10,000 Ottomans. Cantacuzene himself neatly summed up one of the major problems of employing such large numbers of Turkish auxiliaries, which was that since they ‘were too numerous for the Romans [i. e., the Byzantines] to control, they went into action on their own initiative whenever there was the chance of booty.’ More significantly, however, the Turks had thereby gained a foothold in Europe.
Other foreign elements in 14th century Byzantine armies included Bulgarians (2,000 in Philes Palaeologus’ forces in 1311, for instance, and 1,000 sent by Voivode Balik in 1346 to support Anne of Savoy against Cantacuzene); Serbs (Michael IX had the loan of 2,000 cavalry in 1312, Cantacuzene was supported by Serbian troops 1342-43, and John V was provided with 4,000 cavalry by Stephen Dushan in 1352); and Wallachians (recorded in Michael IX’s forces 1305-7). In fact Wallachians continued to be found in Byzantine employ even in the 15th century — Doukas records the presence of Wallachian mercenaries in Constantinople during Murad IPs siege of 1422, and the future voivode Vlad Dracul was even ‘an officer of the army’ of John VIII.
Small numbers of Western European mercenaries also continued to appear in Byzantine employ in the 14th-15th centuries, and on two occasions large bodies of European troops rescued the Empire from particularly sticky situations. The first was a force of 15 ships and probably 1,500-1,900 men under Count Amadeo of Savoy (called the Green Count), which brought succour to John V in 1366-67, when it spent much of its time fighting the Bulgarians. The second was a French expedition, that of Jean le Meingre, Marshal Boucicault (who was later to be captured by the English at Agincourt). In 1399, during Bayezid I’s prolonged blockade of Constantinople, he answered Byzantine appeals for aid with an army of 600 men-at-arms, 600 varlets and 1,000 archers, receiving the title of Grand Constable; he had no horses with him according to one authority, but the fleet that brought him to the city included 3 galees huissieres (horse-transports), though admittedly they could not have carried more than 150-200 horses. On his departure with Manuel II at the end of the year (for it was he who persuaded the Emperor to make a personal appeal for military help throughout the courts of Europe) Boucicault left behind his lieutenant, Jean de Chateaumorand, with 100 men-at-arms, 100 varlets and ‘a quantity of bowmen’, who remained for a further 3 years, until September 1402. Interestingly, correspondence from John VII to King Henry IV in June of that year mentions that some English soldiers were also active in Constantinople’s defence. Similar small troops of Western Europeans continued to enter Byzantine service right up to the fall of the Empire in 1453.
World History
