After Nicaea and Epiros, Trebizond (ancient Trapezus) was the third major fragment of the Byzantine Empire to survive the Latin conquest of 1204, being established by Alexios Komnenos with the aid of Georgian troops during the confusion that followed the fall of Constantinople that year. Despite vigorous expansion Trebizond remained something of a backwater, the least significant of the Byzantine successor-states, and its armed forces were accordingly small. The survival of the state depended more on its geography and diplomacy than on military strength, with the Trapezuntine Emperors (styled ‘Grand Komnenoi’) adroitly fending off the Turks by a policy of marital alliances that successfully kept the Ottomans from their doorstep until as late as the second half of the 15th century. One Ottoman attack was beaten off in 1442, and in 1456 another was bought off by payment of a heavy tribute, but in 1461, after a 21-day siege and several engagements before the city walls, Trebizond finally surrendered to a massive Ottoman army that Kritovoulos records was composed of 60,000 horse and 80,000 foot.
The Empire was organised in traditional Byzantine fashion into 7 banda, comprising from west to east Trikomia, Palaiomatzouka, Matzouka, Trebizond, Gemora, Sourmaina and Rhizaion, plus the thema of Greater Lazia. Smallholders of bandon lands were called by various military terms such as strategoi, phylakes, stratiotoi and so on, which makes it seem likely that the bandons individually provided for their own defence. Greco-Laz frontier lords likewise defended the Pontic passes with their own castles and garrisons (the latter described by travellers as ‘brigands and evil folk’), at first of their own volition but by the late-14th century as an ‘obligation’ performed in exchange for governmental recognition of their lands as pronoiai. At court level, the central military establishment was comprised of the Grand Domestic (later the Pansebastos), Grand Constable, Protostrator, Polemarchos (later the Grand Stratopedarch), and the Grand Duke. Beneath this outward Byzantine veneer, however. Eastern influence predominated, evidenced by the use of such terms as amirkandarios and hourchi in place of protospatharios and akolouthos, the latter in addition significantly carrying a bow before the Emperor in procession. Significantly too, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo in 1404 described how Trapezuntine soldiers used ‘the sword and bow, the like of what arms the Turks employ, and they ride after the fashion of these last.’ (See also figures 61 and 62.) Indeed, it is likely that the majority of the Empire’s armed forces was made up of Turkish and native elements, the latter comprised chiefly of Tzannoi (in fact actually Laz, a Georgian people which wholly absorbed the Tzans in the 14th century). These latter were probably the responsibility of the office of Grand Constable, a post actually held for much of this period by a Laz family with the surname of Tzanichites. Many of them were settled in Greater Lazia, which Anthony Bryer describes rather nicely as ‘a sort of Laz tribal reservation’.
As already mentioned, the Empire’s forces were always small — hardly surprising when its total population probably comprised no more than 250,000, even Trebizond itself possibly having a population of only 4,000 by 1438. The contingent of troops that it had been obliged to provide to the Seljuks in the 13th century is said by the traveller Simon de Saint-Quentin to have numbered only ‘200 lances’, and most 14th century armies appear to have similarly been counted only in hundreds. In 1355 the loss of 50 or 400 men (accounts differ) in combat with the Turks at Cheriana was counted a major disaster; in another engagement, near Marmara in 1370, the Grand Komnenos Alexios III was accompanied only by ‘some few men’ — in fact just 100 cavalry; and in 1380 he is recorded as having ‘divided his army into two parts’, comprising 600 infantry in the one part and ‘the cavalry and another very large party of infantry’ in the other. In fact the very largest Trapezuntine army on record, dating to 1366, comprised a grand total of just 2,000 cavalry and infantry. Admittedly Sanudo in the mid-15 th century put Trapezuntine strength at 25,000 cavalry, or 15,000 in the event of a campaign beyond the frontier, and Ludovico da Bologna in 1459-60 put it at 20,000, but neither of these can be considered in any way reliable. What the Trapezuntines lacked in numbers they made up for in tenacity; an account of c. 1350 (al-Umari) confirms that they were ‘warlike men and fearless’, adding of the Grand Komnenos’ army that ‘although few in number and ill-equipped, [they] are however heroes, like terrible lions who never let their prey escape.’
Further troops might be obtained from the Empire’s various Turkish and Georgian allies, many of them actually related to the Trapezuntine Imperial family by marriage. In 1404 Clavijo records Manuel Ill’s four main ‘vassals’ as comprising his nephew Altamur, once amir of Limnia but now ruling over Boona and St Nikias in Chalybia, ‘master of over 10,000 horsemen’; his son-in-law Suleiman Bey, amir of Chalybia; Melesianos of Oinaion, with a mixed population of Pontic Greeks and Turks; and Leon II Kabazites, principal of the frontier lords mentioned earlier, who ruled the Armenian frontier from his fortress at Sigana and who told Clavijo that he ‘had continually to defend himself against the Turks who were his neighbours on all sides’. A defensive league against the Ottomans proposed by Ludovico da Bologna lists an even grander array of potentates in alliance with Trebizond, comprising the following: Uzun Hasan, chief of the Aq-Qoyunlu (White Sheep Turks), married to the Grand Komnenos David’s niece, with 50,000 men; David’s brother-in-law George VIII, King of Georgia, with 60,000 men; Qwarqware II of Akhaltsikh, a Georgian, later ruler of Zamtche (Greater Lazia), with 20,000 cavalry; Dadian (Duke) Liparit I of Mingrelia (another Georgian) and his son (Chaman-Dawle?), with 60,000; Rabia, the Georgian prince of Abkhazia in Armenia, with his brother, barons and 30,000 men; Bagrat of Imeretia and Mamia of Guria, both Georgians; Dardebech (?) ‘Lord of Lesser Armenia’ (Cilicia, therefore probably the amir of Adana), with 10,000 or 20,000 men; and ‘the nation of the Giths [Djiks or Circassians] and Alani’ who promised ‘to fight under the banner of George, the king of the Georgians.’ The sizes of their contingents of men are clearly exaggerated, but it seems likely that if they were all divided by 10 they might then not be far from the truth (the same also applying to Ludovico’s figure of 30 galleys and 20,000 men for the Trapezuntines themselves). This League was also to have included the Grand Karaman Ibrahim Bey, and Ismael Isfendiyaroglu Bey of Sinope, amir of Kastamonu. Interestingly, the forces of the latter, whose territory was invaded by Mehmed II during the same campaign that saw the fall of Trebizond, are recorded to have been made up of 400 ‘large and small’ guns crewed by 2,000 men (or 400 guns and 2,000 handgunners as Finlay would have it) plus
10,000 men armed with the traditional Turkish combination of spear, bow, sword and mace. This may imply that Trebizond too had artillery by the mid-15th century, though it does not appear in any of the sources.
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