The mid-14th century ‘Book of Offices’ of Pseudo-Codinus gives us a full list of the Empire’s court hierarchy, from which the following information is principally drawn. However, it should be noted that this source gives ‘a picture of what the outward appearance of the Empire still contrived to present rather than the melancholy reality within’.6 Therefore although all of the posts listed did indeed exist, many of them indicated the degree of favour with which their holders were regarded by the Emperor rather than any special military competence — so much so, in fact, that although the posts listed here are all of the senior military and naval commands, many armies were actually commanded in the field by the holders of non-military court posts, such as the protovestiarios (the Imperial treasurer), the mesazon (court mediator) and even the pinkernes (the Imperial butler).
In descending order of rank, the Empire’s senior military and naval field officers during the 14th-15th centuries were probably as follows:
Grand Domestic {Megas Domestikos) — Commander-in-chief of the army after the Emperor.
Grand Duke {Megas Dux) — Commander of the Imperial navy. This title was often purely honorary, as when conferred on foreigners.
Protostrator — The Grand Domestic’s deputy, in effect the Marshal.
Grand Stratopedarch {Megas Stratopedarches) — Responsible for the commissariat.
Grand Primmikerios — Commander of the Imperial retinue.
Grand Constable {Megas Konostablos) — Commander of the Western European mercenaries.
Grand Dhoungarius of the Watch.
Grand Hetaereiarchos — Commander of mercenary elements of the army.
Domestic of the Scholae — Originally the pre-eminent military post, but seemingly no more than ceremonial by this time.
Grand Dhoungarius of the Fleet — The Grand Duke’s deputy.
Protospatharios — Another virtually obsolete post, originally commander of the Emperor’s sword-bearers. Grand Archon — Originally commander of the Imperial retinue, now deputy to the Grand Primmikerios. Grand Tzaousios — A sort of sergeant-at-arms for the Imperial retinue with responsibilities for court ceremony. The term derives from Turkish tchaouch or cavus.
Skouterios — Imperial standard-bearer.
Admiral {Amyriales) — Third-in-command of the navy.
Acolyte {Akolouthos) — Commander of the Varangian guardsmen.
Archon of the Allaghion — By this time deputy of the Grand Archon, but originally commander of the Imperial retinue.
Protallagator — Commander of the Paramonai. After the establishment of the despotate of the Morea there was a Protallagator there too.
Domestic of the Walls — Responsible for the defences of Constantinople.
Hetaereiarchos — Deputy of the Grand Hetaereiarchos.
Stratopedarch of the Mourtatoi — Commander of the bow-armed guardsmen of the same name. Stratopedarch of the Tzakones — Commander of the oarsmen of the Emperor’s personal galley. Stratopedarch of the Monokaballoi — Commander of the ‘Cavalrymen with one horse’. Pseudo-Codinus also mentions cavalrymen with 2 and 3 horses in this part of his text.
Stratopedarch of the Tzangratoroi — Commander of the crossbowmen. It is possibly men of his command that we find armed with crossbows at the final siege. Alternatively, like the French ‘Master of the Crossbowmen’ he may have been responsible for all of the army’s infantry.
Premier Count — Another naval officer.
The 15th century: the end of the Byzantine Empire
The series of civil wars that plagued the Empire in the 1370s and 1380s left the field wide open for Ottoman expansion in the Balkans, where piece by piece the Turks were able to gradually cut all lines of communication by land between Constantinople and Western Europe. Under considerable pressure — and with her armed forces dwindling to the point where most of the armies and navies involved in her domestic squabbles were provided by Turks, Venetians and Genoese — it was only a matter of time until the Empire had to make its formal submission to the Ottomans. Chalkokondyles refers to a treaty being made between John V and the Turks as early as 1362. Probably a formal treaty was drawn up with Murad I in 1372/3, by which Byzantium became a tributary state of the Ottoman Empire; certainly John V and his army accompanied an Ottoman expedition in Anatolia in the spring of 1373. In 1379 John agreed to pay an increased tribute and to provide a contingent of Byzantine troops to the sultan every spring. The figure of 12,000 men given for this contingent in one source is pure fantasy; Doukas, seemingly recording a renewal of the treaty between John and Bayezid I in 1389, gives the true size of this auxiliary contingent as just 100 men — adequate testimony of the Empire’s military potential by this date, when Serbia was expected to provide ten times that figure. Doukas continues: ‘More than once Emperor Manuel [II] was sent by his father Emperor John [V] with 100 armed Roman troops, to campaign in the service of Bayezid when he was fighting against the Turks in Pamphylia.’ In 1390 Manuel even had to lead a Byzantine contingent at the Ottoman siege and capture of Philadelphia, the last free Byzantine city in Anatolia. Small wonder, then, that during this campaign of 1390-91 he should write that ‘one thing is unbearable for us: we fight with [the Turks] and for them, and this means that we increase their strength and decrease our own.’
Repeated Byzantine appeals to Europe for financial and military aid, even when made in person throughout the courts of Europe as was done by Manuel in 1399-1403, tended to fall on ears deafened by religious discord (Europe being Catholic while the Empire was Orthodox), and even when this particular problem was nominally overcome by the unpopular Union of 1439, little help was forthcoming from the West. The Empire contracted yet further, until Bertrandon de la Brocquiere, visiting Constantinople in 1433, observed that it extended no more than 2-days’ ride from the city walls. Pero Tafur a few years later (1437) noted in addition that for its defence the city ‘had but few men’; indeed, there is good reason to suppose that by the time of Mehmed IPs siege in 1453 its regular army probably comprised no more than 1,000-1,500 men.
For the final defence of the city that year a garrison of some 7-9,000 men was raised, of which 4,7737 were Byzantines according to George Sphrantzes, who took a census of them on the Emperor’s orders at the beginning of the siege. The balance (Sphrantzes says ‘200’, clearly an error for 2,000) were foreigners, chiefly Genoese and Venetians as we shall see, but also including others. The Anconitan consul Benvenuto wrote that the defenders numbered 7,000 in all, under 300 provisiores. Jacopo Tetaldi similarly put the garrison at 6-7,000 fighting men ‘and not more’, and Doukas reckoned no more than 8,000. Leonard of Chios, like Benvenuto and Tetaldi an eye-witness, put the number of Byzantine defenders as ‘at the most 6,000’, plus ‘hardly as many as 3,000’ Italians — ‘Genoese, Venetians and those who had come secretly to help from Pera [Galata]’. Genoese Galata was technically neutral during the siege, but a letter sent to Genoa by Lomellino, its podesta, confirms that he ‘sent to the defence of the city all the mercenaries from Chios [probably Catalans] and all those who had been sent from Genoa, and a great number of the citizens and burghers from here, with. . . members of my own establishment.’ Doukas too mentions the presence of‘many armed men from the suburb of Galata’, who served on a sort of rota basis, changing over at night, to prevent the Turks from noticing that too many men were missing from Galata itself at any one time. (The Turks were not fooled, however, since Pseudo-Sphrantzes records that after the fall of the city Mehmed ‘despatched men to Galata, who arrested and executed many individuals.’)
The principal Genoese element amongst the defenders in 1453 was that of Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, who though only granted the rank of Protostratort by the Emperor was effectively in command of the city’s defence. He arrived with a force of 2 large ships carrying 700 men (according to Barbaro) equipped and raised at his own expense, some of them from Chios and Rhodes ‘and that part of the sea’. All the other contemporary accounts give lower figures: the ‘Slavic Chronicle’ says 600 men, for instance, while Leonard says 400, Chalkokondyles 300, Benvenuto 400, and Pseudo-Sphrantzes 300 (though he later records Giustiniani commanding ‘400 Italian and Roman soldiers’). Even Barbaro, having given the figure of 700, later records the defenders of the Gate of St Romanus, where Giustiniani was posted, as ‘300 fully-armed men in good order, all foreigners with not a Greek among them. . and these 300 men had with them some good cannon and good [hand?] guns and a large number of crossbows and other equipment.’ The discrepancy of 3-400 men can probably be put down to the fact that most of the chroniclers counted only the soldiers and failed to include in their figures the seamen who provided the crews of Giustiniani’s ships, which would have almost certainly numbered 3-400 men. Kritovoulos actually says that Giustiniani’s force comprised ‘400 men in full armour [kataphraktot], not counting the rest of the ships’ crews’, and even he later refers to them numbering only 300 men when drawn up on the city walls. Those raised or hired in Rhodes and Chios possibly included Greeks, while some at least were quite probably Catalan mercenaries (110 of Mytilene’s 500 defenders in 1462 were Catalans from Chios). Also amongst his cosmopolitan company was a military engineer named John or Johannes Grant, called a German by Pseudo-Sphrantzes but according to Runciman possibly a Scot.
There were in addition Genoese contingents other than that of Giustiniani, and the names of many of their commanders are recorded in the chronicles; among them were Paolo, Antonio and Troilo Bocchiardo, Giacomo Coco, Bartolomeo Soligo, Maurizio Cattaneo, and Geronimo and Leonardo di Langasco. Pseudo-Sphrantzes also mentions an otherwise unknown Genoese named Manuel defending the fortress of the Golden Gate with ‘200 archers and crossbowmen’.
The Venetian contribution to the city’s defence comprised 3 merchant galleys and 2 light galleys, each of these two groups being commanded by a captain, Alviso Diedo and Gabriele Trevisiano respectively. Barbaro records that these ships landed 1,000 men to assist in the defence of the walls: ‘The master of each galley went with the crew of his galley, their banners before them, and the Captains of the galleys went ahead of the masters.’ In overall command of the Venetians was their bailli in Constantinople, Girolamo Minotto, while other prominent leaders included Filippo and Jacobi Contarini, Zaccaria Grioni, Lodovico and Antonio Bembo and Teodoro Caristo (‘the best archer on earth’). Another prominent Italian contingent was that led by Cardinal Isidore, which included the chronicler Leonard of Chios, bishop of Mytilene. It comprised 200 men, including handgunners and crossbowmen, of whom according to Doukas 50 were Italians (actually Neapolitans) and the rest were ‘hired for pay’ from amongst the ‘Latins’ of Chios, the money having been provided by the pope. Other foreign elements amongst the defenders included resident Catalans under their consul, Pere Julia, who were joined by a number of Catalan seamen. There was even a small Turkish contingent present, under the exiled Ottoman prince Orkhan, grandson of Sultan Suleiman I (1402-10); Barbaro tells us he was ‘in the pay of the Emperor’ and that during the siege he guarded ‘one of the quarters of the city on the seaward side with the Turks in his pay’.
Of the native Byzantine soldiers who fought in Constantinople’s defence in 1453 we know surprisingly little other than the names of their leaders — men like the Grand Duke Loukas Notaras, the Grand Domestic Andronikos Cantacuzene, Nikephoros and Theophilos Palaeologus, Demetrios and John Cantacuzene and John Dalmata. Pseudo-Sphrantzes says that Nikephoros and Demetrios commanded a mobile reserve of 700 men to ‘assist wherever reinforcements were needed’, while Doukas refers to how ‘the Grand Duke patrolled the city’ with a similar force of 500 (or ‘about 500’) men, which would seem from Barbaro’s account to have included 100 cavalrymen. It may also have included mobile artillery, or so we may suppose from Pseudo-Sphrantzes’ account of an argument between Notaras and Giustiniani when the latter ‘asked for the transfer of some pieces of artillery from the district guarded by the Grand Duke to his own area.’ According to Mihailovic the Emperor himself led a reserve of 1,000 infantry after the Turks had broken into the city, while Barbaro says he was accompanied by ‘a great part of his barons and knights’.
World History
