THE ART OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES 23
The Stratêgikon of the Emperor Maurice
3.08. The Stratêgikon of the Emperor Maurice
The Byzantine army may be said to owe its peculiar form to the Emperor Maurice, a prince whose reign is one of the chief landmarks in the history of the lower empire. The fortunate preservation of his Stratêgikon suffices to show us that the reorganization of the troops of the East was mainly due to him. Contemporary historians also mention his reforms, but without descending to details, and inform us that, though destined to endure, they won him much unpopularity among the soldiery. Later writers, however, have erroneously attributed these changes to the more celebrated warrior Heraclius, the prince who bore the Roman standards further than any of his predecessors into the lands of the East. In reality, the army of Heraclius had already been reorganized by the worthy but unfortunate Maurice.
The most important of Maurice’s alterations was the elimination of that system somewhat resembling the Teutonic comitatus, which had crept from among the Foederati into the ranks of the regular Roman army. The loyalty of the soldier was secured rather to the emperor than to his immediate superiors, by making the appointment of all officers above the rank of centurion a care of the central government. The commander of an army or division had thus no longer in his hands the power and patronage which had given him the opportunity of becoming dangerous to the state. The men found themselves under the orders of delegates of the emperor, not of quasi-independent authorities who enlisted them as personal followers rather than as units in the military establishment of the empire.
This reform Maurice succeeded in carrying out, to the great benefit of the discipline and loyalty of his army. He next took in hand the reducing of the whole force of the empire to a single form of organization. The rapid decrease of the revenues of the state, which had set in towards the end of Justinian’s reign, and continued to make itself more and more felt, had apparently resulted in a great diminution in the number of foreign mercenaries serving in the Roman army. To the same end contributed the fact that of the Lombards, Herules, and Gepidæ, the nations who had furnished the majority of the imperial Foederati, one race had removed to other seats, while the others had been exterminated. At last the number of the foreign corps had sunk to such a low ebb, that there was no military danger incurred in assimilating their organization to that of the rest of the army.
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