Byzantine Heavy Cavalry

[Dave Knight]

I am no Byzantine expert so would appreciate some assistance.  My understanding is that they evolved from being dual armed with lance and bow to mixed units of lancers and archers to finally becoming just lance armed.  Is this correct and if so when did the changes take place?  I am interested in general, but particularly want to understand their arms when fighting the Lombards and Normans in the 11th Century.

[nikgaukroger]

I won't claim to be an expert either, but here is my take on it mainly from the manuals.

From Prokopios in the C6th the cavalry appear to be primarily armoured horse archers of whom some also carried a spear. They were certainly also happy to charge and fight hand to hand as well as shoot, but I'm not sure I'd call them "lancers" at this stage.

The Strategikon of the late C6th/early C7th seems to want the cavalry to be double armed but does appear to accept that in reality some will be "lancers" and others "archers" in the formation. Tactics certainly appear to be a "lance charge" being shot in by the archers in the formation. However, (some of) the archers can also be detached to operate more on their own ahead of the "lancer" formation.

The Taktika of Leon (early C10th) basically repeats the Strategikon. However, some historians such as John Haldon think that archery declined in the "Thematic" period.

The Sylloge Tacticorum which is (probably) slightly later than the Taktika has the "line" cavalry in shallower formations than previously with 3 ranks of lancers and 2 of archers. Again the tactic is a lancer charge shot in by the integral archers. This work also introduces the katafraktoi who are similar but in heavier armour and use a "wedge" formation.

The Praecepta of Nikephoros Phokas and the update of that by Nikephoros Ouranos (later C10th and early C11th) are very similar to the Sylloge but the katafraktoi weapons change a bit.

[nikgaukroger]

Forgot to mention in the later manuals there are also dedicated small bodies of cavalry, some mainly horse archers, who operate ahead of and on the flanks of the main body.

In terms of the period you are interested in Eric McGeer's "Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Byzantine Warfare in the Tenth Century" covers the manuals.

[stevenneate]

John Haldon's book Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565–1204, London: UCL Press, 1999 is probably the best study I've read on the Byzantine army, and he goes into detail contrasting performance with the tactical manuals. He contrasts the variety in expectation and performance between the eastern and western themes in 8-9th centuries, the Golden Age of reforms and performance that came after and problems that eventuated after the 3 great Emperors.

What I got out of this for the Thematic Period of the 8-9th centuries was that all was not as clear cut and uniform as the army lists would have us believe! Quality of mounted archery and equipment was variable from Theme to Theme, infantry was below par and everyone was seldom singing from the same hymn book (reference the two periods of Iconoclasm that seriously distracted the central Empire when enemies were pressing from all sides).

I was so inspired I built the army but my performance with it was so appalling that I turned to iconoclasm, sold it and erased it from my memory.

[Martin Smith]

While trying not to hijack the thread....What's the current view in whether Byzantine cavalry ever rode partially armoured / 1/2 armoured horses?
(I have a bunch of them, 1980's Minifigs, which I trot out now and then....just wondering if at any stage they might actually be 'accurate').

[nikgaukroger]

Mentioned for front ranks in the Strategikon and Taktika of Leon. The later manuals don't mention it, only the katafraktoi have horse armour in those.

[vexillia]

That's good to hear.  I've just finished painting a dozen with half-armoured horses. 

[Andreas Johansson]

There appears to be no pictorial or archaeological evidence whatever for Byzantine (or Avar) use of half-armoured horses, but shah Khusrau II had himself depicted riding a half-armoured horse at Taq-e Bostan.

The lack of archaeological evidence isn't particularly surprising - only metal horse armour is likely to survive at all, and what's likely to survive is individual lamellae that you can't readily tell if they were intended as armour for a man or a horse, let alone for half a horse or a whole one - but the lack of pictorial evidence is odder, as is the lack of mention in narrative sources.

The best guess is probably that it existed, but was far from universal even among officers and front-rankers.

This book chapter available online may be of some interest: Equestrian Military Equipment of the Eastern Roman Armies in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries

[nikgaukroger]

Khusrau's equipment for man and horse is pretty much the same as the Strategikon describes for a fully equipped front ranker 

[stevenneate]

Although he was on the other side. Either he sued the Strategikon for plagarism or he was saying "look what I got, and you don't!"

We're in that conflict where we have the theory but no hard evidence (first-hand accounts, pictorial, tombs etc) of the practice. So close! However, the theory is at least informative of what they wanted to field so there is something to work from.

[davidharvey1]

Personally, I find myself wondering whether the traditional narrative of Byzantine cavalry evolution may be a little too simple.

Looking at the tenth-century manuals, particularly those associated with the age of Nikephoros Phokas and John Tzimiskes, integrated archery appears absolutely central to Byzantine cavalry doctrine. Whether every cavalryman was genuinely proficient with both bow and lance is perhaps unlikely, but the ideal seems to have remained a force capable of combining missile fire, manoeuvre and shock action, plus different formations for detached skirmish and harrassment. For battle though where formations contained distinct ranks of archers and lancers, they were still intended to operate as a single tactical system.

What interests me is when and why this appears to change. My current understanding is that there is a gradual evolution from predominantly dual-armed cavalry, to mixed formations of specialist lancers and archers, and eventually towards cavalry whose primary battlefield role was shock combat with the lance. If that is broadly correct, the decisive period of change seems to have been the eleventh century, rather than as used to be thought gradual previous decline - though there would have been internal variation by geography and over time and by class/quality  of troops.

The Norman and Lombard wars seem particularly relevant. Byzantine commanders increasingly encountered highly effective western heavy cavalry, while at the same time relying more on specialist horse archers from Pecheneg, Turkic and later Cuman backgrounds. It seems plausible that this may have encouraged greater specialisation rather than the older ideal of every cavalryman performing multiple functions.

A related question concerns horse armour. We have literary evidence for barded horses and I believe there are some archaeological finds from Constantinople, possibly from the later Komnenian period, which have been interpreted as horse armour. Is there comparable archaeological evidence from the tenth or eleventh centuries, or are we largely dependent on the manuals and artistic depictions?

There are also questions about army size with Sylvanne suggesting very large cavalry armes operating in the C10th. Add to that influence from the east, whether Arab or later Turkic which are often ignored.

[Andreas Johansson]

FWIW, I suspect there may have been both gradual decline in the "thematic" period, and a western-influenced switch of the native cavalry to pure lancers in the 11-12C. It seems plausible enough that there was a revival of archery skills in around the 10C, at least in the more professional parts of the army.

Eastern influence could rhyme with this - the replacement of the Sassanids by the Arabs as the main eastern enemy would presumably reduce the pressure to maintain horse archery skills, while the increasing employment of Turks by the Abbasids from the 9th century would tend to increase it again. Then of course trajectories would diverge in the Comnenan period with the Seljuqs keeping emphasis on horse archers and dual-armed cavalry while the Byzantines appear to westernize.

(Mayhap related to the Comneni placing what seems to me oddly low importance on retaking the Anatolian plateau from the Turks compared to confronting Latin rivals?)

[davidharvey1]

Just to add another layer of complexity, from about the ninth century onwards mounted archery seems to have become much more widespread across the Islamic military elite, not simply among the Turkic ghilmān. One reason I wonder about this is the Hamdanid literary evidence. Poets such as al-Mutanabbī, writing for Sayf al-Dawla, and Abū Firās al-Hamdānī, himself a frontier commander, repeatedly celebrate the elite cavalryman using the bow alongside the lance and sword. They are, of course, writing panegyric rather than tactical manuals, so they must be used with caution, but they do suggest that proficiency in mounted archery had become part of the expected skill set of the aristocratic cavalry more generally. It would therefore be interesting to compare this evidence with the Byzantine manuals and ask whether both military traditions were evolving in parallel under the pressures of the tenth-century frontier wars.