Procopius on the Battle of Satala

Surprise, surprise, I'm not done with Procopian battles yet.  More of the historical in the sequel, however, and less of the military historiographical.

In the first book the idea was to try to discern something of Procopius' military mind, and how that fit into larger cultural and historiographical trends from his era.  Reading through these same accounts again, and in the same kind of detail, but with what I guess you could call a more balanced perspective, thanks in part to all the work I've done in between finishing the PhD and finishing the book, I'm encouraged to see that I'm still seeing that P has understood combat in the way that I surmised.  In other words, my head isn't in my hands and I'm not shouting, "Oh God, what have I done/what was I thinking?" It's tempting to say too that, in hindsight, it seems to have made a lot of sense to have tackled "Procopius on War" aspects in the order that I have.  Understanding something of his approach to describing and explaining combat should now make it easier to make sense of what he says.

I've just taken a look at the Battle of Satala (530) again, which you can find around 1.15.1ff.  For Procopius, the battle seems to hinge on the bravery of one elite Roman individual (a Florentius - 1.15.15), who charges the Persian line, at a point when no one side seems to be making much headway, and manages to seize the Persian general's standard (to strategikon shmeion) and thrust it to the ground before meeting his fate.  The Persians panic, freak out, and return to base in light of this, before heading home the next day.  And the battle ends.  For Procopius individuals, especially those in command positions, are important, and with in mind it's no surprise that things turned out the way they did.  But while this might tell us something about what Procopius and some of his peers thought about what happened and understood as important in what happened, does it tell us anything about might what have happened?

The trick, this time round, is to cut through what Procopius says, and I confess that upon looking it over it's more than a little maddening.  Still, there are some things we can pick out.  We find, for instance, the importance of numbers.  Procopius' implies that the Persians had almost twice as many soldiers as the Romans (30,000 to less than 15,000), and that they were all cavalry.  Whether these numbers are feasible or not is something that I'll have to look at later.  For the moment, while the difference does seem to be significant, it's also important to note that Procopius himself seems to imply that both sides are perhaps less than aware of some important details about each others' contingents.  Procopius (1.15.12) claims that the Persians couldn't work out how many men the Romans had - aided in part by the all the dust kicked up by the conditions, though I suspect too by the speed of the Roman advance, as well as their height advantage.  There is then a hint of the sensory here - sight, sound (implied if not stated), and perhaps too taste (we could imagine the taste of the dust on a hot summer's afternoon).  We also get some of the concerns highlighted by the authors of military manuals (Vegetius and Maurice):  conceal your numbers, especially if you're at a disadvantage.

I've been reading Decker's book on Byzantine warfare, and he implies that the Byzantine state (which includes this era) was lacking exceptional commanders, but did have some competent ones.  It's hard not to think that this might be a bit harsh, or at least that we have evidence of some better-than-competent performance is on view here, if Procopius is anything to go.  For we also read that the Roman force had been split up, with a comparatively small contingent (about 1000) sent up high onto the hills that surround Satala (and you can see them on Google Earth), while the rest moved inside the city walls.  The barbarians had moved outside the city walls when Sittas' force came down upon them from on high, as noted earlier.  He also split it in two - this allowed him to use gravity and the conditions to his advantage against a clearly superior-in-numbers foe.  It also seems to be the case that the Persians were amassed in some sort of confined space round the city walls, which meant that they were bunched up.  Indeed, if you take a look at Satala on Google Earth (best I can do without going there), the ancient city is in a little valley, with a plain, and is surrounded by hills.  In other words, it's easy to imagine this happening, especially if the Persians had as many men as Procopius claims.  So while Sittas may have had more than 1000 with him, contra Procopius, the conditions all seem to support Procopius' claims:  Persians crowded together, backed up against the city walls on one side, looking up at the hills on another side, and seeing an indeterminate number of men charging down on horseback, in the middle of a large dust cloud, and then another army charging out from the city gates.  It's easy to think that the Persians would have been terrified, as Procopius implies.

While the Persians may have had the numeric advantage, everything else so clearly favoured the Romans - spatially, they were much better off.  It's hard to work out (impossible really) what the units were at the Romans' advantage - 15,000 seems a large garrison for Satala, and one wonders when all the soldiers arrived and whether any were based there (that's something to check).  Interestingly, Procopius says all the participants on both sides were horses, which seems astonishing to me.  Either way, he also says that the battle became fierce, but even, with both sides constantly, owing to their abundant cavalry, charging and then withdrawing.  In this I'm reminded of Van Wees' suggestions about Homeric warfare, for which he drew on research on warfare in Polynesia (or, well, somewhere).  Basically, there's a lot of each side sitting back while contingents, individuals, what have going forward regularly to charge and so forth.  Not sure if the Homer/Van Wees/Polynesia (somewhere) parallel works - quite different kinds of soldiers involved (see Procopius' preface even).  It seems to imply not a lot of tactical wizardry, however, at least based on how things were going.  So maybe I'm coming round to Decker's claims (competent but not exceptional leaders - still, given they were outnumbered).

I better wrap this up - and so, this is the historical that I can deduce so far (at this early stage).  Procopius's account is short on detail, full of drama, but most certainly plausible.  This brings us back to the charge of Florentius:  is this not, then, too a plausible outcome for why the Romans won?  Given that the two sides seem to have been evenly matched based on all the other available criteria, if Florentius' charge is all that's left, might it not be the reason for the outcome?   This battle may not tell us too much about how the Romans waged war in the sixth century, but I think it does point to the veracity of Procopius' writing, which in turn would lend greater credence to those other, more detailed battles that he describes.  They'll all have to be checked independently and compared with all available evidence, but suggestive.  NOTE:  I tend not to edit these posts, so apologies for typos/moments of awkwardness. 

Finding Evidence for Strategic Thinking in the Age of Justinian

Besides the aforementioned Roman military textbook, I'm also working on the follow-up to book one on Procopius.  The follow-up exists - something I've referred to in past blog posts - because of some of the troubles I had with that earlier project.  Basically, it nearly fell off the rails completely, then I attended a conference in Oxford (2014 on Procopius), which got me back on, by which point I had already made plans to go in a different direction.  The result was that the original project was rejuvenated, while the new one became a follow-up.  In a nutshell, that's why it exists.

Anyway, I happen to be on sabbatical, and so I have the time to work on these two projects, and if all goes well I'll have made considerable progress by the time the period draws to a close in July.  Like a lot of things, my enthusiasm waxes and wanes depending on my progress, but there is as much positive as negative, which is more than I can say about the hockey I've been watching most of the year (and am right now - mostly negative).

Today, and presumably for the next little while, one of the topics in that project that I'll be working is strategy, fortifications, frontiers and Procopius, in part because I've been (re-)reading Procopius' Buildings, with what could be considered a fine-tooth comb. A number of things are jumping out at me this time round, and one that I'll be devoting more attention to, and which I want to flag here, is his emphasis on defence.  In particular, my reading of Procopius' Buildings so far seems to point towards a strong emphasis on defence in east Rome, and there is a real sense that the purpose of the fortifications was both to monitor and to prevent/check incursions of Saracens and Persians.  Now, maybe this isn't all that surprising.  The Buildings is on, well, buildings, and so of course he's going to talk about fortifications, and if you're talking about fortifications it seems self-evident that you'll be talking about their defensive properties, particularly based on the character of late antique fortifications.  So, of course its defence, and scholars have argued in support of this defensive mentality for quite a while - Luttwak and defence-in-depth, Greatrex more recently on a longer-term defensive mentality. 

Now, in this book/project, the idea is to test as often and wherever possible Procopius' views/comments/descriptions/ with other evidence, whatever shape it comes in.  How do you do this, however, when your subject is strategy?  Given I'm dealing with Justinian, what I'd like is his memoirs, commentarii, or some such thing that sets his foreign policy thinking.  Of course, these things don't exist.  Now, if I'm arguing for, or better testing for whether the strategic mentality with respect to the frontiers was defend and if I'm taking as my starting point the Buildings, there's always the Wars to compare.  I could (will) take a look at all known conflicts in the east and identify who in each case is the aggressor.  If you're always been attacked, then a defensive mentality would seem likely.  On the other hand, it is presumably more than a little bit sketchy to check Procopius by means of Procopius.  In other words, it would be easy enough for him to make sure his statements in one of those works support his statements in the other. 

Thus, I'll certainly have to take a look at the other accounts we have, works like those of Count Marcellinus, Malalas, Pseudo-Joshua, Pseudo-Zachariah, and Agathias.  It would be helpful to visit all known fortifications, but of course this isn't feasible (cost, political situation, etc.), so I suspect that Google Earth and assorted published excavation reports and otherwise will become my friends.  On the other hand, a fort on its own can't say what a fort is doing, and that's where things get stickier.  I could also take a look at Justinian's legislation - does he delve into defensive concerns at any point in his massive collection of Roman law, and if he does is it the case that this reflects a defensive strategic mentality?  There's what evidence of propaganda I can find too - though would you emphasize a defensive mentality?

If I adopt the definition of strategy that I've adopted in the past (following Kagan's 2006 article), that would mean that I should look for evidence of the Roman state using its resources to pursue various foreign policy ends, and in the earlier Roman imperial situation we have all sorts of really good evidence for troop movements, dispositions, and so forth.  In late antiquity, especially after about AD 400, the situation is dire.  The Notitia Dignitatum is a fabulous piece of evidence, and recent research has emphasized the accuracy of the list as we have it for the east (based on examinations of the situations in Egypt and in the Caucasus).  Should we really expect the list as we have it to still be applicable by the time that Procopius is writing though, nearly 150 years later?  Perhaps not, or not exactly, and unfortunately we just don't have something from the sixth century that I'm aware of that provides the desired level of detail.  What are we, then, to do?  To be honest, I'm not sure yet, though I'll be getting to this issue soon enough.

If the defensive approach does turn out to the case at least with respect to the east, that makes for a nice contrast with the wars in Africa and Italy, so clearly offensively-minded, at least on the surface.  I was wondering if these could be taken as attempts of Justinian to counter criticisms that he was too defensively-minded.  If that were true, however, why not take a more offensive approach in the east rather than the west?  Also, if all anyone has known for some time was a defensive approach in the east, who would really criticize a presumed-defensive mentality? 

So, I anticipate a considerable amount of trouble with this topic, and more so than for some of the others that I have in mind.  Only time will tell, I guess, whether I can't find some sort of resolution.

The Roman Military Revolution

One of the projects that I have on the go at the moment is a textbook/survey of Roman military history that will be arranged thematically, and run from the late republic (let's say the Gracchi) to the late empire, at least in the west (let's say Theodosius II, even though he's an eastern emperor).  Today I've been working on the two main background chapters:  the first is the historical overview, which will present a fleeting survey of Roman history over the course of the period in question, with an emphasis on those events that have special bearing on the subject matter (Roman military); the second surveys the sources, and the historiography and varied approaches to Roman military history.  The first chapter is well under way - I have some material from past courses that I'm going to use for this, with some new material tacked on.  As it happens, I have a good chunk for the late republic through the high empire, and less for late antiquity.  Given that in some ways I feel far more comfortable about late antiquity, this is good news.

The second chapter is well underway too.  The first half will present the myriad of sources at the disposal of students of Roman military history, and my plan in the chapter and the book is to incorporate as much of it as possible into my discussions.  Thus, it won't be a history of the military based on the literary sources, or the archaeological evidence, or the papyri, or the epigraphy, but all of this and more (legal evidence, visual evidence, etc.).  Sprinkled in amongst those overviews of the various sources will be some detailed discussions of select pieces of evidence that the problems they create and the questions that arise.  So, for example, I'll take a brief look at Caesar's take on the rivalry between Titus and Pullo, Ammianus' description of his harrowing escape from Amida, Hadrian's speech to his troops in Africa (which survives in an inscription), our evidence for the soldier-poets from North Africa, the famous birthday party invitation from Vindolanda, and so forth.  There'll be a few - and I'll likely have to cut down my working list to keep the discussion readable and workable.

The second half of the chapter provides an overview of the scholarship on the military (not in any way complete) and various approaches that have been adopted, and it will range from the impact of Keegan's "Face of Battle" to notions of western way of war, under which Rome would fall, and cultural readings of military history, those which look at the relationship between how war should be fought (in Rome's eyes) and how it actually was.  In this discussion I'll raise the issue of military revolutions, and this, at long last, brings me to the subject of this little post. 

Rome's military is famous, perhaps justly so.  Its impact continued well after the end of Rome into the middle ages, and resurfaced again in late medieval/renaissance/early modern Europe, thanks in part to the influence of Vegetius (somewhat surprisingly) and the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the concomitant flood of things Roman, and Greek, to the west, amongst other things.  What surprises me, however, is that no major revolutionary advance has been attributed to the Roman military.  Indeed, most change in the Roman military was gradual, and this is true for nearly every aspect, from their equipment to their tactical preferences.  In other words, ostensibly, there doesn't seem to have been any one thing that revolutionized Rome's military and which we could say led to its impressive string of successes, like the advent of iron weaponry, or the gunpowder.  Rather, the Romans were good at a whole host of things, few if any of which could be attributed to them specifically. 

The only possible exceptions - at least to my mind at this point in the writing process - might be the professionalization of the military under Augustus, admittedly a process that seems to have been under way for decades before that.  When I say professional what I mean is:  men were paid to fight on a permanent basis, the military became a career for a large number of people, and the state even regulated their supplies, housing, equipment, training, payment, and so forth.  One issue is whether this really should be deemed a military revolution - or, like with so much else in the military sphere, whether it should be considered a specifically Roman development.  It does seem to have been an important thing, and perhaps played no small part in Rome's longevity, but they gained their empire without such a thing.  Could they have started with a professional military, and if they had, would they have been so successful in accruing an empire?  But then, as I say, what really constitutes a professional army?  Is it misleading in Rome's case because it seems to resemble modern militaries?  What about the Macedonian army?  Or the assorted Assyrian armies?  Or the Egyptian ones?  Because they organized, supplied, and supported their armies in slightly different ways does that make them any less professional? 

Of course, even if we cannot attribute any particular military revolution to Rome, it's probably worth asking whether any state, kingdom, nation, or empire that could be associated with any such development actually enjoyed the level of success that the Romans did.  In other words, does it matter?  It seems to worked to their benefit to be good at a large number of things, revolutionary in none, and perhaps excellent in but a few.

Perhaps one important issue that I will have to consider in the book is why I think they were so successful in the first place.  The Roman military succeeded because of X, Y, and Z.  Another post, perhaps.  Intriguingly, some answers might be sought in the armies and warfare that immediately followed Rome in the Byzantine east and early medieval west.  To follow what I said above, it is perhaps significant that some military historians see "Roman military organization, training, strategic and tactical principles, and patterns of campaigning as pervasive throughout the early medieval world" (Morillo and Pavkovic 2013:  96-97).  In other words, it's this sort of collection of things that are seen as representative of Roman military prowess, not any one thing.