Late Byzantine elites and military literature: authors, readers and manuscripts (c.1050-c.1450)

Abstract

Byzantium was heir to a tradition of Greek and Roman military literature stretching back to the fourth century BC, which was manifest both in the collection, editing and adaptation of surviving texts from classical antiquity and in the composition of numerous new treatises devoted to warfare on land and sea. This broad genre always exhibited a diversity of content, style, language and approach, reflective of different categories of author and reader. Originating in a research project to prepare a full critical edition of Nikephoros Ouranos’ Taktika (c.1000), conventionally acknowledged as the longest and last representative of this literary and intellectual tradition, this paper explores the subsequent and more obscure history of this genre in the Late Byzantine period. Aspects of continuity are discernible in isolated instances of military writing, specifically a tactical opusculum by the scholar-courtier Michael Psellos (c.1050s-70s) and evidence for a lost work by the general Michael Doukas Glabas Tarchaneiotes (c.1297-1305/8), and in a partially overlapping but distinct genre of advisory literature (Kekaumenos, c.1075-8; Theodore Palaiologos, c.1326/7). The investigation addresses the more difficult question of the Late Byzantine audience(s) of military treatises, as reflected in evidence for aristocratic education and literary culture and in what can be inferred from manuscript production and ownership. In particular, these criteria show the continued esteem accorded to Greco-Roman ‘classics’, notably Ailianos’ Taktika Theoria (c.106-13 AD). More generally, they highlight the socio-cultural function of this genre as a component of the schooling, identity and perspectives of Late Byzantine military and civilian elites, over and above whatever practical utility these texts might (or might not) have possessed as ‘technical’ or ‘scientific’ literature. The discussion introduces some hitherto unexploited manuscripts in the Topkapı Palace Library (TSMK G.İ. 19 and 36). (This paper was originally presented at the First International Conference on the Military History of the Mediterranean Sea, Fatih Üniversitesi, Istanbul, 26-28 June, 2015).