Anthony Kaldellis and Marion Kruse
The Field Armies of the East Roman Empire, 361-630
(Cambridge University Press, 2023), 228pp. $110
Anthony Kaldellis and Marion Kruse’s The Field Armies of the East Roman Empire, 361-630 opens with a clear and concise statement of its purpose: to be a new institutional history of the Roman army in the eastern half of the empire and its commanders from the reign of Julian (“the Apostate,” more rarely Julian II or Julian III, r. 361-363) to Heraclius. They question both the date of the fifth-century Roman Notitia Dignitatum and the accuracy of J.R. Martindale’s three volume Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (henceforth PLRE), published in three volumes in 1971, 1980, and 1992, arguing that scholars have been “…distorting the actual nature of the high command to reflect the Notitia.” (p. xi). Kaldellis and Kruse perform this revisionist assessment by looking at the literary and papyrological evidence for the command structure and unit disposition of the Notitia Dignitatum in the absence thereof in four chapters supported by a series of four appendices, thus claiming to be “…the first attempt in a century to avoid the circular logic of the Notitia.” (p. xi). Kaldellis and Kruse reassess and reject the traditional two-phase model of the late Roman army’s institutions in the “longue durée” (p. 98), those being a codification of third century military innovations from the reign of Diocletian (r. 284-305) to the Battle of Adrianople in 378 followed by a comprehensive military reform enacted over the reign of Theodosius I (r. 379-395) reflected in the Notitia Dignitatum composed shortly thereafter and which formed a standard model until the development of the so-called “theme system” in the early seventh century. Traditionally this document has been dated to approximately 398-402 for its eastern portion, as most recently refined in the work of Anna Maria Kaiser. [1] Instead, Kruse and Kaldellis re-date the Notitia Dignitatum’s eastern portion to the 440s, specifically and most likely to the military reorganization attested in the Codex Theodosianus between 444-446, arguing for a continuous evolution of the Roman high command structure. They consider the questions of why this reform happened at this time, why the Notitia and its command structure had such a short lifespan, and whether or not the empire economically could afford this sudden expansion of its military forces, as well as whether economics led to the inability to maintain this force.
The first two essential questions asked in Kaldellis and Kruse’s argument, when the Notitia Dignitatum was compiled, and why did its command structure last for such a short period of time, are their best argued. The first two chapters deal with “a bias in the scholarship in favor of assigning attested generals… to the specific regional commands listed in the Notitia and against leaving them as undesignated ‘generic MMs at large’…” (p. 34). That is to say, Kaldellis and Kruse look at the evidence for specified regional commands outside the Notitia Dignitatum and find the scholarship has habitually applied these titles to unspecified commands, arguing that many of these posts were held in vacante as honorifics or awarded to barbarians save the public image of the government’s fallibility when tribute had to be paid. The third chapter, “The ‘Classic’ Phase of the Eastern Field Armies,” cements this, showing the evidence from after the 440s contrasts significantly with that from before, with specific commands being clearly attested, and concludes with the beginnings of the dilution of the system under Zeno (r. 474-491). The dilution of the title of magister militum, typically rendered as στρατηλάτης (stratelátes) or στρατηγός (strategós) in Greek, is well studied in other works such as that of Cécile Morrison and Vivien Pringent and supports their conclusions. [2] The problems in their work arise in the form of their last two questions regarding the economic implications of this expansion and subsequent contraction, and the fact they do not address the problem of the nature of the foederati, a key question and point of contention in late Roman military scholarship. In the case of the former, their work is under-cited, even if their conclusions are generally correct. Kaldellis and Kruse briefly discuss the uptick in currency use, population increase, and lack of large scale warfare with Persia as reasons for the ability of the empire to not only afford a larger field army but also retain a cash surplus in the second half of the fifth century, but only cite Jarius Banaji’s Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity (2001) and two articles by Andrei Gandila and Alexander Sarantis. [3] While a comprehensive study of the economics of the late fifth to early seventh century Roman empire is not the focus of their work, Kaldellis and Kruse’s reliance on the Justinianic Plague as a critical point in the manpower and economic issues faced by the Roman military could have been replaced with a more comprehensive set of potential reasons for this phenomenon. The mid-6th century saw a number of major geological events including a large-scale volcanic eruption that triggered a famine along with numerous local earthquakes that caused major damage to urban centers in the Levant and Anatolia that would have drained the empire’s cash resources and impacted its manpower. Kaldellis and Kruse needed only cite a few examples of archaeological studies of coin hoarding, urban archaeology (like at Philippopolis), demographic studies, and other facets of micro- and macro-economic history to ground themselves in a more comprehensive framework for their conclusion to this aspect. In fact this may overall represent the under-cited nature of this study; though their conclusions are largely correct, Kaldellis and Kruse take many points for granted and do not cite them, such as the discussion on the extent of the Justinianic Plague (87). This may be a failure more on the part of Cambridge’s editorial process than their own, especially considering some footnotes have been accidentally omitted from the print, such as footnote 63 to chapter three (63).
The devaluation of the titles is also a point that could have been discussed in greater depth, especially in regard to the nature of the forces commanded by certain magistri militum which are treated as mercenary forces instead of questioning the nature of their organization and integration into the Roman military apparatus. It is neither the place of their study nor this review to discuss the debate over Walter Goffart’s model of hospitalitas and the nature of foederati in comparison to both regular military regiments and symmachi. However, their assumption that Gothic forces were wholly separate from the praesental armies when Theodoric Strabo and Theodoric the Amal were awarded the title of magister militum praesentalis, or that the Armenian forces operating under Sittas or sent elsewhere in the empire were automatically symmachi (allied forces or hired mercenaries), pokes holes in their argument for the title’s early devaluation, if small ones. One only need to read Armen Ayvazyan’s, The Armenian Military in the Byzantine Empire (2012) to see that this problem is more complicated than assumed. This leads into possibly the biggest criticism of their work: the condensing of the last eighty years of the timeframe of their study into just 11 pages at the end of chapter four (80-91). This period saw the complete devaluation of the title of magister militum, the reduction of the titles of comes and dux from a regional to a regimental command, and the reorganization of the last of the praesental units into the σκύθοι τιβηρίανοι (skýthoi tiberíanοi) and obsequium, all questions directly related to their central thesis of how long the high command of the Notitia Dignitatum lasted. While the first and third points receive brief mentions (80-1, 83, 86, 90) this section easily could have been an entire fifth chapter of the study. Indeed, a significant portion of the four appendices could also have been directly incorporated into the four primary chapters of their study, particularly the first and fourth on the high command at Adrianople and the internal inconsistencies of the Notitia which reinforce a later dating. Sections such as the argument surrounding the thesis of Dietrich Hoffman (167-171) may have better been served in a chapter dedicated to the historiography of Notitia studies, albeit the book in its whole might best be seen as a historiography rather than a history. Kaldellis’ and Kruse work will be an essential work in the historiography of the late Roman army from this point forwards. However, this book would have better served the academic community as a much longer and more comprehensive study, which late Roman and Byzantine military scholars will now have to undertake.
Evan Schultheis
Winthrop University
[1]- Anna Maria Kaiser, “Egyptian Units and the Reliability of the Notitia Dignitatum, Pars Oriens,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 64 (2015): 243-61.
[2]- Cécile Morrison and Vivien Pringent, “Les bulles de plomb du Musée National de Carthage, source méconnue pour l’histoire de l’Afrique byzantine (533-695/698),” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 162 (2018): 1803-34.
[3]- Andrei Gândilă, “Heavy Money, Weightier Problems: The Justinianic Reform of 538 and its Economic Consequences,” Revue numismatique 169 (2012): 363-402; Alexander Sarantis, “The Socio-Economic Impact of Raiding on the Eastern and Balkan Borderlands of the Eastern Roman Empire, 502 – 602,” Millenium, 17 (2020): 203-64.
