Byzantines
Part of The Encyclopedia of Southern Italy.
Byzantines: More properly, the eastern Romans. The “Byzantine” empire is a name given by later western scholars and politicians to the surviving eastern portion of the Roman Empire which survived the collapse of the Western Roman Empire for nearly a thousand years. The name derives from Byzantium, the Greek town on the European side of the Hellespont, which was replaced by the city of Constantinople in the early 4th century AD. The Byzantines continued to lay claim to Italy and Sicily and made repeated attempts to impose their rule until the triumph of the Normans in the 11th century. As was the case with the previous “Roman Empire”, the Byzantine Empire was held together by a superior military force. From the 6th century, when they wrested the whole of Italy and Sicily from the Ostrogoths until the 13th / 14th centuries when they defied the designs of the French Angevins of Naples, the Byzantine army and navy have played a significant role in southern Italian history. The Byzantine army had its origins in the reformation of the Late Imperial Roman army in the early 4th century. The Roman legions of that era were reorganized into two distinctly different types of armies. The first were the Limitanei, military units strung along the frontier in permanent garrisons. These troops were static in nature, meant to fight defensive actions against barbarians attempting to enter the empire. These garrisons often formed the nuclei of settlements that rose up around them and the soldiers stationed there took local wives, raised families, and were ultimately buried in the local cemeteries. The second Roman force was the Comitatenses, dynamic and highly mobile in nature. These forces were on permanent at the ready to quickly move to deal with any threat throughout the Empire. By the 5th century, the Eastern Roman Empire had five Comitatenses armies, each commanded by an officer called a Magister militum. Two of these armies, designated as praesentales, were stationed at the capital of Constantinople, under the immediate command of the emperor. Two other armies, per Illyricum and per Thracias, were stationed in the northern Balkans to deal with threats from beyond the Danube. The fifth army, per Orientem, was stationed along the Euphrates River to defend against the Persians to the east. A sixth army, commanded by a magister militum per Armenium, was created. Unlike what transpired in the Western Empire, where Germanic mercenaries and allies (known as foederati or federates) came to predominate the army both in the ranks and officer corps, the Eastern Roman army was essentially a “native Roman” force.