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The Army in Peace Time: the Social Status and Function of Soldiers

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The Army in Peace Time: the Social Status and Function of Soldiers 394 Rance Chapter 11 The Army in Peace Time: The Social Status and Function of Soldiers Philip Rance During the Late Roman and Middle Byzantine periods, the place of soldiers in society and their roles and activities when not at war embraced great variations of time, place and context. The evidence for soldiers’ status and function is chronologically and geographically uneven: documentation accu- mulates in late antiquity, owing to imperial law codes and Egyptian papyri, while corresponding Middle Byzantine source-material is comparatively meagre, especially during the 7th-/8th-century “dark age”. In both periods the problem of defining a “soldier” (stratiotes) arises. Although different sources employ this term with varying degrees of specificity, between c. 300 and c. 1200 its usage encompasses a spectrum of full- or part-time, indigenous or foreign servicemen, ancillary forces and semi-private retainers, ranging from an elite guardsman patrolling a palace in Constantinople to a paramilitary “irregular” on seasonal lookout duty at a frontier pass, while in 10th-/11th-century texts “soldier” can signify a landholder who personally performed no military ser- vice but contributed to the upkeep of a combatant. “Soldiers” therefore differed not merely by rank, seniority or unit-type, but in their terms and conditions of service, legal status and institutional identities, which variously reflected their environment, socio-economic background, mode of recruitment, regional affiliations and/or ethnicity. Within this diversity, different mechanisms and approximate levels of remuneration, along with fiscal and juridical immuni- ties, suggest that soldiers shared a relatively privileged position in society, even if Middle Byzantine sources record disparities in income and assets. In this context, the connection between soldiers and landholding, one of the most vexed issues of Byzantine military studies, becomes of pivotal significance for locating soldiers in society and clarifying a nexus of military, fiscal and agrar- ian interrelationships. Correspondingly, it is easy enough to delineate spheres of military-civilian interaction: as a coercive instrument of the state, soldiers performed diverse policing and internal security functions, enforced religious policies and intervened in imperial politics. They participated in regional economies, both institutionally, as state-salaried consumer or employer, and individually, through business and landed interests. As less-distinguishable © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363731_013 The Army in Peace Time 395 aspects of military sociology, however, the presence and behaviour of sol- diers, on and off duty, whether permanently stationed or in transit, affected the socio-economic patterns, cultural complexion and power relationships of urban and rural communities. By its nature the documentation, often reflecting civilian attitudes and furnishing little direct testimony to soldiers’ self-percep- tions, accentuates disputes and abuses and potentially overstates tensions that would be expected in any garrison town, past or present. Accordingly, identity, status and function are integrally connected, insofar as the varying impact of different classes of troops was a measure of their localisation and rootedness in civilian society, through origin, kinship, property and culture, and thus mir- rors longer-term changes in the composition of Byzantine armies. 1 Who Became a Soldier? Late Roman armed forces comprised long-service professional soldiers re­­­- cruited by conscription, voluntary enlistment or hereditary obligation, aug- mented by non-Roman mercenaries. A tax-based system of annual conscription evolved over the 4th century whereby landowners, individually or in consor- tia, supplied recruits, typically from their rural tenantry, or paid monetary equivalents (aurum tironicum). These procedures operated until at least the mid-5th century. Thereafter legal provisions governing conscription diminish but never disappear entirely, while evidence of compulsion in levying recruits undermines neat distinctions between “volunteer” and “conscript”. During the 4th century, sons of soldiers and veterans, regardless of rank and unit-type, were hereditarily obliged to serve, if physically able. Even if this legal obliga- tion lapsed by the mid-5th century, sons customarily followed their fathers into soldiering. In general, evidence of coercion, draft-dodging and desertion, usu- ally in connection with short-term military crises, should be balanced against the income, fiscal immunities and privileges that induced recruits to enrol and remain in the army. The longer-term orientation of recruiting was towards less Romanised rural and peripheral regions – the Balkan highlands, Taurus Mountains, Armenia – and ethnic groups with proven martial qualities, both within the empire – Isaurians, Armenians, Moors – and outside its frontiers.1 Beyond criteria of age, stature and fitness, enlistment regulations took account of socio-legal status. Legislation prohibited municipal elites (curiales, decuriones) from evading hereditary civic obligations by enrolling in the army. At the other end of society, degrading occupations, freedmen, slaves and, later, 1 Whitby, “Recruitment”; Zuckerman, “Two Reforms”; Lee, War, pp. 79-85..
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