The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine EmpireIn this book, the distinguished writer Edward N. Luttwak presents the grand strategy of the eastern Roman empire we know as Byzantine, which lasted more than twice as long as the more familiar western Roman empire, eight hundred years by the shortest definition. This extraordinary endurance is all the more remarkable because the Byzantine empire was favored neither by geography nor by military preponderance. Yet it was the western empire that dissolved during the fifth century. |
From inside the book
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... army and navy, and the supremely important tax-collection bureaucracy that sustained them both along with the emperor and all his officials, changed greatly over the centuries, but there is a definite continuity in overall strategic ...
... army and navy were so weak—or their enemies so strong—that the very survival of the empire was made possible only by foreign allies successfully recruited long before, or just in time: more than once, bands of warriors from nations ...
... , both the individual instruction of new recruits and the regular exercise of unit and formation tactics. That may seem no more than what any army must do as a matter of course—how The Invention of Byzantine Strategy • 9.
... army and navy had their cycles of institutional decay and recovery, but Byzantine survival through constant wars, often fought against superior numbers, could not have been possible without fairly high standards of training. It is ...
... army of Constantine.16 For a century and a half, these incremental and exclusively military measures were not unsuccessful in protecting core imperial territories from incursions and territorial invasions, though at great cost to the ...
Contents
1 | |
The Myth and the Methods
| 95 |
III The Byzantine Art of War
| 235 |
Grand Strategy and the Byzantine Operational Code
| 409 |
Was Strategy Feasible in Byzantine Times? | 421 |
Emperors from Constantine I to Constantine XI
| 423 |
Glossary
| 427 |
Notes
| 433 |
Works Cited
| 473 |
Index of Names
| 491 |
General Index
| 495 |