Byzantine Weapons and Warfare

[egfroth]

The units of measure quoted seem to be open to variations in interpretation not to mention scribal error, therefore reliance on them seems moot.

Variations in interpretation, yes, in that the length of a spithame assumed in the Sylloge seems to be different from the one used in both the Taktika and the Praecepta. And certainly, how do you determine where you measure a hand span? It could very well be 9 inches measured at one point, and six inches at another. But scribal error, no. The length of a spithame is internally consistent in each document.

Equally, there is no uncertainty about the length of an ourguia, and that is the unit in which the length of the menavlion is quoted - one and a half to two ourguiai - which is 9-12 feet.

In heavy rainfall muskets were rendered useless and sole reliance on the bayonet was unavoidable.

As I said, I'm not a Napoleonic expert, but did a cavalry charge ever get stopped by bayonets alone? How many battles were fought in heavy rain, where this kind of thing could happen? I think this is a paper tiger.

I cannot but consider how infantry dealt with very heavy cavalry in other periods. In the Ancient World I seem to remember cataphracts being destroyed by club-weilding infantry, I cannot recall the particulars, however. In the Hundred Years war French knights, once their formation had been broken, were killed off by English bowmen wielding lead mallets. At Pavia the French Gendarmes, the flower of European knightly cavalry, were hacked to pieces by Imperial Landskechts with their array of polearms, which is what happened to the Burgundian men-at-arms at the hands of the Swiss.

In all cases such very heavily armoured cavalry could be held off, or their formations broken, by either spear, pike or missile armed troops, but the majority were actually killed by infantry armed with cutting or bludgeoning weapons. I cannot imagine that the Byzantines found their tactical needs in such situations so very different.

There is no argument that polearms were very effective against cavalry. And when I first saw speculation about the menavlion being such a weapon, I was very interested. I would dearly love it to be a polearm, myself, but however much we might want it to be one, and whatever was used by other armies at other times, the evidence is against polearms being used by the Byzantine army in the 10th century.

Read carefully through the Taktika and the Praecepta and it becomes obvious that the major function of the menavlion was not so much to slaughter the enemy kataphraktoi (helpful though that might be) but to to hold them off from breaking the cohesion of the infantry square.

This whole idea that the menavlion might be a polearm seems to have originated in an incorrectly quoted or remembered length of 6 feet being introduced into the discussion very early in the piece. But it simply doesn't hold water on closer examination. The length given in the original sources is 9-12 feet, and that's what we've got to work with. The alternative is to toss the whole thing out and go with what feels right to us, but surely we're trying to find out what was used, not what we'd like to have been used.