Masters of the Battlefield

by Davis, Paul K.

  Morale, too, is a principle Caesar used to his advantage. Like Hannibal, Caesar did not just command his men, but led them. He did not come out of secure, luxurious quarters to fight among his men, as Alexander often did. Although he was raised in wealth, he did not seem to need it. He slept in a chariot at times, marched bareheaded in column with his men, and was with them in the heat of battle. How often Caesar got his own blade bloody is a matter of conjecture but, like Wellington, he always seemed to be where the fighting was most intense. In Goldsworthy’s assessment, “Caesar commanded a battle from close behind the fighting line, moving to wherever he thought the next crisis would develop and judging how the fighting was going from close quarters.… Roman soldiers fought better [Caesar writes] when they believed that their commander was a witness to their actions.”77 His men knew he was quick to reward bravery, with both rank and riches. “In success he was brilliant, in disaster strong and elastic, and he never weakened in morale. It is adversity which proves the man.… To his personality his soldiers owed all they knew and all they were,” says Dodge.78 This is best illustrated after Dyrrachium, when almost immediately after their retreat, Caesar’s men were clamoring for the opportunity to fight again and restore his faith in them.

  THE PAST HUNDRED YEARS have produced three major commentators on Caesar and Roman warfare, whose works have been quoted throughout this chapter. Their conclusions about the Roman general are worth considering, as each holds a different view of Caesar’s ultimate contribution to military history. Late in the nineteenth century, Theodore Dodge classified Caesar as one of the three great generals of antiquity along with Alexander and Hannibal, describing his abilities in almost all areas of command to be in the middle ground between the two. “What has Caesar done for the art of war? Nothing beyond what Alexander and Hannibal had done before him. But it has needed, in the history of war, that ever and anon there should come a master who could point the world to the right path of methodical war from which it is so easy to stray. Nothing shows this better than the fact that, for seventeen centuries succeeding Caesar, there was no great captain.”79 This book, of course, contends with that statement.

  In the middle of the twentieth century, J. F. C. Fuller wrote extensively on historic and contemporary military affairs, so had a depth of knowledge on which to base his comparisons. While he did not fail to criticize Caesar in his work subtitled Man, Soldier and Tyrant, his analysis in Military History of the Western World gives credit where it is due. He writes that as a commander, Caesar excelled in three main respects:

  He was a marvellous organiser and his faith in his genius was unshakable. Secondly, he grasped the nature of war in his age. It was national: not merely the contending of armies, but the struggle of an entire people yearning for something new.… Lastly, his amazing boldness and seeming rashness were founded on his grasping of the secret that in war, as in peace, most difficulties are self-suggested—that, generally speaking, because opponents are equally fearful of each other, he who first brushes the terrors of the moment aside is the first to set his foot on the high road to victory. Caesar, like Alexander, possessed that spirit of audacity which raises generalship to its highest level.80

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Adrian Goldsworthy is one of the most serious students and writers on Caesar and Roman warfare. As stated earlier, he disagrees with Fuller’s assessment that Caesar was a “marvellous organiser.” Like Dodge, he finds him to be no innovator. “Caesar, Pompey, and many other commanders of the late republic were especially aggressive even by Roman standards, but the difference among them was more one of degree than anything more substantial.… All our evidence, suggests that Caesar’s command style was absolutely typical of Roman generals in this or other periods.”81

  GIVEN THESE DIVERSE VIEWS, why is Caesar included in this work? It is Caesar’s embodiment of all three of these claims. Like the other battlefield commanders included here, Ceasar had the ability to see what no one else of his age could. Caesar was not an innovator; he inherited the Roman army (as did Pompey) from Marius’s reforms half a century earlier. But going into war he took that army and fashioned it into an instrument of war which fitted his own genius. It was his army fighting his way. Had he and Pompey changed armies at Pharsalus, the situation would have been what Caesar described prior to his initial Spanish campaign of the Civil War, an army without a leader and a leader without an army. As Goldsworthy observes, “the difference is one of greater ability rather than differing methods.” The greater ability? “He divined his enemy’s intentions and he set aside his own fears.” As the remainder of this work makes clear, I cannot agree with Dodge that there were no more great captains until Gustavus, but Caesar certainly dominated the age between Scipio and Belisarius.

  7

  Belisarius (505?–568)

  General in the Service of the Emperor Justinian I of the Eastern Roman Empire

  [A] most winning character, was bold to the verge of rashness, resourceful and of an inventive mind, a general always ready to make the most of the inadequate means allotted him by his parsimonious master.

  —J. F. C. Fuller, Military History of the Western World

  BELISARIUS’S BIRTH DATE is a matter of speculation, as is his upbringing. In his classic nineteenth-century biography of the general, Philip Henry Stanhope, Lord Mahon, argues that the description offered by Procopius of a “lately bearded stripling” should make him about twenty years old when he first appears in history as a member of General Justinian’s private guard, a couple of years before Justinian assumed the throne in 527.1 Procopius, who was Belisarius’s secretary and contemporary, and a historian of Justinian’s wars, writes that Belisarius came from the same town as Justinian, Germania in Illyria.2 Most sources claim a humble birth, but Mahon argues for one much higher, pointing out his possession of estates at an age when he could not possibly have achieved sufficient glory and wealth from his wars to have afforded them.3 Further, Belisarius’s parents are not denigrated in Procopius’s Secret History, as are those of his wife, Antonina, the Emperor Justinian, and Empress Theodora.

  Since Justinian was born in 483, it is highly unlikely that the two knew each other until Belisarius joined the bodyguard. Procopius gives us the most complete story of his career but no hint how a member of the guard came to Justinian’s attention. According to Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “He served, most assuredly with valour and reputation, among the private guards of Justinian; and, when his patron became emperor, the domestic was promoted to military command.”4 His first assignment was as cocommander with Sittas, about his age and brother-in-law to Theodora. Assuming the two were friends in the guard, this could well have been how he came to the attention of the man who would be emperor. Belisarius and Sittas were sent on a raid in 526 into Persarmenia, a region long disputed between Romans and Persians, where they succeeded in extensive pillaging and capturing numerous prisoners to obtain slaves.5 On a second raid they were not so lucky, losing what appears to be a skirmish to the Persian commanders Narses and Aratius, both of whom soon defected to Justinian. Procopius certainly downplayed the encounter, saying merely that the Persians “joined battle with the forces of Sittas and Belisarius and gained the advantage over them.”6 Soon after these engagements Justinian assumed the throne in Constantinople (1 April 527) upon the death of his uncle Justin.

  As emperor, Justinian inherited a long-running conflict between his empire and that of Sassanid Persia. In the wake of Alexander’s defeat of the Achaemenid Empire, the Persians absorbed some Hellenistic culture while under the sway of the Successors. As the descendants of the great Macedonians began to fade in the wake of the rising Roman Empire, the Persians found themselves under the rule of the Arsacid Dynasty of Parthians, horsemen from the north. The Parthians began to restore some unity to the region and eventually faced off against the expanding Roman Empire. With a frontier generally regarded as the Euphrates River, Parthians and Romans engaged in decades of
territorial give and take, although the Parthians tended to be the lesser of the two powers. In the early third century AD, the Parthian power had declined sufficiently that the Persians themselves rose up and defeated them. This led to the establishment of the house of Sassan, or Sassanid Dynasty. They reestablished the old Achaemenid titles and ambitions, which included reoccupying lands ceded to Rome. Although Eastern Roman troops kept the Persians at bay, they could not reimpose their will. Emperors Valerian and Julian the Apostate lost their lives trying, and in 363 Emperor Jovian signed a necessary but humiliating treaty with Persia that obliged the Romans to grant some territorial concessions. From this point forward, the Eastern Roman Empire gave up trying to conquer Persia.7

  From 363 until the reign of Justinian, the relationship remained a balance of power. In 387 Rome and Persia divided Armenia between the two empires and in 422 signed a treaty that came to be called the Hundred Years’ Peace. During that time, the Persians dealt with internal religious difficulties when Zoroastrian magi tried to exert significant influence in the government, as well as countering threats from the White Huns invading from the northeast. The Huns also threatened to invade via the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas. This area had originally been jointly defended, but gradual Roman withdrawal had led to Roman subsidies to hold up Rome’s end of the defense agreement.

  Those payments laid the foundation for the Roman-Persian conflict in Justinian’s reign. The Persian failure in 483 to turn over the frontier city of Nisibis (as called for in the treaty of 363) led to Roman refusal to pay its share for the Caucasus defense. The Roman emperor Anastasius I (r. 491–518) built up defenses in Mesopotamia and Armenia, in particular the city of Dara on the Euphrates, not far from Nisibis. Between 502 and 504 the two sides engaged in serious warfare, with the Persian king Cavadh gaining early, temporary victories in Byzantine lands. A few setbacks in 504, coupled with a major Hun invasion, forced him to sue for peace in 505. A seven-year truce followed, which was never renewed, but never abrogated. During the Hunnic-Persian war, the Byzantines further irritated the Persians by allying themselves with the Caucasus kingdoms of Lazica and Iberia.

  Warfare of the Time

  TWO MAJOR FACTORS WERE INVOLVED in radically changing the Eastern Roman army by the early sixth century. First, the nature of the Roman citizen was vastly different than it had been in the days of the republic. Previously, military service had been a duty that adult males engaged in as an aspect of citizenship—any threat to the government and people had to be met, no questions asked. Usually no more than a season or a year of service was necessary to beat back most threats. By the end of the republic, the army was a long-service career followed mainly by the urban poor. A few centuries into the empire, however, and the attitude had changed again. Few adult Roman males answered the call to duty, for military service now involved years in foreign lands. Citizens in many trades were exempt from being drafted, and military service was so unpopular that it was not unknown for men to mutilate themselves to avoid being drafted into service.8 Thus, the army became increasingly dependent on troops recruited from the hinterlands or even from former enemies. Decreased manpower across extended frontiers required more defense than offense, so the empire relied on limes, a cordon defense, or string of forts and fortified cities. These protected citizens and trade routes where there were no natural obstacles. Justinian built limes in amazing numbers and size.9 Backing this line were mobile fighting forces designed to relieve the strong points and pursue enemies.

  The second factor was the nature of the enemies themselves. Both the eastern and western empires were pressured by Asian or Eurasian “barbarian” forces that depended on mobility. Invading armies increasingly were mounted rather than made up of foot soldiers. Although the traditional Roman legion could stand up to cavalry, those troops had been heavy infantry trained by years of service. Less motivated and smaller forces (especially those raised on the frontier with no strong bond to Rome) were less likely to embrace the discipline necessary to stand fast against charging horsemen. Hence, both halves of the empire needed veteran forces that could rapidly respond to fast-moving threats and inflict damage on armies made up of soldiers who were often raised in the saddle. The influx of frontier manpower into the army meant the incorporation of peoples who had the same cavalry-oriented upbringing and experience and somewhat less dependence on the traditional infantry.

  Thus, the Eastern Roman Empire in particular began to build its army around heavy cavalry and light infantry, which could move faster than loot-laden raiders on foot. The speed of the cavalry and light infantry replaced the traditional power of the Roman heavy infantry with even more flexibility than Caesar’s maniples.10 The heavy cavalry cataphracti wore chain mail to the knee or longer and were armed mainly with lances and bows. This allowed them to withstand enemy arrows while attacking either infantry with their lances or cavalry with their bows. In some cases the horse was armored as well. Given the difficulty of training and the expense to equip a soldier with both weapons, it is likely that the Byzantine horseman had his greatest use in shock action. Thus, the lance was primary and the bows provided versatility if necessary.11

  Most of the cavalry was recruited from the fringes of the empire. Once the Hunnish empire collapsed not long after Attila’s death, Hun horsemen joined the Roman service, as did Alans from the Iranian steppes and Germanic Goths. Southeastern Europe also became a breeding ground for horses and horsemen, as in the days of Philip and Alexander.12 Although most of the “barbarian” troops had been expunged from the army in 400 owing to fear of disloyalty, Justinian had no such qualms in his desire to build an army large enough to reestablish the Mediterranean empire. These “federates” (foederati) of foreign (and ultimately domestic) troops were recruited and led by their own commander, who swore loyalty to Justinian. Such a semiprivate army was called a comitatus. The troops were loyal to their commander, requiring Justinian to be certain that the commanders were loyal to him, often a problem in Byzantine history.13 The horse archers possessed the long-range effectiveness of Hunnic warriors with their famous compound bows, but could also fight well at close quarters.14 Also at this time, aristocrats raised units of elite bodyguards (bucellarii), whether federate or Byzantine, that could be available to the emperor on the same terms as the federates.15 For example, Belisarius’s bodyguard numbered as many as 7,000.

  The light infantry carried small shields for protection and swords or axes for close combat, but their primary weapon was the bow. The leading ranks at least were well armored and supplied with large shields to protect against enemy arrows and javelins. All soldiers were instructed in the use of the bow, making long-range warfare the primary method of opening a battle, with the heavy cavalry breaking through whatever weakened areas appeared.16 Although some enemies were extremely effective horse archers, the standing Byzantine archer had the stability to use stronger bows and therefore engage at greater ranges. Often consisting of limitani (frontier militia), the light infantry were of irregular quality. Romano-Byzantine heavy infantry were fewer in number, but equipped with heavier armor, sword or axe, and a spear. They played the traditional role of breaking enemy assaults and protecting the archers. Although these forces comprised a much smaller percentage than earlier Roman armies, many authors comment on their continued importance in sixth-century battles. During Justinian’s reign, the basic tactical unit remained the phalanx, although it was a more flexible unit than that of the classical Greeks. The standard formation was described as 512 men wide and likely twelve ranks deep. That would make 6,144 soldiers, a bit larger than the traditional Roman legion.17 Contemporary authors are of the opinion that a well-trained and disciplined infantry was key to Roman warfare no matter the ratio to the other arms,18 and they were valuable as protection for the cavalry as well as the light infantry.19

  The army generally deployed with infantry in the center and cavalry on the flanks, with light infantry slingers in front if an enemy cavalry charge appeared i
mminent. After long experience against Eurasian cavalry armies, the Byzantine cavalry developed their own method of deployment. Two-thirds of the unit would be deployed forward in ranks eight deep in the center and four deep on the wings. A second line would form up 400 meters to the rear. The horses along the front line were armored. Each division consisted of cursores armed with bows for the offense, protected by defensores who closely followed up their attacks. Such tactics remained in use around the Mediterranean for almost a thousand years.20

  The Sassanian Persian army had undergone some serious reforms in the wake of defeats at the hands of the Hephthalite (White) Huns in the 480s. By the turn of the sixth century, it was little different in makeup from the Romano-Byzantine forces. The dominant arm was cavalry, made up from the “free” citizens, the minor aristocracy. It was lighter than the Byzantine cataphracts but made up about the same percentage of the army. Horse archers were incorporated from frontier societies like the Huns and Armenians. Mercenaries and subject peoples would have furnished auxiliary cavalry in some numbers. Three thousand Sabir Huns are said to have been recruited for the attack on Satala in 530, while the Kadishaye (Kadiseni) were the primary unit of the Persian right wing at the Battle of Dara against Belisarius that same year.21 This lighter cavalry provided archery support for the heavy cavalry, known to the Romans as the clibanarii22 and to the Sassanians as the Savaran,23 which were armored almost exactly like the cataphracts. The Parthian heavy cavalry had a larger scale-armor blanket for their horses, but by Sassanian times this seems to have been reduced to cover just the front half of the animal’s body. The heavy cavalry used the lance as their main weapon, although they also carried multiple hand weapons for close-in fighting should circumstances dictate. By the reigns of Khavad and Khusrow, who were contemporaries of Justinian and Belisarius, the Savaran had abandoned the bow altogether. The elite of the Sassanian army were, as in ancient days, called the Immortals and have been regarded as being as good as or better than the Roman troops.24