Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Rulers
- Map 1 Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia
- Map 2 Armenian Themes and Pri ncipalities
- Introduction
- 1 The ‘Grand Strategy’ of the Byzantine Empire
- 2 Byzantine and Arab Strategies and Campaigning Tactics in Cilicia and Anatolia (Eighth–Tenth Centuries)
- 3 The Empire’s Foreign Policy in the East and the Key Role of Armenia (c. 870–965)
- 4 The Byzantine View of their Enemies on the Battlefield: The Arabs
- 5 Methods of Transmission of (Military) Knowledge (I): Reconnaissance, Intelligence
- 6 Methods of Transmission of (Military) Knowledge (II): Espionage
- 7 Tactical Changes in the Byzantine Armies of the Tenth Century: Theory and Practice on the Battlefields of the East
- 8 Tactical Changes in the Byzantine Armies of the Tenth Century: Investigating the Root Causes
- 9 Byzantine–Arab Battles of the Tenth Century: Evidence of Innovation and Adaptation in the Chronicler Sources
- 10 Tactical Innovation and Adaptation in the Byzantine Army of the Tenth Century: The Study of the Battles
- Summaries and Conclusions
- Primary Bibliography
- Secondary Bibliography
- Index
Summaries and Conclusions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Rulers
- Map 1 Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia
- Map 2 Armenian Themes and Pri ncipalities
- Introduction
- 1 The ‘Grand Strategy’ of the Byzantine Empire
- 2 Byzantine and Arab Strategies and Campaigning Tactics in Cilicia and Anatolia (Eighth–Tenth Centuries)
- 3 The Empire’s Foreign Policy in the East and the Key Role of Armenia (c. 870–965)
- 4 The Byzantine View of their Enemies on the Battlefield: The Arabs
- 5 Methods of Transmission of (Military) Knowledge (I): Reconnaissance, Intelligence
- 6 Methods of Transmission of (Military) Knowledge (II): Espionage
- 7 Tactical Changes in the Byzantine Armies of the Tenth Century: Theory and Practice on the Battlefields of the East
- 8 Tactical Changes in the Byzantine Armies of the Tenth Century: Investigating the Root Causes
- 9 Byzantine–Arab Battles of the Tenth Century: Evidence of Innovation and Adaptation in the Chronicler Sources
- 10 Tactical Innovation and Adaptation in the Byzantine Army of the Tenth Century: The Study of the Battles
- Summaries and Conclusions
- Primary Bibliography
- Secondary Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
—Sun-Tzu, The Art of War, III.18War is a violent form of interaction that has dominated human activity since the dawn of mankind, but to explain the ‘insanity’ of going to war against one's own species, other sciences like psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology and anthropology have contributed their views in the quest to find answers as to why we are the only mammals deliberately killing our own kind. In order to explain this ‘pathological behaviour’, evolutionary biologists have put the blame on several factors ranging from a ‘selfish gene’ most eager to replicate, to excessive amounts of testosterone directly linked to aggressiveness. Psychological explanations put forward by James as early as 1910 have suggested that warfare is as prevalent as it is because of its positive psychological effects, both on the individual and on society as a whole.
As any form of interaction between intelligent beings, war has been fluid and permutable over the two hundred millennia of our existence for which we have archaeological evidence, and over the roughly six millennia for which we have written records. Throughout recorded history, war has not developed linearly from a primitive to a more sophisticated, and hence deadlier, form of killing. As van Creveld has emphasised, there have been fluctuations in warfare but no real breakthroughs, with many factors remaining ‘unaltered well into the age of gunpowder’ or even the twentieth century. In her book on the Evolution of Strategy, Heuser refers to ‘fashions in warfare’, by which she means the prevailing attitudes in both technological aspects of war but also in strategic and tactical thinking, where she has highlighted this rather obvious, but worth emphasising, idea:
The conduct of war has rarely if ever been static … as hostile groups encountering each other always sought to maximise the advantage they could draw from any particularly successful ways of fighting they had developed or were developing.
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- Byzantine Military Tactics in Syria and Mesopotamia in the Tenth CenturyA Comparative Study, pp. 298 - 307Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018