Античная древность и средние века (Oct 2018)
«The clergy who mantled by the spiritual weapons will help you by prayers»
Abstract
The paper is devoted to identifying the specifics of internal organizational methods used in the Byzantine army during the reign of the Palaeologus. According to the author, the combat capability of the Byzantine army depended not only on logistic support, but also on the use of military and political methods, religious and disciplinary action. Among them, in the using for the soldier’s a crucial role played as a completely traditional methods of financial reward, methods psychological and educational nature, and specific for Palaeologus period methods of religious influence. For the military commanders to a greater extent used methods of social and material motivation and the means of social and legal remuneration, which can be described as socially prestigious - titles and marriage alliances. In the system of measures to ensuring the combat capability the special role was assigned to the religious method, which in combination with the other methods represented a complex of elements of influence originating from the doctrine of “Holy war”. The content of this doctrine defined by the interaction system of the army and the church which was founded on the conditions of confrontation to enemies who belonged to different religious denominations, as well as on a major role of mercenaries troops as a part of the Byzantine armed forces. Despite a variety of measures to influence the army, the level of discipline in the army remained extremely low. Increasing the number of separatist rebellions, cases of treason and disobedience, typical for early Palaeologian period, that remained unpunished, indicates the weakness of basileus power and inability to use the military-disciplinary measures for the control of the multiethnic contingent of Byzantine troops. It is likely that this situation could be caused by the persistence of archaic state idea in the changed foreign political conditions, and that this idea has not been capable inspire all the Christian warrior-host of the empire on the military exploits and neutralize personal fear of death. At the same time, the effect of such an idea, directed to consolidation of the ranks of byzantine troops before the onslaught of the enemy, in special cases has been intensified by the using of a complex of religious measures of influence.
