Byzantine military manuals

The Eastern Roman Empire was, for much of its history, one of the major powers of the medieval world.

Continuing the institutions of the Roman Empire, throughout its history it was assailed on all sides by various numerically superior enemies.

These continued a tradition of Greek-Hellenistic warfare and tacticians that stretched back to Xenophon and Aeneas Tacticus, late Hellenistic military manuals adapted and applied for the needs and realities of the Byzantine army, most of them deriving from the wide corpus of ancient Greek and late Hellenistic authors, especially Aelian,[1] Onasander[2] and Polyaenus,[3] and to a lesser extent Aeneas[4] and Arrian.

[5] Pioneering scholars in the modern study of Byzantine military manuals include Friedrich Haase (1808-67), Karl Konrad Müller (1854-1903), Rezső (Rudolf) Vári (1867-1940) and Alphonse Dain (1896-1964).

There is some evidence of similar works being written in the Palaiologan era, but with one exception, none survive.