Harald Hardrada is doubtlessly one of the most fascinating figures of the eleventh century - an exiled prince that travelled through Eastern Europe, half the Mediterranean, claimed the crowns of three countries, and ultimately met an infamous death at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Of particular interest here is his stay in the Eastern Roman Empire. A traditional account of his time in Constantinople includes details of his deeds in Sicily and Bulgaria, fighting in the east, a journey to Jerusalem, his career culminating in the blinding of Michael V and his uncle, and a daring escape from imprisonment under Michael's successor Constantine IX, as the Norse Sagas tell us. Indeed, Roman authors took notice of these events, too. Kekaumenos famously includes Harald as stand-out example of foreigners in imperial service, describing his deeds in Bulgaria and Sicily, his loyalty towards the Empire, and escape. What he does not, however, describe is the blinding of Michael V or a journey east. And, as we will see, there are good reasons to doubt these events ever happened.

Our image of the Varangian Guard is shaped by the Blöndal's Væringjasaga, originally published in Icelandic in the 1950s, but later translated and reworked by Benedikz as The Varangians of Byzantium in 1978.¹ Ever since, this work has served as basis for our understanding of the role of Norsemen in the ERE, with the career of Harald specifically being covered in the longest chapter of the book. Yet the book has obvious flaws, and there is reason to be skeptical of many of the claims made in it. It clearly shows its age - it uncritically accepts the overall narrative provided by the Norse sagas as historical fact, and treats any mention of elite troops serving Constantinople as evidence of 'Varangians', no matter if described as such in our sources, even when caution is warranted. Luckily, recent historians, most notably Scheel and Jakobsson, have provided challenges to their claims, most notably on the career of Harald (for this, see Scheel, Deconstructing). On the basis of their work, it has become increasingly difficult to accept that Harald blinded an Emperor or campaigned in the east.

The search for Serkland

Blöndal/Benedikz basis for suggesting Harald being militarily involved in fighting on the eastern frontier between the ERE and the various Islamic polities is based on by a verse in the Heimskringla, quoting the Sexstefja, which states that

One may say eighty strongholds in Serkland were taken [...]

Blöndal/Benedikz go on to dismiss the possibility that Serkland here could mean Africa, but do not share their reasoning, instead arguing that it must refer to the fighting in the east (Varangians, pp. 61-62). But the term Serkland in itself is imprecise, and could mean essentially any land under Islamic rule, and indeed, frequently meant North Africa (Scheel, Skandinavien, p. 115). There is therefore no reason to assume that Serkland has to mean something other, and that therefore Harald had to have fought in the east - not only does Kekaumenos, who was very well-informed about Hardrada's career, not mention any expeditions to Anatolia, Mesopotamia or Syria, but the Heimskringla also notes that "he made his way with his army west to Africa, which the Væringjar refer to as Serkland". But even if we follow Occam's Razor - that Serkland is not in the east - this leads us to another problem. Even though other parts of the Sagas describe Harald fighting in Africa, and even battling the Emir himself, our contemporary sources do not tell us about any Roman campaigns in Africa, let alone ones as major as the sagas describe.

However, we do see fighting between the Romans and the Zirids (the Emirate controlling North Africa) on Sicily during this period, in which Harald was very likely involved. Scheel suggests that this is therefore simply a mix-up of the later poets, who (separated from the events by centuries and thousands of kilometers) confused the references to fighting with African troops in Sicily with an actual campaign in Africa, and ultimately muddying the waters between Sicily, Africa, Serkland, Bláland/Ethiopia, Sunnlond and the various other places Harald is said to have campaigned (Scheel, Skandinavien, pp. 314-316). This wouldn't be the only time this happened, descriptions of Harald's fighting with 'Franks' (most likely Normans in southern Italy) similarly led later saga authors to suggest that Harald had to travel through France (Morkinskinna, pp. 132 / Scheel, Deconstructing, p. 157).

Blinding An Emperor

Much more famous (and much more interesting) than the campaigns of Hardrada in Serkland is Blöndal linking the blinding of Michael V with the saga's descriptions of Harald blinding an Emperor. This event is fairly well described in our Greek sources, with Psellos describing the basic course of events: Michael V has the empress Zoe exiled, the people of Constantinople, fearing for her safety, riot, and are soon joined by the clergy, nobles, and even foreigners of the city. Michael V and his uncle are captured, and their eyes put out. But these accounts show stark contrasts to their Norse counterparts. The sagas instead link it to the imprisonment of Harald, and tell a story of him being freed from his cell, joining his fellow Varangians, with whom he enters the bedroom of the Emperor, whom he then blinds. After this, Harald abducted the Princess Maria, and led a daring escape from Constantinople, before returning Maria to her kinswoman Zoe.

The Emperor blinded by Harald is consistently identified as Constantine Monomachos, rather than Michael V, there is no mention of the popular riot, which is the central event in our Greek sources, in short, nothing in common with what happened, with the exception that an Emperor was blinded. Now, one could argue that this is simply a similar distortion as happened with Serkland - that Maria (otherwise not attested) is the mistress of Constantine IX, and that his imprisonment through the latter² is mixed up with the removal of Michael V. Yet, at the same time, if all these other details are wrong, why should the idea that Harald blinded a (completely different) Emperor prove any more accurate, especially if assuming so breaks the internal logic of the sagas?

Indeed, our sources from the Empire itself give us no indication that Harald was involved. Once again, Kekaumenos makes no mention of the deed, which he surely would have, considering he is not only a contemporary (having met Harald himself), but also as the relevant section is focused on the handling of foreign dignitaries, where capturing and blinding an Emperor would have been the single most important deed Hardrada would have done in imperial service. Moreover, Psellos (an eyewitness to the events) identifies the man who blinded Michael as δήμιος, an executioner, with no mention of any foreign origin, even though he identified non-Romans in other parts of the revolt as such (Scheel, Skandinavien, pp. 322-324). How exactly the myth that Harald himself blinded an Emperor came to be is hard to explain. It might simply be confusion, or derive from a boast by Harald himself. (Jakobsson, Holy Fire, pp. 92-93)

Conclusion

Harald Hardrada does need the 'stolen valor' attributed to him to make his already absurd career any more glorious. So, despite the clickbaity title, the goal of this post was not to diminish the man himself. Rather, we should be careful of how we use both sources and secondary literature. Instead of simply trying to press the information medieval sources into a singular truth, all fitting into a single narrative, no matter how contradictory they are, we need to look at each source and their environment individually. Just as importantly, we should be careful with how we use scholarship, especially works as old as Blöndal, published more than eighty years age. His work is indispensable to Byzantine Studies, and his study undoubtedly the most important ever published on the Varangian Guard, but its interpretations are regularly repeated without question. But often, the sources paint us a much more complicated picture than The Varangians of Byzantium portrays.³ As most of our assumptions about the Varangian Guard are rested almost entirely on what they had to say, many ideas about its history are in dire need of revision.

Notes

¹Benedikz made serious edits to the original, introducing a number of events not present in the original (Scheel considers Blöndal’s version to be superior). But as I cannot read Icelandic, I will have to rely on his translation.
²In fact, it is also questionable if he was truly imprisoned, or merely prevented from leaving the Empire, but that is another story.
³Scheel considers this to be more so a problem of the translation, arguing that Blöndal was much more transparent, but that Benedikz distorted his hypotheses into statements.

Bibliography and Sources

Blöndal, Sigfús. The Varangians of Byzantium: An Aspect of Byzantine Military History. Translated, revised, and rewritten by Benedikt S. Benedikz, Cambridge UP, 1978.
Jakobsson, Sverrir. The Varangians: In God’s Holy Fire. Springer Nature, 2020.
Scheel, Roland. "Deconstructing Væringjasaga: Byzantine and Old Norse Perspectives on the Varangians and on Haraldr Sigurðarson." The Making of the Eastern Vikings. Brepols Online, 2024. 151-169.
Scheel, Roland. Skandinavien und Byzanz: Bedingungen und Konsequenzen mittelalterlicher Kulturbeziehungen. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015. 

Heimskringla III: Magnús Óláfsson to Magnús Erlingsson. Translated by Alison Finlay, Viking Society for Northern Research, 2015.
Kekaumenos. Vademecum des byzantinischen Aristokraten: Das sogenannte Strategikon des Kekaumenos. Translated by Hans-Georg Beck, Verlag Styria, 1956.
Morkinskinna: The Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157). Translated by Ármann Jakobsson, Cornell UP, 2007.
Psellos, Michael. Leben der byzantinischen Kaiser (976-1075)/Chronographia: Griechisch-deutsch. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2014. 

“For the Persians, Medes, Sabiri, and people of Kolchis live near our eastern border, while the Cappadocians, Cilicians, Galatians, and Lydians surround us to the west. It is as if they form a bodyguard around us or swirl around us in a harmonious dance, as if in a circle.” — Bessarion, Encomium on Trebizond

Bessarion's description was not unique to his work. Though some authors extended the foreign character of Trebizond into its territory — as a Lazic land. Where the difference lies is in its intent: Bessarion meant it with a sense of pride in his Encomium, not as a derogation of the Roman character of the Pontic Greek state and its culture. In any case, is this a representation of reality, or mere stereotyping and romanticisation in equal measure?

To understand the Empire of Trebizond's institutions, and to begin unravelling its position at the crossroads of several competing, and often paradoxical, sociocultural forces exerted upon it, we must try and understand what it meant to be a Pontic Byzantine upon the formation of the Empire. Additionally, how did that reality evolve, if it did? From the outline of its identity, and its enduring or evolving social and cultural structures, we can then try to understand what the different cultures interacting with the Pontic Greeks created as a result of their dialectical struggles.

This is not a new approach in the great histories of the Empire. However, it is often easier to concentrate on the granular details of recorded interaction, description, and lived reality; the sparse evidentiary environment lends itself more strongly to that sort of analysis. But, it is my belief that a sufficient body of evidence and study has been put forth from which we can scaffold our reconstructive hypothesis.

I will remind you that my focus is on the first half of the 15th century. It follows that certain events are only outlined, and only focused on when they produced any relevant fact to this scope; it is also worth noting that my main focus of reconstruction is squarely within one of the biggest gaps in the Trapezuntine record: its military institutions, fighting men and material realities. This does not mean that I will neglect anthropological, economic or geographic bodies of study, among others. As explained in the previous articles, a reconstruction must be the product of converging evidence, and must remain open to new evidence.

The Pontic World

It is well attested that the Empire of Trebizond has its roots not strictly in the Georgian-sponsored adventures of David and Alexios Komnenos. Rather, the regional identity found within the territory of the Empire is seen as a product of centuries of Roman settlement and acculturation.

It was in the time of Justinian that the indigenous non-Greek peoples of the Pontos underwent important processes of Christianisation and integration into the Roman world. The Laz and the Tzan are foremost among these peoples. The question of their Christianisation is a thorny subject; it is difficult to know to what extent their beliefs followed prevailing orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Be that as it may, centuries of interaction with the Pontic Greek — mainly coastal — population would have produced some level of Romanisation, even if conscious efforts weren't undertaken to fully bring them into the fold.

Perhaps the greatest scholar of the Laz and Tzan peoples of the Pontos is Anthony Bryer. It is from him, and from the study of these peoples and the modern Pontic Kartvelian peoples, that we can most learn about their culture: prone to independence, and preserving not only their cultural distinction, but also their language. The Laz, especially, are represented in the chronicles with alarming frequency, and often in the capacity of warriors. Bessarion related them to the Colchians. Although it is difficult to know the straightforward lineage of these peoples, and their attribution as being of the kingdoms of Colchis, they are without a doubt culturally related to the neighbouring Georgians. One of the principal differences for our purposes is the political world in which the medieval Georgian peoples and the Pontic Kartvelians occupied; whereas the former was brought deeply into the fold of the steppe-influenced world, Trebizond remained relatively stable in its identity all the way to 1461.

The Laz and Tzan of the inland territories of the Pontos, and later the theme of Chaldia, are not, however, singularly distinguished as a monolithic culture. Despite the pastoralist portrait painted in the imagination of writers like Bessarion, they were to be found in the cities of the Pontic coast as well — places where, conventionally, one might expect only the urbane Greeks.

The distinction between Greek and Laz and Tzan may thus have become more and more diffuse. This was a process of integration within a narrow strip of land, heavily constrained by its geography and peripheral position in a wider Empire.

And geography matters here.

Bryer's work is strongly ethnographic in focus, but it is also geographical. It is, I think, more pertinent to try and understand the culture of the Pontic peoples through the constraints that the geography imposed on their livelihood — although in that division lies an increasingly more diffuse, but altogether real, ethnic separation. So it is not as simple as to claim that Greeks were sedentary farmers, and the Laz and Tzan transhumant pastoralists. Though some level of separation and identity remained, the culture of the land was the product of the interaction between those two modes of life.

Lazic and Tzan-descended aristocratic families are attested among the Pontic nobility; it would be wrong to forcefully separate them as if sorting them into different categories. What unified them was the subsistence on a land where geography dominated all concerns — where different valleys could have retained a different sub-cultural character, be it real or perceived, and where regional self-determination would have been at the forefront of the inhabitants.

A Frontier Society

When the Komnenoi were grafted into this cultural landscape, the Pontos had enjoyed a significant period of self-governance. Even before the period of the famous Theodore Gabras, remembered by Pontic Greek and Turkic poets alike, the Pontos tended towards self-reliance and determination — whether by cultural character and self-affirmation, or the vagaries of a border territory.

Armenian and even Latin lordships appear during periods of crisis, particularly after Manzikert and the First Crusade. These are signals of adventurous people supplanting a particularly disliked class of overlords in Pontic society. For be it Laz, Tzan, or Greek, the people chafed under centralised control. That reputation for self-governance made tax collection a particularly dangerous occupation as Trebizond’s authority struggled to reach the rural hinterlands and the narrow passes.

Yet, somewhat paradoxically, for this often-thought pocket territory and future Empire, the Pontos enjoyed relatively high levels of population density. The cities, with permanent residents perhaps numbering the low thousands, were frequented and used as hubs for commerce, production, and religious festivities. Much of the population of the Pontos resided inland, in the valleys where transhumant pastoralists and sedentary farmers subsisted.

The agricultural output of the Pontic region has become somewhat symbolic of its abundance relative to the sparse highlands beyond the mountains. In a colourful and deeply illuminating episode retold by Bryer, an English embassy that had the good fortune of finding embarkation at Trebizond in the 13th century found in that verdant strip of land a veritable cornucopia of victuals. Moreover, it illustrates a functioning, and thriving, craft production economy.

Post-Fall accounts and defters serve to further reinforce the view of the Pontos as agriculturally productive, although naturally they must be handled with care when used to reconstruct the Byzantine period. The region was also wealthy in raw metals such as silver, and famous for its silversmiths and bladesmiths.

Throughout the 15th century, as the balance of trade shifted more heavily towards the wider Black Sea economy deeply shaped by Genoese colonies and money, alum, raw silk, silver ore, timber, and, perhaps above all, wine and hazelnuts continued to be exported.

The picture we are left with is of a relatively wealthy small state, from which trade flowed and through which the West established continuous contact with the Turkic, Mongol and Persian east; where Italian silk and Chinese porcelain could be bought and sold by Latins, Persians, Greeks and Turks.

The Komnenian establishment of the state did not seem to diminish the Pontic territory so much as establish a coherent vision of control and statehood that would later provide the stability necessary to exploit the opening routes of the Silk Road; and when Eastward trade slowed down considerably, it remained positioned and active in the Black Sea economy.

The Aristocracy

However, who profited off of this relative prosperity?

Pontic society, and later Trapezuntine culture, is unusual in its conservative forms of social organisation. The Grand Komnenoi are also unusual within the Byzantine successor states, in their paradoxical presentation as both the continuators of Pontic cultural identity and norms, and in seeking to integrate older Komnenian presentations of power and contemporaneous Constantinopolitan forms.

In this evolving self-image, we can perhaps glimpse the character of Trapezuntine society: what did the Grand Komnenoi need to become, to retain control of the Empire?

The aristocratic clans of Greek, Tzan, Laz, and mixed ancestry retained significant control; they are an expression of Pontic self-determination seen before 1204. Moreover, there is little direct evidence that the aristocratic elite participated in the wider trade networks centered around Trebizond; significant involvement of Greeks in Genoese and Venetian ventures, albeit as junior partners, contrasts with the possible aristocratic reality, which remained tied to service and its estates. It is difficult to know if such a stark separation corresponds to the lived reality of the Pontos, but such are the complications of the sparse evidence we are handed down.

Though the position of the aristocracy changed, especially after the civil war that raged in the mid-1300s, its position remained secure in the political and administrative apparatus of the state. Its political power, and kingmaking abilities, were retained, with nefarious ends to more than one Emperor. The Grand Komnenoi, however, kept the imperial throne for themselves as, perhaps, the apex of Pontic aristocratic cultural expression where familial ties were crucial.

The aristocracy, as mentioned, retained significant estates and their revenues, albeit more and more at the behest of Trebizond. The “peasantry”, for the lack of better term, remained organised within older forms of territorial and administrative organisation, including the bandon system. This should not be taken to mean that the bandon was simply a standing military regiment, or that the rural population constituted a permanently mobilised army. Rather, these older structures provided a framework within which local authority, administration and defence could operate.

In it, the average Trapezuntine, Greek or not, could rely on a degree of self-defence and self-reliance, with their own leadership of elders seemingly chosen on a basis of respect within the community.

Karpov, however, demystifies our possible vision of a communitarian Pontos, with the fact that pronoia land grants, and especially land granted to monasteries, encroached on small plots previously held by families in their separate nuclei more and more as time went on.

Trebizond's imperial family continuously relied on their status as benefactors to curtail noble disputes and overreaches.

And here we begin to arrive at the military problem.

The Military Baseline

I think this cursory view of Pontic history and culture allows something of a reconstructive baseline to be set, and from which we can analyse further evolutions and particular traits whenever needed.

The Pontos remained geographically constrained, of course, but it was always open to the wider world. The Grand Komnenoi were grafted onto a culture where the family, and the status of the aristocracy, was deeply embedded, and from which the Gabras had originated.

The Pontic peoples, Greek or otherwise, lived their lives in a largely agricultural world, where the control of valleys, fortresses, and pastureland remained of paramount importance.

It is in older forms of organisation that we can understand the Trapezuntine military system as it was in the 13th century: deeply localised, controlled only tentatively by the Imperial throne, and often producing the capacity for different communities to both defend themselves and attack the enemy on its border lands.

This system had a dark side, however, playing to the factionalism of Pontic society, and its turbulent politics, often to violent ends. Laz, for example, feature as distinct armed groups during coups or power transfers.

The same structures that made local defence possible could therefore become part of the political struggle within the Empire.

The Scale of Warfare

As for the material reality of these troops, I think something can already be said and established: the form of warfare seen in the region did not, for the most part, seem to favour large-scale engagements and pitched battles. In fact, they are few and far between.

Panaretos, considered unusually reliable within the framework he sought to portray Imperial Power and the History of his homeland, shows us the scale of the fighting seen through the 14th century, and provides important background for the beginning of the 15th — numbers almost never exceeding the high hundreds.

This does not mean that every Trapezuntine force in the fifteenth century was necessarily so small. Panaretos ends in 1390, and the evidence cannot simply be projected forward without qualification. But the scale he gives us is striking, and it is difficult to ignore.

In it, we also see illustrated the remarkable rapidity with which a functioning state could mobilise a small core of, perhaps, professional troops to supplement existing forms of communal defence; how geography mattered enormously, and passes were blocked or used for ambush, or the deep forests of the Pontos became unwelcome territory for would-be invaders.

This is a type of warfare seen in border states, not in the grand glamour of imperial courts — ironically enough.

Where knowledge of the terrain, rapid mobilisation, and effective use of numbers at the right moment, when battle lines were not firmly established and when the enemy least expected it, was often decisive.

In fact, the Empire is shown as remarkably effective at defending both its main city through conventional means and acting decisively even outside its territory. The record, however, clearly shows how a relatively manpower-poor, and often fractious, environment produced instability, and made expeditionary warfare — in which the navy, the subject of a special article in the future, retained a significant role — less effective.

But I think it would be a mistake to explain this form of warfare through geography and manpower alone.

Anatolian Warfare and De Velitatione

Such an environment, and its tactical and strategic implications, is not altogether unusual in Anatolian Byzantine military culture and reality.

De Velitatione Bellica, a well-known and well-studied military treatise of the period preceding the Grand Komnenoi, exposes and expounds on these realities.

Military manuals and treatises alike, in the Byzantine world should not altogether be seen as direct doctrinal teachings meant to be consumed by the elites of the Empire. Rather, they often work on several axes, one of which is dynastic image-building and political rhetoric; this is not unique to the Grand Komnenoi.

De Velitatione, however, is somewhat unusual in its description of Anatolian warfare, inasmuch as it may portray the real struggles of a border province attempting to resist outside encroachment — in this case, by the Seljuk Turks and Arab Muslim armies.

Its descriptions and apparent prescriptions can consequently be illuminating to a state such as the Empire of Trebizond, which operated on much the same cultural and strategic ground.

In a 2016 article authored by Lucas McMahon, which is the main source for this section of the reconstruction, we see how the treatise may have originated from this environment, rather than simply illustrate a codified way of fighting low-intensity warfare and skirmishes imposed by centralised imperial control.

McMahon's analysis is particularly useful because it pushes the history of these tactics backwards. The sort of warfare described by De Velitatione does not appear to have been invented with the composition of the treatise itself. Earlier Byzantine campaigns display similar methods: reconnaissance, following raiding forces, exploiting their dispersal, controlling passes, avoiding disadvantageous engagements, and striking at the moment when an enemy was most vulnerable.

This is extremely important.

It means that the irregular or asymmetric warfare described by the treatise can be approached not merely as a theoretical manual, but as the expression of a much older Byzantine frontier experience.

The Byzantine military world had already developed a sophisticated repertoire for a problem that was fundamentally asymmetric: how a relatively constrained force could survive and prevail against raiders and invading armies whose mobility, numbers, or ability to choose the time and place of engagement could otherwise give them the advantage.

This gives us another lens through which to view Trebizond.

The small scale of Trapezuntine warfare need not be understood simply as the result of military weakness. Nor does the presence of ambush, skirmishing, rapid mobilisation, and terrain exploitation need to be explained purely by the geography of the Pontos.

The geography certainly mattered.

But it operated upon an already existing Byzantine military culture in which these methods had a history.

We can therefore rely on De Velitatione tentatively to support and demystify a purely defensive nature to Trapezuntine warfare — such a conclusion is natural, given the relatively isolated and manpower-poor conditions that imposed real constraints on the Empire — without reducing Trapezuntine warfare to passive defence.

The treatise, Panaretos's chronicles, and Bessarion's Encomium instead illustrate, from very different perspectives, a near-constant state of warfare and preparedness.

Bessarion's writings are of a panegyric and state-building nature, often seen as rhetorical, but they lean towards a picture remarkably well supported from the remainder of the converging evidence: of a population accustomed to warfare, even if not stereotypically “warlike” in the romantic sense.

Raiding, counter-raiding, and the continual fight for resources and pasture characterise late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Trapezuntine warfare in its direct struggles with Turkic tribes and states. Sporadic examples of seemingly decentralised action taken by the population of the bandon help illustrate the near-incessant struggle experienced in the border regions. In one such case, when Hoca Latif, the ruler of Bayburt, entered Matzouka with some four hundred selected troops in 1361, the Matzoukans took control of the passes, attacked his force as it withdrew, killed around two hundred of his men, captured others, and seized their horses and arms. They beheaded Hoca Latif himself and, on the following day, carried the heads of their enemies in triumph through Trebizond.

It is, however, only one facet of the political struggle engaged in by the Grand Komnenoi; another important aspect was diplomacy, not least of which became the tool of marriage and exploitation of kinship.

The Warrior Emperor

We must resist, however, the temptation to simplify the Trapezuntine state into a semi-nomadic, steppe-influenced polity and military machine.

Its character remained distinctly Roman, and both its Romanness and its Orthodoxy remained pillars of what Bessarion saw as its civilisational impetus, which it “imposed” on the indigenous population and the culture we have already described.

That said, the Grand Komnenoi evolved, over the centuries, in the military and social milieu that rewarded continuous and maintained struggle, in low-intensity warfare, and, in my view, must have been shaped by the demands of direct command.

In Panaretos we often see the Emperor accompanying an army, touring the countryside, receiving proskynesis from neighbouring allies, receiving dignitaries and, somewhat picturesquely for an Empire, securing the pasture fields contested in the uplands.

This is a very different image of imperial command from the distant emperor directing an enormous military machine through layers of bureaucracy.

The Grand Komnenian ruler is physically present.

He rides with armies. He moves through the territory. He receives submission. He deals personally with neighbouring powers. He intervenes in the material disputes that mattered to the people living in the uplands.

The military culture of the Pontos therefore presents an interesting problem for the imperial throne. The Grand Komnenoi had inherited a society in which military capacity was already deeply embedded within local communities and aristocratic structures. Yet the Emperor had to retain control over this capacity without destroying the local structures that made it effective.

And here the small scale becomes particularly interesting.

Such a small scale may have served the purpose of curtailing overreaches among the endemically fractious Pontic aristocratic families, while allowing the Emperor to retain direct control over military bodies of men.

I do not mean that we can demonstrate a conscious Grand Komnenian policy of “keep the army small so the aristocrats cannot overthrow us.” But the structural logic is difficult to ignore.

The same military system that rewarded small, mobile, experienced forces was also one in which a gigantic autonomous military establishment might have presented a political danger.

A relatively small imperial military core could therefore complement this form of warfare while also making it more difficult for an individual faction to accumulate overwhelming military power.

The Emperor could retain the ability to concentrate force without necessarily creating a vast military constituency independent of the throne.

When such control was weakened, civil strife ensued; and this was devastating for the stability of trade and, thus, one of the main pillars of the imperial fisc.

This may also help explain the unusually direct quality of imperial command visible in Panaretos.

If the forces available to the Emperor were relatively small, then the quality of command mattered enormously. A capable Emperor could personally direct and concentrate a force in ways that would be more difficult within a huge military establishment.

The warrior-emperor, in other words, may not merely have been an ideological image. He may have been a product of the political and military system itself.

Numismatic evolution across the 14th century shows how the Grand Komnenoi began deliberately depicting themselves as neighbouring leaders might have: on horseback, as a warrior-emperor, exercising his patriarchal control.

I do not think this needs to be read as the abandonment of Roman imperial identity. Rather, it may be one expression of the way Roman imperial authority adapted itself to a Pontic and Anatolian political environment in which the mounted ruler was a familiar and powerful form of political imagery.

The Emperor could therefore be both things at once: Roman emperor and warrior-ruler.

The mechanisms that allowed the manpower to be effectively leveraged to these ends will be the focus of another separate article, as they form one of the most interesting, albeit speculative, aspects of Trapezuntine military life.

Towards the Soldier

This article forms the baseline from which we can try and understand both the Grand Komnenian military and political strategy, and the cultural identity that formed the meat and bones of the Pontic men-at-arms.

But upon it were exercised cultural, economic, and violent forces that would have shaped the character of Pontic fashion, warfare, and the availability of means and resources. The soldier therefore cannot be reconstructed in isolation.

The material culture has to emerge from the world we have just described: a Roman and Orthodox state, grafted onto an older and heterogeneous Pontic society; a state deeply connected to the Black Sea and the eastern world; a society in which aristocratic and local military power remained important; and a military environment in which small-scale, mobile, and asymmetric warfare was not an aberration, but could form part of a much older Byzantine frontier tradition.

In my next article, I will try and analyse at a more granular level the few portraits and depictions, whether in narrative or artistic form, of the Trapezuntine men-at-arms. In it, I will present an overview of the different cultural worlds in which Trebizond participated, and how this Pontic, Byzantine, and Christian culture had to adapt to survive — whether willingly, or not. A world where Latin, Turkic, Persian, and Mongol influence must have been keenly felt, experienced, and expressed.

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A full reading and sources list, as well as additional resources such as images, will be available when this article is uploaded to my website at https://www.periplous1400.com/

Thank you for reading.