“How to Fight the Slavs: The ‘Strategikon’ from the Time of Emperor Maurice” 595 A.D скачать в хорошем качестве

“How to Fight the Slavs: The ‘Strategikon’ from the Time of Emperor Maurice” 595 A.D

book of our faithfull author: https://archive.org/details/maurice-s... One of the genres of ancient, and later medieval, literature were taktika or strategemata—manuals of the art of war. The first known to us was written at the beginning of the 4th century BCE by Aeneas Tacticus, possibly from Stymphalos in Arcadia. Its title, How Should Those Under Siege Offer Resistance?, precisely explains what the work is about. Ancient military literature was sometimes extremely anachronistic, as in the case of Aelianus Tacticus, who dedicated to Emperor Hadrian a treatise On Greek Military Formations, in which he described the tactics of the Macedonian phalanx—a formation from the time of Alexander and the Diadochi, that is, more than 400 years earlier. At other times it was more up to date, as in the anonymous De rebus bellicis from the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries, which attempted to solve the military problems of an empire threatened in its very existence—though in a rather extravagant way, by proposing the construction of fantastic war machines that were supposed to give Roman soldiers an advantage over their enemies. All these ancient manuals are decisively surpassed—in their practicality, relevance, and depiction of the real problems faced by contemporary Roman soldiers on the battlefield, rather than those of the times of Pyrrhus or Hannibal—by the Strategikon attributed to Emperor Maurice. This ruler reigned from 582 to 602 and fought against the Persians, the Lombards in Italy, and the Avars and Slavs in the Balkans. In this last struggle he achieved unexpected successes, which after an eleven-year war enabled the Romans to recover the Danube frontier. Maurice himself crossed the river into Dacia—the first Roman emperor to do so since Constantine the Great had done so in the 330s, more than 250 years earlier. Maurice shifted the theater of war onto the lands of the Dacian Slavs and, intoxicated by success, ordered the army to winter in enemy territory, in Dacia beyond the Danube. Terrified, the soldiers revolted under the leadership of the centurion Phocas, who proclaimed himself emperor and ordered Maurice and his entire family to be murdered. Dacia was, of course, evacuated, and nearly all the troops from the Danubian limes were transferred to Asia, where the Persian king Khosrow II declared himself the avenger of the murdered Maurice and launched war against Rome. The Slavs and Avars did not wait long and poured in great numbers into Roman lands, never to leave them again. The Strategikon was not so much written as commissioned by Emperor Maurice. The work was composed around 595 during the war against the Slavs and was probably written by Peter, the emperor’s brother, one of the three principal commanders in the Balkan war against the Slavs. The treatise was conceived as practical support for Roman commanders conducting ongoing military operations on all three fronts of the empire: in Italy, the Balkans, and Asia. It was not written in Latin, still the language of command in the Roman army, but in Greek—the language spoken and thought in by most Romans, including their generals. Its author had military experience, and the military operations described in the treatise—such as combined land and naval forces—often display a level of complexity not seen again before the time of the Second World War.