 the Balkans,
Italy, North Africa and against the Persian Empire.
So many historians fail to understand the unbelievable military and economic pressure the Eastern Roman Empire was under from constant invasions.
Simply, the barbarian invasions never ended. They just kept coming over and over. The massive military expense of wars drained the Empire dry. Virtually all available funds were spent just to survive leaving little for building projects.
A major consideration is what I call the "de-Latinization" of the Empire. With every barbarian thrust over the border you saw the destruction of Roman peoples, towns, cities, infrastructure and the economy. Lands lost to the Empire meant a loss of taxes paid to Constantinople as well as recruiting grounds for soldiers to defend the state.
Every day was a nightmare. - Historians tend to write about a single Eastern Roman battle with no thought given to an Empire wide view.
|While the Eurasian Avars were invading the |
Balkans the Romans fought an invasion of
Italy by the Germanic Lombard tribe.
The Eastern Emperors and their generals in Constantinople woke up every day to a living nightmare of horror. The Empire was monstrously huge with multiple wars both large and small often happening simultaneously on several continents. If the Emperor transferred troops from one front to strengthen another he would only invite invasion on the first front.
The Avars were only one of many problems.
Tiberius II Constantine negotiated a truce with the Avars, paying them 80,000 nomismata per year, for which the Avars agreed to defend the Danube frontier, thereby allowing Tiberius to transfer troops across to the east for a planned renewal of the conflict against the Persians.
In 575 Tiberius began moving the armies of Thrace and Illyricum to the eastern provinces. Buying time to make the necessary preparations, he agreed to a three-year truce with the Persians, paying 30,000 nomismata, though the truce excluded action in the region around Armenia.
Not content with making preparations, Tiberius also used this period to send reinforcements to Italy under the command of Baduarius with orders to stem the Lombard invasion. He saved Rome from the Lombards and allied the Empire with Childebert II, the King of the Franks, in order to defeat them. Unfortunately, Baduarius was defeated and killed in 576, allowing even more imperial territory in Italy to slip away.
Tiberius was unable to respond as the Persian Sassanid Emperor Khosrau I struck at the Empire’s Armenian provinces in 576, sacking Melitene and Sebastea. Shifting his attention eastward, Tiberius sent his general Justinian with the eastern armies to push the Persians back across the Euphrates. The Byzantines followed, and pushed deep into Persian territory, culminating in a raid on Atropatene.
In 577, however, Justinian was defeated in Persian Armenia, forcing a Byzantine withdrawal. In response to this defeat, Tiberius replaced Justinian with the future Emperor Maurice. During the truce which Tiberius concluded with Khosrau, he busily enhanced the army of the east, not only with transfers from his western armies but also through barbarian recruits, which he formed into a new Foederati unit, amounting to some 15,000 troops by the end of his reign.
|Roman – Persian War of 572–591|
The Roman armies faced a major war with the Persian Empire in the east. At the same time they face invasion in the Balkans by the Avars, the invasion of Italy by the Lombards and a North African war against the Berbers.
|Solidus of Emperor Tiberius II Constantine wearing consular robes.|
Throughout 577 and into 578, Tiberius avoided all other entanglements which would have distracted him from the approaching Persian conflict. He appeased, quite successfully, both Chalcedonian and Monophysite Christians by the use of strategic appointments and the easing of persecutions. He paid the Lombard tribal chieftains some 200,000 nomismata in an attempt to keep them divided and prevent the election of a king.
When the Slavs invaded Illyricum, he transported Avar armies to attack th