The Late Byzantine Military (1204-1461)

Let's shift gears a bit and move on to a different topic.  If anyone finds something new on or would like to reply to the discussion on late Byzantine armor, please post on that.

I think it is safe to say that there was an incarnation of the Roman legionnaire in the late Roman/early Byzantine period (4th-5th c.).  That is, the infantry soldier wearing something resembling the segmented armor, etc. (see the picture on the first page).  However, by the time of Justinian to Anastasius there was an influx of barbarian foederati into the Byzantine army.  Even before that too, after the disaster of Adrianople.  I think it was during this time that the old legionnaire was phased out for good.

The old military service tax of the stratiotes was commuted to a simple tac starting in the middle period.  That is, the military service obligation and the call to perform public corvees.  The soldiery was still organized in their respective themes, but were not really the "Thematic" soldiers of the 7th and 8th centuries.  They were called more by their collective ethnicity now than anything else - Amerniakon, Skythikon, Italikon, etc.

The late Byzantine period did see the development of certain feudal tendencies, although not to the same scale as in Western Europe.  In the West feudalism arose out of a power vacuum after the Roman Empire ended.  It was a system of personal relationships between a lord and his vassals, on the one hand socio-economic, and on the other military - to provide security to families and peasants in the absence of a central government. 

In Byzantium, however, still had a central government, obviously.  It was not as closely connected and networked as it had been in former times and resources were scarcer.  So the emperors created the pronoia system whereby they granted the revenues and the right to collect the taxes of certain peasants (paroikoi) living on state-owned land.  These grants were given to individual soldiers, groups of soldiers, and also to civil officials.  For the soldiers it was in return for military service.  The land and the peasants themselves were not granted to the Pronoiar.  The Byzantine peasants were free to alienate land, bequeath it, and move to other villages unlike western serfs who were tied to their lands.

The Pronoiar soldiers were therefore in a separate category than mercenaries, who were hired for a specific amount of time, were usually foreign, and were paid in cash.