During his reign, Basil II reorganized the army and the empire had a theoretical alltogether fighting force of 200,000-250,000 men.Originally Posted by [b
Of course that was, as i said, theoretical but he was usually able to raise armies of 70,000-80,000 men.
The bulgars had, if not so big then, comparativelly bulky armies too.
So 15,000 bulgarian prisoners may had been a large number for the western medieval world but not for the eastern one.
As for the eastern military families, you should know that they had assembled so great estates and wealth that the traditional "thematic" organization of the army was crumbling because most people had no land of their own anymore and were forced to work as underpaid workers in the landlords' great estates.
Therefore, in addition to the Constaninople bureaucrats' lack of interest to the armies, the byzantine army of the time consisted mainly of untrained, unarmored and inequiped peasants.
The great landlords of the military families had their own small personal armies of mercenaries.
The situation in the east of the empire was starting to shift towards feudalism.
Basil II halted this procedure and tried to revive the "thematic" organization.
However, the change was irreversible and after his death the situation deteriorated with the constant civil wars between the bureaucrats in Constantinople and the military families in the east.
It is interesting that Romanos, the emperor who was defeated in Manzikert, was a landlord and was crowned with the support of the military families.
His army consisted of, the central army of constantinople, untrained peasants who were the remains of the "thematic" army, mercenaries of all kinds and some allies like the armenians.
To make a long story short, my opinion is that the concentration of vast lands and tremendous wealth in the hands of a few military families and the indifference of the officials in constantinople for the people in the east as well as their antagonism with the military families, led, not only to the literal starving of most of the peasants in the east, but also to the almost total dismantling of the eastern armies and the increased use of mercenaries.
Under those circumstances, even if the military families had taken over command of the empire long before 1070(i think...), when Romanos was crowned emperor, they wouldn't have gone too far with their mercenary armies.
Remember that their first encounter and defeat by the seljuks was in the mid-11th century, while they were...expanding in the lands of modern Iran
As history showed, it was way too far for them.
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