The Rejection of ‘Holy War'

No concept of holy war comparable to that familiar from Islam, nor of the just war such as was enunciated before, during and after the crusades in western Europe, ever evolved in Byzantium.

That aspect of jihad that Byzantines could actually see, the physical fight­ing directed against the enemies of Islam, became early on something that Byzantine thinkers had to contend with. By the early ninth century, Byzantine critics of Islam knew that those who died in fighting for the faith had been promised paradise; they also thought that those who killed for the faith, in a more positive and intended way, as opposed merely to dying for it, were likewise promised paradise. But such views do not seem to have provoked any special response until well into the ninth century, when Niketas of Byzantium set out to show that Islamic jihad was both inhuman and misguided. Ironically his argument was very different from that of the Syrian Christian churchman John of Damascus a century or more earlier, who argued that if God willed it then it was permitted to kill in defence of the faith (Christianity), where the killing was adjudged a neutral act or as absolute obedience to God's command (citing Old Testament precedents).^[985] Niketas paraphrased the Islamic position to say that there were two forms of killing, those commanded by God in respect of defeating unbelievers or those who opposed Islam, which were acceptable and licit; and those in which a Muslim killed another Muslim, which were illicit.

A later tenth-century prayer to be recited by the troops as they march to attack the enemy is as follows:

Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us. Come to the aid of us Christians and make us worthy to fight to the death for our faith and our brothers, strengthen our souls and our hearts and our whole body, the mighty Lord of battles, through the intercession of the immaculate Mother of God, Thy Mother, and of all the saints. Amen.^[986]

In the context of the considerations dealt with so far, the reluctance of the church to accept that soldiers who fell fighting for the empire should be counted among the martyrs (as the emperor Nikephoros II proposed in the 960s, for example) is readily understood.^[987] The idea was not new. In the military treatise compiled by Leo VI, the Tactica, the reward of the soldier who fights for the faith is expressed in terms not simply of doing his duty as the companion in arms of the emperor, but also in spiritual terms: fighting the enemies of Christendom brings immediate spiritual benefit, and for those who die in battle, perpetual contentment. It has been pointed out that in the same Treatise Leo describes his understanding of the Islamic notion of jihad, and that his own remarks suggest a remarkable parallel between the spiritual rewards reaped by the Christian soldier who falls in battle, and Muslim attitudes.^[988]

The proposal of Nikephoros II highlights the difference between the official and theologically respectable views of the ‘establishment', and those of the ordinary population of the empire, especially of the soldiers who did the fighting and the rural or urban populations who experienced warfare on a regular basis.

Such differences between metropolitan and provincial culture should not be exaggerated. Both shared a common Christian and Hellenised tradition; both also shared similar structures of family relationships and the loyalties that accompanied them; and both shared, at base, similar notions about public and private expressions of honour and shame. The court actively emphasised the divine support granted to imperial military undertakings. Both central and provincial forces were accompanied from the fourth century by crosses of varying patterns and sizes, from simple wooden constructions to much larger and more elaborate bejewelled examples. That their religious and ideological significance was recognised is clear in the ninth century and after from the efforts made by Muslim forces to capture them, and from the attempts made by the Byzantines to recover them, the latter an event greeted with great jubilation.^[989]

It is precisely because the Byzantines fought under the symbol of the cross, and because they saw themselves as soldiers of Christ fighting to preserve God's kingdom on earth, that no theory or doctrine of ‘holy war' evolved. Warfare was almost by definition of a religious character, since the East Roman empire was the sole orthodox polity fighting to preserve and extend the Christian faith. Together with the doubts expressed by the Fathers of the Church in respect of killing, and the unbroken cultural tradition that bound medieval East Rome to its late Roman and early Christian origins, it is not difficult to understand this.

From the fifth century to the end of the empire, therefore, there is a mass of evidence for the formal and official acceptance by both church and court, as well as by the ordinary population, of the need to wage war, the fact of divine support for such warfare, and the need to maintain and to rely upon heavenly aid in waging war. And although the notion of ‘holy war' in the sense understood by the crusaders, or by non-Muslims as typical of Islam, had thus a very brief life in the Byzantine world, this does not mean that the ways in which warfare on behalf of the Christian Roman state were understood did not experience a certain evolution. On the contrary, it is very clear that Byzantines were constantly aware of the need to justify their wars, and this need became the more pressing in a time of political and military expansion­ism such as the tenth century. Constantine V is reported to have charac­terised as ‘noble' his campaign into Bulgaria in 772/3 because no Roman soldiers died; and by the time of the compilation of the Tactica of Leo VI the notion that a war had to be justified in accordance with orthodoxy and the existence of the Roman state was clearly set out: as long as the defence of Roman interests, however broadly defined, was at stake, then warfare was acceptable and just. From this time on, the notion of the just war in defence

the Byzantine World (London: Variorum, 1982), no. VI); and P. Magdalino, ‘Honour among Rhomaioi: The Framework of Social Values in the World of Digenes Akrites and Kekaumenos', Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 13 (1989), 183-218.

31 See Stouraitis, Krieg und Frieden, pp. 263-303; I. Stouraitis, ‘Byzantine War against Christians. An Emphylios Polemos?', Byzantina Symmeikta 20 (2010), 85-110; for the West: G. Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 1-57. For Islam: Ella Landau- Tasseron, ‘Features of the Pre-conquest Muslim Army in the Time of Muhammad', in Cameron (ed.), States, Resources and Armies, pp. 299-336. of the God-granted mission and purpose of the East Roman emperors and the Chosen People was a standard aspect of imperial political propaganda, directed both externally, to the empire's neighbours, whether hostile or not, and internally, as an element in the practice of political-ideological legitimisation of state, society and their institutional structures. War with other orthodox Christians was, of course, to be avoided; yet it could also be justified if the one true empire, that of the Romans, were to be attacked by the misguided rulers of such lands, a position perfectly exemplified in the letters of the patriarch Nikolaos I in the early tenth century to the Bulgar Tsar Symeon.^[990]