THE THEMATA

As with most other aspects of the state's administrative machinery, its structures of military organisation also evolved along lines which resulted in a system of very different appearance in the eighth and ninth centuries from that which operated in the sixth and earlier seventh centuries. A number of processes, which form in practice an evolutionary whole, need to be clarified or explained. All, however, depend to a greater or lesser extent on one key problem: the origins and development of the so-called themata or military provinces and the phenomenona associated with them – the mode of recruiting, equipping and supplying the soldiers, the methods of paying them, and the fate of the civil provincial government.

The differences between the late Roman army of the sixth century and that of the Byzantine state of the ninth century are not difficult to perceive. The late Roman system was characterised by a fundamental division between the civil and military spheres of administration: civil officials had no authority over the military, and vice versa. The armies were divided into two essential groups: those of the mobile field forces, technically referred to as comitatenses (although in their turn made up of a number of distinct types of unit, differentiated originally by their posting, their mode and source of recruitment and so on), and the permanent frontier or garrison units, described and known as limitanei (although again made up from units of widely differing origins).