Byzantine men have a reputation for military weakness, cowardice, and deviousness in both western medieval texts and eighteenth-through early-twentieth-century historiography. More recent scholars of Byzantium have tried to rehabilitate the military reputation of Medieval Roman men somewhat through discussions of military history in which they defend the practice of hiring mercenaries or point to deceptive stratagems in ancient Roman military handbooks. These discussions dance around the driving issue of military honour and do not consider gender. I see the reputation for weakness as deriving more from differing conceptions of proper gender performance and male honour than from differing military tactics or strategies. Nearly all the Medieval Roman texts from which the details of military history are derived were using stories about war to comment on the morals and character of the leading men, so we need to bring the study of masculinity overtly into the conversation about military prowess. As this subject is in its infancy, this chapter does more to lay out problems than offer explanations.

Questions of the actual degree of militarism in the Eastern Empire, as opposed to the highly militarized and violent Western Europe, are entwined with Medieval Roman conceptions of the role of militarism in the construction of an ideal man. The later appears to have been a contested arena with different voices, in different eras, providing somewhat con-tradictory witnesses.

A structural social explanation has been offered for why elite East Roman men often seem less warlike then their Western European counterparts. Compared with Norman elite men, for example, there is no question that the Medieval Romans were less frequently engaged in warfare. Mark Whittow attributed this, in part, to differences in the underpinnings of power. In Western Europe power came from possession of land which was maintained through armed conflict or the threat of it. Men became powerful because they were able to fight and lead men in warfare. In the East, men became powerful because they worked for the imperial government. Such work might be military, but it could also be administrative, leading Whittow to interpret Byzantine ideals of manhood as relatively independent from military valour. The masculinity of Byzantine men was not impugned within their society by their status as civilians.