The Eastern Frontier
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• Uttwak’s strategist – Plan from the top grand strategy – military installation strategically planned. – also from Diocletian onwards that a mobile field army to back up Roman territory recently challenged that there was at different orthodoxy in the East. Different view diversion between theory and practice and practice and aims.
• Was it entirely defensive? Scholars have pointed out few emperors ever thought of trying to defeat or occupy foreign territory – far more concerned with prestige, internal security and policing border areas. New different conception of relation between nomadic and settled groups.
• Were inner defensive roads and measures really so? Too modern an approach, or are they internal structures?
• Persian occupied by proxy Eastern provinces for 15 years – cumulative effects of previous decades of warfare between Byzantium and Persia lay a large role in explaining the ease of Islamic conquests.
• Standard view of a rigid defensive system can no longer be maintained – history of region far from static Nabatean Empire’s decline, creation of the province of Arabia 106 had profound economic and cultural consequences – semi-nomadic Arab tribes who from 4^th century onwards used by both empires as military allies.
• Central role in security of borderlands, paid to do so by patrons. Depending on tribal groupings at the expense regular military investment following practices similar to West a century earlier. Of course policies that could rebound on the government
• Scarcity of Eastern manpower in 540s during Chosroes I invasion. Arab federates not paid and legionary forces withdrawn from south-east Palestine – weakening resistance to Muslims – together with weakening Persian invasions explains why Arabs get in so easily.
• Eastern provinces shared external threat and internal fragmentation. Significant changes in urban and rural settlement – Christianisation, interpenetration of Greek on culture, military and fiscal needs of the state evident before the last Persian invasion of early seventh century. Near East in a ferment of change.

Other Notes in this Category

1. Reasons for their success
2. The Eastern Frontier
3. The Persian and Arab Invasions

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