4 - The Byzantine Naval Forces of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

Summary

Strive at all times to have the fleet in top condition and to have it not want for anything. For the fleet is the glory of Romania [Byzantium].

The resurgence of Byzantine naval power in the Aegean and the Mediterranean in the tenth century is in contrast to the significant territorial losses the Byzantine Empire sustained in the ninth century, such as the fall of Sicily to the Aghlavids of Tunisia by the year 878 and the conquest of Chandax by the Umayyad Muslims from Spain in 824. Several expeditionary armies were assembled and fleets were gathered from all the maritime and coastal themata of the empire against the Muslims of Crete in 911, 949 and again in 960, with the island's capital falling to the imperial forces in March 961, while Cyprus became an effective administrative province of the empire in 965. Hence, the pacification of the eastern half of the Mediterranean basin that came as a result of the conquest of Crete, Cyprus, Cilicia and northern Syria, the securing of the naval routes to and from Constantinople and the increasing presence of the Byzantine authority in its Italian provinces marked a new era of pax Romana on the high seas that was to last for nearly a century.

The structure of the Byzantine navy allowed it to play both a defensive and an offensive role, depending on the policy shaped by the central government. The three major units of the imperial navy, established in the early eighth century, consisted of the imperial fleet, an elite unit based primarily at Constantinople and commanded by a drungarius of the fleet; the fleets of the marine themata of the Cibyrrhaeots, Samos and Aegean Sea, each under its own strategos; and the provincial fleets of the rest of the coastal themata of the empire, small squadrons that had as their main duty the policing of the coasts and major ports, each under a turmarch or an arkhon.