Byzantine Army - Byzantine Weapons

Byzantine Weapons

The Byzantines originally used weapons developed from their Roman origins, swords, spears, javelins, slings and bows etc. However they were gradually influenced by the weapons of their Turkish and Arab neighbors, adopting the use of the composite bow and the cavalry mace

There were many sword (xiphos) types; straight, curved, one- and two-handed, which are depicted in illustrations. According to the Strategika, by the sixth century the short Roman gladius had been abandoned in favor of a long two-edged sword, the spathion, used by both the infantry and cavalry. The tenth century Sylloge tacticorum gives the length of this kind of sword as the equivalent of 94 cm and mentions a new saber-like sword of the same length, the paramerion, a curved one-edged slashing weapon for cavalrymen. Both weapons could be carried from a belt or by a shoulder strap.

Infantrymen and cavalrymen carried spears for thrusting and javelins for throwing. Cavalrymen of the sixth and seventh century wielded lances with a thong in the middle of the shaft (Avar style) and a pennant. Infantrymen's spears (kontaria) in the tenth century were 4-4.5 meters long (cavalry lances were slightly shorter) with an iron point (xipharion, aichme). One type of spear, the menaulion, is described in detail; it was very thick, taken whole from young oak or cornel saplings and capped by a long blade (45–50 cm), for use by especially strong infantrymen (called menaulatoi after their weapon) against enemy kataphraktoi - an excellent example of a weapon and a type of specialized soldier developed for a specific tactical role. Both light infantry and cavalry carried javelins (akontia, riptaria) no longer than three meters.

Maces (rabdia) and axes (pelekia, tzikouria) served as shock weapons. The tenth century kataphraktoi carried heavy all-iron maces (siderorabdia) – six-, four- or three-cornered – to smash their way through enemy infantry. Infantrymen used maces and battle-axes in hand-to-hand combat; the two handed axe was the preferred weapon of the mercenaries from Rus' and Varangian Guard of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Byzantine axes were single-bladed (rounded or straight edged), sometimes with a spike opposite the blade.

The sling (sphendone) and the bow (toxon) were the weapons used by light soldiers. Slings were the ordinary hand-held type; the Roman staff sling (fustibalis) was apparently little used. The Byzantine bow, like the late Roman bow, was the composite, reflex type featuring an unbendable horn grip with the reinforced wooden bowstave slung in reverse of the bow's natural flex when unstrung. A bowshot (flight, not target, range) is over three hundred meters for an infantry bow, but cavalry bows, standing 1.2 meters high, were smaller and less tightly strung for greater accuracy and ease of handling, they had a flight range of 130–35 meters. The solenarion is a hollow tube through which an archer could launch several small arrows (mues, i.e., "mice") at a time; Anna Komnene remarked that the Crusader's Western-type crossbow, which she called a tzangra, was unknown to Byzantium before the 12th century.