Standardized Numbers in the Byzantine Army

Abstract

Many of the statistics that appear in sources for Byzantine armies and their pay show a pattern of roundness and uniformity. While some scholars have taken this as evidence that the statistics are unreliable, the consistency of the pattern indicates that the Byzantine army, like the Roman army, deliberately preferred standardized numbers. Such standardization offered great advantages in mustering, deploying, and paying a large and well-organized force without the help of modern methods of record keeping. Other medieval armies, and the Byzantine army after the eleventh century, did without such standardization because they were smaller and more loosely organized.