The effect of religion on the army

[Jim Webster]

1) The donatists didn't start off as a heresy. They just rejected any clergy who had handed over religious texts to be burned rather than face martyrdom.
So they couldn't accept anybody ordained by such a person.
Theologically they were mainstream in their belief in baptism being the only washing away of sin, Constantine himself was baptised on his deathbed. (Mainstream in what the public seem to have believed as opposed to what various church fathers taught)

The argument was therefore between two factions who wouldn't accept each other's clergy and fought over who owned what buildings. In 315 Constantine actually agreed with the donatists.

2) Doubtless pagan, tribal and political factions made it messier to the detriment of the Empire as well, but I struggle to see the relevence

3) Aurelian failed. He was murdered, died without heir and the dance continued. Diocletian tried a new tack and that didn't work either.

4) Still a dynasty, with loyalty to the Dynasty and usurpers were from within the Dynasty

5) I notice how you've ignored the Egyptian evidence. If in Egypt you feel that Christianity brought violence and more riot and fighting than Egypt had seen before, how come the same Religion was responsible for an outbreak of pacifism in the rest of the Empire?

Agincourt shows that what we have is a situation where Christians have fought pretty well as many wars as anybody else, with just as much enthusiasm as anybody else, but here, uniquely, in the case of the later roman empire, which had so many other things going wrong (bloated bureaucracy for a start), Christianity induced Pacifism.

Jim

[Patrick Waterson]

The point about Donatists is that they were one more Christian sect or belief variant that added to the turmoil within the Empire - a turmoil that existed in various forms, but was accentuated by the adoption of Christianity as the state religion as it added another layer of disturbances where disturbances existed and a new layer where they did not.

Aurelian did not fail: he reunited the Empire.  To end up murdered is not necessarily a lack of achievement.

4) Still a dynasty, with loyalty to the Dynasty and usurpers were from within the Dynasty

I am puzzed: is Sir trying to maintain that there was a single dynasty extending from the first to the last Constantine, or something of similar nature?  If so, I suggest taking a look at late Roman and Byzantine emperors and the number of 'fresh starts' in the succession.  If not, a bit of clarity about exactly what is meant would help.

5) I notice how you've ignored the Egyptian evidence. If in Egypt you feel that Christianity brought violence and more riot and fighting than Egypt had seen before, how come the same Religion was responsible for an outbreak of pacifism in the rest of the Empire?

Because the 'pacifism' was selective, preaching an aversion to warfare but happily engaging in domestic factional strife.  This was not unique to Egypt.

Agincourt shows that what we have is a situation where Christians have fought pretty well as many wars as anybody else, with just as much enthusiasm as anybody else, but here, uniquely, in the case of the later roman empire, which had so many other things going wrong (bloated bureaucracy for a start), Christianity induced Pacifism.

This is a non-argument.  As previously mentioned, Latin Christianity, prevalent in the west after the 7th century AD, was a different beast to Orthodox Christianity, which flourished under, and to the detriment of, the Roman and Byzantine Empire.

[Rob Miles]

To go back to the subject title: the effect of religion on the army has been and continues to be:

1) A morale boost
2) A generator of compassion, hatred or other mindset particular to the faith, circumstance and comparative religion or values of the enemy
3) Personal reconciliation to the prospect of death, horror and killing other human beings
4) A reason for fighting in the first place

Much of the discussion so far has been on pacifism. Western Christianity started very well with its non-violent philosophy, but once it got established and found sworn enemies in Islam and other non-believers it began to get a little lairy. Nevertheless, it has given us Westerners a long-held view that war should be 'just', even if it is 'just' that one big fat king should have that bit of land instead of that other big fat king. Prisoners should not be routinely slaughtered unless they are non-believers and civilians who manage to hide for three days can emerge safely when their city is attacked. We all know of countless abuses, but these WERE seen as abuses. The moral contradiction of Christianity in the act of slaughter does cause introspection that no Viking raider or Mongol, pagan Roman or Greek would ever consider.

'If God is with us, who can be against us?' is a common theme with soldiers. The Spartan phalanx (the big one with all the Spartiates on the right wing) would always sacrifice ON THE BATTLEFIELD before moving against the enemy to make sure the gods were on their side. I do not know of any occasion when the omens were not favourable, but if you were a Spartan priest you knew which side your bread was salted. If you knew the gods or god favoured your cause, you went into battle a happy bunny. So the Oracle at Delphi would be consulted, the unfathomable knot sliced open, the sacrifices would be made, the pilgrimages would be undertaken all to prove to the soldiers (if not the leader) that divine favour was with them.

[Duncan Head]

The Spartan phalanx (the big one with all the Spartiates on the right wing) would always sacrifice ON THE BATTLEFIELD before moving against the enemy to make sure the gods were on their side. I do not know of any occasion when the omens were not favourable

More than once at Plataia, apparently:

They could get no favorable omen from their sacrifices, and in the meanwhile many of them were killed and by far more wounded (for the Persians set up their shields for a fence, and shot showers of arrows). Since the Spartans were being hard-pressed and their sacrifices were of no avail, Pausanias lifted up his eyes to the temple of Hera at Plataea and called on the goddess, praying that they might not be disappointed in their hope. While he was still in the act of praying, the men of Tegea leapt out before the rest and charged the barbarians, and immediately after Pausanias' prayer the sacrifices of the Lacedaemonians became favorable.

"If at first you don't succeed,
Try, try again.
Till the Gods get it right."

Of course you could go ahead with unfavourable omens:

Shall we be unmoved by the story of the recklessness of Publius Claudius in the first Punic War? Claudius merely in jest mocked at the gods: when the chickens on being released from their cage refused to feed, he ordered them to be thrown into the water, so that as they would not eat they might drink; but the joke cost the jester himself many tears and the Roman people a great disaster, for the fleet was severely defeated.

[Justin Swanton]

How religion affects an army is actually a hugely complicated question, or collection of questions. Here are a few that come to mind:

1. Is the religion in question pacifist? This leads to a couple of sub-questions:

a) To what extent does the religion permit or uphold defensive warfare?
b) To what extent does it permit or uphold offensive warfare?

2. Is the religion's stance on warfare a part its fundamental teachings, or is it something more peripheral?

3. Do the religion's injunctions on warfare emanate from its highest authority and are they permanent, or are they more circumstantial, emanating from local religious authorities and varying in time and place?

4. To what extent to the adherents of a religion - especially the military adherents - take seriously the religion's stance on warfare? Does this vary from age to age? This applies to adherents who take their religion seriously but manage to rearrange its teachings on warfare to suit themselves. Ask a member of the IRA how this works.

5. And a bit different to 4, to what extent do the adherents of a religion take their own religion seriously? (i.e. they may know that such an injunction for/against warfare is important, but their religion is not really central to their lives)

Food for thought!

[Patrick Waterson]

The Spartan phalanx (the big one with all the Spartiates on the right wing) would always sacrifice ON THE BATTLEFIELD before moving against the enemy to make sure the gods were on their side. I do not know of any occasion when the omens were not favourable

More than once at Plataia, apparently:

Yes.  And curiously enough, the change to favourable omens seems to have coincided with the Persian cavalry riding off over the horizon looking for Greeks who were not huddled behind shields in an all-round defensive formation.  With the Persian cavalry gone, the omens became favourable, the Spartans went on to the attack and all was rosy in the temple garden.

One wonders whether the diviners occasionally had something of a tactical eye.

How religion affects an army is actually a hugely complicated question, or collection of questions. Here are a few that come to mind:

1. Is the religion in question pacifist? This leads to a couple of sub-questions:

a) To what extent does the religion permit or uphold defensive warfare?
b) To what extent does it permit or uphold offensive warfare?

And perhaps: does it differentiate between the two?  As far as the Assyrians (for example) were concerned, defensive warfare seems merely to have been the opponent getting his army mobilised first rather than a different ethical precept (but see below on gods and treaties).

2. Is the religion's stance on warfare a part its fundamental teachings, or is it something more peripheral?

For Jainism, avoiding warfare would be pretty fundamental.  For Islam, it was pretty central, especially with regard to getting into paradise.

3. Do the religion's injunctions on warfare emanate from its highest authority and are they permanent, or are they more circumstantial, emanating from local religious authorities and varying in time and place?

And does it in fact have any injunctions, or does it accept warfare as a fact of life?  For the Romans, it seems to have been more a matter of which ceremony to use (OK, chaps, whose turn is it to oil the hinges of the doors to the Temple of Janus?) rather than any question of fighting being a questionable activity - until (dare I say it) Christianity became the official religion.

What might be worth pointing out, particularly in connection with the Romans, is that it was sometimes held that the gods frowned upon going to war for the wrong reasons.  Both sides were usually very keen to convince the gods, or at least their contemporaries, that the other side had violated a solemn treaty or similarly blotted its copybook - and particularly in the Biblical period, we see elaborate curses written into a treaty to affect anyone who breaks it.  The wrath of heaven was anticipated, or at least hoped for, if anyone went to war without 'due cause'.

4. To what extent to the adherents of a religion - especially the military adherents - take seriously the religion's stance on warfare? Does this vary from age to age? This applies to adherents who take their religion seriously but manage to rearrange its teachings on warfare to suit themselves. Ask a member of the IRA how this works.

5. And a bit different to 4, to what extent do the adherents of a religion take their own religion seriously? (i.e. they may know that such an injunction for/against warfare is important, but their religion is not really central to their lives)

The simple answer seems to be that some do and some do not.  Herodotus of Halicarnassus saw the fingers of the gods in every major event.  Dionysius of Halicarnassus felt that Pyrrhus' loss at Beneventum was amply explained by the fact that the Epirot monarch had previously helped himself to sacred treasure, or at least to treasure from a temple.  To Thucydides, gods were an irrelevance not worthy of mention, or perhaps belief.  I suspect this may be more of a constant through the ages than we may think.

[Dangun]

I think the problem was more geographic contraction: the loss of provinces does not seem to have helped the situation.

I'd have to disagree, everything east of Syria being an example of provinces that were too expensive for Rome to keep.
Similarly, in the third century, losing your safest and wealthiest provinces every decade to a new usurper e.g. Postumus et. al. had a devastating impact on the economy and then the army as one fought to reintegrate.

If we base the decline of Rome on a purely or even predominantly economic argument, the loss of expensive-to-defend provinces which seem not to have entirely paid their way, such as Britannia and Gallia, or for that matter Illyria, Moesia and Pannonia, would have left the Empire with provinces which were on average richer and more populous, combined with shorter frontiers - hence economically and strategically much more advantageous.

Yes.

Yet these lost provinces, even if in some cases only intermittently lost, were also the best recruiting areas of the Empire.

This actually touches on a novel and advantageous characteristic of the Roman Empire. They had a mechanism for admitting non-citizens to the citizenry. (For example, by contrast, Carthage did not - hence mercenaries?) It definitely wasn't perfect. But the fact they had one at all, of that scale, was a competitive advantage.

So the 'uneconomic' provinces seem to have been a source of strength rather than weakness, in that they provided manpower for the armies and tended to absorb the worst of a barbarian incursion before it could reach the richest and most populous provinces, the ones which really paid for the armies.

A bit circular - provinces are good because you can recruit from them the troops required to hang on to said province. mmm?

Again, given the sheer amount of warfare, and the - until recently - near universal identification with one belief system or another, it seems very difficult to argue that in all but the tiniest minority of cases, that religion inhibited any state's ability to conduct war. (And there are so many better alternative limiting factors - headcount, money, technology, location etc. why look there for an explanation of differential efficacy?)

Would it help to generalize about the impact of religion?
Monotheisms are, by their nature, divisive because they are intolerant of other religions and create in-group, out-group situations, irregardless of what their adherents claim to believe or how they behave. The presence of monotheism might then weaken a pluralist state, until of course the large majority of the state and its citizenry adopt that monotheism. This process would arguably map onto the trajectory of the Roman Empire.

[Patrick Waterson]

I think the problem was more geographic contraction: the loss of provinces does not seem to have helped the situation.

I'd have to disagree, everything east of Syria being an example of provinces that were too expensive for Rome to keep.

The basic problem was that by yielding Mesopotamia, the Empire gave the Persians access to the provinces of Osrohene and Syria - Syria being a critical part of the Imperial economy, or at least revenue.  Armenia was supported as an independent buffer state because it acted exactly as such: the Parthians spent a lot of their effort trying to subdue Armenia, effort which would otherwise have been directed against the Empire.

There is more to the question of Imperial defence than economy, although obviously one will not get much of a defence if one has no economy from which to draw a revenue.  Specifically, the Empire needed - and fielded - a system of defence in depth (at least when not plunged into the depths of civil war) which absorbed small raids and acted as a 'tripwire' to warn of and delay larger incursions so that a suitable army could be concentrated to deal with them.

One part of the equation was population, and the security of same.  If one's farmers are repeatedly raided, their yield (and numbers) will drop, which puts an additional, and perhaps excessive, burden on the remaining inhabitants of the province: note that revenue does not necessarily drop: the survivors are just squeezed harder until something gives.  Gaul under Constantius II was a case in point: having invited barbarians in to distract Magnentius, Constantius was unable to get them out again (he eventually sent Julian to Gaul where, much to everyone's surprise, Julian cleared the provinces of barbarians).  However this did not reduce the amount of money being raised from the province; Constantius' administration simply upped the taxes to keep the revenue flowing.

We might note that this revenue did not necessarily reach the troops it was theoretically intended to support.  Ammianus, on Julian's fourth year in Gaul:

"For through all their career of laudable achievements, and the critical moments of hazard, the soldiers, though worn out by their labours in Gaul, had received neither donative nor pay from the very day that Julian was sent there, for the reason that he himself had no funds available anywhere from which to give, nor did Constantius allow any to be expended in the usual manner." - Rerum Gestarum XVII.9.6

It would also seem that the Imperial administration was horribly inefficient and wasteful, with much slack which could be pruned by a careful and attentive ruler.  Ammianus again:

"Last of all, not to speak of the victories in which he routed the savages, who often fell with spirits unbroken, what good he did to Gaul, labouring as it was in utmost destitution, appears most clearly from this fact: when he first entered those parts, he found that twenty-five pieces of gold were demanded by way of tribute from every one as a poll- and land-tax; but when he left, seven only for full satisfaction of all duties." - Rerum Gestarum XVI.5.14

A bit circular - provinces are good because you can recruit from them the troops required to hang on to said province. mmm?

In isolation, it does look rather peri-orbital, but if hanging onto the said province has a net cost of X and keeps the barbarians from raiding provinces whose revenue amounts to 2X, it is a good investment.  It is an even better investment if you can get good troops from said province which would be impossible to raise if the province were lost/yielded/ceded, rendering you unable to defend your provinces worth 2X.

Again, given the sheer amount of warfare, and the - until recently - near universal identification with one belief system or another, it seems very difficult to argue that in all but the tiniest minority of cases, that religion inhibited any state's ability to conduct war. (And there are so many better alternative limiting factors - headcount, money, technology, location etc. why look there for an explanation of differential efficacy?)

Some of the 'tiniest minority' were quite significant, at least for the nations concerned.

"When Rehoboam arrived in Jerusalem, he mustered all Judah and the tribe of Benjamin—a hundred and eighty thousand able young men—to go to war against Israel and to regain the kingdom for Rehoboam son of Solomon.

But this word of God came to Shemaiah the man of God: "Say to Rehoboam son of Solomon king of Judah, to all Judah and Benjamin, and to the rest of the people, 'This is what the Lord says: Do not go up to fight against your brothers, the Israelites. Go home, every one of you, for this is my doing.'" So they obeyed the word of the Lord and went home again, as the Lord had ordered." - 1 Kings 12:21-24

Would it help to generalize about the impact of religion?
Monotheisms are, by their nature, divisive because they are intolerant of other religions and create in-group, out-group situations, regardless of what their adherents claim to believe or how they behave. The presence of monotheism might then weaken a pluralist state, until of course the large majority of the state and its citizenry adopt that monotheism. This process would arguably map onto the trajectory of the Roman Empire.

Generalisation can help up to a point, although understanding a specific situation will require specific analysis - and with that tautology out of the way, some monotheisms had very different effects over time.  Persian Zoroastrianism was traditionally tolerant of other religions, and even gave authority to local priesthoods over and above what they had held when their nations were independent.  One can see this in Babylonian temple records and - after a bad start under Cambyses - in the raising of Egyptian priest-theocrats to a pseudo-kingly status - as Persian puppets, of course.  Jews, as fellow monotheists, were also ruled by - or through - their priesthood, and usually had favoured status (at least when the likes of Haman the Agagite were not intriguing against them).

Judaism - as opposed to the original Hebrew religion - was markedly less tolerant of other religions, at least in theory.  Nehemiah's diatribe (in the Book of Nehemiah) about half-breed Jews who could not even speak proper Hebrew marked the end of an on again-off again inclusionist approach to other peoples and religions and a conscious separation of the 'true believers' from everyone else.  This was not necessarily divisive, and indeed both Persians and Macedonians found the Jews to be agreeable subjects until Antiochus IV rather spoilt things by attempting forcible conversion to Hellenism - a measure which probably preserved Judaism over the long term, because up to that point Jews had been tending to adopt Hellenism voluntarily.  The Hasmoneans again complicated the issue by forcing Judaism upon the Edomites and ultimately the Khazars, unwilling to become either Christian or Muslim but wanting a 'proper' religion, adopted Judaism to keep both at bay, becoming what Arthur Koestler calls the Thirteeth Tribe.

And then there were the Falashas ...

Getting back to the Roman Empire, one of its problems following the adoption of Christianity is that it was quite hard for everyone to agree on exactly what Christianity was.  Here is a partial list of 'heresies', i.e. bright ideas that never quite made it into orthodoxy, at least for any great length of time.

Adoptionism
Antinomianism
Apollinarism
Arianism
Audianism
Docetism
Donatism
Ebionites*
Euchitism
Iconoclasm
Luciferianism
Marcionism
Melchisedechiansm
Monarchianism
Monophysitism
Monothelitism
Montanism
Patripassianism
Pelagianism
Pneumatomachianism
Psilanthropism
Sabellianism
Semipelagianism

*Condemned not so much for the beliefs they had as for those they did not have.

Anyone interested in any of these can look them up here.

For much of its history after adopting Christianity, the Empire had one or more of the above religious controversies going (although the Ebionites, the traditional followers of Jesus, had been expelled before this point, and Docetism discarded).  The major controversies, especially Arianism, Monophysitism, Iconoclasm and Monothelitism, rent the Empire with civil (or rather uncivil) disturbances and the suppression of the Paulicians assumed the aspects of a war.  This forms the basis of my view that the adoption of Christianity fundamentally weakened the Empire; the difficulties of recruitment suggest if they do not necessarily demonstrate that Christianity was also having a serious effect on the defence of the Empire, the lack of recruitment having to be made up with barbarian troops of increasingly dubious reliability (and mainly Arian heretics into the bargain).

[Dangun]

One part of the equation was population, and the security of same.  If one's farmers are repeatedly raided, their yield (and numbers) will drop, which puts an additional, and perhaps excessive, burden on the remaining inhabitants of the province: note that revenue does not necessarily drop: the survivors are just squeezed harder until something gives. 

Absolutely.
In an agrarian economy, the size of the economy is intimately linked with population.