Walls of Constantinople - Garrisons of The City

Garrisons of The City

During the whole existence of the Byzantine Empire, the garrison of the city was quite small: the imperial guards and the small city watch (the pedatoura or kerketon) under the urban prefect were the only permanent armed force available. Any threat to the city would have to be dealt with by the field armies in the provinces, before it could approach the city itself. In times of need, such as the earthquake of 447 or the raids by the Avars in the early 7th century, the general population, organized in the guilds and the hippodrome factions, would be conscripted and armed, or additional troops would be brought in from the provincial armies.

In the early centuries, the imperial guard consisted of the units of the Excubitores and Scholae Palatinae, which by the late 7th century had declined to parade-ground troops. At about that time Justinian II established the first new guards units to protect the imperial palace precinct, while in the 8th century the emperors, faced with successive revolts by the thematic armies and pursuing deeply unpopular iconoclastic policies, established the imperial tagmata as an elite force loyal to them. As the tagmata were often used to form the core of imperial expeditionary armies, they were not always present in or near the city. Only two of them, the Noumeroi and the Teicheiōtai, the palace guard units established by Justinian II, remained permanently stationed in Constantinople, garrisoned around the palace district or in various locations, such as disused churches, in the capital. The units present in the city at any one time were thus never very numerous, numbering a few thousands at best, but they were complemented by several detachments stationed around the capital, in Thrace and Bithynia.

The small size of the city's garrison was due to the uneasiness of emperors and populace alike towards a permanent large military force, both for fear of a military uprising and because of the considerable financial burden its maintenance would entail. Furthermore, a large force was largely unnecessary, because of the inherent security provided by the city walls themselves. As historian John Haldon notes, "providing the gates were secured and the defenses provided with a skeleton force, the City was safe against even very large forces in the pre-gunpowder period."