International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Yannis Stouraitis
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria; 
[e-mail]
Holy Warriors? Some Thoughts on the Religious Identity of Byzantine Soldiers
In the last years, the discussion about the religious aspect of Byzantine warfare has focused 
on theoretical-methodological and socio-historical issues concerning the problematization of ‘holy 
war’ both as a category of analysis and as a historical phenomenon in Byzantine society. Whether 
or not the members of the Byzantine ruling élite shared a vision of warfare against the infidel as a 

---

484
religious task and a means for the salvation of the soul remains a hotly debated issue. Within this 
framework, what needs to be further problematized is the religious identity of Byzantine soldiers. 
Quite often, notions such as ‘athletes of Christ’, ‘chosen people’, ‘God›s army’ etc., which are recurrent 
in the discourse of Byzantine authors, are considered to reflect the war mentality and to have 
underpinned the religious motive of the average soldier on the battlefield particularly in war against 
infidel enemies. This tendency to reify the Byzantine soldiers’ religious identity as represented in 
texts with a distinct literary aspect is problematical insofar as it adopts a methodologically rather 
outmoded approach to written sources as “mirrors” of social reality, in particular of the common 
people’s thought-world.
In the current paper, I shall address the issue of the literary aspect of text-based justification 
of Byzantine warfare and the need to distinguish between an operative religious ideology on the 
battlefield and an intertextual symbolic universe in the writings of an educated élite that was mainly 
built on literary motifs from the biblical repertoire. If the latter was the main source of an idiomatic 
religious language that Byzantine authors commonly employed to ethically justify imperial warfare 
in their writings, there is enough evidence to support the argument that the relationship of Byzantine 
soldiers with religion on the battlefield was far less idealistic despite their occasionally depicted 
textual image as sacred warriors of the faith.