land, and exemption from taxation on a graduated scale for himself and his family.[1]
Such was the carefully digested scheme of military defence bequeathed to his successors by Constantine, who doubtless anticipated that he had granted a lease of endurance to the regenerated Empire for many centuries to come. But in the course of a hundred and fifty years this fine system fell gradually to pieces; and by the beginning of the sixth century no more than a cento of the original fabric can be discerned in the chronicles of the times. The whole forces were diminished almost to a moiety of their full complement;[2] the great peripheral bulwark of the Limitanei, scarcely discoverable on the Illyrian frontier, in other regions was represented by meagre bodies of one or two hundred men;[3] whilst the Palatines and Comitatenses betrayed such an altered character that they could claim merely a nominal existence.[4] The very name of legion, so identified with Roman conquest, but no longer available in the deteriorated military organization, became obsolete. In a Byzantine army at this period three constituents exist officially, but with little practical distinction. They appear as the Numeri,[5] the Foederati, and the Buccellarii. 1. The Numeri are the
- [Footnote: dromonibus." By "armed ships" I presume he means bulky transports
laden with soldiers and munitions of war); Procopius, De Bel. Vand., i, 11, etc.]
- ↑ Cod. Theod., VII, xx.
- ↑ Evidently from Agathias, v, 15, and the following.
- ↑ Rescript of Anastasius, Mommsen, op. cit., pp. 199, 256.
- ↑ The Limitanei and Comitatenses are mentioned in the Code (I, xxvii, 2 (8), etc.), but the Palatine troops do not occur by name in the literature of the sixth century (?).
- ↑ The term was used long before the word legion dropped out; Cod. Theod., VII, i, 18, etc. By the Greeks the Numeri were called the Catalogues; Procopius, passim (also in previous use).
