Introduction

During the period when the Byzantine Empire was ruled by the ‘Macedonian Dynasty’ it experienced an age of recovery and reconquest. On its western, northern, eastern and southern borders the empire witnessed successful campaigns and conquests, including the recovery of Crete in 961 and the annexation of Bulgaria in 1018. Notably in the same period there was a revival in the literature of military science, leading to the writing of several significant manuals on tactics and strategy in the tenth century. Thus, generalship in the age of the Macedonian Dynasty offers a rich field of study, reflected by the increasing number of books and articles on the subject. The focus of this chapter is on particularly arresting aspects of generalship in the period, namely the facts that several emperors of the Macedonian Dynasty were not active commanders themselves and among the generals whose careers distinguish the period there are several who were eunuchs. These aspects are united by the theme of gender: how was the status of emperors as men affected by the fact that they did not play an active military role (so important a feature of the promotion of imperial regimes) and how was the gender identity of eunuch generals perceived? The chapter addresses each aspect in turn, drawing on the rich diversity of sources, especially histories and military manuals but also material evidence such as reliquaries and manuscripts. It will be seen that non-campaigning emperors could present themselves as military authorities with a claim to the virtue of courage and could value a personal active role, and that eunuchs could also lay claim to traditional masculine virtues and be considered successful men. In Byzantium generalship is a vital role to consider in relation to all emperors and in relation to the eunuchs who characterise the existence of the empire.

Non-Campaigning Emperors

The Macedonian Dynasty was one of the longest-lived dynasties in Byzantine histo-ry. It was founded in 867 by Basil ‘the Macedonian’, who came to power through the patronage and then assassination of his predecessor the emperor Michael III (842–867), and lasted until the death of its last representative, the empress nun Theodora, Basil I's great-great-great-granddaughter, in 1056. Although the empire witnessed territorial expansion under this dynasty, most of its members did not take to the field themselves.

The art of generalship or the ability of successful leadership in a military context, as Addison perceptively observed, is not at all dependent on fortune or tyche (meaning in reality good luck) to ensure victory. Victory might be obtained through good luck just happening, but the soundest method of ensuring success relies on fastidious management in the camp and while on the march in conjunction with inspiring leadership on the field of battle. How many or how few generals in antiquity measure up to such a stringent assessment of their capabilities, their practice of the art of being a general, and so deserved the successes they obtained and their subsequent immortal fame? In the following chapters the discussion aligns to this focus. Julius Caesar, for example, makes frequent reference to ‘good fortune’ in his Gallic campaigns (Nolan), but he was an able if not the consummate manager of his military adventures, in Gaul, Italy, Spain and Greece in the first century BC. In political life he perhaps lacked that lightness of touch which his successor Augustus, only a moderately capable military leader, possessed in abundance. Leonidas, the Spartan king (Evans), and the Roman emperor Decius (Potter), on the other hand, no doubt both capable soldiers, found immortality not in success, but in two of the most famous defeats in the history of the Greeks and Romans: Thermopylae in 480 BC and Abritus in AD 251 respectively.

The importance to cultures in antiquity of success in military affairs can easily be measured by noting that Homer's Iliad, among the earliest surviving literary evidence for the history and civilisation of the ancient Greeks, is essentially a tale in verse about the flawed leadership of the protagonists: Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector. All are active participants in the military campaigning around Troy and the battles that took place there (Kucewicz). None is the perfect general, but Alexander the Great (336–323 BC), probably the greatest warrior general of history, and the most sublime practitioner of generalship, constantly sought to emulate these mythical figures; and he was not an isolated example.

Introduction

At Thermopylae in early August 480 BC, after a brief stalemate lasting roughly four days (Hdt. 7.210), the Persians in the next two to three days overcame the Spartan-led defence of the narrow coastal link that joined Thessaly to Boeotia and Attica. The defenders were mostly killed but the greater part of the army of the Peloponnesian city-states, members by then of a Hellenic League, retreated in good order to the Isthmus. When news of the defeat at Thermopylae was related to the accompanying fleet stationed further along the coast opposite Euboea it also retired, and the way was left open for a Persian advance into Attica and the capture of Athens, all within a fortnight. This was the darkest hour for the Greek poleis that had decided to oppose any form of rapprochement with the Persians and their king Xerxes: it was Hellenic independence or death. As Herodotus describes, and what is thoroughly familiar to most, the Greek fleet went on to win an unexpected victory over the Persians at Salamis. Moreover, in the next summer the combined armies of the mostly southern Greek city-states routed the Persians at Plataea. Xerxes’ ambitions to extend his empire westward were ended. Thermopylae was, in practical terms, not at all a contributing factor to the victory of the Greeks over Persia: rather the opposite, since the Boeotian League, politically lukewarm to both Athens and Sparta, the leaders of the Hellenic League, turned instead to Persia for an alliance in order to save its cities from destruction.

Introduction

Following the excavations at Kalkriese and then the relatively recent bimillennial, there has been a renewed interest in P. Quinctilius Varus and the disaster by which he was made infamous: the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9. The question of the location of the battlefield has been taken up with a renewed interest as scholars once again tackle the fraught issue of the connections between author, text and the historical event. Varus’ reputation as an incompetent military commander has received a more even-handed evaluation as part of the broader question of whom or what to blame. The descriptions of the battle, especially that of Tacitus, have profited from more literary studies, focusing on themes like transgression and memory. Varus has even re-entered the popular imagination in novels, and he, Arminius and the battle have exercised the talents of a growing number of scholars, whose interests also lie in the reception of the classics. The field is expanding to include in the conversation new kinds of evidence that promise to illuminate further the events and personalities of the past and our relation to it. Yet one element seems to remain static in scholarship. Interest in Varus is scarcely found outside of the historical event of the Teutoburg Forest – its causes, location and consequences – and his fairly well-charted political connections and military career. The pool of our textual sources has appeared to many commentators as stagnant. An appropriate investigation about Varus and the battle will include some combination of the standard sources – Velleius Paterculus, Tacitus, Florus and Cassius Dio – and little apart from them. There is, however, a body of evidence that remains relatively underappreciated. Scholars have belaboured the sources for the battle and Varus’ role in it, but Varus is named many more times in Greek and Latin literature.

In this chapter, I take as my starting point all instances of the name of Varus in the extant writings from antiquity that relate to his defeat in Germania. Drawing on this evidence, I argue that in less than a decade after the disaster, Varus was made out to be the model of a negligent general, and that this became a tradition among all of our sources.

In some martial cultures, public speaking in the form of the rousing pep talk or pre-bat-tle exhortation had a prominent place. Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War is peppered with commanders’ speeches delivered just before leading their troops into combat, a tradition that was still alive and well when Alexander the Great campaigned against the Persian Empire. Although Thucydides’ speeches should not be taken as the ipsissima verba of the speakers, they do make it clear that the Greeks considered oratory appropriate and even necessary to the occasion. A first glance at the so-called ‘Confucian Classics’ would seem to suggest that the pre-bat-tle speech was also a standard fixture of traditional Chinese warfare. The Book of Documents (Shu jing) includes several martial harangues (shi 誓) attributed to ancient rulers, among them the speech that King Wu, the founder of the Zhou Dynasty, purportedly delivered to his army just before his decisive victory over the last Shang king at the Battle of Muye in or around 1045 BC. Yet in the end, the dominant military tradition that emerged from the Warring States period (453–221 BC) placed little reliance upon oratorical performance and emotional appeals to the rank and file. Sunzi's Art of War (Sunzi bingfa), the most influential of the military writings passed down from that time, advises the general to distance himself from his troops; he is not to share his plans with them, and he is supposed to motivate his men not by haranguing them and making demands but by placing them in desperate situations where they must conquer or die.

This is not to say that Sunzi's highly prescriptive text can be taken as fully representative of Chinese military practice. It is not difficult to find examples of generals who did give speeches or pep talks to their men. In AD 538, for example, the Western Wei general Wang Xiong defended the prefectural city of Huazhou against an Eastern Wei siege at a time when it appeared that the regime he served was on the brink of collapse. Summoning both soldiers and civilians to the city gate, Wang delivered the following speech:

Chapter 10 explores the challenges of representing dissonant historical narratives related to questionable practices of incarceration, particularly of civilians. Heritage sites and institutions have preserved and interpreted the histories of these many sites through encounters with former captives and collection of their stories, objects and artworks, onsite at the physical locations of former captivity. Revisiting the major case studies in Canada, Australia, Japan and Singapore, the chapter examines the construction of physical memorials, cemeteries and peace gardens as a reparative practice, with ensuing tensions for national memory-making, asking what lessons might be drawn regarding settler citizenship.

Chapter 8 links and compares two case studies. The sites of the Canadian and US internment or incarceration of people of Japanese origin were spatially initiated through their demarcation of a strip of land along the Pacific coast varying approximately inland as an exclusion area. The Canadian government moved “members of the Japanese race” in British Columbia, including Canadian citizens, into the mountainous terrain of the Kootenays region. Camps, named Assembly Centers and Relocation Centers, were designed as prison cities laid out in grid systems with repetitive rows of standard military barracks, using US Army Corps of Engineers standard plans. Using Manzanar and New Denver as case histories, the chapter examines how incarcerated civilian populations immediately set about altering the camp environments to make them more habitable.

Chapter 7 describes the Southeast Asian camp network as temporarily extending an emergent military industrial complex centered in Japan, already tested prewar in its East Asian colonies. This alliance of the military and defense industries manifests physically through temporary, existing or purpose-built facilities, ranging from factory dormitories to timber-and-attap huts. The distribution of working parties across Asia, including when constructing the Burma-Thai railroad, the journey to Japan, more specifically from Changi to Naoetsu, and, finally, the concentration, forced labor and eventual post-capitulation dispersal of Japanese Surrendered Personnel convey the aggregation and dissolution of the Japanese Empire through a study of its camps.

Chapter 4 focuses on unguarded POW labor distribution and the farms and rural industries associated with the camps. Across the Pacific theater civilians and POWs, as well as alienated citizens (in North America), supplemented wartime industry through their nominally waged employment in manufacturing and agricultural industries. The chapter looks at the penal economy, the labor regimen and the ways in which the labor of Italian POWs became integrated into a larger network of wartime labor circulation throughout Australia, with insights into the exceptional productivity of camps at Marrinup, Hay and Loveday. Key differences between internee and POW labor employment are contextualized in the wartime mobilization of workers across Australia.

The Introduction outlines the book’s scope as exploring the taxonomy of concentration-camp types that emerged, temporarily, in the three geographical areas of focus: Australia, the USA and Singapore, and in related conflicts around the Pacific Basin. It highlights key theoretical approaches: genealogy, archipelagic consciousness and border-thinking as the book’s intellectual framework investigating how the global conflict shaped and transformed settler-colonial forms of sovereignty as revealed in the wartime prisons and prison camps’ designs and materiality. The Introduction argues that although architectural histories have previously neglected the Pacific War architectures of confinement, the discipline offers a unique lens into wartime histories.

Chapter 5 shifts to the island colony of Singapore, where Australia’s Eighth AMF Division defended the island alongside British and local forces and volunteers in the weeks before its capitulation, suffering greatly as Japanese captives. The chapter describes the dispersal of camps at the fall of Singapore, following the fate of Australian and other Allied soldiers across an emergent camp geography. Its main aim is envisioning the entirety of the island as converted to an encampment through the distribution of Allied camps, including the dispersal of work camps in requisitioned domestic and institutional facilities, exploring how wartime defense and capitulation provided structures for contemporary citizenship.

Chapter 11 takes us to the edges of the Pacific archipelago for a closer look at the camps for Japanese Surrendered Personnel and the War Crimes Trials Compounds in the Australian-administered island territories of New Guinea. The chapter traces their changing accommodation in underground tunnels, timber barracks and Quonset huts. The War Criminals Prison at Manus Island precedes the later location there of the infamous offshore detention center, one of many such facilities later created for incarcerating unauthorized asylum seeker arrivals to Australia. The chapter makes the case for a genealogical approach to physical sites of incarceration as important for understanding the continuous historical entanglements of sovereignty and spatial forms of violence.

Chapter 1 lays out the reasoning behind the book and its investigative schema, drawing links with interpretations of incarceration familiar to the discipline. The chapter’s central argument is that the Pacific War’s imperial border contestations were inscribed in those national populations who were alienated or disenfranchised by new hostilities, and that camps treated as border facilities became places for testing cultural boundaries, advancing programs of assimilation but also of prisoner defiance, dissidence and cultural recovery. Case studies are viewed comparatively in order to gain an understanding of the differing physical makeup of each camp environment in the various national sites explored.