ABSTRACT
The Sylloge Tacticorum (ST) is a tenth-century Byzantine handbook of military tactics, written in Greek. Its title translates as A Compilation of Tactics and it belongs to the literary genre of military handbooks or Taktika, which stretches back to antiquity. The dynastic uncertainty in Constantinople in the early tenth century made the Byzantine empire vulnerable to attack. The border between Christian Byzantium and the Islamic caliphate in eastern Asia Minor had long since been stabilised so that Arab-Byzantine warfare now largely took the form of annual raids across the border which aimed only to seize plunder and captives before withdrawing as quickly as possible. The changing military situation on the eastern frontier provided much of the impetus for the production of military handbooks such as the ST. The ST was the product of the Byzantine literary revival known as the Macedonian renaissance.
