394 Rance Chapter 11 The Army in Peace Time: The Social Status and Function of Soldiers Philip Rance During the Late Roman and Middle Byzantine periods, the place of soldiers in society and their roles and activities when not at war embraced great variations of time, place and context. The evidence for soldiers’ status and function is chronologically and geographically uneven: documentation accu- mulates in late antiquity, owing to imperial law codes and Egyptian papyri, while corresponding Middle Byzantine source-material is comparatively meagre, especially during the 7th-/8th-century “dark age”. In both periods the problem of defining a “soldier” (stratiotes) arises. Although different sources employ this term with varying degrees of specificity, between c. 300 and c. 1200 its usage encompasses a spectrum of full- or part-time, indigenous or foreign servicemen, ancillary forces and semi-private retainers, ranging from an elite guardsman patrolling a palace in Constantinople to a paramilitary “irregular” on seasonal lookout duty at a frontier pass, while in 10th-/11th-century texts “soldier” can signify a landholder who personally performed no military ser- vice but contributed to the upkeep of a combatant. “Soldiers” therefore differed not merely by rank, seniority or unit-type, but in their terms and conditions of service, legal status and institutional identities, which variously reflected their environment, socio-economic background, mode of recruitment, regional affiliations and/or ethnicity. Within this diversity, different mechanisms and approximate levels of remuneration, along with fiscal and juridical immuni- ties, suggest that soldiers shared a relatively privileged position in society, even if Middle Byzantine sources record disparities in income and assets. In this context, the connection between soldiers and landholding, one of the most vexed issues of Byzantine military studies, becomes of pivotal significance for locating soldiers in society and clarifying a nexus of military, fiscal and agrar- ian interrelationships. Correspondingly, it is easy enough to delineate spheres of military-civilian interaction: as a coercive instrument of the state, soldiers performed diverse policing and internal security functions, enforced religious policies and intervened in imperial politics. They participated in regional economies, both institutionally, as state-salaried consumer or employer, and individually, through business and landed interests. As less-distinguishable © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363731_013