Talk:Bureau of Barbarians

Possible source

There seems to be very little in the way of detailed information on this bureau freely available on the Web. I did find an interesting forum post at

   http://www.freefirezone.net/showthread.php?t=4348

The content is as follows:

Despite evidence that military commanders were using spies to gain advantage in battle as far back as when Joshua sent two men to reconnoiter Jericho, the world today tends to think of a centralized intelligence service as strictly the creation of modern, industrialized nations.

Not so. By the end of the Sixth century, the Byzantine Empire, guardian of the legacies of Greece and Rome during the Dark Ages in Europe, had established an intelligence and security service that would remain unrivaled in sophistication and cunning for the next 800 years.

Very little information remains about the origins or structure of this shadowy organization, which was known as the Bureau of Barbarians. As the name implies, its primary mission was the study and neutralization of the nomadic barbarian tribes that were the Byzantine Empire's greatest threat, although the more civilized nations of the Middle Ages were also included in its purview.

Any record of the origin of this secret organization has been lost. One historian has speculated that the Emperor Justinian I (527-565) convened a sort of primitive national security council known as The Silence. It then eventually expanded and evolved into the Bureau of Barbarians. However the organization began, we know that by the time of Justinian's reign it was able to take on complex and difficult assignments. The first documentary evidence of a Byzantine intelligence service comes from the historian Procopius, who refers to its agents as katakopoi- literally meaning "those who look beneath."

One of the most notable events in Byzantine history is the reconquest of North Africa by Justinian's great general Belisarius with less then 8,000 men. It was an astounding feat of arms- thanks in part to Justinian's use of Bureau officers to clear the way for Belisarius' forces.

The Vandals, a tribe with Germanic origins that had bedeviled Rome for centuries, held most of the North African littoral and the island of Sardinia. The citizens of North Africa, under Roman rule from the end of the Punic Wars until the Vandal conquest in 439, surreptitiously contacted Justinain and asked him to free them from Vandal oppression. When intelligence reached Justinian that the governor of Sardinia was disposed to rebel against Vandal rule, the emperor immediately dispatched an agent to Sardinia with the authority to promise anything in order to instigate revolt. The envoy's entreaties, undoubtedly coupled with Byzantine gold, did the trick. Soon after, the uprising took place, and the Vandal fleet sailed from Carthage with 5,000 soldiers to put down the insurrection.

Meanwhile, Justinain had landed 120 picked commandoes on the Libyan coast, with orders to rouse pro-Byzantine factions there to arms. By the time Belisarius landed his forces in North Africa, there was a significant fifth-column activity underway, and the Vandal fleet was nowhere in sight. After Belisarius' two great victories at Ad Decimum and Tricameron, North Africa was once again a Byzantine territory.

But these kinds of covert operations where not what made the Bureau of Barbarians really unique. The Bureau's special gift was its unmatched intelligence-gathering and analysis capability. In a government as autocratic as the Byzantine Empire, it was a relatively simple thing to get every citizen who traveled in foreign lands to help with the gathering of information. In addition to data from trained spies, ambassadors and other imperial officials, the emperor could count on important information from merchants, fishermen, pilgrims, even priests and missionaries.

Byzantines could be found from Spain to China. Records indicate the presence of Byzantine merchants in sixth-century Ceylon, while historians of China's Tang dynasty note that Byzantine emissaries requested a military diversion against the menace posed by the rise of Islam. Information from all over the known world was collected and filed in the imperial palaces in Constantinople. Each state was studied, and methods were recommended for both utilizing it and neutralizing it. Notes were kept on each nation's influential families and what presents they preferred, along with their tendances to support or oppose their current regime.

The extent of the Byzantine espionage network provided tremendous advantage when facing opponents on the battlefield...or at the bargaining table. The Byzantines depended on a very small but highly trained professional army. They were rarely willing to risk this force in pitched battle, so they developed statecraft to such an extent that the word "byzantine" is today synonymous with intricate and cryptic.

Byzantine emperors knew the value of timely and reliable intelligence. A quote attributed to Nicephorus II Phocas of the period 963-969 reads: "Never turn away freeman or slave, by day or night, though you may be sleeping or eating, or bathing, if he says that he has news for you."

Armed with the intelligence provided by the files of the Bureau, Byzantine emperors played sates off against each other, incited internal revolts in enemy states, bribed kings, khans and cardinals, kept a stable of pretenders to nearly every throne in Europe and the Middle East, and extended their influence beyond the reach of any army or fleet. Byzantine history is replete with successes of imperial agents.

In 1171, Emperor Manuel I Comnenus was faced with a hostile Venetian fleet anchored for the winter at the island of Chios. The Venetian Doge Vitale Michael personally commanded the fleet and sent two ambassadors to Constantinople to parley with Manuel. Having been denied an audience with the emperor, the envoys returned to Chios with a Byzantine official who also happened to be a spy. This unnamed Byzantine urged the Doge to send another embassy to Constantinople, which he did.

The Venetians on Chios where soon decimated by illness. Rumors spread the local water had been poisoned. The Doge evacuated the fleet to the island of Panagia, to which the second emissary returned- also without having met with the emperor. A different Byzantine official accompanied them and suggested a third envoy. The Doge was suspicious, but with his men still suffering from illness, he was anxious to come to terms. So the third man was sent. By this time , of course, Manuel I was fully informed of the condition of the Venetian forces. He stalled and delayed until Michael, faced with a possible mutiny, decided to head for home. While the Doge's throughly demoralized fleet limped back to Venice, the Byzantine navy ambushed and harried it until there was almost nothing left of the once great armada. Adding insult to injury, Manuel sent a message to the Doge, "Your nation has for a long time behaved with great stupidity."

Less then five years later, Manuel was not so arrogant, as he found himself in a desperate situation. Fortunately for him, Byzantine agents proved themselves able not only to achieve bloodless victories bit also to mitigate military disasters.

One of the more devastating defeats in Byzantine military history occurred at the hands of the Seljuk Sultan Kilidj Aslan at the battle of Myriocephalum in 1176. The Byzantines, trapped in a mountain pass, were severely thrashed by the Turkish army. Manuel, commanding the Byzantine force, was surrounded and in danger of losing his entire army and his life. But rather then deal the death blow, Kilidj Arslan sent one of his advisors, named Gabras, to offer peace terms to the emperor.

The sultan's principal demands were that the newly constructed fortifications of Dorylaeum and Choma-Soublaion be dismantled. Considering the straights in which Manuel was caught, these were exceedingly generous terms. The explanation, according to contemporary historian Nicetas Choniates, was that Gabras and other advisers to the sultan had been in the pay of the Emperor Manuel- and they persuaded the sultan to propose his peace terms.

The Byzantines often proved that one spy in the right place was more effective then a squadron of cavalry. In the year 1259, Micheal VIII Palaeologus and his army were confronted by a superior force at pelagonia, on the Greek mainland. His opponents consisted of an assortment of Italian and Frankish princes who had set up independent principalities and duchies in Greece after the fall of Constantinople to the knights of the forth crusade in 1204. Allied with the Franks and Italians was Micheal Angelus, the Byzantine "Despot of Epirus," who hoped to retake Constantinople for himself someday.

Micheal VIII sent a spy (pretending to be a defector) to the camp of Micheal Angelus with instructions to inform the despot that Micheal the VIII had bribed the Franks and Italians to turn against him in the coming battle. The despot, a noble Byzantine himself, was undoubtedly aware of the kinds of tactics a Byzantine emperor would employ, and this story rang all too true for his tastes. Fearing betrayal, he immediately gathered up his troops and fled under cover of darkness. When the allies arose the next morning, and discovered the Epirots had gone, they became suspicious that Micheal VIII had arranged to deal with the Epirots (who, after all, were Byzantines themselves) to fall upon the westerners. Since they also feared betrayal, hundreds of them began to depart the field.

Faced now with only a fraction of the original force, Micheal VIII commenced an attack on the allies and killed or captured the remaining troops.

In the ensuing years of Micheal's reign, he gained experience and confidence in the capabilities of his intelligence assets. In the last year of his life, against the most formidable threat to the existence of the empire, he employed the intelligence service's full range of abilities and scored what may have been his greatest triumph.

In 1282, Micheal found himself confronted by a vast coalition led by Charles of Anjou, the French nobleman whose domains included Sicily and much of Italy. It was Charles' ambition to sit on the throne of Constantinople, and he bribed, bullied and cajoled nearly every nation that bordered Byzantium to ally itself with him. Aware of the far reach of the Byzantine secret service, he left Micheal VIII without maneuvering room...or so he thought.

Micheal had his agents at work under Charles' very nose, in Sicily. The Byzantines had made contact with native Sicilians who hated Angevin rule and were ready to rise up. Byzantine gold for Sicilian partisans "primed the pump," but the Sicilians could not hope to defeat the Angevin forces alone. So Micheal VIII sent his envoys to Pedro of Aragon, who had a claim to the throne of Sicily. Pedro agreed to provide the regular forces (in exchange for more Byzantine gold). On March 31, 1282, with the Angevin fleet preparing to sail for Byzantine territory, the uprising known as the Sicilain Vespers erupted and spread throughout the island. Within days, all hope for an Angevin assault upon Constantinople had faded, and Charles was desperately fighting to preserve his own territory. The empire had been saved without the loss of a single Byzantine, although there is some evidence that Byzantine spies helped burn 70 Angevin ships anchored at Messina.

Micheal VIII later said of the Sicilians: "If I dare to say that God prepared their liberty and that He did it by my own hands, I would be telling only the truth."

The effectiveness of the Bureau of Barbarians declined along with the fortunes of the empire in the 14th and 15th centuries. But as Byzantine territory shrank and Byzantine armies disappeared, aggressive diplomacy became the only weapon left for the empire. And, just as it had in the days of Justinian, the Byzantine intelligence service provided the ammunition. When the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid was defeated and captured by Timur at the battle of Angora in 1402, the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus took advantage of the situation by sending agents to each of Bayazid's four sons. With little encouragement, all four sons were battling each other instead of the Byzantines. By backing one heir, then another, Manuel II was able to extend the length of the civil war until 1413, when Mehmet I became sole ruler of the Ottomans and made peace with Byzantium.

Even as the final curtain fell on the Byzantine empire in 1453, Byzantine agents were hard at work, desperately seeking a way to save Constantinople from the Ottomans. Contemporary chroniclers of the seige claimed that Sultan Mehmet II's grand viser, Halil Pasha, was in the pay of the Byzantines throughout the entire siege. When the Sultan decided to make one final all-out assault (victorious, as it turned out), the news of the coming attack was covertly delivered to the Byzantines via an arrow, shot over the triple walls of Constantinople.

For more than eight centuries, the Bureau of Barbarians helped protect the empire from Hun and Goth, Persian and Arab, Norman and Angevin, Bulgar and and Serb, Crusader and Turk. With an army that never surpassed 140,000 men, the Byzantine Empire relied on speedy and accurate intelligence for its very survival. The efficiency of the Byzantine intelligence service is exemplified by the fact that, despite an unremittingly hostile environment, the Byzantine Empire endured for a longer period of time than any other empire save that of ancient Egypt. Byzantine spies were dogged and cunning in their efforts to gather intelligence for the emperor. But it also was the knack for analyzing the information received and applying it in the service of a dynamic statecraft that makes the Bureau of Barbarians worth remembering.

Unfortunately no sources are cited. Does anyone know of sources to corroborate these accounts?

Thanks.

--Mcorazao (talk) 20:34, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

No Sources

Hi there. There is a Bureau of Barbarians mentioned in the Notitia Dignitatum of the fifth century. It is however merely an office staffed (likely three or four clerks, perhaps some more, it is impossible to know) who handled record keeping for the Eastern part of the Empire. You can reference it to Otto Seeck, Notitia Dignitatum accedunt Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae Laterculi Prouinciarum (Berlin, Apud Weidmannos 1876) pp 31-33. But there is no evidence that it was an espionage office, or even that it survived the reform of the "master of offices" position under Leo III. Varangian (talk) 12:01, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Varangian, you have deliberately removed a list of sources I had provided. Granted, some were not the most authoritative sources but it is hard to find a lot of research on this obscure topic.

What you have done in the article is deliberately push your opinion that everybody is wrong about it being a spy agency. You may in fact be correct but your pushing this opinion is "Original Research" and inappropriate. If you felt the article needed to be more balanced then you should have contributed to it in a way that balanced it but you have instead turned this into an essay espousing your personal opinion.

--Mcorazao (talk) 15:03, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Some additional references:

• Recueil Des Cours by the Hague, Vol. 69, pg. 160

"C'est ainsi que toutes les ambassades arrivant a Constantinople etaient logees dans un palais special, surveille et espionne par un Departement d'Etat special appele <<Skrinion Barbaron>> ou <<Bureau des Barbares>>.

which rougly translates

It is thus that all the arriving embassies to Constantinople were housed in a special palace, watched and spied upon by a special Department of State named "Skrinion Barbaron" or "Bureau of the Barbarians".

• A history of diplomacy in the international development of Europe by David Jayne Hill, pg. 207-208

"During their sojourn at Constantinople, the embassies ... were installed ... in a palace set apart for their residence; -- a special office, called "Skrinion Barbaron," or "Bureau of the Barbarians," taking charge of their entertainment. All their movements were secretly watched ..."

The book specifically discusses the Bureau as an 11th century institution.

--Mcorazao (talk) 16:59, 13 May 2009 (UTC)