Aldarion
Archmage
Historical Armies – Army of King Tomislav
Baptized Croatia musters as many as 60 thousand horse and 100 thousand foot, and galleys up to 80 and cutters up to 100. The galleys carry 40 men each, the cutters 20 each and smaller cutters 10 ea…
warfantasy.wordpress.com
Baptized Croatia musters as many as 60 thousand horse and 100 thousand foot, and galleys up to 80 and cutters up to 100. The galleys carry 40 men each, the cutters 20 each and smaller cutters 10 each. This great power and multitude of men Croatia possessed until the time of Prince Krasimer. But when he was dead and his son Miroslav, after ruling for four years, was made away with by the ban Pribonias, and quarrels and numerous dissentions broke out in the country, the horse and foot and galleys and cutters of the Croat dominion were diminished. And now it has 30 galleys and *** cutters, large and small, and *** horse and *** foot.
Above is the passage from De Administrando Imperio, by Roman Emperor Constantine VII. It is probably the only direct source for military strength of Tomislav’s Croatia we have, and had been long a subject of debate. Generally speaking, the 19th century Romantic Croatian historians had uncritically accepted it, using it to prove the military strength of Tomislav’s Croatia – even though it really requires no proving, considering his achievments could only have been possible with a strong army. But massive military strength apparently shown by Constantine was used to prove that Croatia was a Balkan superpower, something that was followed by 1990s and some of the later Croatian historians. Authors such as Šanjek, Milošević and Ivan Vujčić presented the above numbers as factual.
