Qualla: Optimatoi

Optimatoi: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It is not often that an army's finest cavalry unit is turned into a baggage train. Yet that is exactly what happened to the Optimatoi — the "Best Men" of the Byzantine Empire — somewhere around the mid-eighth century, when Emperor Constantine V decided they were more useful hauling equipment than wielding swords. The story of their fall from glory, and the province that grew from their reassignment, plays out across the hills and shores of Bithynia, just across the water from Constantinople itself.

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Optimatoi: Gothic Riders on a Roman Frontier

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Optimates trace their origins to around 575 AD, when Emperor Tiberius II Constantine assembled an elite regiment of foederati — foreign troops fighting under Roman contract — most likely drawn from Gothic warriors. They served as a heavy cavalry reserve, their commander holdi...

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Optimatoi: Demoted to Mule-Drivers

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Power in the Byzantine Empire was always fragile, and provincial military commanders — the stratēgoi — were a perpetual source of anxiety for emperors who feared their independence. When Artabasdos, Count of the Opsician Theme, led a serious revolt against Constantine V, the empe...

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Optimatoi: A Province Takes Shape

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The territory of the Optimatoi thema was geographically intimate with the capital in a way no other province could claim. It included the peninsula directly opposite Constantinople, both shores of the Gulf of Nicomedia — the elongated inlet now called the Gulf of İzmit — and stre...

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Optimatoi: Crusades, Latins, and an Ottoman Ending

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, Seljuk raiders devastated the thema's rural districts, though Nicomedia itself held out. Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, reigning from 1081 to 1118, stabilised the region with help from the armies of the First Crusade passing through. Then the F...

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Optimatoi: What Remains

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Optimatoi left no monuments to themselves — no towers with their name carved in stone, no inscribed dedications. What survives is the outline of their territory, which maps almost exactly onto the modern Kocaeli Province east of Istanbul. Nicomedia became İzmit, now the indus...

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