Legionary Officers and NCOs - Late Roman Army (284 - 565 AD)

[Urselius]

I thought that the medieval Greek empire fought mostly defensive wars, and when it tried to expand it was rarely succesful. Edit: Foughtl mostly defensive wars after the Arab invasions, that is! The campaigns under Justinian and the Persian War were hardly defensive.

The Byzantine Empire conquered: northern Syria, Armenia and the central and northern areas of the Balkans in the period 950-1025. Following the First Crusade until 1180 the Empire was again on the offensive. Manuel I (1143-1180) conducted campaigns from Italy to Syria and Hungary to Egypt. In the 1160s two Byzantine armies made a vast pincer movement, one moving through Wallachia and then crossing the Transylvanian Alps, the other moving through Moldavia and the Russian principality of Galicia to cross the Carpathians, they entered the Hungarian province of Tranylvania and ravaged it.

I cannot think of any contemporary Western European state fighting on such a large geographical scale - excluding the Crusades which were largely multi-national.