The discussion cautions against treating the army as an automatic slide from classical legions to medieval heavy cavalry. It also questions the linked assumptions that local troops had become ineffective part-time farmers and that non-Roman soldiers supplied most of the army's effective strength. Contemporary narrative sources and imperial legislation reveal much, but authors such as Procopius often use non-technical terms and selectively report numbers. At Busta Gallorum, for example, he gives figures for troops important to his account of the fighting while leaving much of Narses's army uncounted. The result is a military system that has to be reconstructed from incomplete evidence rather than reduced to a single clean model.
Notable Point · 3:43-6:29
Why the sixth-century Roman army resists simple labels
The book uses narrative histories and legislation to question familiar claims about cavalry, local troops, and supposedly non-Roman armies.