Méa Corentin. La cavalerie romaine des Sévères à Théodose

Université Michel de Montaigne - Bordeaux III, 2014. — 619 p.In his reference book L'Empire romain en mutation des Sévères à Constantin (192-337 p.C.), Jean-Michel Carrié evokes changes in the late Roman army. He notes that “tasks of border patrols and the need of quick intervention in threatened areas imposed a better mobility”. Echoing to twentieth-century historiography, he argues that the Roman army appears “largely converted to the cavalry” at the Battle of Adrianople (378 A.D.) Several historians have already written about the rise of the weapon of cavalry in the Roman army during the reigns of Septimius Severus and Theodosius. All of them agree to highlight the revival of cavalry when dealing with the evolution of the Late Roman army. Considering that Gallienus would have created a command of cavalry in 256 A.D., theirs works are mainly based upon the analysis of a fourth-century document called the Notitia Dignitatum. We endeavour to reopen the case in order to question the reality of an army supposedly “largely converted to the cavalry”. Were there such things as great structural changes and a renewal of the hierarchy? Would assigned missions, both military and civilian, be very different in the Late Empire than they were in the Early Empire?