This article was inspired by two things; Terry’s additional article to Saga #84 and my current research for information on the Byzantine military.

Now Terry talked about using the local university to do research on some of his armies. This is an admirable thing to do as it has the potential to increase the understanding of the armies, tactics and general history of the specific wargame periods that we enjoy. Far from being a simple quest for the “killer” army that seems to be the Holy Grail of some wargamers, research can be targeted at a wide variety of interests. One can search for uniform information, the colour of clothing dyes, tactics and formations as used by a specific army or even banners to add to the character of an army.

In recent years, we have been fortunate in the increase in resources that can be used to collect and collate information. In addition to the numerous wargame publications, there are the local public libraries, academic libraries and the Internet. It is amazing what can be found if one knows where to look and this is the basis of my article.

I have had much success in tracking down information using all of the above mentioned resources. From all the collated information, I could produce a relatively good and detailed over view of the Byzantine military. I decided that I wanted to dig a bit deeper to ensure that I had found not only lots of information, but also checked the best sources. That is much easier said than done.

I have a high speed Internet connection that uses the same cable as my TV so that I can search and then download information quickly (and does not need the telephone line). I have purchased a membership for the local university library so that I can borrow books and check academic journals for articles. The library also has a good copying system when I find articles worthy of keeping on file. I purchased a scanner with a good software (OCR) programme so that I can keep lots of information in my computer (normally on removable data like floppy disks and more recently CD-ROM).

The things that still elude me are the some of the sources, both books and articles, that are considered the best references. I even checked with academics whom I know for their help and resorted to employing a neighbour's son, who attends university to gain access to an inter-library loan (ILL) (universities restrict this privilege to staff and students and my library card allows only access to on-site resources).

During all of my research, I kept coming across mentions, either as footnotes or references in the text, to these well regarded other sources. Unfortunately, many of the authors did not include much about what information was contained in these wonderful sources. This can be annoying as the reader is expected to have either read them or will read them. This of course also assumes that the references are easy to find and read.

Now sometimes, I have been lucky enough to contact someone who has a copy of an article or a book, but it is not always easy to find some of the sources. I do not have the resources (that means money) to travel around to the various libraries to conduct research. So I must patiently wait and hope that my ILL is successful.

The ironic part is that I am missing only a few of the articles and books that would be ideal for this project. Without them I feel that I would be just rephrasing material already summarised in many of the more common books, all of which are easily found in hobby shops and bookstores.

All this would have been much easier if I was a student at university or had a grant to do academic research. Well I just have to wait until later when I can return to university full time for post-graduate studies, by then the book will be finished.