Miriarcha is the name given in the Chronicon breve normannicum to the Byzantine general who led the defence of the Catapanate of Italy in 1060–1062. The anonymous chronicler has, however, misinterpreted the Greek title merarches (commander of a division, merarch) as a name. The actual name of the general is unknown, and since the rank of merarches is not otherwise clearly attested in southern Italy his exact function is not known either. Probably the office was immediately below that of the catapan.
Miriarcha is the name given in the Chronicon breve normannicum to the Byzantine general who led the defence of the Catapanate of Italy in 1060–1062. The anonymous chronicler has, however, misinterpreted the Greek title merarches (commander of a division, merarch) as a name. The actual name of the general is unknown, and since the rank of merarches is not otherwise clearly attested in southern Italy his exact function is not known either. Probably the office was immediately below that of the catapan.
In the spring and summer of 1060, the Normans under Duke Robert Guiscard with his brothers Mauger and Roger conquered several cities in Byzantine Apulia and expelled the last Byzantine garrisons from Calabria. In response, the new Byzantine emperor Constantine X dispatched reinforcements under the command of a merarch. They arrived in Bari in October 1060.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).