The Stratioti or Stradioti ( stratiotes; ;, ; ; ; ) were mercenary units from the Balkans recruited mainly by states of southern and central Europe from the 15th century until the middle of the 18th century. They pioneered light cavalry tactics in European armies in the early modern era.
Name
One hypothesis proposes that the term is the Italian rendering of Greek στρατιώτες, stratiotes or στρατιώται, stratiotai (soldiers), which denoted cavalrymen who owned pronoia fiefs in the late Byzantine period. It was also used in Ancient Greek as a general term for a soldier being part of an army. According to another hypothesis, it derives from the Italian word strada ("street") which produced stradioti "wanderers" or "wayfarers", figuratively interpreted as errant cavalrymen. Italian variants are stradioti, stradiotti, stratioti, strathiotto, strathioti. In Albanian they are called stratiotë (definite: stratiotët) in French estradiots, in Serbo-Croatian: stratioti, stradioti, in Spanish estradiotes.
Since many stradioti wore a particular cap, in Venice the name cappelletti (sing. cappelletto) was initially used as a synonym for stradiotti or albanesi. In the 16th and 17th centuries the term cappelletti was mainly used for light cavalry recruited from Dalmatia. A feature that distinguished the cappelletti form the stradiotti was their increasing usage of firearms. From the 17th century Venice recruited light cavalry no longer from the Morea, but mainly from Dalmatia and Albania, and the cappelletti gradually replaced the stradiotti. However they had not the same success as light cavalry was gradually abandoned.
History
The stradioti were recruited in Albania, Greece, Dalmatia, Serbia and Cyprus. Those units continued the military traditions of Byzantine and Balkan cavalry warfare. As such, they had previously served Byzantine and Albanian rulers, they then entered Venetian military service during the Ottoman-Venetian wars in the 15th century. It has been suggested that a ready pool of Albanian stradioti was the product of the northern Albanian tribal system of feud (Gjakmarrja) and consequent emigration. The precise year when stratioti units began to be recruited in western armies is not known. However, under 1371 state decrees of the Venetian Republic those Greeks that lived in Venetian controlled territories were allowed to join the Venetian army.
The precise definition of their ethnic identity was the subject of careful study, while modern scholarship concludes that they were Albanians and Greeks who mainly originated from the Peloponnese. Studies on the origin of their names indicate that around 80% of the stradioti were of Albanian origin, and very few of Slav origin (Crovati). The remainder were Greek, most of whom were captains. Some of the officers' surnames who were of Greek origin are Palaiologos, Spandounios, Laskaris, Rhalles, Komnenos, Psendakis, Maniatis, Spyliotis, Alexopoulos, Psaris, Zacharopoulos, Klirakopoulos, and Kondomitis. A number of them, such as the Palaiologoi and Komnenoi, were members of Byzantine noble families. Others seemed to be of South Slavic origin, such as Soimiris, Vlastimiris, and Voicha. Some renowned Albanian stratioti were the Alambresi, Basta, Bua, Meksi, Capuzzimadi, Crescia, and Renesi. The study on the names of the stradioti does not indicate that most of them came directly from Albania proper, rather from the Venetian holdings in southern and central Greece. The stradioti who moved with their families to Italy in the late 15th and early 16th centuries had been born in the Peloponnese, where their ancestors immigrated in the late 14th and early 15th century, after the request of the Byzantine Despots of the Morea, Theodore I and Theodore II Palaiologos, who invited the Albanians to serve as military colonists in the Peloponnese in the attempt to resist Ottoman expansion in the Balkans.