Chapter 3 - Christian and Muslim Sources for the Battle of Manzikert: Making Sense of Numbers and Local Topography

Summary

Military Demography

For military history, the problem of assessing the size and make up of armies is of critical importance, and the question “how big was an army?” echoes in the mind of any historian interested in the history of war. This “million dollar” question has stirred up such a heated debate within the academic community in the last century that historians should tread with caution when referring to issues of military demography. Therefore, it is my intention here to assess the various factors that would have affected the army estimates of the primary sources for the Battle of Manzikert, and to explain to what extent the figures they provide for army sizes are reliable, both in absolute numbers and in the ratios given between mounted and dismounted troops.

In terms of how contemporary historians obtained their numbers, we may consider two broad categories: first, those who had no access to official reports and data because of their position in society and/or because of any secrecy act/policy by the state; and second, those who did have access to official reports and data, and therefore provided numbers based either on military reviews or on regulations or custom. To begin with, the accounts of historians belonging to the first category would have been affected by three factors, depending on whether they were eyewitness to the events they describe. The first factor relates to the time when their work was written, and the reliance on oral testimonies by the historians. Such accounts always bore the risk of inflation and/or miscalculation. We should also consider that memories inevitably focus on the outcome and significant incidents. In fact, Thucydides observes that battles are difficult enough to reconstruct because each witnesses only knows what is happening in their immediate vicinity. This becomes more acute the lower an eyewitnesses was in the military hierarchy and, as a result, would have had a limited opportunity both to observe and to grasp the reality on the battlefield, which could provide us with a distorted picture of the day's events (although not always).