Introduction

Summary

IT HAS BEEN described as a dreadful day, a most shattering and shameful defeat, a debacle, an unmitigated catastrophe, the breaking of Byzantium, the beginning of the end of medieval Hellenism, and the day that opened the gates of Anatolia to the Turks, while being pondered over whether or not it was “un désastre militaire” for the Byzantine army of the late 1060s. Whatever the case, the battle that was fought on August 26, 1071, between the forces of the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes and the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan is—rightly so—regarded as one of the most significant turning points in medieval history. In recent years, an increasing number of scholars specializing in the period have lent their voices in support of the view that the Battle of Manzikert was not the real military disaster as it was once portrayed, framing the upcoming collapse of the Byzantine rule in Anatolia that followed as the direct outcome of two factors: Byzantine aristocratic infighting and civil war, and the increased involvement of the Seljuks in these civil wars that “eased” their penetration into Anatolia.

Indeed, it is also my firm conviction that Romanos Diogenes's “Manzikert campaign” of 1071 may have been a strategic failure for the emperor, but it was not a tactical disaster. It should have only confirmed Turkish domination of the Armenian highlands in eastern Asia Minor, rather than almost all of Anatolia, which itself was overrun by the Turks within eight years. Therefore, even though no great military figure is said to have died in the battle, and it seems clear that the actual losses incurred were limited to the emperor's immediate retinue, the decisive outcome of the Battle of Manzikert ushered in an element of chaos in the geopolitical history of the Byzantine Empire in the 1070s: the civil wars of the early 1070s that followed the battle marked the political and military collapse of the empire in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Italy as well as central and eastern Asia Minor.

In the introductory part of this book found in the first three chapters, I examine the Christian and Muslim narrative sources for the battle strictly from a military perspective, and I reach several conclusions regarding the value of these sources for the his-tory of warfare in Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean in the eleventh century.