Battle of Manzikert

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Battle of Manzikert was fought on the 26th of August, 1071, near a town in what is now eastern Turkey, and the man who lost it was captured alive by his enemy. No Byzantine emperor had ever suffered that fate before. It was, as the historian Steven Runciman wrote, "the most decisive disaster in Byzantine history." Byzantine historians themselves returned to that day again and again, calling it simply "that dreadful day."

  How did the mightiest Christian empire in the world end up with its emperor kneeling in the dirt, a conqueror's boot on his neck? The answers lie in decades of military neglect, a fractured aristocracy, and a field commander who made one fateful decision too many. What happened at Manzikert did not end Byzantium immediately, but it set in motion a chain of events from which the empire would never fully recover.

• 2. A Fraying Empire

  ›

  Around 1053, Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos disbanded an Iberian army of 50,000 men. The 11th-century Byzantine historian John Skylitzes named this force specifically, and two of his contemporaries, former officials Michael Attaleiates and Kekaumenos, agreed that disbanding it did catastrophic harm to the empire's eastern defenses.

  This was not an isolated blunder. Constantine IX was judged militarily incompetent, and his successor Constantine X Doukas continued the slide. A brief two-year reform period under Isaac I Komnenos merely delayed the damage. The eastern frontier grew porous. In 1064, after a truce with the Seljuks finally broke, a large Seljuk army under Alp Arslan attacked the theme of Iberia and besieged the city of Ani for twenty-five days before capturing it.

  The provincial troop numbers kept falling because the imperial government had shifted money toward mercenaries. Hired soldiers were cheaper to dismiss after a campaign and were considered less likely to involve themselves in court politics. That calculation would prove disastrously shortsighted at Manzikert, where it was precisely those mercenaries who abandoned the field first.

• 3. Romanos Marches East

  ›

  Romanos IV Diogenes took power in 1068 and immediately began reforming the army. He retook the city of Hierapolis that same year. He chased Turkoman raiding parties across Anatolia, winning limited success but no decisive blow. By 1070, his general Manuel Komnenos had beaten back a Seljuk attack on Iconium, only to be defeated shortly after in the Battle of Sebasteia by Arisighi, who was Alp Arslan's brother-in-law.

  In 1071, Romanos identified what he believed was an opportunity. Alp Arslan had been drawn west, focused on besieging Aleppo. Romanos assembled a large and diverse force, marching it east to recover lost Armenian fortresses before the Seljuks could respond. The army included 500 Frankish and Norman mercenaries under Roussel de Bailleul, Uz and Pecheneg Turkic mercenaries, Bulgarian mercenaries, infantry under the Duke of Antioch, Georgian and Armenian contingents, and elements of the elite Varangian Guard. The total came to around 40,000 men.

  The march across Asia Minor was punishing. Romanos brought a luxurious baggage train that alienated his own troops. His Frankish mercenaries plundered the local population along the route, forcing him to dismiss them. The army rested at Sebasteia on the Halys River, reached Theodosiopolis in June 1071, and then pressed on toward Manzikert, choosing the route of the Kocasu Stream through Khnus partly to meet water needs. The men made their spears from trees in that region.

• 4. The Fatal Division

  ›

  Romanos placed Andronikos Doukas in command of the rear guard. That appointment was a serious error. Andronikos was the son of John Doukas, a rival of Romanos, and the loyalties of the Doukas family were far from certain. Romanos knew this, yet put him in exactly the position where betrayal could do the most damage.

  Alp Arslan was already in the area, reinforced by cavalry from Aleppo and Mosul and by a force of Kurdish fighters, estimated at 10,000, sent by the Marwanid emir Nizam al-Din ibn Nasr al-Dawla. His scouts tracked Romanos precisely, while Romanos had no clear picture of where the Sultan was or how many troops he commanded.

  Thinking Alp Arslan was either far away or not coming, Romanos divided his army. He sent his general Joseph Tarchaniotes, along with the Varangians, Pechenegs, and Franks, to the nearby fortress of Khliat. Romanos himself led the remaining force to Manzikert, splitting roughly 20,000 men on each side. What happened to Tarchaniotes remains uncertain. Islamic sources say Alp Arslan destroyed his column entirely; Byzantine sources say nothing of any such battle. Michael Attaleiates suggests Tarchaniotes simply fled at the sight of the Seljuk Sultan. Either way, when Romanos most needed his full strength, he had less than half of it.

• 5. The Day of Battle

  ›

  On the morning of the 26th of August, 1071, Alp Arslan addressed his assembled army wearing a white robe that resembled an Islamic funeral shroud. The message was deliberate: the Sultan was prepared to die in battle that day.

  Romanos had already captured the town of Manzikert on the 23rd of August. On the 25th, some of his Turkic mercenaries made contact with their Seljuk kin and deserted. That same day, a Seljuk peace envoy arrived. Romanos rejected the offer. He calculated that another campaign would be too costly to mount if he failed to win now, and he wanted a final resolution to the persistent Turkic incursions.

  On the 26th, the Byzantine army formed up with the left wing under Bryennios, the right wing under Theodore Alyates, and the emperor commanding the center. The Seljuks arranged themselves in a crescent formation roughly four kilometres away. Their horse archers struck repeatedly as the Byzantines advanced; the center of the crescent pulled back continuously while the wings swept around to envelop the advancing army. The Byzantines pressed through the arrow fire and captured Alp Arslan's camp by late afternoon. But the wings had nearly fractured where the arrows fell heaviest, because individual units kept breaking off to chase Seljuk cavalry who simply disengaged and rode away.

  As darkness fell, Romanos ordered a withdrawal. The right wing misread the signal. Andronikos Doukas deliberately ignored the order to cover the retreat and marched directly back to the Byzantine camp. The army dissolved into confusion. The Seljuks attacked. The right wing broke almost immediately, with soldiers convinced they had been betrayed. The left wing under Bryennios held briefly, then also collapsed. The remnants of the Byzantine center, including Romanos himself and the Varangian Guard, were encircled. Romanos was wounded and taken prisoner. The professional core of the Byzantine army was destroyed by dawn.

• 6. Prisoner and Peace

  ›

  When Romanos was brought before Alp Arslan, the Sultan refused to believe that the filthy, bloodied man in front of him was the emperor of the Romans. Once satisfied of the identification, he placed his boot on Romanos's neck and made him kiss the ground, a customary symbolic gesture of submission.

  What followed surprised everyone. The Sultan treated Romanos with genuine kindness. According to Ibn al-Adim, Romanos told the Sultan that the raids of Rashid al-Dawla Mahmud into Byzantine territory had been his reason for the entire campaign. The two men negotiated while Romanos ate at the Sultan's table. The agreed terms required Byzantium to surrender Antioch, Edessa, Hierapolis, and Manzikert. The core of Anatolia, crucially, would remain Byzantine. Alp Arslan initially demanded a ransom of 10 million gold pieces; Romanos balked at the sum, so the Sultan reduced the immediate payment to 1.5 million gold pieces, with an annual tribute to follow. A marriage alliance was arranged between Alp Arslan's son and Romanos's daughter. The Sultan then gave Romanos gifts and sent him home with an escort of two emirs and one hundred Mamluks.

  The terms, had they held, might have preserved the Anatolian heartland. They did not hold. Back in Constantinople, Andronikos Doukas led a coup, proclaimed his cousin Michael VII as basileus, and moved against Romanos before the released emperor could raise loyal troops. Romanos was defeated three times in battle, then deposed, blinded, and exiled to the island of Proti. He died shortly after from an infection caused by the blinding.

• 7. The Long Catastrophe

  ›

  Modern historians are careful to note that Manzikert was not the massacre it was once assumed to be. Byzantine losses were relatively low. Most commanders survived: Doukas, Tarchaniotes, Bryennios, Theodore Alyates, and Roussel de Bailleul all took part in subsequent events. Many Byzantine prisoners were released within weeks. The battle itself did not immediately shift the military balance between the two empires.

  The true damage came from what followed. The political vacuum created by the coup allowed Turkic populations to move into Anatolia largely unopposed. By 1080, the Seljuk Turks had gained an area of 78,000 square kilometres of former Byzantine territory. The Seljuks established their capital at Nikaea, the city now called Iznik, in 1077, positioning themselves to monitor Byzantine struggles and exploit new opportunities. It took three decades of internal conflict before Alexius I, who ruled from 1081 to 1118, restored stability to Byzantium.

  Roussel de Bailleul, the Norman mercenary commander who had served at Manzikert, tried to carve out an independent kingdom in Galatia. He defeated the emperor's uncle John Doukas, who had been sent to suppress him, and threatened the capital itself, destroying Chrysopolis on the Asian coast of the Bosphorus. The empire finally asked the Seljuks to crush de Bailleul, which they did, though the Turks then ransomed him back to his own wife. Only the young general Alexios Komnenos ultimately managed to capture him.

  John Julius Norwich, writing in his trilogy on Byzantium, called Manzikert "its death blow, though centuries remained before the remnant fell." Paul K. Davis concluded that the defeat denied Byzantium control of Anatolia, its major recruiting ground, leaving the empire confined to the territory immediately around Constantinople. The First Crusade of 1095 was, in part, a western response to the Byzantine emperor's call for military assistance after this loss. Historians have traced to Manzikert one of the root causes of the entire crusading movement.

• 8. Memory and Meaning

  ›

  Norman soldiers who had served in the Byzantine army carried stories of the defeat back west, and those tales likely inspired an episode in the Chanson de Roland, in which a figure called the amirant of Babylon, Baligant, fights Charlemagne and is defeated only through the intervention of Saint Gabriel.

  In Turkey, the battle became a founding memory of a different kind. The largest mosque in Turkey, the Camlica Mosque in Istanbul, was built with four minarets each spanning 107.1 metres, a figure that references the year 1071. Turkey's ruling AKP announced in 2018 a set of targets for the years 2023, 2053, and 2071, marking the hundredth anniversary of the republic, the six-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of Istanbul, and the thousandth anniversary of the Battle of Manzikert.

  Historian Andrew Holt, writing in the 2022 anthology The Worst Military Leaders in History, made Romanos the focus of his contribution precisely because a defeat with such catastrophic long-term consequences was, in large part, the emperor's own doing. Holt acknowledged that the Byzantine army's problems had been building for decades, but argued that a more careful commander would have addressed them before campaigning at all. The decision to give Andronikos Doukas command of the reserve, above every other error, cost Romanos half his forces at the moment they were most needed. Anna Komnene, writing a few decades after the battle, described a Roman army dispersed in all directions while the Turks spread between the Black Sea, the Hellespont, the Aegean, and the Mediterranean. The fall of Nikaea to the First Crusade in 1097 would be the next chapter in the story that Manzikert began.