Battle of Manzikert (1071): Byzantium's Defeat by the Seljuks

The Battle of Manzikert was fought on 26 August 1071 near the town of Manzikert, north of Lake Van in eastern Anatolia, between the Byzantine Empire under Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes and the Seljuk Turks under Sultan Alp Arslan. The Byzantine army broke up and Romanos was captured, the only Byzantine emperor ever taken prisoner by a Muslim ruler. The battle itself was not a massacre, but the civil wars that followed left Anatolia open to Turkish settlement and changed the map of the Middle East.

Background: Byzantium and the Seljuks

In the early 11th century the Byzantine Empire was at a high point. Basil II (976–1025) had conquered Bulgaria and pushed the eastern frontier into Armenia, annexing several Armenian principalities. After his death, however, a series of short reigns, court intrigues and cuts to the old provincial armies weakened the empire’s defences. The government relied increasingly on paid mercenaries, among them Normans, Franks, Varangians and Turkic Pechenegs and Oghuz (Uzes).

At the same time a new power rose to the east. The Seljuks, a Turkic dynasty from Central Asia, conquered most of Iran and in 1055 their leader Tughril Beg entered Baghdad as protector of the Abbasid caliph (see Seljuk capture of Baghdad). Turkmen nomads loosely attached to the Seljuks raided deep into Byzantine Armenia and Anatolia, sacking cities such as Melitene (1057–1058) and Caesarea (c. 1067).

Tughril’s nephew Alp Arslan became sultan in 1063–1064. With his vizier Nizam al-Mulk he ran a vast empire whose main rival, in his eyes, was not Byzantium but the Shiite Fatimid caliphate in Egypt. In 1064 he took Ani, the old Armenian capital, a heavy blow to Byzantine prestige in the Caucasus.

Romanos IV Diogenes and the road to war

Romanos Diogenes was an experienced general from a Cappadocian military family. On 1 January 1068 he married the widowed empress Eudokia Makrembolitissa and became co-emperor alongside her young sons, among them the future Michael VII Doukas. The powerful Doukas family, led by the Caesar John Doukas, resented him from the start.

Romanos campaigned in the east in 1068 and 1069 with mixed results; in 1070 he stayed in the capital and sent a general who was defeated. In spring 1071 he led a large army east again. Its size is uncertain: modern estimates usually range from about 40,000 to 70,000 men, although some historians argue for lower numbers. It was a mixed force of regular units, Armenian and Georgian contingents, Varangians, Western mercenaries under the Norman Roussel de Bailleul, and Turkic Pechenegs and Uzes.

Alp Arslan was then campaigning in northern Syria against the Fatimids and had recently agreed a truce with Byzantine envoys. When he heard that Romanos was heading for Armenia, he abandoned the siege of Aleppo and hurried north, gathering troops on the way. His army is also of uncertain size; it was probably smaller than the Byzantine one, perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 men, and largely made up of mounted archers.

The campaign of August 1071

Romanos aimed to recover the fortresses of Manzikert and Khliat (Ahlat) on the northern shore of Lake Van, which the Seljuks had taken shortly before. Believing the sultan was still far away, he divided his forces. A large detachment under the general Joseph Tarchaneiotes, with Roussel’s mercenaries, was sent towards Khliat, while the emperor took Manzikert itself with little resistance around 23 August.

Tarchaneiotes’s division never rejoined the emperor. Byzantine sources disagree about whether it retreated after meeting Seljuk forces or simply chose not to fight; either way, Romanos went into battle with perhaps half of his army. Seljuk skirmishers began harassing his foragers, and some Uz mercenaries defected to their Turkic kin.

Alp Arslan sent envoys offering peace. Romanos refused, probably because a peace without a victory would have weakened his position at home after an expensive campaign.

The battle on 26 August 1071

On 26 August Romanos drew up his army in a long line and advanced across the plain. The emperor commanded the centre, with Andronikos Doukas, a son of the Caesar John and a political enemy, leading the rearguard of reserve troops. The Seljuks did not stand to fight. Their mounted archers fell back before the Byzantine advance, shooting at the flanks, in the classic steppe tactic of drawing an enemy away from its camp.

By late afternoon the Byzantines had reached the Seljuk camp without bringing the main enemy force to battle. Fearing that his camp, now largely unguarded, would be attacked at nightfall, Romanos ordered the imperial standard turned round and the army to return. The manoeuvre caused confusion. Some units thought the emperor was retreating or had been killed.

At this moment Andronikos Doukas led the rearguard away from the field instead of covering the withdrawal; according to the eyewitness Michael Attaleiates, he deliberately spread the rumour that the emperor had been defeated. The Seljuks then attacked the disordered line. Many units fled. Romanos and the troops around him fought on until he was wounded in the hand, his horse was killed, and he was captured.

Captivity and the treaty

The next day the emperor was brought before Alp Arslan. Christian and Muslim sources tell the meeting in different ways; several Muslim accounts include the symbolic gesture of the sultan placing his foot on the emperor’s neck, which may or may not have happened. What is agreed is that Alp Arslan treated Romanos with courtesy and released him after about a week.

The terms are reported differently in the sources. Muslim historians mention a ransom (often given as 1.5 million dinars), an annual tribute, the release of Muslim prisoners, a marriage alliance and the handover of frontier towns such as Manzikert, Edessa, Hierapolis and Antioch. Modern scholars stress that the sultan’s demands were moderate: he wanted a quiet frontier while he dealt with Egypt, not the conquest of Byzantium.

Civil war and the loss of Anatolia

The real disaster came after the battle. When news of the defeat reached Constantinople, the Doukas faction, with the scholar-courtier Michael Psellos, declared Michael VII sole emperor and repudiated any agreement Romanos had made. Romanos raised troops but was defeated by the Doukas brothers. In 1072 he surrendered at Adana in Cilicia on a promise of personal safety, but was blinded on the orders of the new government and died of his wounds on the island of Prote.

Alp Arslan, freed from his treaty by the deposition of Romanos, did not return to Anatolia; he was killed in late 1072 during a campaign in Central Asia. But without a strong central army, Byzantine Anatolia fell into chaos. Rebellions followed one another, including those of Roussel de Bailleul (1073–1074), Nikephoros Bryennios and Nikephoros Botaneiates (both 1077–1078). Rival claimants hired Turkish bands and invited them into cities.

By around 1080 Turkish leaders controlled much of the Anatolian plateau. Suleiman ibn Qutulmish, a member of a rival branch of the Seljuk family, set up what became the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum and by c. 1081 held Nicaea, barely 100 kilometres from Constantinople. When Alexios I Komnenos seized the throne in 1081, the empire had lost most of its Asian heartland, its main source of soldiers and taxes.

Key people

• Romanos IV Diogenes (emperor 1068–1071): a capable soldier who lacked support in the capital; his blinding made him a tragic figure in later Byzantine histories.
• Alp Arslan (sultan c. 1063–1072): second sultan of the Great Seljuk Empire; his name means “heroic lion” in Turkic.
• Andronikos Doukas: commander of the rearguard, whose withdrawal is blamed by Byzantine writers for turning a setback into a rout.
• Joseph Tarchaneiotes: commander of the detachment sent to Khliat, absent from the battle.
• Michael Attaleiates: a judge who served on the campaign and wrote the most detailed eyewitness account.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Byzantine army was annihilated. Most historians now think casualties on 26 August were moderate. Large parts of the army, including the rearguard and the Khliat detachment, survived. The lasting damage was political: the civil wars that followed destroyed what remained of the eastern field army.

Myth: Alp Arslan set out to conquer Anatolia. The sultan’s main concern was the Fatimid caliphate, and his treaty with Romanos was moderate. The Turkish occupation of Anatolia was driven more by independent Turkmen groups and by Byzantine factions inviting them in than by a Seljuk plan.

Fact: Manzikert helped prepare the ground for the Crusades. Michael VII appealed to Pope Gregory VII for aid in the 1070s, and in 1095 envoys of Alexios I asked Pope Urban II for help against the Turks, leading to the First Crusade.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1055: Tughril Beg enters Baghdad; the Seljuks become the leading power in the Islamic east.
• 1064: Alp Arslan captures the Armenian city of Ani.
• 1068, 1 January: Romanos IV Diogenes becomes emperor.
• 1071, March: Romanos leaves Constantinople on his eastern campaign.
• 1071, c. 23 August: The Byzantines retake Manzikert.
• 1071, 26 August: Battle of Manzikert; Romanos is captured.
• 1071, October: Michael VII Doukas is proclaimed sole emperor in Constantinople.
• 1072: Romanos surrenders at Adana, is blinded and dies soon afterwards.
• 1081: Alexios I Komnenos takes the throne; Turks hold Nicaea.

Legacy

Later Byzantine writers looked back on Manzikert as a disaster, and modern historians long treated it as the start of the empire’s terminal decline. More recent work sees it as a turning point mainly because of the political crisis it provoked. The Komnenian emperors recovered the western coastlands of Anatolia, but the central plateau became permanently Turkish and, over the following centuries, largely Muslim and Turkish-speaking.

In Turkey, Malazgirt is remembered as the victory that opened Anatolia to the Turks, and the anniversary on 26 August is marked each year at the battlefield town.

Why it matters

Manzikert showed how a military setback could become a catastrophe when a state was divided against itself. The civil wars after 1071 cost Byzantium its Anatolian heartland, made possible the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum and, in the long run, the Ottoman state, and pushed Constantinople to ask Western Europe for help, a request that led to the Crusades.