Download PDF | Brian Todd Carey_ Joshua B. Allfree_ John Cairns - Road To Manzikert_ Byzantine And Islamic Warfare 527-1071-Pen & Sword Books Ltd. (2012).
223 Pages
Preface and Acknowledgements
The battle of Manzikert is often referenced as a ‘turning point’ when studying the clash of civilizations between Islam and Christian Europe in most college freshmen-level western and world civilization textbooks, a battle where a Seljuk victory over the Byzantine army led to the rapid Islamization of Anatolia and marked the decline of the Byzantine Empire.
The battle is also often portrayed as the ‘casus bell” for the Levantine crusades that for ever altered the relationship between the Islamic Middle East and the West. In fact, the battle of Manzikert is frequently the only Byzantine military engagement identified by name from the sixth century wars of Justinian to the successful Catholic siege of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Much of this is due to a western European focus when discussing the middle ages. However, a closer look at this dynamic period of Byzantine civilization reveals numerous important military engagements (Pliska, Anchialus, Dorostolon, to name a few) that marked the ebb and flow of Byzantine military fortunes and the usually sophisticated nature of the Byzantine approach to warfare.
Many of these same criticisms can be levelled at how Islamic warfare is treated in college textbooks. Muhammad’s prowess as a general is implied but rarely discussed. Muslim Arab victories like Yarmuk River and al-Qadisiya the seventh century over Byzantine and Sassanian Persian forces respectively are rarely mention by name, although these battlefield successes are well known and widely celebrated in the Islamic world today as proof of a past golden age when Islamic civilization could match and defeat powerful regional powers.
A resurgent modern Turkey has a similar relationship with the battle of Manzikert. This victory over Romanus IV Diogenes marks the beginning of the Turkification of the peninsula and is today celebrated as a perfect symbol for Turkish nationalism. This was evident forty years ago when the battle was treated as a national event on its nine-hundredth anniversary in 1971. Today, a statue of the victorious Seljuk commander, Alp Arslan, on a rearing warhorse, stands at the western entrance of the modern city of Malazgirt (medieval Manzikert), while each year, on the anniversary of the battle on 26 August, the engagement is re-enacted by Turkish Boy Scouts in costume in front of throngs of adoring Turkish citizens.
As the title of this book suggests, this study attempts to shine more light on the military histories of these two significant, but often neglected, regions and civilizations in the early medieval period — the Byzantine and Islamic east, intertwining military histories that culminated in the important battle of Manzikert. Once again I am joined by my excellent illustrators, Joshua B. Allfree and John Cairns, who illustrated our previous books, Warfare in the Ancient World, Warfare in the Medieval World, and Hannibal’s Last Battle: Zama and the Fall of Carthage.
These outstanding tactical, strategic and regional maps give this book its uniqueness and allow readers to easily visualize the military movements and strategic context of the battles covered in this book. Once again, we could not have completed this effort without the collaboration and support of a few notable people. First and foremost we would like to thank Pen and Sword Books for their dedication to this project. This is our second time working with Phil Sidnell and he has once again proved to be a wise editor, while the copy-editing of Ting Baker polished the narrative into its present form.
Without their assistance this book would simply not have been possible. Special thanks are also extended to my superiors at the American Public University System, History and Military History Director Dr Brian Blodgett, Dean Linda Moynihan, and Provost Karan Powell, whose generous financial support through a research grant assisted me greatly in securing the materials needed to research and write my last two books. Finally, we would like to thank our family and friends whose unswerving support and sacrifice over the process of creating these past four books in the last six years has been instrumental to our success.
Brian Todd Carey Loveland, Colorado
Introduction:
Byzantium, Islam and Catholic Europe 'The Battle of Manzikert as Historical Nexus
The Battle of Manzikert in Modern History
The battle of Manzikert has long been considered a turning point in the history of the Byzantine civilization. In late August 1071 the Eastern Roman emperor Romanus IV Diogenes (r.1068—1071) formed his multi-national army outside of the walls of the fortress city of Manzikert near Lake Van on the empire’s Armenian frontier. His adversary was the second sultan of the Great Seljuk Empire of Iran, Alp Arslan (r.1063—-1072), ruler of the most powerful Muslim state in the Near East and champion of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad.
The battle that unfolded over the course of a few days would witness desertion, defection and betrayal among the Byzantine troops and the ultimate defeat and capture of Romanus. This event sent shockwaves across the Christian and Islamic worlds and opened the floodgates of Turkish invasion and migration into Anatolia, strategically the most important region to the Byzantine Empire. A decade of civil war and Seljuk depredations further weakened the Eastern Roman Empire, forcing Alexios I Komnenos (r.1081—1118) to ask for military assistance from Catholic Western Europe, and the First Crusade was born.
For more than two centuries historians have remarked on the magnitude of the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert and subsequent loss of Anatolia. The Enlightenment English historian Edward Gibbon wrote in his seminal work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1789), that ‘[t]he Byzantine writers deplore the loss of an inestimable pearl: they forgot to mention that, in this fatal day, the Asiatic provinces of Rome were irretrievably sacrificed.”’
Another Englishman, the military historian Charles Oman, echoed Gibbon when he wrote in 1898 that ‘the empire had suffered other defeats as bloody as Manzikert, but none had such disastrous results.’? In volume three of his History of the Art of War: Medieval Warfare (1923), the German military historian Hans Delbruck challenged both Oman’s assertion of the enormous size of the Byzantine and Seljuk armies and how the battle unfolded, but agreed with Oman that ‘Alp Arslan destroyed most of the Byzantine army.”
A half century later, the esteemed crusade historian Steven Runciman reemphasized the importance of the engagement in volume one of his History of the Crusades (1951) when he boldly stated that ‘[the] battle of Manzikert was the most decisive disaster in Byzantine history.”* About this same time, the eminent German historian of Byzantium, George Ostrogorsky, commented that ‘the numerically superior, but heterogeneous and undisciplined, Byzantine army was annihilated by the forces of Alp Arslan.
In the decades that followed, other historians have added their voice to this chorus. More recently, John Norwich remarked in his Byzantium: The Apogee (2006) that ‘the battle of Manzikert was the greatest disaster suffered by the Empire of Byzantium in the seven and a half centuries of its existence.” All of these historians emphasized Manzikert as a decisive defeat and a pivotal engagement, after which Byzantine Anatolia was violently transformed into Muslim Asia Minor.
However, other historians have questioned the decisive nature and strategic significance of the battle of Manzikert and the fantastical troop strengths of the belligerents, prompting historians as early as Delbruck to comment that ‘a study and review of the battle based on the sources would be desirable.’ This challenge was actually taken up in the early twentieth century when the French historian J. Laurent began to piece together the late eleventh century Manzikert campaign using Christian and Islamic sources.
Detailed studies of Byzantine and Turkish Anatolia followed later in the late 1960s when the French historian Claude Cahen and American historian Speros Vryonis reconstructed the Islamization of Anatolia using Muslim and Byzantine primary sources and a growing body of archaeological evidence. Vryonis and the French scholar Jean-Claude Cheynet would write articles challenging old perceptions of Manzikert as a crippling military defeat and their findings would be reflected in the writings of many prominent contemporary and future historians writing on this subject, including Jonathan Riley-Smith, Warren Treadgold, and John Haldon, to name a few.*
The Battle of Manzikert Revisited This work endeavours to follow the revisionist vein of scholarship concerning the battle of Manzikert and its place in military history. Although not the devastating loss described by contemporaries of the battle and repeated by some historians over the last two hundred years, Manzikert does represent a significant historical nexus with a cast of players from many of the major civilizations shaping the medieval world in 1071.
Accompanying Romanus and his native Greek troops on his campaign were Byzantium’s traditional allies, the Armenians and Georgians, whose homelands the expedition was approaching in eastern Anatolia. Because of court intrigue in Constantinople and the poor combat capabilities of native imperial forces, Romanus supplemented his army using mercenaries from Catholic Europe, most notably the Normans, and warriors from the Eurasian steppes, including the Bulgars, Uze, and Pechenegs, once and future adversaries of the Byzantine Empire.
Protecting the emperor were members of the Varangian Guard, Swedo-Slavic warriors from the Ukraine who had served the Eastern Roman emperor since the reign of Basil II (r.976-1025) and died in large numbers trying to protect him when the Byzantine army began to disintegrate that fateful August evening.
Romanus’ adversary at Manzikert, sultan Alp Arslan, was served by the greatest light cavalry corps of the age, the fleet and ferocious Seljuk steppe warriors, many of whom were the barely Islamized and often uncontrollable Turkoman raiders. These mounted warriors had plagued Anatolia for decades before the battle of Manzikert and were instrumental in the invasion of the peninsula in the wake of the Byzantine defeat. As ruler of a new sultanate that stretched from Armenia to the Oxus River and south to the Persian Gulf, Alp Arslan commanded a multi-national army capable of sophisticated military action that married the best of steppe tactics with the martial traditions of Umayyad and Abbasid warfare.
The result was an Islamic army capable of campaigning on horseback over vast distances and different topographies, converging on the enemy from numerous directions, striking, and then disappearing in Central Asian fashion, or fighting set-piece battles and reducing powerful fortress cities in a manner consistent with the more infantry-focused militaries of the age.
Romanus understood how to meet and beat the mounted Seljuk army that arrayed before his combined-arms army outside the walls of Manzikert, as he was a proven general well-versed in the numerous Byzantine tactical manuals produced by past emperors and generals. But Romanus, for reasons both in and out of his control, did not heed those lessons and his poor generalship was instrumental in his army’s defeat.
Romanus ignored hundreds of years of Byzantine military doctrine developed fighting previous steppe societies like the Huns, Khazars, Bulgars, Magyars, and Pechenegs. But Romanus’ defeat was not entirely due to bad military decisions. His expedition was sabotaged even before battle was met by the desertion of over half his army and the defection of valuable steppe allies.
The betrayal of his reserves, under the command of a political rival, sealed his fate. Still, the loss was not a great tactical disaster, as only about 10 per cent of the total Manzikert expedition was lost, hardly the annihilation depicted in the primary sources and repeated by many modern historians. The Byzantine army was not destroyed, but Romanus’ capture, blinding and death precipitated a decade of Byzantine civil war where Seljuk emirs and troops played instrumental roles in raising new Byzantine emperors to the purple.
In the decade between the Byzantine loss at Manzikert in 1071 and the accession of Alexios I Komnenos in 1081, Byzantium’s strategic position was severely degraded on all frontiers and much of Anatolia was lost to the Seljuk Turks. However, the strategic situation in Asia Minor was far from static. Beginning with Alexios, Byzantine armies retook important regions of the peninsula and Catholic crusader successes in the Levant changed the balance of power, albeit temporarily, between Islam and Christendom in this region. These modest successes so long after Manzikert reduce, but do not eliminate, the strategic importance of this battle in history.
Manzikert was an influential engagement, one referred to again and again by Byzantine historians as ‘that dreadful day.’ A large Byzantine expeditionary force was defeated and perhaps just as importantly, the emperor of the Eastern Romans, ruler of the most powerful Christian civilization over the last five hundred years, was captured by a Muslim prince. The psychological importance of this event to the Islamic world is difficult to overestimate. Romanus’ campaign in 1071 also changed the trajectory of Islamic history.
Alp Arslan’s long-awaited campaign against the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt was first detoured to intercept the Byzantine army at Manzikert, and then derailed when the sultan was killed by a treacherous emir in his eastern provinces a year later. Romanus’ loss at Manzikert should be seen more as a political disaster than a military defeat, one that weakened Byzantium’s standing among its political and military rivals and invited challenges to Byzantine power on the edges of empire and opened central and eastern Anatolia up for a permanent Seljuk invasion and conquest in the decade ahead. In this light, the debacle at Manzikert can be seen as a symbol of Byzantine decline, even if many of the military elements attributed to the battle by sources medieval and modern did not take place.
This book endeavours to reinforce the importance of the battle of Manzikert in the history of Byzantium by echoing the findings of historians who see the engagement as a political failure and significant, but not devastating, military defeat. The battle is presented as the climax of the study, a study that begins by tracing the wars of Justinian in the sixth century and ends with a discussion of the reign of Alexios I until the origins of the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century.
Chapters one and three concentrate on the development of Byzantine warfare, while chapters two and four focus on the rise and triumph of Islam and its military institutions. Important battles illustrating Byzantine and Islamic warfare are highlighted throughout the text, as this book is designed to serve as a broad military history of the conflict between Byzantium and Islam in regions where these two civilizations were in contact.
Other periods of history and theatres of operations are given attention to illustrate the martial capabilities of the Eastern Roman Empire from its territorial height under Justinian, who died in 565, just five years before Muhammad was born, and Islam from its rise under the Muslim Prophet in the early seventh century through the Rashidun, Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates until the rise of the Seljuk sultanates.
Justinian’s wars are explored in some detail to give the reader an understanding of Byzantine military organization at a time of transition between Roman antiquity and the medieval world, while also introducing the reader to the Sassanian Persians, who figured prominently in the emperor’s Eastern campaigns and who, along with the Byzantines, were primary adversaries later in Islam’s expansion into Mesopotamia and Persia in the seventh century.
Moreover, Sassanian heavy cavalry would be emulated by the Byzantines, producing the famous kataphraktoi and klibanophoroi that dominated Byzantine battlefields for hundreds of years and who were present at the Greek defeat at Manzikert. Byzantine warfare during political and military crises and _ territorial contraction (the seventh to ninth centuries) and recovery in the tenth and early eleventh centuries is also discussed. The reigns of Alp Arslan and Romanus IV Diogenes are given special emphasis in chapter five, as is the campaign of 1071 leading to the battle of Manzikert, and the battle itself.
A variety of medieval sources are used to reconstruct the battle of Manzikert, the most of important of which is the account by the Greek chronicler Michael Attaleiates. Attaleiates was present at the battle, and his position as an advisor to Romanus gave him access and invaluable insight into the reconstruction of the battle. Attaleiates’ views are present in the writings of contemporaries or near contemporaries of the event like John Skylitzes and John Zonaras.
The account of Nikephoros Bryennios, who was the grandson and namesake of a Byzantine general present at Manzikert, is also used, but this history is not as detailed as Attaleiates’ account. When useful, Syrian and Armenian sources are used, but often these sources were written with a strong religious providential viewpoint by historians like Aristakes of Lastiverd and Matthew of Edessa writing for a Christian audience. This author read many of the excellent translations of twelfth Muslim sources reconstructing Manzikert, but found little new information to add to the detailed Christian accounts of the strategy and tactics used in the battle."
However, Muslim sources are used to reconstruct earlier campaigns during the rise of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and in the conflict between Islam and Persia and Islam and Christian Europe surveyed in this book.
A Note on Transliterations
Because of the scope and nature of this military history, numerous languages are transliterated into English. For Greek words, The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (1991) provides the guide for most technical terms and titles, although the macrons on Greek long vowels have been omitted. Some well-known Latinized Greeks words have been retained (Constantine and Constantinople), as have Latin names where appropriate, especially when dealing with the reign of Justinian, a time of transition when Latin was still in use in the empire.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (2009) is used for Muslim, Sassanian Persian, and Turkish terms. Again, accents have been removed from these transliterated words. However, this is an imperfect solution to the challenges of writing about the military histories of so many connecting civilizations throughout Eurasia over a six hundred-year time span, and any confusion created by inconsistencies is regretted by the author of this work.
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