Battle of Manzikert

The Battle of Manzikert was fought on 26 August 1071 near the fortress of Manzikert, today's Malazgirt in eastern Turkey, between the Byzantine Empire and the Seljuk Empire. The Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan defeated and captured the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes. The defeat itself was not overwhelming, but the civil wars that followed left Anatolia open to Turkish settlement and set in motion the long process that turned it into a Turkish land.

Under Basil II, who died in 1025, Byzantium had been the strongest state in the eastern Mediterranean, and it had recently annexed most of Armenia. In the following decades the empire was ruled by a series of short-lived emperors, the army was neglected and the eastern frontier increasingly relied on mercenaries. Meanwhile the Seljuk Turks, who had taken Baghdad in 1055, expanded westward. Turkish raiders struck deep into Byzantine Anatolia, and in 1064 Alp Arslan captured Ani, the old Armenian capital.

Romanos IV Diogenes, a soldier, became emperor in 1068 by marrying the widowed empress, and he set out to restore the eastern defences. In spring 1071 he led a large army east, perhaps around 40,000 men according to modern estimates, though figures vary. It included Byzantine regulars, Armenian and Anatolian levies and foreign mercenaries such as Normans, Franks, Pechenegs and Oghuz Turks. Alp Arslan, who had been campaigning against the Fatimids in Syria, hurried north to meet him. Romanos divided his forces, sending a large detachment under Joseph Tarchaneiotes towards the fortress of Khliat; its fate is unclear, but it took no part in the battle. Romanos retook Manzikert on 23 August.

On 26 August Romanos advanced against the Seljuk army, which relied on mounted archers and avoided close combat, withdrawing before the Byzantine line while harassing its flanks. Towards evening Romanos ordered a return to camp. The rearguard was commanded by Andronikos Doukas, a member of a family hostile to the emperor, who instead of covering the withdrawal led his troops away, reportedly spreading word that the emperor had fallen. The Turks attacked the disordered army, and the centre around Romanos was surrounded. The emperor was wounded and taken prisoner. Many of the mercenaries and levies had already fled, so the heaviest losses fell on the professional regiments.

Alp Arslan, according to the chronicles, first humiliated the captured emperor and then treated him with courtesy. After about a week he released him under a treaty that included a ransom, an annual tribute, the surrender of several frontier towns and a marriage alliance. The sultan's chief concern remained Syria and Egypt rather than the conquest of Anatolia.

In Constantinople the Doukas family had already declared Michael VII Doukas emperor. Romanos was defeated, deposed and blinded in 1072, and died soon after of his wounds. The treaty was no longer honoured, and Byzantium descended into a decade of revolts and civil wars in which rival claimants hired Turkish troops. Turkish groups spread across central Anatolia almost unopposed, and by the early 1080s a Seljuk prince ruled from Nicaea, close to the capital, in what became the Sultanate of Rum.

The emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who seized power in 1081, gradually stabilised the empire and appealed to the West for help, an appeal that led to the First Crusade. In modern Turkey, Manzikert is celebrated as the opening of Anatolia to the Turks, and its anniversary is marked each year at Malazgirt.

Our 1000 map shows the Byzantine Empire still holding Anatolia, and the 1100 map shows much of the interior in Turkish hands after the battle.