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the bizarre battle at Manzikert

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One of the problems is that there is no single authoritative source which can define what occured.

The difficulty is that the outcome had immense consequences. In that one day Byzantium lost Anatolia, their bread basket, recruiting ground and some sources say "the heart of the empire".

Given the consequences of the battle the Byzantine sources try to characterize the battle as an accident - not one that was lost from force of arms but rather a terrible mistake.

The Muslim sources have a rather different view characterizing the battle as a brilliant military victory. As always the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

I have found one good summary on the web.

http://www.dicksonc.act.edu.au/Showcase/ClioContents/Clio2/manzikert.html

I also suggest you read some of the books on the subject. It was truly a terrble day for the Empire.
 
You can't help but feel for Romanus, he just had everything working against him. It's interesting that the Norman cavalry refused to fight, I never heard that part before. Perhaps they had a prophetic vision of the resulting Crusades their descendants would fight if the Empire lost :D
 
I have heard the Muslims weren't looking for a major fight though I'll have to look it up when I get home (postin at work) . I heard they kinda stumbled into the Roman Army. Romanus screwed over his Armenian allies as well if I remember correctly Which resulted in a major loss of manpower from a traditional ally in the region.
 
Originally, the Turkish forces (or were they turcoman?) didn't want to fight Romanus. They were busy trying to depose the heretical caliphate of Egypt. The turkish leader whose name momentarily escapes me...Actually offered to give up huge tracts of land in Anatolia and Armenia in order for a truce. Romanus would have nothing of it, and there was a battle, in which the Turks barely got there in time for. Due to treachery, the Byzantines lost very badly.
 
Contact began, predictably enough, with trickery. When a party of Turkish scouts was seen reconnoitering the Byzantines, Basilakes, commander of the Theodosipolitan theme, or military commandery, charged and hotly pursued the handful of Turks until his troop was ambushed, then killed or taken prisoner. Romanus sent a column in support, but they only found corpses. He prepared for a battle.

Romanus drew up his army in two lines. The front was of cavalry from the various themes. He himself rode in the middle with his guards and metropolitan provincial troops. The second line consisted of foreign mercenary cavalry such as Germans, Normans from Italy and troops from the eastern borders belonging to the marcher lords whose territories lay along the frontier. The horsemen were probably largely armored as the Byzantine cavalry had been from the fifth century onward, and they were equipped with lances and broadswords. It seems, however, that fewer of them carried bows or fought as mounted archers than had been previously the case; because of internal political wrangling at Constantinople the army had declined in quality and the bow appears to have fallen out of favor as a horseman's weapon.

The mercenary horsemen fought, of course, as conventional Western armored knights. This second line, meant to function as a reserve, was under the command of Andronicus Ducas, a relation of Romanus's predecessor, Constantine Xl. Unknown to the new emperor, Ducas was his enemy.

Alp Arslan offered to withdraw instead of fight, but the emperor refused the offer, which he probably did not regard as legitimate; and he may have been right to doubt the offer. Negotiations for the purpose of delay or confusion were a common steppe device: the Magyars had gulled the Italians two hundred years before with such offers, only to attack them when they were unprepared.

The Battle of Manzikert began as numbers of Turks rode about the Byzantine line shooting arrows but never closing. After some time Romanus ordered an advance along the line with the reserves in the second line following. The Turks fell back before the advance and declined to come to grips with the Byzantines, so that the advance went on for several hours without much harm to the Turks. As the evening came on, Romanus commanded his tired army to turn about and return to camp. The army's center obeyed, but the wings did not receive the order timely and, when they did, failed to keep formation. Breaks appeared in the line. The Turks closed back in and began to harass the retreating Byzantines, so much so that Romanus ordered the line to turn about, threaten the Turks and drive them away. Andronicus Ducas, in charge of the second line, now saw his chance at betrayal. Instead of stopping and facing the enemy as ordered, he led the second line back to the camp, abandoning the emperor and half of the army to its fate.

The Turks took full advantage of the reserve's disappearance to surround those who remained. Enveloped by the SeIjuk horse archers, the emperor's right wing tried to face both ways, fell apartand then ran. The Turks then concentrated on the center, where the emperor fought hard but was finally captured. The left wing was chased off the battlefield.

With this one battle a great army was destroyed and all of Anatolia lost forever. Byzantium was weakened, and, while it would last another four centuries, it would never recover its earlier strength.
Click to expand...
 
Originally posted by Jens Z
Never forget to quote the source of such information like above :)
Click to expand...

I forget ;)

I fetched it from an older post in this forum, it's from a book about horse nomads through the ages, but it is a nice description anyway.

edit: five minutes of hunting allowed me to know 'Warriors of the Steppe' by Erik Hildinger.
 
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