Battle of Manzikert

In the 1060s Turkish raids reached deep into Byzantine Anatolia, and in 1064 Alp Arslan took Ani. Romanos IV, a general crowned in 1068 after marrying the widowed empress, campaigned against them, and in the spring of 1071 he led a large army — by modern estimates 40,000 to 70,000 men (Muslim chroniclers give fantastic figures of 300,000–700,000), including Frankish and Norman, Pecheneg and Oghuz mercenaries — into Armenia to retake Manzikert and Khliat, believing the sultan to be far away in Syria. In fact Alp Arslan was approaching with his cavalry. Romanos divided his forces, sending perhaps half of them under Joseph Tarchaneiotes towards Khliat; that contingent never rejoined him. He recaptured Manzikert on 23 August, rejected a Seljuk offer of peace and on 26 August advanced against the sultan's crescent-shaped line, whose horse archers fell back before him and shot at his flanks. When at nightfall he ordered a withdrawal, the reserve under Andronikos Doukas, the son of his rival John Doukas, marched back to camp instead of covering the retreat; in the confusion the Turks attacked, the wings broke, and the wounded emperor was captured.

Alp Arslan, after a ritual gesture of humiliation, treated his captive courteously and released him a week later in return for a ransom and tribute, the surrender of Manzikert, Edessa, Hierapolis and Antioch and a marriage alliance. But in Constantinople the Doukas family had already proclaimed Michael VII emperor; Romanos was defeated, blinded and died in 1072. Modern historians stress that the losses at Manzikert itself were moderate — all the commanders and many units survived — and that the disaster lay in the decade of civil wars that followed, when rival claimants hired Turkish bands and the frontier defences collapsed. By 1081 Turkish chieftains held most of Asia Minor; Byzantine historians, as Steven Runciman put it, referred again and again to "that dreadful day".