ACCORDING TO HENRY of Livonia, the preparations for the Danish attack on Lyndanise had begun in the summer of 1218 when King Valdemar II summoned all important men of his realm for a meeting in Schleswig. Among the participants were fifteen bishops, three dukes, and three counts, together with an unsaid number of abbots and other worthy people. The alleged primary reason for the summoning of all these important individuals was the king's wish to have his eldest son and heir, Prince Valdemar, crowned in the cathedral church of Schleswig. The young prince had already been recognized as heir to the throne in 1215 and it was time to have him wear the crown like his father, thereby consolidating the order of succession. In this way, King Valdemar II followed in the footsteps of his father, King Valdemar I who was the first king of Denmark to have his son, the future King Knud VI, crowned as co-regent in 1170, while at the same having his father Knud Lavard enshrined fol-lowing his recognition as a saint the previous year by the pope. Now King Valdemar II followed in his father's footsteps and had his own oldest son crowned as his co regent. The cathedral church of Schleswig must have seemed the ideal place for this important dynastic event for several reasons. It was the main town of the duchy of Southern Jylland and also conveniently located with regards to King Valdemar's involvement in the (imperial) politics of northern Germany and his many military campaigns there.

Among the high number of bishops mentioned in the sources was also probably Bishop Albert of Riga. Henry of Livonia mentions that the German bishop went to see King Valdemar, accompanied by a former German knight, Bernhard of Lippe (ca. 1140–1224), who had become abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Mount St. Nicholas (Daugavgrīva/Dünamünde) not far from Riga. Later that same year Bernhard became bishop of Semgallia and was thus closely tied to the politics of the Livonian Church. Henry also mentions that “the bishop of Estonia” (episcopus…Estiensis) accompanied Bishop Albert to this meeting in Schleswig. It cannot have been anyone else but Bishop Theodoric who would eventually follow King Valdemar on the expedition to Estonia the following year.

EIGHT MEDIEVAL EMBROIDERIES in gold and silk were rediscovered in Belgium in 1867, attached to a composite textile known as the casula of Saints Harlindis and Relindis (Fig. 4.1). Animals appear on four of them: two strips of arcades and two of roundels.

They are now in the treasury of the church of St. Catherine in Maaseik, having been transferred there in 1571 from a religious house at Aldeneik, founded in the early eighth century for two sisters, Harlindis and Relindis. At the time of its establishment it was within Carolingian Francia, a region which in the later ninth century became part of the county of Flanders. The area is now in the Belgian province of Limburg.

Local tradition, going back at least to the Vita Sanctarum Harlindis et Relindis (composed 855–881), attributed the embroideries to the founding saints. However, in 1951 Marguerite Calberg recognized them as later than the founding of Aldeneik, suggesting, on stylistic grounds, that they were English work, dating to ca. 850. A detailed study in the 1980s by Mildred Budny and Dominic Tweddle endorsed the Englishness of the embroideries, while slightly adjusting their dating. Certainly later than the sister saints, they are probably late eighth- or early ninth-century, and perhaps arrived on the Continent as gifts to missionaries from Anglo-Saxon England. They might originally have been intended as ornaments of an altar cloth or cloths, or (my own suggestion) as apparels of ecclesiastical vestments. They may have been taken direct to Aldeneik, or transferred there when the cult of the founding saints and prestige of the establishment were increasing. It had been made a royal abbey by 870.

Early in their existence, the embroideries were additionally ornamented with pearls on the arches and roundels. These were removed at some point between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, leaving some linen attachment thread, still visible in several places. None of the surviving zoomorphic embroideries is a complete piece. They have been cut down and re-used, probably on more than one occasion. Much of their gold thread has been deliberately removed or lost. As they were arranged on the composite casula on which they were rediscovered, their design was carelessly ignored or unrecognized: the arcades were both oriented the same way, the roundel strips in opposite directions.

THE MILITARY CONQUEST of both Livonia and Estonia was, by all accounts, an extremely brutal affair, characterized by a high level of violence. We have already touched upon the practices of raiding and plundering enemy lands, taking as much booty as possible while enslaving the local people. This type of warfare was carried out both by land and by sea enabling attacks deep into enemy territory and involving pretty much everybody in the region. Largescale campaigns were fought with little regard to enemy lives or properties. Often, men of fighting age were seemingly killed right away, according to contemporary sources like Henry of Livonia, whereas women and children were taken captive to be sold as slaves at one of the local slave markets or shipped off to foreign lands never to see their ancestral homes again. Even fellow Christians ran the risk of becoming entrapped during these wars, especially if the enemy belonged to a dif-ferent denomination as we have already seen with the German-Rus’ relations between whom there were very little reverence or respect.

Neither the German nor the Danish crusaders brought warfare to a region other-wise untouched by this favoured pastime of mankind—far from it. Various forms of con-tinual warfare with raids and larger military expeditions into enemy territory seem to have been the norm for generations among the Baltic people, predating the arrival of the Western crusaders and their novel ideas of holy wars and crusades. As such, martial cultures were strong among most of the local people. For their part, Western crusaders would have been unable to subjugate these vast territories had it not been for the direct and active support of the locals who, for one reason or the other, chose to side with the powerful newcomers in their continuous struggle against age-old local enemies, and, thereby, gain military advantage. Like in so many other crusading theatres along the fringes of Christendom, it was, by no means, the crusaders who introduced the art of war among the local people. Rather, the crusaders became (new) players in already existing power struggles and age-old feuds.

FOLLOWING THE BATTLE of Lyndanise, the Danish crusaders celebrated their victory by praising God, thanking him for this Christian triumph over the pagans. Thereafter, the Danes could devote themselves to the task of Christianizing the whole region. It was time to initiate, in earnest, the important work of converting and bap-tizing the locals even if it required many more embittered fights in the years to come. Consequently, the Danish stronghold on Toompea Hill became of paramount importance for the continued work in Estonia. The wooden structures of the hastily constructed ini-tial fortress were replaced over time with stone buildings and walls, making the castle stronger. It was only when the Sword Brethren conquered the castle for a period, nearly ten years later, that its first rebuild was completed.

While the Danes worked on their castles and sent out missionaries, they also contin-ued to fight the locals. Quite clearly, the people of the northernmost provinces of Estonia had no intention of submitting freely to the power of the Danes, and also, at the same time, had to defend themselves against the repeated German attacks from the south. As such, the outcome of the Battle of Lyndanise was not definitive in breaking the Esto-nian's ability to fight back. Nor do the actual losses seem to have been as high or as catastrophic as suggested by Henry of Livonia. Similarly, the losses or the near-defeat suffered by the Danish crusaders did not make King Valdemar abandon his enterprise in Estonia. Neither did it take the king long to decide that the castle—even in its unfinished condition—was strong enough to act as the central power base of the Danish presence in northern Estonia and the seat of a royal-appointed bailiff. When King Valdemar left Estonia—he seems to have been back in Denmark no later than September 1219—, he left behind a garrison in the castle. We do not know anything about the actual size of this force. Apart from manning the castle, the main task must have been to protect the cler-ics who also stayed behind in Estonia, eager to commence with their missionary work. Following the death of Bishop Theoderich, the king's chaplain Wescelo was appointed the new bishop of the Estonians.

Diogenes's Campaigns of 1068 and 1069

Emperor Romanos's choice of Hierapolis and northern Syria as the main area of opera-tions for the 1068 campaigning season, rather than, for example, the northeastern (“anti Taurus”) region in Asia Minor, should be attributed to the military pressure brought upon the ducate of Antioch by the Seljuk raiding parties led by Afşin Bey, Sunduq al Turki, Ahmetşah, Türkman, Demleçoğlu Mehmet, Duduoğlu, Serhenkoğlu, and others. These particular groups, but especially the one led by Afşin, were launching increasingly destructive raids both in the frontier regions and in the interior of Asia Minor, as we saw in the previous chapter. Afşin's intention may well have been to disrupt the communica-tions between Edessa and Antioch, considering his victory over the doux of Edessa in 1066, and his wintering at the foot of the Black Mountains, only 90 kilometres north of Antioch, the following year.

Attaleiates makes a reference to Alp Arslan “detaching a fairly large contingent that he divided into two parts and encamped in upper Asia, placing the one more to the north and the other to the south,” which should be understood as the sultan's strategic response to the news of Diogenes's campaign preparations in the theme of Anatolikon, assigning large detachments in both the northern (Caucasus and Armenia), and the southern (Edessa and Syria) operational areas. A few lines later Attaleiates also notices that “the Persian army to the north…gave the impression that it was withdrawing before the emperor's advance,” hinting at the apparent departure of the main Seljuk army from the Caucasus region. Accordingly, we see Romanos's reaction in his advance southeast to the small theme of Lykandos, to the west of Melitene, instead of marching north to Sebasteia and Koloneia, evidently in preparation for an invasion of Syria.

The strategic and tactical inability of the cumbersome imperial forces to block or intercept the smaller and more mobile Turkish raiding parties became apparent when the emperor had to march back north to Sebasteia to deal with the aftermath of an “utterly unexpected” Turkish raid and pillage of Neokaisarea on the Lykos River, around 160 km to the northwest of Koloneia.

CRUSADING BECAME A reality in the Baltic in the context of the wide-scale and papal initiated preaching campaigns that followed in the wake of the fall of Edessa in 1144. But even before that point, some sources suggest that some of the earlier military campaigns in the region, in fact, may have been inspired by the wider crusading move-ment that had taken root in Europe shortly before 1100 and which eventually came to influence all societies within Western Christendom.1 The military conquest of Livonia and Estonia, therefore, needs to be viewed within the overall framework of holy war and crusading ideo logy, taking into account both the general papal crusading politics of the time and the specific papal involvement in the Baltic Sea region during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The particular aim of the preaching campaigns following the fall of Edessa was to recruit crusaders to what would become known as the Second Crusade (1145–1149); the goal being to reconquer what had been lost and to help the hard-pressed Chris-tians in the Holy Land.2 The loss of Edessa sent shockwaves throughout Europe and led directly to Pope Eugenius III (r. 1145–1153) promulgating the crusading bull Quan-tum praedecessores. The bull exhorted the princes of Christendom to take the cross and come to the aid of their fellow Christians in the Holy Land. Pope Eugenius was wholly dependent on the many preachers who travelled around on his behalf announcing what happened in Edessa, while exhorting their audiences to answer the pope's call to take the cross and go on crusade to the Holy Land.3 A papal legate also travelled to Denmark to persuade the Danes to take part in the planned crusade to reconquer the lost ter-ritories.

One of the most prominent of these crusade preachers was the Cistercian abbot Ber-nard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). Pope Eugenius had appointed him as his special envoy in recognition of his considerable oratorical skills. Bernard's work took him all round France, where he had great success preaching to the king of France and his leading bar-ons at Easter 1146.

THE EARLIEST RECORD of the miracles of St. Swithun, composed by the continental monk, Lantfred, provides a lengthy and stylistically baroque account of the many miracles of the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon bishop of Winchester. Lantfred wrote the Translatio et miracula S. Swithuni within just a few years of the translation of the saint's relics in 971 ce, though it seems likely that he did not himself witness the event The Latin work adopts the conventions of the translationes of previous saints which were clearly well-known to Lantfred, though his debt to these writings is by no means slavish. Though apparently not present for the translation itself, Lantfred likely was on hand in person for many of the miracles (or their aftermath) that he records, thus leading to the rich detail he provides of the persons involved and the contexts of many of the miracles. Ælfric's Old English translation, based upon Lantfred's Translatio et miracula and an Epitome of Lantfred's work (possibly extracted and written by Ælfric himself) provides another unique insight into the impact that a newly recognized saint could have upon the community in which the saint's cult was being established. Ælfric witnessed many of the recorded events himself, including the translation, and though Ælfric's record is sometimes at odds with Lantfred's accounts, it “leaves us much in the dark with regard to its author's innermost thoughts on the events recorded there,” as Mechthild Gretsch points out. Such hagiographical variety, written so closely to the events, pulses with the life and energy of eye-witness accounts from both inside and outside the monastery at Old Minster. Elaine Treharne observes that “A hagiographer could and did move between writing the lives of saints and writing the chronicle of his or her religious institution, arguably seeing little difference between the modes of composition.” Both Lantfred's and Ælfric's works demonstrate how inextricable hagiography and institutional chronicle could be. Ælfric's Old English translation of Lantfred's Latin translatio makes available to his tenth-century vernacular audience (and to Old English scholars today) not only the story of Swithun's discovery, but also unique details of how the afterlife of the new saint shaped and impinged upon the lives of the monks at the Old Minster in Winchester—at times to an uncomfortable degree.

HAVING A WIDE variety of primary sources at a historian's disposal can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how ready one is to peel away the multiple layers of “literary goals” and “‘political agendas” to reach “true history” (as opposed to Anthony Kaldellis's “unhistory”). A historian writing about the Battle of Manzikert, therefore, must tackle a dizzying array of sources not only from both the Chalcedonian and the non-Chalcedonian historiographic traditions but also from the medieval Arabic and Persian ones. Some of them were contemporaries to the events they describe, which means they had access to stories and evidence from the recent past, while others repeated well-established historical episodes for didactic and/or propagandistic purposes several centuries after the battle; some of them were (high-ranking) civil servants, while others were religious scholars and famous preachers.

To answer the question of how we are to write the history of the Battle of Manzikert in light of what we know about our sources, we should appreciate their accounts not as collections of “facts” that can be understood as being either true or false, but rather as “literary artefacts” with their own aims, skills and aesthetic.” Or, as Stamatina McGrath aptly put it, “the act of composing history should be understood as a deliberate, political act with the intention of influencing how the past would inform the present and future concerns of the authors, their patrons, and their worlds.” Therefore, to be able to read and better evaluate the battle-narrative of another author, we need to be able to understand the frame of reference with which the author constructed narratives. Accordingly, this chapter will refer to some basic points in our authors’ social and educational backgrounds, the date and place of the compilation of their works, their own sources and the way they collected their information. I will try to make sense of their biases and sympathies, and how far their “socio-political agendas” shaped accounts, paying particular attention to their treatment of the personalities and reigns of Emperor Romanos and his successors, Michael VII and Nikephoros III.

The Turkoman and Seljuk Incursions into Eastern Asia Minor, 1017–1067

The late 1030s witnessed a struggle for supremacy in Khorāsān between the Ghaznavids and the Seljuks who, by taking advantage of a growing Ghaznavid weakness that followed the death of Sultan Mahmud of Ghāzni (r. 998–1030), gradually seized territories formerly administered by the Ghaznavids. Merv went over to the Seljuks in 1037, followed by the cities of Herāt and Nīshāpūr less than a year later. On 8 Ramażān 431/23 May 1040, outside Dandānqān near the city of Merv (in modern Turkmenistan), a force of some sixteen thousand Turkmen led by the Seljuk brothers Ṭuḡril Beg and Čaḡrī Beg, defeated a heavily armed Ghaznavid army under Sultan Masʿūd of Ghāzni (r. 1030–1041), whose combat effectiveness had been badly impaired by famine and drought conditions in the region. Not only did the victory abruptly end Ghaznavid dominion there, as Ṭuḡril was proclaimed emir of Khorāsān on the battlefield, but it also opened up Khorāsān to the Seljuks. Rayy and Hamadhan fell within the next three years, thus becoming strategic jumping-off points for further expansion westwards into Azerbaijan and Upper Mesopotamia.

Attacks in eastern Asia Minor by bands of the so-called ‘Iraqiya Turkmen began many years before the Battle of Dandānqān, with the Armenian sources dating them to either the year 465 ae (1016–1017 ad)2 or 467 ae (1018–1019 ad), about half a decade before Vaspourakan was officially surrendered to the Byzantine Empire by Senek’erim-Yovanēs. There is a consensus among historians that these were nothing more than raids conducted by unruly Turkmen to acquire pasturelands and loot, which were “side effects” of the Seljukid infiltration of Azerbaijan and Upper Mesopotamia. These ‘Iraqiya Turkmen were followers of one of Seljuk's sons, Isra’il/Arslan, who had been taken prisoner by the Ghaznavids and imprisoned in India in 1025, where he died (in 1032), after which his followers migrated to Persian Iraq and Azerbaijan, areas that would serve as an ideal location for their flocks. Ibn al-Athīr notes some two thousand Iraqiya migrated towards Mount Balkan (modern Uly Balkan) in the west of modern Turkmenistan, whilst those reported raiding in Rayy were five thousand strong.

THE OLD ENGLISH (OE) version of Alexander's Letter to Aristoteles (henceforth abbreviated as AlexArist) is a translation of the Latin Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem. When this was originally composed is difficult to tell. In any case, the Latin text and its OE rendering show an interest in Alexander the Great even in the early Middle Ages. AlexArist is largely fictitious; it narrates Alexander's exploits in India and introduces a wealth of strange creatures, many of which attack Alexander and his army.

The OE AlexArist is one of the prose texts preserved in the famous Beowulf manuscript, which was written around the year 1000; now it is manuscript London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv, where AlexArist occurs on fols. 107r–131v. As Kenneith Sisam has plausibly suggested, the Beowulf manuscript was probably assembled as a book of monsters, and AlexArist certainly fits into this category.

The OE AlexArist was edited three times in the twentieth century, namely by Rypins in 1924 for the Early English Text Society (Latin text and OE version), by Fulk in 2010, 34–83 (OE version and Modern English (ModE) translation), and by Orchard in 1995 (OE version with a ModE translation, and Latin text). Here I quote from the revised edition by Orchard because it is more recent than Rypins, and because it presents the Latin and the OE texts. I have expanded 7 to and; the paragraphs (§) refer to Orchard's edition. The translations offered here are often indebted to or dependent on Orchard's translations.

Like the other texts of the Beowulf manuscript, most notably Beowulf itself, AlexArist is probably a copy of a text that was composed (or rather translated) much earlier. It is often assumed that the original translation of AlexArist was in the Anglian (more specifically Mercian) dialect of OE (see also section on Dialect Vocabulary on pp. 111–12 below), and that the original translation was made in the second half of the ninth century, which would roughly coincide with the reign of King Alfred (king of Wessex 871– 899). Because there are no OE prose texts that can definitely be dated earlier than the reign of Alfred, the OE AlexArist may belong to the earliest layer of OE prose.

THE I PERIAL ARMY under Diogenes was based in Theodosiopolis probably until the high summer of 1071, before advancing into “unfriendly territory” and having to rely on their two-month supplies that the emperor had ordered his troops to carry for the forthcoming march to Lake Van. Yet, it would seem inconceivable that Romanos was unaware that Alp Arslan was assembling an army. As we saw in the previous chapter, we must assume that, in June or July, the Byzantine leader was receiving some very bad or even misleading intelligence reports that would have a disastrous effect on his strategic decisions for the following stage of the campaign.

Strategic Miscalculations

Sometime in late July or early August, Diogenes's overconfidence led him to make a critical strategic error. After leaving Theodosiopolis to march southeast to Manzikert via Xnis/Xinus (modern Hinis, Erzurum province), a distance of around 230 km, the emperor decided to divide his forces because, according to the sources, he was under the impression that the Turks and Daylami defenders of Manzikert would be easily over-come. Matthew of Edessa reports that Diogenes also ordered the dispatch of some ten or twelve thousand troops to the “Abkhazes,” which is a rather dubious report in my view, although we should not exclude the possibility of sending smaller detachments to Georgia to procure supplies. Other sources also account that the emperor dispatched separate detachments of troops to march to the strategic fortress-city of Khliat that con-trolled the western approaches to the region. These detachments comprised of “Uze mercenaries and the Franks under Rouselios…[sent] towards Khliat to forage for pro-visions,” and because the emperor “considered them [Turkish defenders] of no great importance since they were few in number, he detached another not insignificant por-tion of his army [to march to Khliat] and placed it under the command of the magistros Joseph Trachaneiotes.”

There are two crucial points we need to emphasize here: first, that the detachment under the magistros Trachaneiotes “consisted of select troops, difficult to withstand, taking the initiative in close combat and other types of battle and ready to face dan-ger, and far more numerous than the soldiers retained by the emperor.”

THE SUCCESSFUL SUBJUGATION of the Western Slavic people between the Elbe River and Eastern Pomerania in the later part of the twelfth century made the Danes turn their attention towards the troublesome (according to Saxo Grammaticus) people of Estonia. They had continually raided the easternmost provinces of Denmark, Skåne, and Blekinge in modern-day Sweden, while also attacking ships in open waters in their quest for booty and captives, says Saxo. A similar view is found in the chronicle of Henry of Livonia, who, at one point, indignantly records the consequences of these attacks where endless numbers of enslaved young Christian (Scandinavian) women were forced into marrying pagan men because of the slave-raiding marauders.1 As we have already seen, the Estonians were indeed frequently engaged in various forms of warfare and raiding activities as an integrated part of their societal structures.2 The islanders of Saaremaa were, in that respect, especially renowned for their superior naval power equalled only by the Danes. Quite often, the people from Saaremaa operated in close alliance with their Curonian cousins during such raids while, at the same time, eagerly protecting their own dominant position in the eastern parts of the Baltic Sea region. Consequently, they would do anything in their power to ward off the encroachment of any foreign people venturing too deep into their spheres of interest, like the Danes or the Germans for exmple, who looked more and more like a serious threat to the Estonians. The term “Curonians” actually seems to have been used as a generic term to simply refer to seaborne pirates, whether they were in fact from Curonia, from Saaremaa, from coastal Estonia, or from someplace else.

The relationship between the Danes and the people of Saaremaa and their Cou-ronian allies did have very long historical roots with intermingling periods of trading and raiding. As is already mentioned, Saxo suggested that sheer boredom enticed the Danes to attack Estonia when things became too quiet at home for them!Both par-ties—the Danes and the Estonians—possessed very powerful naval forces that were frequently brought into action during various military expeditions.