A Military Disaster?

In a ground-breaking article published in 1980, Cheynet pondered whether Manzikert was “un désastre militaire.” Since then, the consensus among historians of the period has been that Manzikert was not a military disaster and that the imperial army seems to have escaped relatively unscathed from the day's fighting on August 26, 1071, with the political and socio-economic consequences of the defeat far outweighing the losses the empire sustained on the battlefield. The rearguard and reserve units of “the tagma of the Hetairiae and that of the nobles” under Andronikos Doukas certainly escaped back to the capital without suffering any casualties, whilst Bryennius's left wing, which included the five western tagmata also escaped with relatively few losses; these units are reported defending the Balkans against the Patzinaks in the following years. Concerning the units of the right wing under Alyates, and especially the Armenian and Kappadokian forces, the sources tell us that a significant number of them managed to make an orderly escape to Trapezounta, Theodosiopolis, and Dokeia. According to Attaleiates, the units under Alyates reportedly pledged their allegiance to the emperor after his release from Turkish captivity.

Furthermore, what is notable is that the prominent men who were reported to have died in the battle were few and relatively unknown figures (Leon, who was epi ton deeseon and the magistros and protoasecretis Eustratios Choirosphaktes), while even fewer were captured alive (the protovestes Basileios Maleses and Nikephoros Basilakes, the latter having been taken prisoner the day before the main battle).5 If we add the elite units of Trachaneiotes and Roussel, which retreated to Melitene before the battle, a significant number of perhaps even twenty thousand men, it seems clear that the actual losses incurred during the battle were limited to the Diogenes's immediate retinue, the Armenian infantry, and the palatine and other elite units close to him, around five to ten percent of the campaigning army.

WHILE FOR SOME time the papacy had tried re-establish stronger bonds— perhaps even a renewed union—between the Western and Eastern churches, attempts had not been crowned with any significant success during the thirteenth century. Henry of Livonia bears great witness to the rising conflicts between the Catholic Westerners and the Orthodox Easterners during the conquest of both Livonia and Estonia. Mutual tolerance was replaced by hostility and outright war between the various Rus’ princes and the Germans and Danes in Livonia and Estonia; famous is the battle on Lake Peipus in 1242 with Prince Aleksandr Nevskij (1221–1263) defeating the knightly brethren of the Teutonic Order and their vas-sals. This was only one of many encounters throughout the hundred-year period up to 1346, when the Danish kings finally withdrew from Estonia, a region continually marked by unrest and wars.

The death of King Valdemar II in 1241 meant that the Danish involvement in Esto-nia became somewhat weakened in the years to come. Internal conflicts concerning the succession of the dead king's sons and the various branches of the family made it difficult to pursue a consistent foreign policy in an extremely unruly region that saw the Teutonic Order strive for more power and land. Also decisive were the internal and repeated disputes between archbishops and kings in Denmark, which gained momen-tum under Archbishop Jakob Erlandsen (1254–1274) and reached a critical peak under Archbishop Jens Grand (1289–1302), absorbing (more or less) the full attention of the Danish rulers.

Formally, of course, the Danish kings were present in Estonia even during these critical and turbulent years. There were two important Danish officials in Estonia: a bishop (in contemporary sources referred to as “the bishop of Reval,” Episcopatus Revaliensis) and the king's bailiff. The bishopric formally belonged to the archbish-opric of Lund, but ever since 1219 it had been the Danish kings who appointed the bishops of Reval/Tallinn. In addition, there was the aforementioned bailiff, who was the king's formal deputy, having his seat in the castle on Toompea Hill. Around 1282, a council was set up consisting of twelve of the king's most important vassals in the region.