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.

IT HAS BEEN described as a dreadful day, a most shattering and shameful defeat, a debacle, an unmitigated catastrophe, the breaking of Byzantium, the beginning of the end of medieval Hellenism, and the day that opened the gates of Anatolia to the Turks, while being pondered over whether or not it was “un désastre militaire” for the Byzantine army of the late 1060s. Whatever the case, the battle that was fought on August 26, 1071, between the forces of the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes and the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan is—rightly so—regarded as one of the most significant turning points in medieval history. In recent years, an increasing number of scholars specializing in the period have lent their voices in support of the view that the Battle of Manzikert was not the real military disaster as it was once portrayed, framing the upcoming collapse of the Byzantine rule in Anatolia that followed as the direct outcome of two factors: Byzantine aristocratic infighting and civil war, and the increased involvement of the Seljuks in these civil wars that “eased” their penetration into Anatolia.

Indeed, it is also my firm conviction that Romanos Diogenes's “Manzikert campaign” of 1071 may have been a strategic failure for the emperor, but it was not a tactical disaster. It should have only confirmed Turkish domination of the Armenian highlands in eastern Asia Minor, rather than almost all of Anatolia, which itself was overrun by the Turks within eight years. Therefore, even though no great military figure is said to have died in the battle, and it seems clear that the actual losses incurred were limited to the emperor's immediate retinue, the decisive outcome of the Battle of Manzikert ushered in an element of chaos in the geopolitical history of the Byzantine Empire in the 1070s: the civil wars of the early 1070s that followed the battle marked the political and military collapse of the empire in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Italy as well as central and eastern Asia Minor.

In the introductory part of this book found in the first three chapters, I examine the Christian and Muslim narrative sources for the battle strictly from a military perspective, and I reach several conclusions regarding the value of these sources for the his-tory of warfare in Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean in the eleventh century.

WHEN NEW WAVES of Western merchants and missionaries and eventually cru-saders came to the Baltic lands in the later part of the twelfth and early part of the thirteenth centuries they did not come to a region devoid of people—on the contrary. Already during the early medieval period Scandinavians in particular had visited these lands regularly on their way to the prosperous markets of Kyivan Rus’ and the even more prosperous markets of far-away Constantinople and Baghdad. These adventures brought great wealth to the Scandinavian lands and also played a significant role in the founding of several princedoms along the major riverways in modern-day Ukraine and Russia. While some of the Scandinavian merchants and warriors would settle down permanently in these foreign lands, many more simply visited, journeying to and from the local markets and trading posts on an annual basis. On these journeys, travellers also visited the coastal regions of Estonia, Livonia, and Curonia (Latvian: Kurzeme), each having their own important markets and trading hubs as contact points between the East and the West. Such local places also became convenient over winter when travelling became too difficult or outright impossible due to the harsh weather in the eastern parts of the Baltic Sea region. In this way, important bonds were forged between the visitors and the locals.

In the later part of the twelfth century, the local Baltic markets were still important steppingstones in a regional commercial network tying the West to the East and vice versa. Western merchants would do business with Estonians, Livonians, Letgallians, Semgallians, Curonians, Lithuanians, and of course, with people from the Rus’ princi-palities of Novgorod, Pskov, Jersika, and Polotsk bordering the Baltic lands. They met on an annual basis, each having their own cultural and religious traditions through which they turned the entire region into a sort of “middle ground” between an Orthodox East, a Catholic West, and a conglomerate of (mostly still) pagan people in the middle. Through-out the centuries, strong local and regional powers each sought to expand their domi-nance into this important region.

ABRAHAM WHEELOCK (1593–1653) was the first individual to hold a university appointment dedicated to research on the earliest phase of English history and the study of texts written in the Old English language. In the late 1630s, the noted antiquary Sir Henry Spelman (ca. 1562–1641) provided the funding for Wheelock to take up a lectureship in “British and Saxon Antiquities” at the University of Cambridge. Spelman's primary goal in creating the lectureship was to enable Wheelock to conduct research on the rich array of manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon period available in Cambridge. Having been the university's librarian since 1629, Wheelock enjoyed privileged access to the university library's own collection; he also closely studied manuscripts in several of the university's constituent colleges, in particular, Corpus Christi College and Trinity College. The major product of Wheelock's tenure of the lectureship was a magnificent edition of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People that issued from the university's presses in 1643 and that displayed Bede's eighth-century Latin text in parallel columns with the Old English translation of the Ecclesiastical History made in the late ninth or early tenth century. Wheelock supplemented his edition with extensive notes that he appended to many of the individual chapters of Bede's work. These notes incorporate numerous quotations from a broad array of the Old English texts that Wheelock encountered in the manuscripts he studied.

As he emphasizes in the book's prefatory materials (comprising two epistles dedicatory and a preface to the reader), the major goal of Wheelock's publication was to present evidence that, in his view, demonstrated the historical basis of the doctrines and practices of the Anglican church against its Roman Catholic counterpart. This was an enterprise in which Wheelock had a personal and professional stake: he had been ordained as an Anglican priest in 1622 and was the vicar of Cambridge's church of the Holy Sepulchre, the twelfth-century round church located near the intersection of Bridge Street and St. John's Street.

Until the tragic events of 4 June 1989 in Beijing, the 1980s saw a substantial broadening and strengthening of Sino–Australian relations, building on the foundations that had been laid in the previous decade and responding to the economic changes taking place in both countries. It was a good working relationship which enjoyed bipartisan support in Australia. While its emphasis was on commercial and economic interests, it was diverse, multifaceted and broadly-based within a cooperative framework, the result of sustained efforts and single-mindedness on the part of successive Australian governments. These efforts, begun by the Whitlam administration in the 1970s, were made on the ground that building productive links with a developing socialist country like China required official initiatives, professionalism and a whole range of skills. Traditionally Australia relied on largely non-official entities to establish and foster its external relations in the economic, commercial and cultural spheres. In the case of China, it was considered necessary to engage Beijing at the official level and to develop strategies with the expectation that this would facilitate non-official contacts.