August 26 - Battle of Manzikert

The last catastrophe to befall the Byzantine Empire only seems to have happened yesterday, in fact it was on August 20, and behold, the next one comes along.

On August 26,1071, a Byzantine army commanded by the Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes, was defeated by a Seljuk force, led by the Sultan Alp Arslan, near the Armenian fortress of Manzikert.

Manzikert tends to be regarded in historiography as the single most important event in deciding the further fate of the late Byzantine Empire.
Much has been written and discussed about the prehistory of the battle, its actual course, its immediate aftermath and its historical significance, last but not least here in AE and so I can spare you here most of the details.( You can change the outcome of the battle, if you wish so, in one of the campaigns in Ages of Empires II.)

In short, a huge Byzantine army, the usual mixture of native Byzantine troops and mercenaries of all nations, was led by their Emperor to the East in the erroneous belief that he could stamp out the Seljuks Turks who for a few years now had been pestering the Eastern borders of the Empire. Rather unnecessarily they provoked the Seljuk Sultan who was far more concerned with Egypt and half way down the road to the Nile already when the Byzantines arrived in Armenia. The Sultan turned round, rushed to Manzikert, met the Emperors troops outside the ancient fort and to everyone�s great surprise the numerically superior Byzantine army was soundly beaten, due to some downright betrayal amongst their higher ranks, the usual switching sides of some mercenaries and the even more usual ineptitude of some Byzantine generals. The Emperor was captured, ritually humiliated but treated rather gentlemanly, and sent back to Constantinople after the customary ransom was paid and the usual promises of eternal peace and annual tributes were made.



Alp Arslan, with no guarantee of authenticity

On the whole, and in view of similar disasters, not an earth-shattering event, especially as the Byzantine losses were actually not that terrible, or the immediate consequences not that dramatic, but nevertheless the event went down in history books as a seminal occasion.
Manzikert is not significant due to its direct military or territorial consequences, but because of its symbolic character. It was the first instance that the same people, who ultimately destroyed the Empire, made an intrusive appearance in Byzantine history. In Manzikert, the Turks emerged on the Byzantine horizon, and for the next four centuries Byzantine history was concerned with the desperate, and ultimately futile, defense against the slowly but steadily advancing Turkish nations. And more, Manzikert send out alarm signals beyond the Empires borders, and the European West, that for centuries had enjoyed safety behind the Byzantine barriers that had held out against the Arabs, at last saw enough reason to intervene itself in the East, and went out on the Crusades, although the initial call to assist the Byzantines was quickly forgotten amongst the riches that the East offered to the land-grabbing European aristocracy.
To the Turks, who until then had been content with ruling their Muslim brethren in the Middle East, Manzikert suddenly opened up the prospect of equally rich pickings in the West, and having realized how morose and tired the Byzantine Empire was, they made full use of it.
There have surely been many beginnings of the end of the Byzantine Empire, but Manzikert was in many aspects the most conspicuous.



Seljuk Empires in the late 11th century

The story of the battle of Manzikert has many of the elements of the story of the Byzantine Empire itself, it has the decent and capable Emperor who in vain tried to rectify the terrible mistakes of his inept predecessors, but at the same time was unable to face the realities of a changing age and made mistakes of his own; it�s full of intrigues and betrayals amongst the closely related Byzantine elite; it featured many of the nations that were enemies and allies of the Empires alike, depending on changing circumstances; it has an entertaining mix of courageous and incredibly stupid acts; and at the end there is the melancholic moment of Romanus� ultimate humiliation, who being captured, was thrown before the Sultan Alp Arslan who placed a foot on the Byzantine Emperor's neck, a symbolic act whose significance couldn't escape the rest of the world.

Even if this story is nothing more than a legend, it illustrates the fall from grace that would strike the Byzantine Empire after Manzikert.



What else happened on this day?

55 BC Roman forces under Julius Caesar land in Britain in the largest naval invasion in history until D-Day 1944, nearly 2,000 years later.

1346 At the Battle of Crecy in Normandy, King Edward III's 9.000-man English army annihilated a French force of 27.000 under King Philip VI. The battle, which saw an early use of the deadly longbow by the English, marked the decline of the mounted knight in European warfare, and the rise of England as a major European power.

1789 The Constituent Assembly of revolutionary France approved the final version of the Declaration of Human Rights.


Full list:

Wikipedia

Edited by Komnenos

1278: in a battle called D�rnkrut (in Hungarian Morvamez�) Rudolph Habsburg and Ladislaus IV. Hungarian king destroyed forces of Ottokar II. Chec king.

Raider:

About Morvamez�: it sounds very comic, but our ancestors helped the Habsburgs to built their empire and many years later they bacame strongor than us.

Caesar had two invasions against Britain, didn't he?

Yup, he liked Britain so much, he came again next year for his holiday, in 54BC.
The invasion of Claudius in 43AD, however was more important in establishing Roman rule in Britain.


Sorry, Nagyfejedelem, something went seriously wrong here. I tried to quote you, but somehow I edited yor post.

Edited by Komnenos

Raider:

I agree with you, Bohemia was a very hard enemy in this time. But the consequence of the battle was a borning of a new empire.