Byzantine-Seljuk Wars

At issue: Control of the Byzantine Empire

Date: 1048–1243

Location: Armenia and Turkey

Combatants: Byzantines vs. Seljuks

Principal commanders:Byzantine, Basil II (957/958-1025), Romanus IV Diogenes (d. 1071), Alexius I Comnenus (c. 1048–1118), Manuel I Comnenus (c. 1120–1180); Seljuk, Toghrïl Beg (c. 990-1063), Alp Arslan (c. 1030–1072), Kilij Arslan II (d. 1192), Khwārezm Shāh, also Kaykhusraw (d. 1211)

Principal battles: Dandanqan, Melitene, Manzikert, Myriokephalon

Result: Turkish rule

Background

Turkish nomads had been the dominant military force on the Central Asia steppe since the late sixth century. By the tenth century, the Turks of Transoxiania, admired for their bravery and skills at horsemanship and mounted archery, were introduced as Mamlūks and mercenaries by the Khwārazm shahs and Samanids of Iran. They soon rose to important military positions; in 994, the Turkish Mamlūk Sebüktigin founded the Ghaznavid Empire.

Action

Soon thereafter, entire Turkish nomadic tribes were permitted to migrate into Iran as mercenaries for the Ghaznavids and Qarakhanids. The most important of these clans, the Seljuks, who had converted to Islam a generation or two earlier, quickly took to brigandage. Ghaznavid armies responded but were unable to catch the highly mobile Turkish warbands. Lured into the desert, a large exhausted Ghaznavid army was routed at the Battle of Dandanqan (1040) by a Seljuk force of only 16,000 men. Many other Turkish nomads quickly rallied around the victorious Seljuks, who swept through the nearly defenseless Iran. As Muslims, the Seljuks respected the urban civilization of Islam and were accepted by most Iranians as a new military aristocracy that would restore order. By 1055, the Seljuks had conquered all of Iran and Iraq; their leader Toghrïl Beg was welcomed into Baghdad in triumph as the champion and defender of the moribund ʿAbbāsid caliphs.

As the new sultans of a sedentary Islamic state, Toghrïl and subsequent Seljuk rulers were required to prevent the unruly Turkish nomads from plundering their new domain. Yet to retain the nomads’ loyalty, the sultans needed to provide them with plunder. Many Turkish warbands were therefore directed toward the new frontier with Christian Armenia and Byzantium. From 1043 on, Turks increasingly raided Byzantine territory, occasionally in organized armies under the command of the Seljuk sultan.

The military strength of the Byzantines had been rapidly declining since the death of Basil II. Fearing possible usurpation by the great military magnates of Anatolia, Basil began a trend toward using mercenaries and demanding taxes in cash rather than military service. Although this strengthened the central government, its long-term effect was to weaken the border warlords and militias. Two centuries of relative peace in Anatolia also had decreased their military readiness. The Byzantines relied on a static line of border fortifications rather than defense in depth; once the Turks were past these border fortresses, the interior was weakly defended. The field army of the Byzantines, with large infantry contingents, could not hope to catch the mobile Turks, who would simply strike whenever the main Byzantine army was absent, fleeing upon their approach. Byzantine relations with the Christian Syrian and Armenian border populations were frayed because of ecclesiastical disputes. The Byzantines also faced serious simultaneous threats on all of their boundaries: Pechenegs and Oghuz in the Balkans, the Rus from the Black Sea, and the Normans in Italy. Factionalism and succession disputes at Constantinople wasted military resources and culminated in civil war. The Byzantines were thus in a position of serious military crisis and decline when the Turkish nomadic warbands appeared on their eastern borders.

The initial Turkish inroads into Armenia and Anatolia took the form of raids, which, however damaging, did not seriously threaten the state. In 1057, Isaac Comnenus, uncle of the future emperor Alexius, stripped the eastern frontier of most of its troops to support him in his successful bid for the throne. Seizing the opportunity, the Turks sacked Melitene in 1058, and in the following decade, their raids intensified as the Byzantines proved increasingly unequal to the task of defense. Several important cities were sacked, while the Norman mercenaries of the Byzantines deserted, attempting to create independent principalities. Turkish nomads were thus able to begin permanent migration and settlement in Anatolia. In 1067, Romanus IV Diogenes, a successful general, was raised to the throne with the aim of defeating the Turks and restoring the frontier. His massive army was decisively defeated by the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan at the Battle of Manzikert (1071). The defeat at Manzikert was serious but not initially fatal to Byzantine interests in Anatolia. Alp Arslan treated Romanus with honor and released him without ransom. It was the shrewdest act of the entire war, because the Byzantines, assuming Romanus was dead, had selected another emperor. Viewing this as treason, Romanus attempted to retake the throne by force, plunging Byzantium into a ten-year civil war, during which both sides turned to Turkish and other foreign mercenaries to bolster their weakening armies. The Turks were thus able to migrate throughout Anatolia both as independent warbands and in Byzantine service. Within a decade, nearly all of Anatolia was in the hands of Turkish warlords; Byzantine control was limited to coastal regions in the west.

By 1081, Alexius I Comnenus emerged as the victor in the Byzantine civil war. The military situation was still desperate. Italy had fallen to the Normans, who conspired to take Constantinople. Much of the Balkans was lost. The Turks were in control of most of Anatolia, with a strong base at Nicaea, only a few miles from Constantinople. The empire was nearing collapse. Alexius’s military and diplomatic genius saved the empire, in part by calling for mercenaries from the West. These came, not as individual soldiers as Alexius had hoped, but as the First Crusade, which swept through Anatolia, defeating the Turks at Nicaea and Dorylaeum (1097), thereby permitting Alexius to recover a number of important cities.

From 1055 and 1118, the Seljuk sultans had managed to hold together an empire stretching from the Indus to the Mediterranean. By 1118, however, the empire had fragmented into several regional states, each ruled by independent dynasties of collateral lines of the Seljuk royal family. The Turkish-controlled regions of Anatolia fell to the lot of a clan that came to be known as the Seljuks of Rum (meaning Rome, from the Byzantine practice of still calling themselves Romans). A different Turkish clan, the Danishmendids, took power in eastern Anatolia. Thus, the combination of the victories of the crusaders over the Turks and the fragmentation and civil wars of the Seljuk Dynasty led to a period of Byzantine resurgence in Anatolia. Under Alexius I Comnenus and his two strong successors John and Manuel, the Byzantines were able to recover much of western and coastal Anatolia. Nonetheless, the crusader and Byzantine victories over the Turks were not decisive. The Seljuks of Rum remained a powerful state that regularly raided Byzantine territory. To secure this central Anatolian frontier, Manuel campaigned repeatedly against sultan Kilij Arslan II, forcing him to pay tribute in 1162. By 1176, Manuel had prepared a large army intending to capture the Rum Seljuk capital at Konia (Iconium), thereby restoring Byzantine domination of central Anatolia. Manuel’s army was ambushed, however, in a narrow mountain pass at Myriokephalon (1176), where they were decisively defeated by Kilij Arslan. Western Anatolia was again swept by a wave of Turkish raids and migrations. The Byzantines’ position was further eroded by another series of civil wars and court factionalism that broke out following the death of Manuel in 1180. This culminated in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by crusaders who were ostensibly supporting a Byzantine claimant to the imperial throne. The empire fragmented into nearly a dozen successor states, some ruled by crusaders and others by Byzantines.

That the Rum Seljuks failed to completely overrun the fragmented Byzantine state at this time was because of their own set of problems. From 1188 to 1205, an extended fratricidal civil war absorbed Seljukid military power, which was further undermined by the passing through their territory of the Germans of the Third Crusades under Frederick I Barbarossa in 1190. When order was restored under Khwārezm Shāh and his successors, the Turks were able to extend their power for the first time to the coast, capturing the ports of Antalya (Attaleia) and Sinope and surrounding coastal regions, foreshadowing the rise of Turkish maritime power. Further progress against the Byzantines was forestalled by wars in the east with the crusaders, Cilician Armenians, Ayyubids in Syria and Mesopotamia, and rival Turkish warlords in eastern Anatolia. Generally successful in these campaigns, by 1240 the Rum Seljuks were masters of nearly all of Anatolia and the most powerful state in the region.

Aftermath

Their dominance of the Rum Seljuks was short-lived, however, for the Mongols had recently conquered Iran and sent a large force to the steppes of Anatolia. The sultan Khwārezm Shāh II mobilized his army, which was crushed by the Mongols at Kose Dagh (June 26, 1243). All Anatolia swiftly submitted to the Mongols, becoming a tributary protectorate. Mongol rule in Anatolia was not enduring. Within a few decades, most of the Turks of Anatolia were again independent. In place of the powerful and united Rum Seljuk sultanate, a number of minor principalities and warlords emerged, squabbling among themselves for dominance. From this post-Mongol political chaos would emerge a new Turkish dynasty in Anatolia in the late thirteenth century—the Ottomans—who in 1453 would complete the conquest of the Byzantine Empire that had begun nearly four hundred years earlier on the field of Manzikert.

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