Emperor Romanus Diogenes was a determined if not a gifted general, and when the Seljuks crossed the border in strength during his reign, he somehow managed to push them back across the Euphrates. Unfortunately for the empire, the small victory awakened all the aristocratic courtiers’ old fears that a strong emperor would restrict their privileges. By the time the Turks returned the next year and seized a small Armenian fortress in the town of Manzikert, support for the emperor had begun to dangerously erode.
Oblivious to the mounting dissension, Romanus marched out with his army, determined to evict the Turks from Christian lands once and for all. On August 26, 1071, the two armies met, and the most fateful battle in Byzantine history began. Despite massive defections from his unreliable mercenaries, the emperor managed to push the Turks back, but at a critical moment his scheming nobles betrayed him and withdrew. The cream of the army was slaughtered on the spot, and Romanus Diogenes was captured and forced to kiss the ground while the sultan, Alp Arslan, rested a boot on his neck.
The humiliation of an emperor groveling in the dust seemed to many later Byzantines as the awful moment when everything started to go wrong, but if it marked the beginning of their final decline, then it was the Byzantines themselves who were to blame. The battle could easily have been avoided. At Manzikert, the sultan had tried to come to terms, but the petty nobles had refused his offers and insisted on being the authors of their own destruction. And while the loss of prestige and manpower after the battle were bad enough, they could have been recovered from. It was the behavior of the aristocrats afterward that truly wrecked Byzantium. After fleeing from the scene of their defeat, the nobility escaped to spread chaos throughout the empire, unleashing civil war in their vain attempts to seize control of the sinking Byzantine ship. Rival claimants to the throne rose up in a bewildering succession and were overthrown just as quickly by yet another general with imperial dreams.
Now that the facade had cracked, the frontiers of the empire collapsed with alarming speed. In Italy, the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard conquered Bari, ending more than five centuries of Byzantine rule in its ancestral land. In the East, the Turks came pouring into Asia Minor, and instead of trying to stop them, ambitious generals tried to use them as mercenaries in their own bids for power. Unreliable troops switched sides with alarming frequency, and famine followed in the wake of armies that trampled fields and seized crops. Within ten years, the Turks had overrun thirty thousand square miles of Asia Minor virtually unopposed, robbing the empire of the source of most of its manpower and grain. Except for thin strips along the Black Sea coast and the Mediterranean, Anatolia was lost forever, along with any hope of a long-term recovery for the empire as a whole. Even if a strong emperor came along, there were no longer any reserves of men or material to draw upon. The empire was dying, and instead of helping, foolish men insisted on fighting over its corpse.
When the Turks broke into Chrysopolis on the Asian side of the Bosporus in 1078 and burned it to the ground, the end of the empire seemed at hand. The army was shattered and broken, and the government was in the hands of privileged, arrogant men who had jealously guarded their own interests, undermining any emperor who showed a glimmer of ability. In only fifty-three years, these men had nearly wrecked the empire with their irresponsibility and greed, squandering a bursting treasury and sitting idly by while the empire lost more than half its territory. The only hope of deliverance now for the impoverished and miserable citizens was that one of the squabbling generals would emerge a clear victor and at least bring order to the disintegrating state.
It would take a man of rare abilities to restore some measure of life to the sad and shattered Byzantium, but on Easter Sunday of 1081, that man arrived. After pausing long enough to enjoy the acclamations of the crowd, a thirty-three-year-old general named Alexius Comnenus walked into the Hagia Sophia and received the crown from the patriarch. The task ahead of him was nearly insurmountable, but Alexius was energetic and shrewd, and he would prove to be among the greatest men ever to sit on the Byzantine throne.
*They were also deeply impressed by its sophistication. In 1004, a Byzantine aristocrat named Maria sparked enormous interest in Venice by eating with an ancient Roman double-pronged golden instrument. Touted as the latest word in sophistication, the device became enormously popular, and soon the fork was common throughout the West.*The normal Byzantine practice was to settle veterans on the frontier who would provide a well-trained militia in exchange for land. This had the great advantage of lowering the cost of defense without seriously degrading the empire’s safety and had worked magnificently for years.*The western church certainly took its time in adopting the Spanish version. As late as the ninth century, Pope Leo III posted the original wording of the creed outside the entrance to Saint Peter’s, and in 880 John VIII had remained completely silent when Constantinople had condemned the addition.†This split between Rome and Constantinople can most plainly be seen in modern Serbia and Croatia. Though both are Slavic countries that speak the same language, they had the misfortune to fall into opposing religious camps. Croatia allied itself with Rome and became a Catholic power, writing the common language in the Latin alphabet, while Serbia joined the Orthodox orbit and uses Cyrillic.
21
THE COMNENI RECOVERY
Alexius I Comnenus was an unlikely savior. A member of the aristocratic ranks that the Macedonian dynasty had struggled so long to suppress, he seemed at first to be just another usurper in a long line of meddlesome nobles that had brought such ruin to imperial fortunes. It was true that Alexius had an unrivaled military reputation—in his early twenties, he had fought at Manzikert, and he hadn’t lost a battle since—but he had risen to power in the usual way by overthrowing his short-lived predecessor instead of by fighting the Turks. The motley army he commanded was so full of foreign mercenaries that the moment he brought them inside the walls of Constantinople they started looting the city, and a full day passed before he could bring them under control. Some of Constantinople’s older citizens might well have shaken their heads and muttered that there was indeed nothing new under the sun.
It was hardly an auspicious start, but worse was yet to come. Within a month of Alexius’s coronation, word reached him that a terrible force of Normans had landed on the Dalmatian coast and was heading toward the port city of Durazzo. If they took the city, they would have direct access to the thousand-year-old Via Egnatia and with it a straight invasion route to Constantinople.
The Normans were no ordinary wandering band of adventurers. The descendants of Vikings, these Northmen were the success story of the eleventh century. While their more famous brothers in Normandy had battered their way into Saxon England under the command of William the Conqueror, the southern Normans had batted aside a papal army, held the pope captive, and managed to expel the last vestiges of the Roman Empire from Italy. Led by the remarkable Robert Guiscard, they had invaded Sicily, capturing Palermo and thoroughly broken Saracen power over the island. Now, having run out of enemies at home, and with his appetite whetted for imperial blood, the irascible Guiscard turned his attention to the far more tempting prize of Byzantium.