The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (54 page)

hearing more in due course; as a result of this single audience, however, she changed her mind. Romanus, who had left for Cappadocia immediately afterwards, had not even reached his home before he was summoned to return; the marriage and coronation followed a few days later.

It is impossible not to feel sorry for Romanus Diogenes. Although an arrogant man with a strong sense of his own importance, he was also an able and hard-working administrator and a brave soldier; and he fully recognized the gravity of the Seljuk menace. Already once he had risked his life to overthrow an Emperor whom he believed to be leading the Empire to its destruction; now that he found himself to be that Emperor's successor, he set to with spirit and determination to restore imperial fortunes - and it was not his fault that he failed. Wherever he looked, whatever he tried, the dice were loaded against him. In Constantinople, he had to contend with Psellus - who loathed him - and the Ducas family, who bitterly resented his rise to power and were resolved, sooner or later, to bring about his destruction. In the field, he found a hopelessly demoralized army composed largely of vacillating mercenaries, ill-fed, ill-equipped and frequendy on the point of mutiny. Both 1068 and 1069 saw him leading military expeditions to the East, and it is a remarkable tribute to his powers of leadership that he achieved some degree of success - particularly in Syria, where he captured Hieropolis (the modern Mambij) and appreciably strengthened the Byzantine position; but the account
of those expeditions by Attalei
ates, who accompanied him as a member of his military tribunal, makes almost unbearably depressing reading. The Emperor's personal courage, his determination not to be defeated by conditions and circumstances that would have driven most generals to despair, shines out like a beacon in the darkness; for the rest, we have a seldom-interrupted saga of frustration and disorganization, of cowardice and chaos.

Fighting in the East continued through the first half of 1070, and was followed by a truce. This campaign was not, however, under Romanus's personal command. Every time that he left the capital there was a risk that his enemies - Psellus, the Ducas and their followers - might attempt a
coup,
and internal tensions during that year were such as to rule out any prolonged absence from Constantinople. In fact, his enforced stay had one major advantage: it enabled him to devote his energies to improving the lot of the army, settling arrears of pay, procuring new equipment, instituting training programmes and generally making good at least some of the damage wrought by Constantine IX and X and their predecessors. It also gave him time to recruit new forces. The experience of the past two years had shown him that the existing army of the East, even when in top fighting form, would never be sufficient to inflict on the Seljuk hordes a defeat decisive enough to ensure the safety of Armenia and, through Armenia, of Anatolia. The truce he had recently concluded with Alp Arslan was being continually broken by the raiding Turkomans and was, so far as he was concerned, a dead letter; he was therefore already planning a campaign for 1071 in which he would be able to throw some 60,000 to 70,000 men
1
into the fray.

That expedition crossed the Bosphorus in the second week of March 1071, and immediately headed eastward. Once again, Michael Attaleiates was present; and his version of the events of that summer, while it leaves a tantalizing number of points unexplained and questions unanswered, remains by far the most detailed and trustworthy account that has come down to us. As always, he makes no secret of his admiration for the Emperor; he notes, however, that after the army had gone some zoo miles Romanus's demeanour seemed to change:

He became a stranger to his own army, setting up his own separate camp and arranging for more ostentatious accommodation. When the army crossed the river Halys, for example, he did not cross over at the same time but remained behind and spent some day
s at a fortress which had recentl
y been built at his command. Soon afterwards he issued an order to separate his private possessions from those of the army.

Scylitzes, whose narrative for this period clearly derives from Attaleiates, suggests that Romanus had been perturbed by various supposed portents, among them the sudden breakage of the central pole of his tent and an unexplained fire in which he lost much of his personal equipment, together with several of his best horses and mules. It may well be so — this was a superstitious age and the Byzantines were even more credulous than most; there seems little doubt, at any rate, that to his natural arrogance the Emperor now added several other faults which threatened to become liabilities in the days to come: remoteness, ill

1
Such figures as these are, as always, highly conjectural. Byzantine sources give no information, Muslim ones range from
200,000
to
600,000
and Matthew of Edessa claims, grotesquely,
1
million. Most modem historians seem to agree that the estimate given above is the most probable, though the true number could have been as high as
100,000.

temper, impatience with advice and a streak of cruelty which we have not seen before.
1

Strangely enough, while the immense Byzantine army was marching across Anatolia, Alp Arslan was heading in a completely different direction. Being totally unable to control the Turkoman raiders and having frequently disclaimed all responsibility for their activities, he believed the truce of the previous year to be still in force; he had therefore decided that the moment had come to fulfil his long-cherished ambition of destroying the Fatimid Caliphate. Late in 1070 he left his headquarters at Khurasan, captured the Armenian fortresses of Manzikert and Archesh, then marched south-west to Amida and on to Edessa where, towards the end of March, he drew up his army beneath the walls. Scarcely had he begun the siege when he received a message from the Emperor proposing a renewal of the truce and the exchange of Manzikert and Archesh for Hieropolis in Syria, which he had captured three years before. He accepted and, leaving Edessa untaken, continued his march. Six weeks later he was besieging Aleppo when there arrived another envoy from Romanus, now in Armenia, repeating the offer but this time presenting it in distinctly threatening terms.

If Romanus had received Alp Arslan's previous acceptance of his offer, he had played the Sultan false. Even if he had not, he was now in a position of strength and putting forward what amounted to an ultimatum. Seeing at once that he had no choice but to abandon his Fatimid expedition, Alp Arslan turned ab
out and made straight back for h
is homeland. Such was his haste that he failed to take adequate precautions in recrossing the Euphrates: many of his horses and mules were carried away by the current and drowned. But this hardly mattered to him. He knew that he would anyway have to raise a very much larger army before he could meet the Emperor on his own terms. Sending his vizier Nizam al-Mulk ahead to raise troops in Azerbaijan, he himself headed for Khoi (now Khvoi), between Lake Van and Lake Urmia, picking up some ten thousand Kurdish cavalry
en
route;
there he was joined by his new army and set off in search of his foe.

1
At one point of the campaign a Byzantine soldier accused of stealing a donkey from a local inhabitant and brought before the Emperor was sentenced to have his nose severed - a punishment that had fortunately gone out of fashion in the eighth century. It was when Romanus upheld this sentence even after the poor man had invoked the intercession of the victory-bringing icon of the Holy Virgin of Blachernae (which was always carried by the
basile
us
into battle) that Attaleiates reports his first presentiment of the divine vengeance that would follow.

Romanus had meanwhile encamped near Erzurum, where he had split his army into two. The greater part he dispatched under the command of his general Joseph Tarchaniotes to Khelat (now Ahlat), a strongly defended Seljuk-held fortress a few miles from the northern shore of Lake Van, while he himself - together with his other principal commander, Nicephorus Bryennius - set off with the remainder for the litde fortress-town of Manzikert, which he believed would offer no serious resistance. He was, as it turned out, perfectly right: the garrison gave in without a struggle. Tarchaniotes, on the other hand, was less fortunate. We do not know precisely what happened. Later Muslim hi
storians refer to a pitched battl
e in which Alp Arslan scored a decisi
ve victory, but there is no menti
on of such an engagement in any Byzantine source — the most trustworthy, Attaleiates, simply reporting that the news of the Sultan's arrival with his new army was in itself sufficient to send 'the scoundrel' Tarchaniotes into headlong flight, his men after him. They never stopped until they reached Melitene on the Euphrates, and did not reappear again during the whole campaign.

But it cannot, surely, have been as simple as that. Joseph Tarchaniotes was a highly respected general, in command of a force of 30,000 to 40,000 - larger, very probably, than the entire Seljuk army. If we reject the Muslim version - that he was soundly beaten in the field - we are left with various other possibilities, all in varying degrees improbable: that he was angry with Romanus, whom he had strongly advised not to split the army, and determined to prove him wrong whatever the cost; that Alp Arslan had taken his army by surprise, and that since it had no opportunity to regroup a general
sauve-qui-peut
was the only answer; or -most intriguing of all - that Tarchaniotes was a traitor, a tool of the Ducas, who had actually set out from Constantinople with the deliberate intention of abandoning his Emperor when the moment came. If such a theory seems at present far-fetched, it may seem less so by the end of this chapter; and it would also go a long way to explain another mystery - why it was that no word of what had happened was sent to Romanus, only thirty miles away at Manzikert. But however much we may speculate about the cause of the rout, its consequence is all too clear: that by the time the Emperor finally met
the Seljuks on the field of battl
e, more than half his army had deserted him.

Romanus Diogenes had captured the fortress of Manzikert; he did not have long, however, to savour his triumph. On the very next day some
of his men, out on a foraging expedition, were set upon by mounted Seljuk bowmen and suffered heavy casualties. The Emperor, assuming that he had to deal with nothing more serious than a small band of marauders, sent out a small detachment of troops under Bryennius — and flew into a fury when he received, an hour or two later, an appeal for reinforcements. After some hesitation he dispatched a rather larger force under an impulsive Armenian named Basilacius; they tried to pursue the bowmen, but were trapped by them and quickly surrounded. Basilacius himself was captured, but few of those who followed him escaped with their lives. Bryennius, riding out once again - this time with the entire right wing of the army behind him - in an attempt to rescue his rescuers, found himself confronted with what must have been a considerable proportion of the entire Seljuk army. He and his men retreated in good order to the camp, but not before he had received no less than three wounds, two from arrows in the back and one, in the chest, from a lance. Fortunately all three proved to be superficial, and he was able to continue the campaign.

That night there was no moon - and little sleep for the Byzantine army. The Seljuks kept up an unremitting pressure, loosing hail after hail of arrows and generally causing so much tumult and confusion in the darkness that again and again they were thought to have broken down the defences and overrun the camp. It was a pleasant surprise to everyone the next morning to find that the palisades had held - but a most unpleasant shock to learn that a large contingent of Uz mercenaries had defected to the Seljuks; there were several other Turkic units in the army, any or all of which might at any moment follow their example. In such circumstances, and with half his army — including one of his best generals - vanished without trace, one might have expected the Emperor to welcome the delegation that arrived a day or two later. It came, officially, from the Caliph in Baghdad (though in fact it was obviously sent by Alp Arslan in the hopes that it might fare better than one from himself) and it proposed a truce.

Why, we may ask, did the Sultan want one? Almost certainly because he was far from sure of victory. We know that shortly before going into battle he spoke of possible martyrdom in the field; he dressed himself in white in order, as he explained, that his garment might also serve as his shroud; and he enforced oaths from those around him that his son Malik-Shah should succeed him in the event of his death. In the past the Seljuks had always relied upon their skill in irregular warfare - the warfare of raids, ambushes and surprise att
acks. They disliked pitched battl
es, which they avoided whenever possible; and recent Byzantine humiliations notwithstanding, they still retained a healthy respect for the imperial army.
1
Besides, was there, from the Sultan's point of view, any real reason to fight? The one serious difference of political opinion concerned Armenia, which had considerable strategic value for both him and Romanus. If only the two of them could agree on a mutually acceptable division of Armenian territory, both armies could remain intact - and Alp Arslan could turn his attention back to what really interested him: the Fatimids.