Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  Peopled for most of the Common Era by the Christian nation that came to be known as the Armenians, the region has seen cruelty and upheaval well into the present day. In 1915, near the towns of Malazgirt, Van, Mus, and Bitlis, tens of thousands of Armenians were herded together to begin their death march northeast toward the Caucasus. Nowadays the windswept plateau is home to dirt-poor Kurdish beet farmers and their families, their status in the modern Republic of Turkey a thorny question. Here and there, hundreds of bleached white boulders have been laboriously lined up on the slopes of bald hills to form gigantic exhortations to Turkish patriotism—mind-numbing makework projects for the army of conscripts stationed in eastern Anatolia to keep an eye on the Kurds. Of the Byzantines, there is scarcely a trace left in the region; of the Armenians, little more, save an exquisite medieval monastery standing deserted on Akdamar Island, surrounded by the eerie quietness of Lake Van.

  Here only the memory of Alp Arslan is promoted, his distant victory over Romanus Diogenes the sole event to merit present-day recognition. In a traffic circle at the western entrance to the town of Malazgirt, Alp sits astride a rearing stallion, the animal's impossible-to-miss male attributes the sculptor's statement on the manliness of the Turks. Never mind that the Turks, like all nomads from the Asian steppes, rode only geldings and mares into battle, the virile message is admirably conveyed. An inscription on the pedestal plaque, once it has cited the mandatory nugget of wisdom from Ataturk, makes a more subtle, if unverifiable, claim about Alp Arslan's prowess: he, it states, had only 15,000 men; the enemy, 210,000.

  East of town, near where the engagement of Manzikert is thought to have taken place, two white monoliths poke up forty-two meters into the sky, like the tines of some colossal tuning fork. This "Gateway to Anatolia" stands in a cleared park—a rarity in this poor region—replete with stone bleachers for performances every August. A guide from the local cultural office explains that the annual festivities consist of a reenactment of the battle put on by a dozen or so costumed Boy Scouts. As is only historically correct, the Rumi are bested by the Turks, to the applause of their parents and the politicians. In 2003 Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan came all the way from Ankara to watch the show. "The same boy gets to play Alp Arslan every year," the guide says. "He looks exactly like him."

  Shortly after the year 1000 the Turks entered history and stayed there. Long after their Christian coevals in sudden conquest—the Normans—had faded into obscurity, the descendants of Alp Arslan would continue to have their day in the sun. When they first tentatively ventured out of their homeland between the Caspian and Aral seas, no one would have imagined that they would soon be the spearhead, then the bulwark of Mediterranean Islam—the first in wresting Anatolia from the Greeks, the second in defending the Near East against invading Latin crusaders. However unlikely, such was their destiny, for they made their move west just as great change was occurring throughout the lands bordering the old mare nostrum.

  The caliphate of Córdoba,, torn to shreds following the demise of Almanzor at Medinaceli in 1002, was succeeded by the weakened statelets of a fractious Muslim Spain, prey to fratricidal wars and the malevolent attentions of their newly aggressive Christian neighbors beyond the Duero. Indeed, western Christendom as a whole was finally awakening—continental historiography has often used the year 1000 as a benchmark, a starting block for the coming race of events. Some contemporaneous consciousness of the change seems to exist: the eleventh-century chronicler Radulf Glaber wrote movingly of a "white mantle of churches" descending upon Europe around the year 1000. The conversion to Christianity at this time of the Scandinavians, under Harald Bluetooth, and the Hungarians, under King Stephen—two heretofore obstreperous pagan peoples—could not but have given heart to the small bands of educated men toiling in the monasteries and in the entourage of a newly revitalized papacy.

  The Gateway to Anatolia during a recent celebration of the anniversary of the Battle of Manzikert.

  As the century turned, a once-cowering Church undertook to tame the feral energies of its flock: it began negotiating Truces of God, sworn agreements forbidding warfare at certain times and, especially, enjoining the belligerent to spare ecclesiastical property and persons. By century's end, however, the Church had changed tack; it was to channel these energies—both religious and warlike—in an attempt to take back what had been lost so long ago: Jerusalem and the Near East. There the Latins would come up against the Turks.

  As few written sources chronicle the rise of the Turkic peoples, much of their history preceding their incursion into the dar al Islam remains hazy. Of the three great groupings of central Asian nomads—Mongol, Iranian, Turkic—the last came to be the most widespread, its many constituent nations (Huns, Cumans, Uigurs, Kazakhs, Uzbeks) each carving its own niche in Eurasian history. Interestingly, given the subsequent Muslim confessional identity of most of these nations, it is thought that the Jewish Khazars were of Turkic stock, but their kingdom—which the sephardic grandee Hasday ibn Shaprut tried contacting from distant Córdoba,—had all but vanished by the year 1000, victim to the expansion of the recently christianized Slavs of Kievan Rus (the forerunner of Ukraine and Russia). The disappearance of the sedentary Khazars coincided with the apparition of a nomadic Turkic people in Iran and Afghanistan, led by a warrior named Seljuk. These Seljuk Turks, as they are known, would change the Middle East and Islam.

  Their first conquests were the kingdoms bordering their traditional pastoral grounds. Seljuk and his followers had seceded from the larger Oghuz tribe near the Aral Sea and had advanced into Transoxiana and eastern Persia sometime around the turn of the millennium. For several centuries already, the once-unitary umma—at its apogee the Umayyad caliph al-Walid I (705-15) ruled an empire stretching from India to Portugal—had been divided and subdivided into various statelets and dynasties. The center could not hold its far-flung possessions, and local governors broke away from the capital to set up their own royal lines. (The Fatimids of Egypt and the Umayyads of Spain went so far as to claim caliphal status.) Even in the heart of Islam, the Abbasids of Baghdad were a much-diminished force, having fought ruinous civil wars and, by the tenth century, having been reduced to the rank of a shaky first among equals in a hierarchy of competing entities. When the toughened nomads rode into the region on their hardy ponies, they were first hired as mercenaries by the rival powers, only to turn on their paymasters and take control. The Seljuks, having been converted over time to the sunni Islam of their neighbors, promptly subdued western Afghanistan, Iran and, by 1055, were before the gates of Baghdad itself.

  Their opponents there were not the Abbasids but the Buyids, a group of Iranian opportunists from near the southern shores of the Caspian Sea who had become the power behind the caliphal throne after capturing Baghdad in 945. The Buyids were shia, militantly so, which caused sparks to fly when dealing with their sunni Abbasid puppets. The entire edifice of caliphal legitimacy was questioned by the party of Ali, especially after the killing in Karbala of Huseyn, Ali's son, during the second of the Muslim civil wars of the seventh century. The Buyids promoted Huseyn's memory and may have established the tradition of ashura, the great annual festival of lamentation in his honor. The shia traditions of cursing the memory of the first three caliphs and organizing mass pilgrimages to the tombs of Ali and his family in Karbala and Kufa (Najaf ) are also thought to originate from the Buyid stewardship of Mesopotamia. Yet however earnest and ultimately divisive their brand of devotion, the Buyids were also clear-sighted: unlike their shia contemporaries, the Fatimids of Egypt, they did not attempt to usurp the caliphal title, preferring, like Almanzor of al-Andalus, to exercise their power and influence from behind a screen of traditional legitimacy. Thus the Abbasids continued to guide their sunni followers, their actual power waxing or waning depending on the forcefulness of the occupant of the caliphal throne and the intensity of infighting among Buyid grandees.

  When the Turks finally arrived before the great city on the Tigris, with
their ranks of mounted bowmen willing to let fly in yet another swarming victory, the slave armies of the Buyids were in no mood to be led to the slaughter. They melted away in fear. The capital itself was hardly any more motivated, the confessional tensions of the last century having transformed the city into a series of walled-off warrens of sunni, shia, Christian, and Jewish communities. Seljuk's grandson, Tughril Bey, accepted the acclaim of the inhabitants and threw out the Buyids. He then went north to quell a revolt in the al-Jazeera (Island), the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates in northern Iraq. On his return to Baghdad in 1058, the grateful sunni caliph made him the "King of the East and West." The once-despised nomads—many Turks served as mercenaries and slaves for Persian and Arab rulers—had gained effective control of the huge central swath of the dar al Islam. The caliph, an Abbasid, retained spiritual primacy, but the sultan ("holder of power") ruled the roost.

  On Tughril Bey's death in 1063, his thirty-three-year-old nephew, Alp Arslan, succeeded to the sultanate. He was said to have a mustache so long that he had to tie it behind his back before riding to battle (which makes the idea of his present-day Boy Scout look-alike even more intriguing). During his decade-long reign, Alp would have many such occasions for securing his whiskers, for his aptitude and appetite for warring equaled that of his uncle. From Alp's perspective, there were two reasons for driving farther west beyond the al-Jazeera: the heretical Fatimids and his uncontrollable kinsmen. The first stemmed from the young sultan's sunni creed—although the Seljuks had but recently been unlettered infidels, their embrace of Islam was fervent, and their convert's zeal led them to view deviation from the emerging sunni consensus as a stain to be cleansed. Furthermore, the greatest blot on the umma, the shia Fatimids of Egypt, happened to possess a large and rich kingdom, ruling through subject allies Palestine and Syria as well; hence the reward of conquest would not be solely spiritual. As so often occurred around the medieval Mediterranean, the precepts of faith dovetailed nicely with the dictates of greed.

  Yet faith was not what led Alp Arslan into his world-changing conflict with the Christians of Constantinople. Rather, the clash came about from the second of his motives for heading west: the pell-mell nature of the Turkish advance. The Seljuks, now partly sedentarized and domesticated, had been fairly orderly in their quest for greener pastures, but their fellow Turks far less so. The eleventh-century migration of the steppe nomads into Persia, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia was a gradual, uncoordinated mass movement of peoples taking advantage of the lack of a cohesive force able to keep them out. Alp Arslan's distant kinsmen, sometimes called the Turkomans or Turkmen, were not interested in the niceties of Islamic doctrine or the lure of Baghdadi scholarship. They simply sought pasturage for their ponies and sheep, and the less severe climes of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Anatolia seemed splendidly suited for setting up their tents. If Alp wanted to control these unruly nomads, he needed to corral them for organized, coherent campaigns of conquest. Otherwise, chaos on his northwestern border would ensue, perhaps diverting him from his main goal of wresting Syria and Egypt from the grasp of the heretical Fatimids. He planned to help these Turkomans secure their mountain meadows to the south of the Caucasus, then turn his attentions elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the people already living there—the Armenians—did not agree to the theft of their lands, and neither did their sometime friends in Constantinople. This was Christian turf that would be defended. Fortunately for the invading sultan, at precious few times in its history was the Byzantine Empire so ineptly led.

  Constantinople a mere generation or two before the advent of Alp Arslan had been at a summit of power and glory. A formidable basileus, Basil II, had mercilessly and methodically quashed threats to the empire, earning the sobriquet Bulgaroctonus—the Bulgar-Slayer—by blinding fourteen thousand vanquished enemies on a Balkan battlefield and sending them to stumble home as a warning to all who would dare defy him. Muslim privateering in the eastern Mediter-anean had been curbed; Crete and parts of Italy recaptured; an offensive to retake Sicily envisaged. The coffers of the well-managed empire were overflowing. Basil had cracked down on the sharp practices of the wealthy landowners in Anatolia and encouraged the prosperity of small farmers and artisans. Farther east the Armenians had been forced to bend their knee to Byzantine authority for the first time in two hundred years, and even the Muslim worthies of Damascus and Aleppo, alarmed at the loss of Antioch to Basil, agreed to pay tribute to the Rumi. The empire had not covered such a large area since the days before the rise of Muhammad.

  Basil's main failing was that he was childless—and mortal. His death in 1025, after a reign of forty-nine years (the longest in Byzantine history), instantly ushered in a carnival of incompetence and intrigue at the highest levels of the state. The empire would never recover from the ensuing half-century of foolishness. Although a sophisticated bureaucracy held the creaking apparatus together, within four decades of Basil's demise the Byzantine Empire was well on the way to bankruptcy, its military establishment reduced to a mere shadow of its Bulgar-slaying eminence, and its woes only worsened by a debilitating tug-of-war among different factions of aristocrats, functionaries, generals, and churchmen.

  Basil's brother, a pleasure-loving sexagenarian, had been the first in succession, to be followed by the husbands and adopted adult sons of his two daughters, Zoe and Theodora. Through their short-sighted alliances, the throne passed to the incompetent family of a scheming palace eunuch and thence to aristocratic clans—the Monomachus and the Ducas—determined to drain the treasury in order to shower favor on courtiers. Basil's vast surplus disappeared, and the landowners of Anatolia, freed from his wise practice of preventing estate consolidation at the expense of the peasantry, became staggeringly wealthy, with few, if any, incentives to serve the state. The armies of the themes—the political and military provinces established by Heraclius—became a thing of the past, even though they had been the cornerstone of Byzantine military might for four centuries. Based on citizen-soldiers drawn from the ranks of a landholding peasantry, the thematic levies dried up as an impoverished populace could not meet its military obligations and became little more than serfs on the immense estates of the powerful.

  All of which might have stood as a mere case study in bad public policy had not the Byzantine military machine come sputtering to a halt at the very time it would be called upon to meet its greatest threat since the fleet of Caliph Muawiya had sailed into the Sea of Marmara. The basileus Constantine IX Monomachus (ruled 1042—55), a philosopher-king whose erudition and taste fostered a magnificent flowering of art and learning in the capital, proved disastrous in the more down-to-earth matter of protecting his empire. At midcentury the basileus disbanded the thematic army of Armenia—the principal target of Turkoman raids—in order to raise revenue for his courtly amusements. These citizen-soldiers, who should have been the frontline defense of the Byzantine Empire, were dispensed from ever mustering again once they had raised enough cash to send to Constantinople.

  Our best historical source for this astonishing period of mismanagement is Michael Psellus, the author of Chronographia, a valuable but self-serving memoir. The brilliant Psellus, a bureaucratic infighter of the highest order, was the eminence grise behind the sorry succession of intriguers to don the purple regalia and misrule with zeal. Thanks to their efforts, the undoing of Basil II's achievement came about with stunning swiftness. A once-cohesive and powerful empire was reduced to relying on a cutthroat collection of mercenaries to defend itself, most of whom turned instantly mutinous once, as often happened, the imperial treasury could not cough up enough money to pay them.

  At Psellus's urging, an even more incompetent Constantine took the throne in 1059. The reign of Constantine X Ducas made that of his predecessor look like a heyday of good governance: under Ducas, the themes were further disbanded, the treasury raided, the civil list padded, and the military beggared. No longer could a popular and capable general lead a revolt, for the simple reason that no one c
ould field an army. As one historian noted with bemusement: "History provides few such vivid examples of the baby being thrown out with the bath water. At the end of the process the civilian party no longer had anything to fear from the military. But then neither had the Seljuks."

  Into the midst of this spectacle of self-inflicted decline came yet another misfortune: a religious dispute fraught with future consequence. On July 16, 1054, Christianity was definitively sundered into Orthodox and Latin. Three papal legates marched into the Hagia Sophia and excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople before a clerical congregation agog at their cheek. The schism, which endures to this day even though the excommunication was rescinded in 1965, may have been inevitable. The churches of Rome and Constantinople had drifted apart through the centuries of turmoil, and the West was now in a combative, assertive mode. One of the legates thundering out his condemnation of the patriarch—he had called one of the Greek prelates a "pestiferous pimp"—on that fateful day of 1054 was Humbert of Moyenmoutier. This ferocious cardinal from Lorraine was the spiritual godfather of the papacy of Gregory VII, who would lay out a vision of Europe that called for the subordination of all kings and princes to the will of the man wearing the tiara in Rome. To the Byzantines, such a proposition was preposterous, as their basileus already provided the direct link between the temporal world and the almighty.