Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  When Alp Arslan first got wind of the vast Rumi army is not known. He did, however, retrace his steps in a hurry, abandoning his siege of Antioch and his plans of conquest to the south in favor of dealing with the immediate menace looming in the north. He sent his wife, in the company of his capable Persian vizier, Nizam al-Mulk, to race ahead of his army and return all the way to Azerbaijan in order to recruit more horsemen for the coming clash. By early August the Seljuks had mustered somewhere in the vicinity of the town of Van. Alp and his forces, in all likelihood, skirted the lake's southern shore—thereby passing within sight of the Armenian monks at their monastery on Akdamar Island—and rounded its westernmost point in their ride to Manzikert. This itinerary, conjectural at best, is favored by historians searching for a reason why the half of the Byzantine army under Tarchaniotes and Roussel simply disappeared.

  No consensus of opinion, or definitive answer, can explain the desertion. Tarchaniotes was a capable general; Roussel, a fearsome leader. Cowardice cannot have been the cause. Either they were bested by Alp Arslan—a theory favored by the Muslim chroniclers writing several centuries after the event—or they left of their own accord, through treachery, insubordination, or just plain disgust with tactics of their commander. Our most reliable sources—the eyewitness Attaliates and the Byzantine and Armenian memoirists writing within a generation or two of the event—do not mention any battle; they disagree only on the motives behind the sudden flight. They all concur, however, that no one told Romanus what had happened. No messenger galloped north to inform him that a great part of his army was now scampering back through Anatolia. The huge force he had spent an entire year husbanding the empire's resources to assemble was, in the twinkling of an eye, halved. As the basileus retook a poorly defended Manzikert and celebrated his bloodless victory there, he did not know that Khilat, a day's ride away, was still in Turkish hands—for the very good reason that no one had bothered to attack it. And he did not know that tens of thousands of horsemen under the command of Alp Arslan had taken their places in the hills and were looking out over the plain of Manzikert, waiting.

  Great battles do not create or undo nations at a single stroke; their aftermath, however, sets up the conditions necessary for immense change. Such is the case of Manzikert. What happened in this remote corner of Armenia on that day in August 1071 would set off a movement of people and ideas that changed the northeastern Mediterranean decisively. Christianity in the region, slowly but surely, would retreat before Islam, and the indigenous inhabitants of Anatolia would, over centuries, change identities. None of this, of course, could be foreseen by the protagonists—for them, the innocence of immediacy prevailed, and that was troubling enough.

  Romanus began hearing strange reports of Turkish skirmishers on horseback harassing his foraging parties out in the plain to the south of Manzikert. Normally the Turks preferred sudden and unexpected attacks, pinpricks followed by a hasty retreat, but these newcomers seemed buoyed by an unusual fearlessness. Perplexed by this information and by the lack of news of Tarchaniotes, Roussel, and their armies, Romanus summoned Nicephorus Bryennius and instructed him to take a small force out to investigate and, he hoped, link up with the half of the army believed to be fifty kilometers to the south in Khilat.

  The Armenian church on Akdamar Island in Lake Van, looking north toward Mount Suphan.

  Long before he could reach the hills, Bryennius saw that the situation was serious. The enemy was out in force. After some heavy skirmishing, he called for reinforcements, at which point Romanus, displaying the high-handedness deplored by friendly and hostile chronicler alike, publicly berated his general for cowardice. Into the picture then stepped Basilacius, an Armenian commander, who seconded Romanus' misjudgment and vowed to prove that these harassers in the hills were nothing more than a sorry band of marauding Turkomans. Brave Basilacius tore out of camp with a small group of like-minded warriors; the mysterious riders in the hills retreated before them, letting them get farther and farther away from the larger force commanded by Bryennius. When they were well and truly alone, thousands of Seljuks emerged from their hiding places and surrounded Basilacius and his rash companions. Almost all were killed.

  Once rumors of this debacle reached Manzikert, Romanus ordered Bryennius to take the whole left wing of the army and find out what was going on. The general did what he could, but soon he was repulsed by a force far superior in numbers. Just as he had said earlier in the day: these were not a handful of skirmishers out in the hills but the main force of the sultan's army, the cream of the Seljuk fighting cavalry. Raised in the saddle and renowned for their ability to loose bolts from their composite bows with uncanny rapidity and accuracy, the Turks were massed in the hills to the south of the Byzantine position. Bryennius, after having staged a brave fighting retreat, rode back to Manzikert with two arrows lodged in his back and a wound to the shoulder.

  The moonless night that followed was filled with terror for the Byzantines. Some of their Turkic mercenaries were caught by surprise outside the walls of the Manzikert citadel—as they rushed in from the Seljuk ambush, it was difficult to tell friend from foe. The blackness came alive with cries and alarums from all sides, as shadowy horsemen raced round the palisade of stakes encircling the camp, shooting flaming arrows into the huddled soldiery within. Wild rumors spread that a gate had been breached, that the citadel had fallen, that much of the Turkic mercenary force had defected. Daybreak revealed the last rumor to be true.

  Shortly after dawn an embassy arrived at Romanus' tent, envoys from the Abbasid caliph himself, although Sultan Alp Arslan could not have been a stranger to their mission. After being obliged to lie facedown on the ground before the basileus, the dignitaries dusted themselves off and proposed a peace treaty with the Byzantine Empire. Romanus, demanding unacceptable concessions, turned them down. He had mustered a great army and marched all the way into Armenia, and he knew that the intriguers in Constantinople would be apopleptic if he shrank from battle when the elusive enemy was finally within reach, all in exchange for a tenuous and easily betrayed promise of a lasting truce. Whether warrior pride or political calculation made Romanus rebuff the Abbasid ambassadors can never be known. By so doing, he made the choice to take the fight to the Turks.

  Mass was heard in the camp at Manzikert. The sacred icons were paraded within view of the estimated thirty thousand or so foot soldiers and horsemen readying themselves for the clash, the calls to Christian duty alternating with exhortations to crush the Seljuk hordes. Nearby, in the hills, Alp Arslan dismounted and harangued his followers. While the phrasings in the speech may be the imaginings of later Muslim chroniclers, the sentiments expressed are telling:

  Either I shall be victorious and fulfill my goal or I shall be a martyr and enter Paradise. Those who desire to follow me, come with me; those who wish to go back may do so freely. There is here no Sultan commanding and no soldier being commanded. For I am today only one of you . . . When some of you who follow me and dedicate their lives to the most high God die, they will enter Paradise, and those who stay alive will acquire great riches. Eternal fire and infamy await those who desert us.

  What had started as a dispute over the porous borders of Armenia had become tinged with the rhetoric of jihad, at least in the subsequent legends of the battle. Just as Christian authors transformed Roland at Roncesvalles from a straggler ambushed by the Basques into a saint slain by the Muslims, Islamic historians would effect a similar switch for Alp Arslan, making a sultan concerned primarily with protecting himself from a neighboring empire into a holy warrior bent on destroying the infidel. This does and does not matter: whatever Alp's inner life, the Islamization of Asia Minor would be his testament.

  Romanus formed up his men in a long straight line probably four or five ranks deep and marched them into the plain south of Manzikert. He commanded the center; Bryennius, the left; a Cappadocian general, Alyattes, the right. Tailing them, at a considerable distance, came the private armies of the great Ana
tolian landowners, led by Andronicus Ducas, to function as a rear guard ready to jump into the fray should the situation call for it. Even at half strength, this huge Byzantine army, heavily armored and ably commanded, would have been a sight to make the heart quail.

  And so it seemed to have done to the Turks. Throughout the morning and afternoon they fell back as the Greek bulldozer inexorably rolled forward, the retreating Turkish forces forming the shape of the crescent that they would soon bequeath to Islamic iconography. At the tips of this crescent, however, the Seljuks showed no fear. All day their horsemen displayed the nomad's virtuosity with bow and arrow, harrying the extremities of the Greek lines and luring exasperated groups to break ranks and ride out to punish their tormentors. These Turks would then flee into the lateral hills that ring the plain, peppering their retreat with a rain of arrows fired to their rear—a feat of over-the-shoulder bowmanship for which they would become famous—and thus further spurring their furious pursuers to close with them. Once away from the main body of troops and cloaked from sight by the hilly terrain, the isolated Greeks fell into the murderous ambushes that had been set for them. As detachments of cavalry on the flanks again and again took the poisonous bait and sheared off from the compact mass of the army, only to vanish for good, the advance nonetheless continued. The center of the Byzantine line, under Romanus, had barely been bloodied or even come within range of the enemy, but still it pressed on.

  As the great force neared the end of the plain, where the hills rise in the south, Romanus noticed the lengthening shadows they cast. A glance west told him that the sun was dangerously low for soldiers so far from the safety of their camp. They would have to fight another day. The basileus ordered the imperial standards to be reversed, the signal for an orderly retreat.

  Alp Arslan had been waiting for this moment all day. He ordered the attack. The main force of his army in the bulging belly of the Turkish crescent wheeled about and rode full tilt toward the Byzantine soldiers as they turned to make their way back across the steppe. Down from the hills poured thousands of mounted bowmen, loosing a cloud of arrows. Farther north, from their hiding places in the rough terrain on both sides of the battlefield, galloped fresh new contingents of skirmishers, racing to cut off the Byzantine route back to Manzikert. They met up and turned toward the startled Greeks, who suddenly found themselves beset on all sides.

  This was the moment for the Byzantine rear guard to come to the rescue, to smash the curtain of Turks separating it from the main army. It never came. Instead Andronicus Ducas spread the word that Romanus had been slain. Such, so he said, was the significance of the reversed imperial standards. The many mercenaries in the army, not knowing any better, believed the lie. The court intrigues of the past half-century had finally found their vilest, most destructive expression on this steppe in western Armenia. As the forces of the rear guard rode back toward, then beyond Manzikert, its leaders no doubt delighted with themselves for leaving Romanus in the lurch, the surrounded Byzantine army dissolved in panic, each man determined to run for his life. In the ensuing pandemonium, the shouts of an enraged Romanus were drowned out. Attaliates, the eyewitness, described the scene:

  It was like an earthquake: the shouting, the sweat, the swift rushes of fear, the clouds of dust, and not least hordes of Turks riding all around us. Depending on his speed, resolution and strength, each man sought safety in flight. The enemy followed in pursuit, killing some, capturing others and trampling yet others under their horses' hooves. It was a tragic sight, beyond any mourning or lamenting. What indeed could be more pitiable than to see the entire imperial army in flight, defeated and pursued by cruel and inhuman barbarians; the Emperor defenceless and surrounded by more of the same; the imperial tents, symbols of military might and sovereignty, taken over by men of such a kind, the whole Roman state overturned—and knowing that the Empire itself was on the verge of collapse?

  Once the bloodlust subsided, a few hundred fortunate survivors were taken prisoner and guarded throughout the night as their wounded comrades lay agonizing on the ground, awaiting the dagger stroke of scavengers in search of weapons and armor. The Byzantine camp at Manzikert, its imperial occupant missing, was stripped of all its valuables. Sometime the next morning a slave trader brought a wounded warrior into the presence of Alp Arslan, claiming that his captive was none other than the king of the Rumi himself. The sultan, disbelieving, summoned Basilacius, the cavalry commander taken prisoner after his disastrous sortie a few days earlier. Upon seeing his basileus, the Armenian cried out and fell to his knees. Then must have come a moment of realization, a moment when sultan and basileus, Turk and Greek, Muslim and Christian, looked into each other's eyes. Alp Arslan, horsetail switch in hand, ordered Romanus IV Diogenes to grovel on the ground.

  South and east of Manzikert's monumental Gateway to Anatolia stretches the dun-brown steppe leading to the foothills of Mount Suphan, a snow-capped volcano that towers to an altitude of 4,058 meters on the north shore of Lake Van. A few horsemen, like visitors from the past, pick their way over the upturned soil, disappearing from view behind undetected undulations in the expanse, their turbans the first to reappear as the next gentle incline is climbed. The riders trot along the crest of a ridge, their silhouettes sharp, then vanish entirely. The sky is a harsh blue, the air still, except for the occasional swirl of dust kicked up by the passage of a car.

  About ten kilometers farther on to the southeast the hills begin, a great crescent shape of geological violence. Their slopes are treeless, irregular, yellow with stiff grasses unshifting in the noonday quiet. The landscape becomes a maze of hidden defiles and blind valleys—the type of terrain ideal for lying in ambush. In one crease of the land where hill meets plain is a lone Kurdish village, a huddle of cinder-block cubes topped with corrugated metal sheeting. Beside most of the twenty or so houses stand tall pyramids of dung, drying out to be used as fuel once the sting of winter arrives. The local headman scrambles uphill to find out more about the intruders standing above his village. His smile reveals gold, his weathered face creases in pleasure when informed why outsiders are on his hill gazing out over the plain of Manzikert. He speaks of amateur digs—everyone has been looking for a treasure from Alp Arslan—and of how little of much value has ever been found. He has, alas, nothing to sell. Nobody knows where the battle took place.

  He is right. For all the abundant source material, we will never determine where precisely the battle occurred. The only certainty is that it happened somewhere out in the wide, flat plain below—and in the crescent of hills that closes off the expanse. With a sweep of his hand and an almost propietary pride, the Kurd villager indicates several far-off mountain ranges, some blocking the way west to the interior, others the route north to Erzurum and thence to the Black Sea. In all directions, in fact, mountains guard the horizon, mute spectators to the doings on this staging ground of history.

  Somewhere near or in these hills, Romanus Diogenes stretched out on the ground before Alp Arslan; on the plain below at the same time lay the bodies of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of the slain. The double-headed eagles on the standards of Byzantium had been trampled into the blood-soaked dirt. Although on the day of the battle Alp Arslan had used his strengths brilliantly, deploying his mounted archers to devastating effect, in the end the brave basileus of the Byzantines was defeated by his own side. Betrayal lost Anatolia for the Greeks.

  At Khilat (now called Ahlat), from which Roussel, Tarchaniotes, and their armies ran away to find safety in central Anatolia, a different narrative emerges. The small Kurdish town on the north shore of Lake Van has no monument to Alp Arslan. Instead, in an overgrown meadow on a height overlooking the lake, there is a large graveyard, filled with hundreds of headstones carved from rust-colored volcanic rock. This is a Seljuk holy place from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, undisturbed and untended, the resting place of lords and ladies whose pieties are celebrated in delicate calligraphy that runs the length of each man-sized rectang
le of stone. As a marker of a vanished civilization, the Seljuk cemetery of Ahlat is supremely evocative, its forlorn setting in what is now a backwater of Turkey adding poignancy to its grandeur. Mount Suphan stands off to the east, majestic and indifferent, its reflection caught on the surface of the lake. Of the cats that haunt the cemetery, few are of the unnerving Van variety, snowy white with one eye green, the other blue. Ahlat reminds us of the end of the Seljuks; nearby Manzikert, of their beginnings.

  The new world ushered in at Manzikert had several lasting consequences. The eleventh-century heyday of the Great Seljuks—the unitary empire ruled by a lone sultan—turned out to be one of intellectual and spiritual ferment. Nizam al-Mulk, the powerful Persian grand vizier of both Alp Arslan and Malikshah, the son who succeeded him in 1072, turned his attentions to the elaboration of Islam. The conquest of Fatimid Egypt would be left to other times. Nizam established madrasas, "places of learning," taking care to be inclusive of the many strands of sunni thought. The madrasa, an Islamic innovation second only in importance to the mosque, would serve as an engine of piety and scholarship throughout the Middle East and form an important part of the superstructure of the Muslim state. However great his contribution to faith, Nizam is also credited with fostering the arts. The Seljuk grand vizier is thought to have been the patron of his fellow Persian Omar Khayyam, whose Rubaiyat (Quatrains) makes gentle mockery of the pretensions of the powerful and the pious.

  Closer to the Mediterranean, the interplay between Christian and Muslim in the Turkish dominion would bear surprising fruit. Although the empire of the Great Seljuks broke up after the reign of Malikshah, victim to nomadic share-the-wealth inheritance customs, the smaller, successor states of various Turkish atabegs (governors) proved equally fertile ground for change. In Anatolia, where, with a toponymic tip of the turban to the Byzantines, the Sultanate of Rum (as in Rumi, or Romans) took shape, the encounter between Turkomans,