August 26 is the anniversary of one of the great world-altering events in history.  The event itself carried immediate repercussions for those involved, but more importantly it was the spark that ignited a 400 year chain of events that ended with the creation of the modern world.  The event is the Battle of Manzikert, which took place on this date in the year 1071.

The battle was fought in the far eastern part of present day Turkey, an area which at that time was inhabited by a polyglot population of Armenians, Assyrians, Turkomen, Persians, and Kurds. It represented the fluid frontier between the Orthodox East Roman, or Byzantine Empire, and the Empire of the Seljuk Turks, Sunni Moslems whose realm encompassed the greater part of Persia and Mesopotamia.    

The battle has largely been forgotten among most of us who trace our cultural roots to Western Europe.  Its details are fairly simple.  For several years, the Seljuk Turks had been taking advantage of dynastic conflicts within the Byzantine Empire to expand their territory into the eastern part of Byzantine Anatolia, modern day Turkey.  A new Byzantine emperor named Romanos assumed the throne in the late 1060’s, and marched east with an army of about 40,000 men, many of whom were foreign mercenaries, including a large contingent of Turcomen, to push the Seljuks out of Anatolia back into Mesopotamia. 

Shortly after the battle commenced, one of the primary Byzantine generals in command of a large contingent of reserve infantry deserted the field.  This general had been involved in the dynastic infighting of the previous years, and had opposed Romanos’ succession to the throne.  He was not eager to put his life on the line for an emperor to whom he had no loyalty.  Many of Romanos’s mercenaries also deserted after seeing the defection of the reserve infantry, with some of the Turkish mercenaries even joining their Seljuk cousins.  The result was a route of the Byzantine army.  Romanos was himself captured, and held briefly as a prisoner of the Turkish Sultan.

While in captivity, Romanos negotiated a peace treaty with his captors.  In exchange for his freedom and the safe passage of his army, the emperor promised to remove his troops from the border area, and would pay a yearly tribute to the Seljuk Empire.  Unfortunately for Romanos, his army had largely scattered by the time of his release, and when he finally reached the capital with a small number of loyal troops, few in Constantinople recognized his authority.  A new emperor was already sitting on the throne, and he commanded a much larger army than that of the disgraced Romanos.  The deposed emperor was captured, blinded with hot branding irons (long a favored way to dispose of defeated rivals to the Byzantine throne), and sent into exile on a remote island.  Soon afterward, the wounds on his eyes became infected, and within a few weeks he was dead.

One might reasonably ask what relevance a battle that was fought more than 900 years ago, between two adversaries long gone and only vaguely remembered, has on our lives today.  The answer, quite simply, is a lot.  With the death of Romanos, the Battle of Manzikert gains significance.  On hearing of Romanos’s imprisonment and death, the Sultan no longer felt compelled to abide by the terms of his treaty.  With the Byzantine army in disarray and engaged in internal power struggles, the Anatolian heartland of the East Roman Empire lay undefended.  Great masses of Turkish tribesmen, under the protection of the Sultan’s army, began migrating into Asia Minor.  The peninsula that had been the Byzantines’ most important province, both in population and economic output, was now outside of their control.  Its ethnic character also changed, from a largely Greek, or at least Hellenistic and Christian population, to an Islamic Turkish one.  This was when Turkey started to become the land of the Turks.

 Byzantine Empire circa 1050

Byzantine Empire circa 1080

The very existence of Constantinople’s empire was now in jeopardy.  Fortunately, after another 10 years, a new and more competent dynasty came into power.  Its first emperor, Alexius Comnenus, looked to the resurgent Western European powers for help in restoring his Asian realm.  Pope Urban II answered Alexius’s appeal by calling for a Crusade.  Alexius would allow Crusading knights safe passage through his territories and offer military assistance to help them take Jerusalem, if they would help restore Anatolia to Byzantine control.

The Crusades would proceed with gradually declining levels of enthusiasm for over 300 years.  Their impact was immense.  For the first time in centuries, Western Europeans interacted with societies that were carrying on the classical heritage they had lost after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  Crusaders and their sponsors in the West quickly became jealous of the superior wealth, learning, and culture that existed among the Byzantine Greeks and the Moslems of Palestine, Egypt, and Spain.  Western powers sought to emulate, or forcibly take, what they found in those lands.  

The creation of new Crusader states in the Middle East, though short lived, forced a huge increase in economic activity between Western Europe and the Levant, and from there to the Far East.  These new commercial contacts created a mercantile class in cities across the Western Mediterranean, reversing the pitiful economic conditions that had impoverished Western Europe for the previous 700 years.  The Crusades, which were a direct result of the chaos caused by the Battle of Manzikert, were the match that set the Renaissance ablaze.  Absent the Crusades, the radical transformation of European society would not have occurred in the same way or at the same time that it did.

That's not all, however.  The combination of rapidly advancing international commerce, economic prosperity, and dramatic improvements in scientific knowledge also created the conditions necessary for the Age of Discovery.  The fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the unwillingness of Western leaders to engage in a new Crusade to save the moribund Eastern empire, put the new prosperity at risk.  Western Europeans urgently needed to find different trade routes to the Far East that did not pass through Constantinople and the hostile Moslem hinterlands.  Within a generation of Constantinople’s collapse, the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope on their way to India, and Columbus wondered if sailing westward might be the preferable option.

The world was a far different place in the late fifteenth century than it was when two medieval armies confronted each other in Eastern Anatolia, near a small city called Manzikert.  But the great battle that took place there on August 26, 1071, helped make possible the world of Leonardo and Columbus, and ultimately our own, too.