Chapter 6 - The Battle of Manzikert

Summary

THE I PERIAL ARMY under Diogenes was based in Theodosiopolis probably until the high summer of 1071, before advancing into “unfriendly territory” and having to rely on their two-month supplies that the emperor had ordered his troops to carry for the forthcoming march to Lake Van. Yet, it would seem inconceivable that Romanos was unaware that Alp Arslan was assembling an army. As we saw in the previous chapter, we must assume that, in June or July, the Byzantine leader was receiving some very bad or even misleading intelligence reports that would have a disastrous effect on his strategic decisions for the following stage of the campaign.

Strategic Miscalculations

Sometime in late July or early August, Diogenes's overconfidence led him to make a critical strategic error. After leaving Theodosiopolis to march southeast to Manzikert via Xnis/Xinus (modern Hinis, Erzurum province), a distance of around 230 km, the emperor decided to divide his forces because, according to the sources, he was under the impression that the Turks and Daylami defenders of Manzikert would be easily over-come. Matthew of Edessa reports that Diogenes also ordered the dispatch of some ten or twelve thousand troops to the “Abkhazes,” which is a rather dubious report in my view, although we should not exclude the possibility of sending smaller detachments to Georgia to procure supplies. Other sources also account that the emperor dispatched separate detachments of troops to march to the strategic fortress-city of Khliat that con-trolled the western approaches to the region. These detachments comprised of “Uze mercenaries and the Franks under Rouselios…[sent] towards Khliat to forage for pro-visions,” and because the emperor “considered them [Turkish defenders] of no great importance since they were few in number, he detached another not insignificant por-tion of his army [to march to Khliat] and placed it under the command of the magistros Joseph Trachaneiotes.”

There are two crucial points we need to emphasize here: first, that the detachment under the magistros Trachaneiotes “consisted of select troops, difficult to withstand, taking the initiative in close combat and other types of battle and ready to face dan-ger, and far more numerous than the soldiers retained by the emperor.”