Manzikert and the Turks come to Anatolia

The Turks’ story begins far from Turkey. Turkic-speaking peoples appear in Chinese and other records in the steppes of Mongolia and Central Asia; the first state to call itself “Türk”, the Göktürk khaganate, arose in the sixth century, and its eighth-century Orkhon inscriptions in Mongolia are the oldest texts in a Turkic language. Over the following centuries Turkic peoples moved west, many of them into the Islamic world as soldiers, and converted to Islam.^•

The Seljuks

In the eleventh century one Oghuz Turkic clan, the Seljuks, swept out of Central Asia, took Iran and in 1055 entered Baghdad as protectors of the Abbasid caliph. Their rulers took the title of sultan, governed through Persian bureaucrats and spoke a Turkish shaped by Persian culture.^•

The battle

In 1071 the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes marched east with a large, mixed army to secure the frontier. The Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan, who had been campaigning towards Fatimid Syria, turned to meet him. On 26 August, near Manzikert (today Malazgirt, north of Lake Van), the Byzantine army broke. Part of it, under a rival of Romanos, apparently left the field, and the emperor himself was captured, the first Roman emperor taken prisoner by a Muslim ruler.^•

Alp Arslan treated him with famous courtesy. Muslim chronicles tell how the sultan asked the emperor what he would have done had their positions been reversed; Romanos admitted he would have had him flogged; the sultan let him go on terms. Romanos returned home only to be overthrown, blinded and killed in a Byzantine civil war.^•

Opening Anatolia

The battle itself was not a massacre, and Alp Arslan did not set out to conquer Anatolia. What mattered was what followed: Byzantium’s civil wars left the frontier undefended, and Turkmen bands spread across the plateau within a decade. A branch of the Seljuks set up the Sultanate of Rum, “Rome”, with its capital eventually at Konya, which for two centuries was a brilliant centre of Persianate Islamic culture, where the poet Rumi lived and taught.^•

Over the next centuries, through settlement, conversion and intermarriage, Anatolia slowly became mainly Turkish-speaking and Muslim, though Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, Syriac and other communities remained across it until the twentieth century. Historians generally agree that modern Turks descend both from Central Asian incomers and from the much larger population of Anatolia they joined.^•

The memory

Carole Hillenbrand has shown how Manzikert grew in later memory, from a moment in Muslim chronicles to a founding myth of Turkish nationalism in the twentieth century. In recent years the Turkish state has marked the anniversary with large ceremonies at Malazgirt, linking Alp Arslan to the 1922 victory over Greece and to the present.^•

Why it matters today