Arrival of new enemies
The new enemies that emerged in the 11th century, unlike the Arabs
or the Bulgars, had no cause to respect that reputation. They appeared
almost simultaneously on the northern, the eastern, and the western
frontiers. It was nothing new for the Byzantines to have to fight
on two fronts at once. But the task required a soldier on the throne.
The Pechenegs, a Turkic tribe, had long been known as the northern
neighbours of the Bulgars. Constantine VII had thought them to be
valuable allies against the Bulgars, Magyars, and Russians. But
after the conquest of Bulgaria, the Pechenegs began to raid across
the Danube into what was then Byzantine territory. Constantine IX
allowed them to settle south of the river, where their numbers and
their ambitions increased. By the mid-11th century they were a constant
menace to the peace in Thrace and Macedonia, and they encouraged
the spirit of revolt among the Bogomil heretics in Bulgaria. It
was left to Alexius I to avert a crisis by defeating the Pechenegs
in battle in 1091.
The new arrivals on the eastern frontier were the Seljuq Turks,
whose conquests were to change the whole shape of the Muslim and
Byzantine worlds. In 1055, having conquered Persia, they entered
Baghdad, and their prince assumed the title of sultan and protector
of the 'Abbasid caliphate. Before long they asserted their authority
to the borders of Fatimid Egypt and Byzantine Anatolia. They made
their first explorations across the Byzantine frontier into Armenia
in 1065 and, in 1067, as far west as Caesarea in central Anatolia.
The raiders were inspired by the Muslim idea of holy war, and there
was at first nothing systematic about their invasion. They found
it surprisingly easy, however, to plunder the countryside and isolate
the cities, owing to the long neglect of the eastern frontier defenses
by the emperors in Constantinople. The emergency lent weight to
the military aristocracy in Anatolia who, in 1068, finally secured
the election of one of their own number, Romanus IV Diogenes, as
emperor. Romanus assembled an army to deal with what he saw as a
large-scale military operation. It was a sign of the times that
his army was mainly composed of foreign mercenaries. In August 1071
it was defeated at Manzikert, near Lake Van in Armenia. Romanus
was taken prisoner by the Seljuq sultan, Alp-Arslan. He was allowed
to buy his freedom after signing a treaty, but the opposition in
Constantinople refused to have him back as emperor and installed
their own candidate, Michael VII. Romanus was treacherously blinded.
The Seljuqs were thus justified in continuing their raids and were
even encouraged to do so. Michael VII invited Alp-Arslan to help
him against his rivals, Nicephorus Bryennius and Nicephorus Botaneiates,
each of whom proclaimed himself emperor at Adrianople in 1077 and
at Nicaea in 1078. In the four years of ensuing civil war there
were no troops to defend the eastern frontier. By 1081 the Turks
had reached Nicaea. The heart of the empire's military and economic
strength, which the Arabs had never mastered, was now under Turkish
rule.
The new enemies in the West were the Normans, who began their conquest
of South Italy early in the 11th century. Basil II's project of
recovering Sicily from the Arabs had been almost realized in 1042
by the one great general of the post-Macedonian era, George Maniaces,
who was recalled by Constantine IX and killed as a pretender to
the throne. The Normans thereafter made steady progress in Italy.
Led by Robert Guiscard, they carried all before them; in April 1071,
Bari, the last remaining Byzantine stronghold, fell after a three-year
siege. Byzantine rule in Italy and the hope of a reconquest of Sicily
were at an end.
The disasters at Manzikert and at Bari, in the same year 1071,
at opposite extremes of the empire, graphically illustrate the decline
of Byzantine power. The final loss of Italy seemed to underline
the fact of the permanent division between the Greek East and the
Latin West, which was now not only geographical and political but
also increasingly cultural and ecclesiastical. In 1054 a state of
schism had been declared between the churches of Rome and Constantinople.
The political context of the event was the Norman invasion of Italy,
which at the time was a matter of as much concern to the papacy
as it was to Byzantium. But the event itself, the excommunication
of the patriarch Michael Cerularius by Cardinal Humbert in Constantinople,
symbolized an irreconcilable difference in ideology. The reform
movement in the Roman Church had emphasized an ideal of the universal
role of the papacy that was wholly incompatible with Byzantine tradition.
Both sides also deliberately aggravated their differences by reviving
all the disputed points of theology and ritual that had become battle
cries during the Photian Schism in the 9th century. The schism of
1054 passed unnoticed by contemporary Byzantine historians; its
significance as a turning point in East - West relations was fully
realized only later. |