On a hot August day in 1071, on an arid upland valley in Armenian, the Eastern Roman/Byzantine army marched out of camp to battle the forces of the Seljuk Turkish Sultan, Alp Arslan. There, near the town of Manzikert, the course of medieval history and the map of the Near East would be changed forever. It was a seminal moment, that would set in motion a chain of events whose impact is felt to this day.
The Eastern Roman Empire was the strongest and most developed nation in Europe and the Near East. (The term “Byzantine” was an invention by later historians, and would have seemed bizarre to the men of the time, who thought of themselves as “Romans”, and their land Romania. In Greek, the language of the Empire, their realm was called Basileia Rhōmaiōn; and in the West was referred to in Latin as the Imperium Romanum.) It possessed the only truly professional army in the world, the linear descendant of the armies of the Caesars. At its greatest extent, under the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, the Empire had stretched from Spain to the Euphrates River.
However, since the Muslim conquests of the 7th century, the Empire had shrunk to an area encompassing the Balkans in Europe, and the Anatolian peninsula in Asia. Under the warrior Macedonian Dynasty of emperors, the Romans had pushed back in both the east and the west. Only two generations earlier the “hero Emperor” Basil II had pushed the borders of the empire to their largest extent since the days of Justinian (see “Greatest Commanders of the Middle Ages“). The Muslim Emirates of Eastern Anatolia had been conquered and all of Anatolia was reclaimed for the Empire. Armenia, long a battleground between Rome and whatever power ruled in Persia, was again part of the Empire. Even southern Italy once again bowed to the Emperor in Constantinople.
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https://deadliestblogpage.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/the-battle-of-manzikert-byzantiums-terrible-day/
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