The details of the battle that followed are only known in outline. The Bulgarians fielded perhaps 15–20,000; the size and composition of the Byzantine force is unknown, though it would have included armoured cavalry. Samuel sent south one of his commanders, Nestoritsa, to threaten the Byzantine city of Thessaloniki and compel Basil to turn back, but the Bulgarian raid was defeated by the governor of the city, Theophylactus Botanietes, a close companion of the emperor, who then brought his army to join Basil at Kleidion. Fruitless assaults on the wooden fortifications strung across the Struma Valley persuaded Basil to find an alternative. One of his generals, Nicephorus Xiphias, suggested a deception: while the army hammered away at the palisade, he would lead a force across the forested mountainside of Belasitsa to circle the Bulgarian army and attack it from the rear. The ruse worked. On 29 July, Basil attacked the Bulgarian defences while Xiphias, safely and secretly through the forest, attacked the enemy from the rear. The result was a devastating defeat for Samuel, who narrowly escaped with his life, fleeing on horseback to the castle at Strumitsa. Early Byzantine chronicles claimed that 14–15,000 were taken prisoner, but a late-medieval Bulgarian account suggests little more than half this figure.
The defeat was heavy but not, despite the later Byzantine accounts, comprehensive. Basil moved on to invest Strumitsa. Further south, he found that the road to Thessaloniki was also blocked by ramparts set up by his enemy. While he surrounded the town, Basil sent Botaniates to open the road, but this time the Bulgarians, by no means completely routed, deceived Basil. On his return from clearing the road, Botaniates and his army were ambushed in a gorge, probably at Kosturino, and slaughtered to a man by a hail of boulders and arrows. Botaniates himself is said to have been speared by Samuel’s son, Gavril Radomir. When Basil heard the news of the death of his favourite, he raised the siege on Strumitsa and returned towards Constantinople. At some time after the battle, Basil ordered the Bulgarian prisoners to be blinded and sent back to their tsar, a punishment, it was said, for the death of his beloved Botaniates. Out of every hundred men, one was blinded in only one eye, so that he could lead the others back to Bulgaria. The number mutilated was almost certainly smaller than the 15,000 claimed by Byzantine accounts, but the sorrowful trail of blinded men was too much for Samuel. When they arrived in early October, the shock is said to have killed the Bulgarian emperor, already lying ill in the city of Prespa. Samuel had an apoplectic fit, revived briefly and then died on 6 October 1014.
A detail from Synopsis of Histories, a manuscript created by John Skyllitzes in Sicily in the twelfth century to illustrate the history of the Byzantine emperors. It shows the ambush by Bulgarian warriors of the Byzantine forces led by Theophylactus Botanietes, governor of Thessaloniki, in August 1014.
The two battles in and around the Struma Valley each showed the merit of concealment and strategem in different ways. Ambushes were common devices used by irregular forces to offset the numerical or tactical advantages enjoyed by a stronger and well-organized enemy. The use of mountainous terrain to conceal an outflanking movement was as old as Thermopylae and probably older. The outcome of the two battles was nevertheless not a draw. The death of Samuel provoked confusion and conflict among the surviving Bulgarian commanders and within four years the whole Bulgarian Empire was defeated and occupied by Byzantium. The Byzantine Empire now extended its authority throughout the Balkan Peninsula, reaching the highpoint of its medieval revival. Basil II earned the nickname by which history has remembered him, Boulgaroktonos – the ‘Bulgar-slayer’.
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No. 57 BATTLE OF MANZIKERT
26 August 1071
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The Battle of Manzikert (Malazgirt in modern Turkey) was a battle full of surprises. When it was over the emperor of Byzantium, Romanos IV Diogenes, was brought before the victorious Saljuq (Seljuk) Turk leader, Muhammad Ibn Da’ud Alp Arslan, covered in dirt and dried blood, and it was some time before the Turkish sultan would believe that this could possibly be the ruler of the Eastern Roman Empire. Romanos was not deliberately in disguise and the ragged emperor was soon identified. His hapless state was the product of a long and exhausting battle in which the Turks used their traditional skill at deception to confuse and frustrate the larger imperial force they were confronting.
Romanos assumed the imperial title as regent in 1067 after a century in which the Byzantine lands in the Balkans, Anatolia and Armenia – the heart of the empire – had been subject to raids and losses to different Turkic peoples from the central Asian steppes. The most successful were the Saljuq Turks, who established their rule across an area from the Sea of Azov to modern Iran and Iraq, and raided Armenia and what is now present-day Turkey. Under Alp Arslan (‘Heroic Lion’), sultan from 1063, the Saljuqs began to encroach ever further into Syria and Armenia. Romanos saw his appointment as regent as an opportunity to stabilize the eastern frontier of the empire and if possible to inflict a damaging longer-term defeat on the Saljuqs. In March 1071, he mustered a large army of foot soldiers and cavalry from all over the empire, an ethnic melting pot that included the famed Varangian Guard composed of Normans and Germans, as well as some Turkish mercenaries. Estimates from medieval texts vary widely, but it is thought that he led at least 30–40,000 men, supported, according to one account, by a huge train of baggage and siege equipment mounted on 3,000 carts.
Neither side knew what the other was intending. Alp Arslan collected an army to capture cities in Syria and then to threaten the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt, but he failed to capture the besieged city of Aleppo. Romanos’s army tramped across Anatolia in the direction of Lake Van and the cluster of fortified towns around it, including Manzikert, recently seized by the Saljuqs. When news arrived that the Sultan was stuck in Syria, Romanos assumed he would have an easier time securing his goal. When Alp Arslan abandoned the siege and moved east, Romanos thought he had been defeated and was no longer a threat. This was to be the first of many surprises. The sultan was much better informed about the Byzantine progress and abandoned Aleppo in order to gather a fresh army in northern Iran (then Azerbaijan) to meet the Roman threat. Taking with him only 4,000 of his best ghulam (professional cavalry), he called to arms the Kurdish and Turkic tribes to the north and arrived in eastern Anatolia, quite unknown to Romanos, with an estimated 20–30,000 (the exact figures will never be known) and a hard core of 15,000 skilled horsemen.
Both armies arrived north of Lake Van at almost the same time. On a flat plain, broken by ridges and shallow gorges, dominated by the snow-covered peak of Süphan Dag, more than 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) high, the two armies set up camp. Alp Arslan was careful to make sure his camp was concealed to increase the degree of surprise when he faced an enemy he knew to be much stronger. Still ignorant of the threat, Romanos sent part of his army south, under the command of Joseph Tarchaniotes, to capture the city of Ahlat. The news reached Alp Arslan, who despatched 10,000 of his cavalry to intercept the force. They drove it back westwards, away from contact with the main Byzantine army. Manzikert fell to Romanos’s impressive show of force the same day, 23 August. No news came of the disaster at Ahlat, and Romanos was so confident that there was no immediate threat that no reconnaissance was undertaken. Only when foragers sent out from his camp were attacked in force by Turkish soldiers did it suddenly become clear that he might have miscalculated. On 25 August, Saljuq emissaries arrived to see whether an agreement could be reached, perhaps because the sultan could see just how imposing the Byzantine force looked in its large fortified camp. They were humiliated by the emperor and sent back to the sultan. Romanos was confident that in a pitched battle, even one so unexpected, his army was a match for an army of Turks.
After a parade of icons and crosses, the Byzantine army marched out in three broad sections with a fourth reserve section behind it. Romanos commanded the best troops and the heavy cavalry in the centre, armed with lances. After commending his soldiers to the will of Allah, Alp Arslan drew up his army in a crescent shape, a centre and
two wings, dominated by horsemen with bows and spears. Appearances were deceptive, however, because many of the Saljuq army were in hiding waiting to ambush the approaching Byzantines. Romanos was lured on as the Turkish crescent bent and the centre retreated. A cloud of choking dust arose from the marching feet and hooves, driven across the Turkish lines by a strong wind. As the Turks moved back under the cloud, the formation of the Byzantine army began to lose coherence while Turkish horsemen suddenly appeared from nowhere to harass the enemy units, disappearing again behind ridges and rocks, only to spring another ambush further ahead. The elusive enemy tactics wore down the patience and morale of Romanos’s forces, and he decided to withdraw from a fruitless pursuit. His signal was mistakenly read as an indication that the centre had been defeated and a panic set in as the structure of the Roman force broke up. The rearguard failed to come to the assistance of the front line as it gave way. Sensing the crisis, Alp Arslan ordered his whole force forwards with cries of ‘Alluhu Akbar’ (‘God is Most Powerful’). The Byzantine centre, the Varangian guard and Romanos himself were surrounded and cut down, the emperor falling from his horse. It was here, dusty and wounded, that an unknown ghulam is supposed to have found and captured him, leading him the following day to the humiliating meeting with the incredulous sultan.
A Turkish painting of the Battle of Manzikert in August 1071 shows the Byzantine emperor, Romanos IV Diogenes, brought as a prisoner before the Seljuk Turkish leader, Muhammad Ibn Da’ud Alp Arslan, at the end of the battle.
The battle was not the massacre it was once thought to be, since it is now evident that many soldiers escaped as fast as they could back to Constantinople and safety. Romanos was generously freed, perhaps because Alp Arslan guessed what was in store for a defeated emperor. His enemies conspired to take his throne and after a brief civil war, he was captured, hideously blinded and died of his wound in July 1072. Alp Arslan was killed in November the same year, stabbed by a rebel prisoner he had just condemned to execution. The battle nevertheless opened the way to Turkish encroachment and conquest of Anatolia and the slow extinction of the Eastern Roman Empire.
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No. 58 BATTLE OF LAKE PEIPUS
5 April 1242
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At the climax of the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film Alexander Nevsky, made in 1938, is a scene in which the Teutonic Knights, German thirteenth-century crusaders against the Russians of Novgorod, are lured into a battle on the ice of Lake Peipus (Chud) and plunge into the icy waters as the weakening spring ice gives way beneath the heavily armoured men and horses. Deceived by the presence of the enemy on the far bank of the lake, the Germans fail to realize that they have been tricked onto the ice. This was a prescient allegory. Only two years later, German armies roared across the Soviet frontier in Operation Barbarossa, a name also plucked from Germany’s medieval past, only to be frustrated and destroyed by a modern-day Russian army.
Almost everything about the battle on the ice was in reality the product of centuries of literary embellishment of an event about which almost nothing is known. The only certain facts available come from a handful of medieval texts, the earliest written fifty years after the battle. According to these accounts, the battle took place on 5 April 1242 near the lakes west of Novgorod. After a tough struggle, victory went to Alexander Nevsky and a number of German crusaders were killed or captured. The very first account has the battle taking place ‘on the grass’. Not until a century after the battle is there an account mentioning that the knights were fought ‘on the ice’, and not until 1500 is there a source that claims the Germans were chased ‘across the ice’. There is no agreement about who started the battle, although it suited Russian chroniclers to assume that the German knights were the aggressors. The very first account has Alexander as the aggressor, coming to the lands of the Teutonic Order to ‘rob and burn’. Later histories suggest that Alexander was summoned by the people of Novgorod to protect them against an approaching army of German knights and local, probably Estonian, foot soldiers.
A film poster for the Soviet production of Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, first shown in 1938. The film was a thinly veiled warning about the threat from Hitler’s Germany and was based on a legendary victory of the medieval hero Prince Nevsky over the German Teutonic Order.
Alexander Yaroslavich himself was not a fiction. He was commander of the army of the Republic of Novgorod in what is present-day northern Russia. In 1240, he defeated a Swedish invasion at the Battle of the Neva, from which he got his title ‘Nevskii’. That year the Livonian Order, a branch of the crusading Teutonic Knights, under their commander Dietrich von Grüningen, had invaded and captured a number of towns up to the edge of Novgorod itself. Alexander drove them back the following year, and in 1242 seems to have taken the offensive against Livonian territory in present-day Estonia. The early chronicles make it clear that Alexander arrived somewhere between Lake Peipus and Lake Pskov, linked by the narrow Teploe Ozero, or Warm Lake, and that he drew up his army near Raven’s Rock Island, a landmark close to a promontory jutting into Teploe. This is an area of water that modern research has shown to contain warm currents that make the ice shallower and more brittle. Most early accounts have the Livonian Order and their Estonian troops attacking Alexander’s army. The Teutonic Knights usually employed a wedge-shaped formation, attacking and breaking the enemy line by sheer physical power. This was probably how the battle began. The very first chronicle describes a fierce battle in which the Novgorod army used archers to attack the knights, while ‘swords were heard cutting helmets apart’. This account reports 20 dead Livonian knights and 6 captured; later medieval accounts talk of 400 or 500 dead from the Order and 50 captured.
That is the full extent of what is known. Modern-day estimates of the numbers involved are mere guesses, though a few thousand on each side seems a not unreasonable speculation. The idea that the knights drowned as they struggled on the breaking ice is a modern invention for which there is no historical evidence. Indeed, the first indication of such an outcome can be found in Eisenstein’s film. The film was shot in the summer so all the vegetation on the outdoor set had to be painted white, while the famous lumps of ice on the lake had to be held in place by gas-filled balloons. Eisenstein himself claimed to have been inspired not by the legend of Alexander’s victory but by the scene of the battle in heaven from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which the Host of Satan is driven back and plunges into ‘the wasteful Deep’ down to the ‘bottomless pit’ of Hell.
The story of the battle on the ice has existed as myth, used to symbolize the centuries-long struggle between the Russians and enemy invaders. The film proved awkward after the German–Soviet Pact of August 1939 had been signed, and it was not shown. When Operation Barbarossa began, Alexander Nevsky was brought out again and widely screened as the heroic defence of Russian heroes against the savage German foe became the main focus of Soviet propaganda. The battle is a curious phenomenon, projected backwards onto a past otherwise silent about its details. Between 1958 and 1961, the Soviet authorities, interested to find out more about a battle they had appropriated for their own purposes, despatched an archaeological expedition to the supposed site of the Battle at Teploe Ozero. Exploration underground and underwater could not find a single trace of any battle, though heavy silt deposits now covered the lake floor. This was perhaps the greatest deception; the battle on the ice remains permanently elusive.
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No. 59 FALL OF TENOCHTITLÁN
28 May – 13 August 1521
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In the sixteenth century, the capital of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlán, site of present-day Mexico City, was one of the largest and most populous cities in the world. It was the heart of a remarkable warrior civilization that dominated central America for 200 years, and was ruled by a ‘chief speaker’ (tlatoani) chosen by the Aztec nobility. It survived by exacting heavy tribute from the subject peoples of the area, including regular human sacrifice
s to appease the Aztec gods. It was into this world that the Spanish adventurer Hernán Cortés arrived from the Spanish colony of Cuba in the spring of 1519 with 600 men and a number of horses. He came seeking new sources of wealth for Spain and fresh converts for Christianity, but his arrival heralded doom for the Aztecs. Their capital was destroyed two years later, thanks in part to Cortés’s decision to build a fleet of small warships on dry land in order to take the Aztec city in the middle of Lake Texcoco by surprise.
The destruction of the Aztec Empire was not inevitable. There were many opportunities for the Aztecs and their vassals to destroy the invaders, despite the disparity between the stone clubs of the Aztec warriors and the Spanish weapons forged from Toledo steel. Accompanied by only 450 men, Cortés entered the city in November 1519 to meet the chief speaker Moctezuma II (also known as Montezuma). The thousands of Aztec warriors held back from killing him because of a suspicion that the Spaniards might be gods. But following the Spanish slaughter of hundreds of Aztec nobles who had gathered for a celebration in the Great Temple, Cortés and his men were besieged by a crowd of angry warriors dressed in traditional jaguar and eagle costumes and armed with slings, spears and the deadly macuahuitl – a wooden club embedded with obsidian blades. The Spaniards, together with a number of allies recruited from the Tlaxcalan people, who were hostile to the Aztecs, managed to fight their way out on 30 June 1520 and across the lake causeways, but they lost 800 of the Spanish garrison of 1,300 in the process. Cortés himself almost drowned in the lake. The events of 29–30 June 1520 – the ‘night of sorrows’ as it came to be known – almost brought the Spanish expedition to an end. Cortés retreated to the mountains north of the capital together with his Tlaxcalan allies. The Aztecs pursued them but were defeated in a battle on the open plain, where Cortés’s few surviving cavalry could operate effectively.
A History of War in 100 Battles Page 26