78 The Double Disasters
Learning Objective
- Identify the Double Disasters and their consequences
Key Points
- A number of wars between the Normans and the Byzantine Empire were fought from c. 1040 until 1185.
- In 1071, the Byzantines were defeated by the Normans during their conquest of Italy, thereby driving the Byzantines from southern Italy.
- Even more dangerous than the Normans was a new enemy from the steppe: the Turks.
- The Battle of Manzikert was fought between the Byzantine Empire and the Seljuq Turks on August 26, 1071, and proved a decisive defeat of the Byzantine army.
- This defeat and the capture of the emperor Romanos IV Diogenes played an important role in undermining Byzantine authority in Anatolia and Armenia, the heartland of the Byzantine Empire.
Terms
Battle of Manzikert
A major battle between the Byzantines and the Turks that ended in a Byzantine defeat and ushered in the decline of the Byzantine Empire.
Normans
The people who in the 10th and 11th centuries gave their name to Normandy, a region in France. They were descended from Norse raiders and pirates from Denmark, Iceland, and Norway who, under their leader Rollo, agreed to swear fealty to King Charles III of West Francia.
The Normans and the Defeat at Bari
A number of wars between the Normans and the Byzantine Empire were fought from 1040 until 1185, when the last Norman invasion of Byzantine territory was defeated. At the end of the conflict, neither the Normans nor the Byzantines could boast much power. A Byzantine defeat in 1071 proved decisive for the disintegration and collapse of the empire.
The Normans had come from the Duchy of Normandy in West Francia, which in 911 had been granted to the Viking Rollo in the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte by the French king Charles the Simple. The Normans and their new land took the name of these “Northmen.” During the time that the Normans had conquered southern Italy, and the Byzantine Empire was in a state of internal decay; the administration of the empire had been wrecked, and the efficient government institutions that provided Basil II with a quarter of a million troops and adequate resources by taxation had collapsed within a period of three decades. Attempts by Isaac I Komnenos and Romanos IV Diogenes to reverse the situation proved unfruitful. The premature death of the former, and the overthrow of the latter, led to further collapse as the Normans consolidated their conquest of Sicily and Italy.
Reggio Calabria, the capital of the tagma of Calabria, was captured by Robert Guiscard in 1060. At the time, the Byzantines held a few coastal towns in Apulia, including the capital of the catepanate of Italy, Bari. Otranto was besieged and fell in October 1068; in the same year, the Normans besieged Bari itself, and, after defeating the Byzantines in a series of battles in Apulia, and after any attempt of relief had failed, the city surrendered in April 1071, ending the Byzantine presence in southern Italy.
The Norman adv