Memorializing Manzikert: Triumph, Loss and Making Sense of a Battle in the Twelfth-Century Mediterranean

forthcoming

MEMANZ investigates the construction of the memory of the battle of Manzikert in different literary discourses of the Medieval Mediterranean. The battle took place in the eleventh century between the sultan Alp Arslan of the Great Seljuks and emperor Romanos Diogenes of Byzantium. The capture of Romanos and the Byzantine defeat, the battle precipitated a chain of events that led to the civil war in Byzantium, a Turkic migration to Anatolia and the First Crusade. MEMANZ uses notions of “triumph”, “trauma” and “loss” to demonstrate how educated literati from Eastern Roman, Latin, Seljuk-Arabic and Armenian linguistic spheres constructed the memory of the battle for their own aims and means. A Byzantine princess Anna Komnene used Manzikert to rally Byzantine nobles around the flag of her family. A Crusader bishop William of Tyre used it to justify the onset of the Crusades. A Seljuk-Arabic intellectual Ibn al-Athir used the battle to highlight the agenda of his Ayyubid rulers. Finally, a set of three Armenian historians depicted the battle as a meaningful event in the history of the Armenian community. The project reveals many unknown connections between different narratives about the battle. It demonstrates how a single event produced several cycles of interpretations in four different cultures, and how the later generations of educated people re-shaped the memory for their audiences. MEMANZ demonstrates the multipolarity of collective memory in the Medieval Mediterranean that is not limited to the dichotomy of “East” and “West”. The analysis of the construction of the battle allows better understanding of the nature of ideological dichotomies in the European Mediterranean. It opens a new path for the analysis of ongoing confrontations, some of which still deploy memories of Manzikert in everyday discourse. In collective memory of several groups the battle remains a traumatic event and the understanding of it is important for the future of EU and it’s neighbors