The πππππ₯π π¨π πππ§π³π’π€ππ«π was a defeat which plunged the Roman Empire into a civil war and brought it down to depths of despair never known before!
A tale of disaster and betrayalβ¦
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At the beginning of the 11th Century, the Roman Empire was at the height of its medieval power thanks to the indomitable spirit and military capability of Basil II BoulgaroktΓ³nos who extended the empireβs borders on all fronts.
However, the empire began to face new threats in Italy and on its Balkan borders around the middle of the century under Emperor Constantine IX which coincided with the coming of the Seljuk Turks who broke into the empire under Alp Arslan when they invaded Iberia in the 1060s!
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Romanos Diogenes, a renowned general, took power in 1068 after the death of Constantine X who ruled that his own son should succeed him. Romanosβ succession enraged the Doukas family whose anger would have dire consequences for the new emperor.
By 1068 much of Cappadocia had been overrun by the Turks, culminating in the sack of Ceasarea, but Romanos had resolved to turn them back and restore order to the empire.
He led a successful campaign in 1068 and 1069 chasing the Turks from one place to another over Anatolia
Affairs elsewhere, including Norman advances in Italy and their imminent capture of Bari, took his attention from the Turks in 1070 but in 1071 he was ready to set out against them once again.
The Roman Army was in a sorry state by the time Romanos became emperor and had a serious discipline problem. It took considerable effort to deal with mutineering mercenaries. His own actions, including bringing a large baggage train on campaign also did not endear him to the men
Romanos thought Alp Arslan was much farther away then he was and assumed he could quickly capture Manzikert. However, Alp Arslan was close by and knew exactly where the Romans were.
Romanos made the fatal decision to split his forces and send half to retake the fort at Khliat.
What happened to those men is not known for sure. However it is thought that either Alp Arslan swept down and destroyed them or that their commander Tarchaneiotes led them away at the sight of the mighty army mustered by Alp Arslan.
With half his army gone, Romanos pushed on and captured Manzikert, oblivious to the doom that awaited him.
The next day scouts reported that the Turks had retreated and Romanos sent a small force of cavalry toward them, still ignorant of the size of the Turkic army.
The men he sent were routed and Romanos drew up his army and sent his left wing forward which was surrounded and forced to retreat. The Turks then hid in the hills that night, making another attack impossible.
The next day his Turkic mercenaries defected.
Peace envoys were sent to Romanos with terms that he rejected in favour of settling the problem of the Turkic presence in the Empire for good.
He sent out scouts to recall Tarchaneiotes and the rest of his army. No word came back, and Romanos advanced again without them.
He made the grave error of leaving the rear of his army under the command of Andronikos Doukas, a member of the Doukas family, who still resented the Romanosβ succession.
The Turkic horse archers advanced in a crescent formation with the centre drawing back farther to draw in the Romans whose flanked were now susceptible to arrow fire while the Turks simply disengaged whenever the Romans attempted to force them to stand and fight.
When Romanos ordered his forces to withdraw, Andronikos Doukas betrayed his emperor and refused to cover the withdrawal and instead marched the rear of the army back to the camp near Manzikert.
The Turks exploited the confusion and stormed the Roman lines, routing the right wing.
The left wing of the army under Nikephoros Bryennios held out for longer but was eventually routed.
All that remained was the emperor commanding the centre of the army, including the famously steadfast Varangian guard
In his last stand, Romanos is recorded to have βlaunched himself into the thick of the battle. He knocked down several very valiant fighters and caused disarray in their ranks!β
They fought valiantly, refusing to retreat until they were eventually surrounded. Romanos was wounded and taken prisoner and the professional core of the army was destroyed.
The battle was over, but the disaster was just beginning to unfold.
When Romanos was brought before Alp Arslan it is said that he refused to believe a man in such a state could be the emperor.
He placed his boot on his neck and forced him to kiss the ground. Then he offered the previously rejected peace terms and released the forlorn emperor.
The Doukas family seized upon the defeat of Romanos. Andronikos had marched from Manzikert to Constantinople to launch a coup in favour of his cousin, now hailed as Emperor Michael VII.
The true disaster of Manzikert was not the defeat itself but the war with resulted from it.
Romanos raised an army to defend his throne but was defeated by Andronikos Doukas and retreated to the fortress of Adana. From there, knowing his cause was lost, he sent a large shipment of gold to Alp Arslan in attempt to save the peace he had agreed and prevent further war.
He surrendered after Doukas promised him that he could resign to a monastery unharmed.
But Doukas lied.
Romanos was seized and blinded.
Attaleiates wrote βwhen he arose, his eyes were drenched with blood, a pathetic and pitiable sight that made everyone who saw it cry uncontrollablyβ. He was sent into exile without much needed medical attention.
Before dying from an infection caused by the poorly carried out blinding, Romanos received one last insult.
A letter arrived from Michael Psellos, a courtier and supporter of the Doukas faction.
In the letter he congratulated Romanos on the loss of his eyes.
The fallout from the betrayal of Romanos Diogenes and the ensuing war gave the Turks free reign in Anatolia which they utilised to conquer it almost entirely.
The heartland of the empire was gone.
For the time being the empire was reduced to a mere Balkan state.
β’ β’ β’
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The Spanish Armada sent to conquer England in 1588 is well known!
But did you know there were three more Spanish Armadas in 1596, 1597, and 1601?
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β’ ππππππππππ! β’
When Queen Mary I died, many Catholics in England wanted her 1st cousin once removed, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots to succeed her instead of Elizabeth. This was also the desire of the Catholic powers of Spain and France.
Elizabeth became Queen of England in 1558 and Mary became Queen of France in 1559, a marriage arranged by her incredibly powerful French relatives.
When she was widowed, Mary eventually returned to Scotland and was deposed by a Protestant faction and replaced with her infant son, James, whose regent was Maryβs Protestant half-brother.
When she fled from Scotland to England, she was detained by Elizabeth who eventually executed her for her alleged involvement in a plot to kill Elizabeth before a Catholic invasion.
The continental Catholic reaction to Maryβs execution was furious.
Philip II, King of Spain and former King of England through his marriage to Queen Mary, invaded in response to Maryβs execution and Elizabethβs support for the Dutch rebellion against Spanish rule in the Netherlands.
The story of the first Spanish Armada is well known. The large Spanish fleet of 137 ships and 55,000 men arrived in the Channel only to be harried by the smaller and more manoeuvrable English merchant ships.
Then fire shops savaged the Spanish fleet at Calais and ultimately the Spanish sailed home but were forced to sail around Britain en route to Spain and lost more ships in the process.
I first learned about Skara Brae about 15 years ago and it has fascinated me ever since.
Stone-walled houses with a sewerage system built five thousand years ago in a settlement way up on an island north of Scotland?
Simply amazing.
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Located in the Bay of Skaill on the Orkney Islands, Skara Brae was discovered in 1850 but a full excavation did not take place until much later, after the site was plundered for an unknown quantity of artefacts and damaged by storm.
Skara Brae consisted of seven or eight semi-subterranean houses built in hollows in the ground and reinforced and walled by red sandstone found on the island which can fracture into slabs when worked.
The houses had cupboards built into the walls for storage, and a hearth in the centre of the house surrounded by furniture
During a riot, a man named Conan Pilatus conspired to deliver Rouen over to William Rufus, the king of England.
It did not go well for him.
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William the Conqueror had three surviving sons; Robert Curthose, William Rufus, and Henry Beauclerc.
The unprecedented nature of his conquest of England meant that he had to decide what to do with his smaller ancestral Dukedom of Normandy and his much larger and richer kingdom of England.
When he died in 1087, he left Normandy to his eldest son Robert Curthose, and England to his second son, William Rufus. To his youngest son Henry Beauclerc, he left a large sum of money.
Robert Curthose as Duke of Normandy, began gathering Norman lords to his side for a war with William as he clearly felt that as the oldest son he deserved England.
He began garrisoning troops in Norman castles and also exploited rivalries and tensions in Rouen.
Conan Pilatus was a wealthy burghur and part of the anti-ducal faction. He accepted a bribe from King William to turn over the city to him.
Shark attacks are usually seen as a more recent phenomena, but sharks have been attacking humans for as long as humans have been venturing into the sea!
This is a thread on ancient and medieval shark attacks!
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Shark attacks were rarely recorded in the distant past, but the earliest known shark attack comes from ancient Japan!
Dated to around 1370β1010Β BC, the burial remains of one individual show signs of a hideous shark attack.
He was buried at the Tsukumo site near Japanβs Seto Inland Sea where modern attacks are recorded.
The victim had βat least 790 perimortem traumatic lesions characteristic of a shark attack, including deep, incised bone gouges, punctures, cuts with overlapping striations and perimortem blunt force fracturesβ
Most, but not all of his body were recovered:
β’ Herodotus β’
Herodotus wrote that in 492 BC, Mardonius, a commander under the Persian King Darius, was sent to attack the Greeks.
Unfortunately for Mardonius, his fleet was βcaught in a violent northern gale when it rounds the Athos promontory. Three hundred ships are smashed up, and twenty thousand men are devoured by sea monsters.β
Naturally, it is unlikely that the numbers here are correct, but it clearly indicates a shark attack.
At the battle of Lincoln, King Stephen was betrayed, outnumbered and surrounded, but would not yield!
He βkept his ground like a lion, standing alone in the field, grinding his teeth and foaming at the mouth like a boar!β
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King Henry I was the son of William the Conqueror and the third Norman king of England.
When his only legitimate son died in the infamous White Ship disaster, he was left with only one legitimate heir; his daughter Matilda.
Being as powerful as he was, he compelled his nobles to swear allegiance to her as his successor, but when he died, Stephen of Blois, his nephew, sailed to England before Matilda and claimed the throne and was crowned king.
Matilda, supported by her illegitimate half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, waged war on Stephen for her birthright!
In this period, commanders were wary of pitched battles, and warfare was dominated by sieges.
Ranulf of Chester defected to Matildaβs side and sought to take Lincoln castle.
Ranulf arranged for wife to visit the wife of the constable of Lincoln castle and escorted her with a handful of his household knights, dressed in civilian clothing.
Once inside they seized weapons held inside the castle, overwhelmed the guards and opened the gates to Ranulfβs men!
Crusading is often thought of as mostly a French and German affair, but from the start there was a much less known English tradition of crusading!
This is a thread on the Englishmen who took the cross and journeyed to the Holy Land to fight for God and Jerusalem!
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The First Crusade was called in AD 1095 as a result of the total collapse of order in Anatolia that followed the deaths of two powerful Turkic rulers and the danger that represented to Christians living in the east and Christian pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem.
After the runaway success of the First Crusade, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was established and made up of Jerusalem and several other cities that were captured in the Levant.
As the Muslim powers in the region began to attack and reconquer territory from the Christians, more crusades were launched to defend the borders of the Christian realm and retake what had been lost!
β’ The First Crusade β’ AD 1096β1099
In 1095, England had only recently been conquered by the Normans and so English soldiers most likely went with their new Norman lords on the First Crusade!
The multi-ethnic composition of the First Crusade was arrested by Fulcher of Chartres
βWhoever heard of such a mixture of languages in one army. There were Franks, Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Allobroges, Lotharingians, Alemmani, Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Dacians, Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks and Armenians.β
However, the Norman and Anglo-Norman lords with connections to England who went on crusade like Ralph de Gael, Ivo de Grantmesnil, or Eustace of Boulogne had more prominent ties to Normandy than England at the time, and it is likely that the Englishmen mentioned in the chronicles were soldiers brought from their estates rather than prominent figures.