The Battle of Manzikert[/caption]
Malazgirt [MA-laz-geert] n. (place name) Manzikert
Who won the Battle of Manzikert, or Malazgirt, as Turks know it?
Easy. 1071, August, eastern Anatolia: The emperor Romanus IV Diogenes, abandoned by his allies, dragged bloodied before the Seljuk leader Alpaslan, forced to the ground in submission—and then invited for dinner. One of Byzantium's worst defeats, signalling the end of its control of Anatolia.
So who won the battle for the memory of the Battle of Manzikert?
At a time when Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, rather unexpectedly chooses to make Manzikert a theme of his annual Party Congress speech, that's a more interesting question.
"A great nation, a great power, 2023 is the target," he said, referring to the centenary of the founding of the Republic. "But we have another target: the millennium of the founding. Youngsters! The target is 2071!"
When the prime minister talks about the Ottomans (and he did at the congress, at great length), that's not news. The republic turned its back on the Ottomans, and he's from a political tradition that presents itself as an opponent of republican ideology. He likes to compare himself to Mehmet the Conqueror. His supporters take umbrage at a TV series—The Tudors, Turkish-style—showing Suleyman the Magnificent in his cups and his wife Roxelana in a tight bodice.
But the Seljuks—the Turkic dynasty that ruled an area from Afghanistan to Egypt and Anatolia before fragmenting under the impact of the Mongol invasions—have a more ambiguous place in Turkish national historiography.
In a way, it was the early republican elite that rediscovered them. It had wiped the Ottoman slate clean, but—at a time when the Western powers were ganging up to gobble up bits of land, or feed tidbits to their allies—it needed historical justification for its territorial claim to the whole of Anatolia.
[inset_left]If you abstract yourself from the ferocious ideological debates in Turkey about right and wrong readings of history, this re-appropriation of Manzikert seems a fairly natural step.[/inset_left]
Enter Manzikert! Enter 1071. The battle was the moment at which Turks staked their historical claim to the land. It was a battle of the Turkish David against the Byzantine Goliath, a foreshadowing of the battle twentieth century Turks had to fight against the West. It represented the beginning of the historical process that was completed in 1923 when Turkey's leaders persuaded the world to accept Turkish control of Anatolia.
Islam, at the start, had very little to do with the whole story. Alpaslan was a chivalrous knight who treated his defeated foes with mercy. His victory was a victory for Turks, not Muslims. But it wasn't long before religion—the less-loved but ever-present double of Republican Turkish identity—began to creep in. By 1945, as the French scholar Etienne Copeaux has shown, school children were being taught how Turkish Muslim mercenaries on the Byzantine side had switched loyalties before the battle. By the mid-1970s, Alpaslan's victory was described as the result of an alliance of Muslim faith and Turkish virtue. Fifteen years later, textbooks described how the caliph in Baghdad (Alpaslan's uncle) ordered prayers throughout the Muslim world in the run-up to the battle.
The move away from the original "secular" interpretation has not always been linear, but the general direction was clear enough—from an emphasis on Turks who happened to be Muslims to an emphasis on Muslim Turks. (Textbooks brought out after the 1980 military coup made much of the fact that the Battle of Manzikert fell on the same day, 26 August, as Ataturk's nationalist troops began their offensive against the Greeks during the War of Independence in 1922.)
And so it was on the last day of September this year, like a straight-A product of Turkey's 1980–1990 school system, that Turkey's prime minister recounted Alpaslan's words to his troops before the battle to tens of thousands of his supporters. "O Commanders! O Soldiers! I wish to attack the enemy now, while all Muslims are praying for us. Either I will vanquish or I will fall as a martyr and go to heaven... Should I fall as a martyr, let this white robe of mine be my shroud. . ."
If you abstract yourself from the ferocious ideological debates in Turkey about right and wrong readings of history, this re-appropriation of Manzikert seems a fairly natural step. Chronologically speaking, it seems more rational for a nation to seek its history in an unbroken chain of events stretching from the Seljuks through the Ottomans to the Republic than to do as the early Republicans did, and refuse to have anything to do with the six centuries immediately preceding its creation.
Who knows: it's just possible that Ataturk himself, had he been sitting in the stands on 30 September alongside admiring politicians from around the region—from Bosnia, Iraqi Kurdistan and some of the Central Asian states—would have approved.
As he himself once said: it's all very well making history; the important thing is writing it.
