Seljuks · a Light

One August day in 1071 opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement

On 26 August 1071 the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan met the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes near Manzikert, in what is now eastern Turkey. Alp Arslan had been trying to avoid the battle and had offered terms. He won it, and captured the emperor, who by most accounts was treated courteously and released for a ransom that was never fully paid. The consequences were not military so much as demographic. Byzantine control of the Anatolian interior collapsed into civil war, Turkoman groups moved in over the following decades, and the region that had been Greek speaking for well over a thousand years slowly became the Turkish speaking country it is today.

Alp Arslan · Manzikert, 26 August 1071