Decline of the Byzantine Empire
In the 11th century the empire experienced a major catastrophe in which most of its distant territories in Anatolia were lost to the Seljuks following the Battle of Manzikert and ensuing civil war.
In 1203, the imprisoned former emperor Alexios IV Angelos escaped jail and fled to the west, where he promised the leaders of the Fourth Crusade generous payment if they would help him regain the throne.
Two separate periods of civil war, again making extensive use of Turkish, Serbian and even Catalan troops, often operating independently under their own commanders, and often raiding and destroying Byzantine lands in the process, ruined the domestic economy and left the state virtually powerless and overrun by its enemies.
The Serbian king Stefan Uroš IV Dušan made significant territorial gains in Byzantine Macedonia in 1345 and conquered large swathes of Thessaly and Epirus in 1348.
While civil war was exhausting Byzantium, the Turks conducted frequent [naval] incursions from Asia with the help of monemes and triremes [galley ships], making their way with impunity into Thrace, especially during harvest season, seizing livestock, carrying off women and children into slavery, and causing such evils that these regions afterward remained depopulated and uncultivated.
[8] The army demanded Constantine VIII's daughters ascend to the throne of their relation to Basil II, leading several marriages, and increasing power for the courtly faction.
As civil wars broke out, and tensions between courtly and military factions reached a zenith, the demand for soldiers led to the hiring of Turkish mercenaries.
[11][12] Reliance on foreign military intervention, and sponsorship for political motives, continued even during the Komnenian Restoration, Alexius I used Turkish mercenaries in the civil wars he participated in with Nikephoros III Botaneiates.
Economic concessions to the Italian Republics of Venice and Genoa weakened the empire's control over its finances, especially from the ascension of Michael VIII Palaiologos in the 13th century onward.
[13] This further led to competition between Venice, and Genoa to get emperors on the throne who supported their respective trade agenda to the detriment of the other, adding another level of instability to the Byzantine political process.
Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos signed a union with the Catholic church in the 13th century in the hope of staving off the Western attack, but the policy had mixed results.
More serious was the opposition of the sons of Michael of Epirus, Nikephoros I Komnenos Doukas and his half-brother John the Bastard: they posed as the defenders of Orthodoxy and gave support to the anti-unionists fleeing Constantinople.
The Arsenite party found widespread support amongst the discontented in the Anatolian provinces, and Michael responded there with similar viciousness: according to Vryonis, "These elements were either removed from the armies or else, alienated, they deserted to the Turks".
[21] Another attempt to clear the encroaching Turkmen from the Meaender valley in 1278 found limited success, but Antioch on the Maeander was irretrievably lost as were Tralles and Nyssa four years later.
John called a final synod at Neopatras in December 1277, where an anti-unionist council of eight bishops, a few abbots, and one hundred monks, again anathematized the Emperor, Patriarch, and Pope.
[25][26] When the Turks invaded their land, the Armenians doggedly resisted and likely would have continued to defend themselves, but in 1045 Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, (believing that this mountainous region would serve as an effective barrier against any eastern powers) annexed and disarmed significant areas of their kingdom, and took much of its wealth back to Constantinople.
The Byzantine policy of removing important lords from their Armenian lands and settling them elsewhere (principally on imperial territory, in Cappadocia and northern Mesopotamia) proved to be extremely shortsighted in two ways.
The overextended Byzantines had found themselves sharing a wide border with a large and powerful empire of Nomadic horse archers whose style of fighting they were not used to, and they could no longer rely on the Armenians (who they had disarmed and persecuted) for assistance.
Concern for the frontier and its defence was largely dropped; the empire’s resources were spent on the luxuries of the civil bureaucracy, which came to dominate the byzantine government and ruled in all but name.
The indifferent and “squanderous” lifestyle of Empress Zoe Porphyrogenita was the beginning of the "utter decline in our national affairs and the cause of our subsequent humiliation,” says Michael Psellus.
[34] During this time, recruitment of the Anatolian peasants whom the Byzantines relied on for many centuries drastically fell; “indifferent foreigners were enlisted, arms, artillery and warlike stores neglected, and castles and fortresses allowed to fall in ruin.”[35] In short, “the legacy of the civilian bureaucrats and of the emperors who were their nominees and puppets—profligate spenders on their own ostentations and miserly providers for their armies—was a defenseless Asia Minor.
Eventually, the Arabic threat would begin to fracture and wane while Byzantium itself rebuilt strength and was able to tame its western frontiers, absorbing Bulgaria and vassalizing countries such as Croatia.
[38] In the north, new tribes of nomadic raiders such as the Pechenegs and Cumans would begin to raid across the Danube, creating a third front for the Imperial armies to deal with, in addition to both Norman and Turkish wars.
The cumulative result of perpetually insecure borders was a mostly gradual, though at times dire, inability to respond to major threats simultaneously and a continual drain on fiscal and military resources.
[41] These fronts never totally closed, only compounding the problem and leaving Byzantium ripe for damage from a powerful opponent, as it would suffer in the 1080s to the Seljuks and 1204 to the fourth crusade.
The result was a weakening of the Byzantine defenses in the region, which, when combined with insufficient resources and incompetent leadership, led to the complete loss of all the empire's Asian territory to the Turks by 1338.
From the middle of the eleventh century, and especially after the battle of Malazgirt [Manzikurt] (1071), the Seljuks spread throughout the whole Asia Minor peninsula, leaving terror, panic and destruction in their wake.
On their departure all that was left were devastated fields, trees cut down, mutilated corpses and towns driven mad by fear or in flames.’”’ At Armorium, it is said, 100,000 people perished, and at Touch 120,000 were massacred and 150,000 sold into slavery—thus the destruction went on.
In a few years Cappadocia, Phrygia, Bithynia, and Paphlagonia lost the greater part of their Greek population.” J. Laurent writes further:“In brief, the population of Asia Minor vanished before the Turks.
And as they fell fallow, the Turks with their tents and their flocks wandered over them contentedly, as they had done in the deserts out of which they had come"[44] Demetrios Cydones on the Turkish depredations in Anatolia:[45] They took from us all the lands which we enjoyed from the Hellespont eastward to the mountains of Armenia.
