The rapid downturn in Asia Minor was viewed with horror by westerners living in Byzantium. ‘The Turks allied themselves with many nations and invaded the rightful possessions of the empire of Constantinople’, wrote one eyewitness from central France. ‘Far and wide they ravaged cities and castles together with their settlements; churches were razed down to the ground. Of the clergymen and monks whom they captured, some were slaughtered while others were with unspeakable wickedness given up, priests and all, to their dire dominion and nuns – alas for the sorrow of it! – were subjected to their lusts. Like ravening wolves, they preyed pitilessly on the Christian people whom God’s just judgement had handed over to them as they pleased.’15
News of the devastating collapse in Asia Minor spread quickly all over Europe. Stories of plunder and arson, kidnap and sexual violence were reported across France, for example, with gory accounts of brutality, disembowelling and decapitation recorded by monks in their chronicles.16 Information of this kind was passed on by westerners who were living in or visiting Constantinople in the early 1090s, such as a monk from Canterbury, who had made a home for himself in the capital, or an awestruck traveller who described the sights of Constantinople and recounted the conversations he had with its inhabitants.17
Alexios himself was the source of some of the reports describing the horrors endured by Byzantines at the hands of the Turks. A letter sent by the emperor to Robert, Count of Flanders, gives a devastating picture of the situation in Asia Minor in 1090–1.18 This correspondence has traditionally been viewed as a forgery, its contents discounted by generations of scholars on the grounds that Byzantium’s eastern provinces had been lost by 1081 and that there was therefore no major change in conditions in the years immediately before the First Crusade. Thus the claims about the shocking reversals against the Turks have been regarded as wild, implausible, and with only a slender basis in fact. Scholars have forcefully argued that the letter is a fabrication to rally support against Byzantium at the start of the twelfth century after relations between Alexios and some of the senior figures who took part in the Crusade irretrievably collapsed.19
It is widely recognised, conversely, that a letter probably was sent by Alexios to the Count of Flanders in the early 1090s, given the relations between the two men. As such, it has been suggested that there was an original document sent from Constantinople that provided the base of the letter that survives – albeit translated, elaborated on and added to.20 Certainly, the prose and language of the letter are unmistakably Latin, while the diplomatic and political thought are clearly western, rather than Byzantine in style.
However, this does not mean that the text is a falsification. As we have seen, there were many westerners living in Constantinople in the late eleventh century, including a number who were close to the emperor. As such, both the tone and ideas expressed in the letter could just as easily represent the hand of a foreigner writing in the imperial capital, as that of an author writing after the First Crusade. And in this respect, what is perhaps most striking about the letter is that almost everything it says tallies with the new picture of Asia Minor that can be established from other contemporary sources. The letter to Robert of Flanders also reports desecration of churches in the early 1090s that we know about from elsewhere: ‘The holy places are desecrated and destroyed in countless ways and the threat of worse looms over them. Who cannot lament over these things? Who has no compassion when they hear of it? Who cannot be horrified? And who cannot turn to prayer?’21 The letter contains accounts of the ferocity of the Turkish attacks which likewise find parallels with other sources from this period, albeit in more detaiclass="underline" ‘Noble matrons and their daughters, robbed of everything, are violated, one after another, like animals. Some [of their attackers] shamelessly place virgins in front of their own mothers and force them to sing wicked and obscene songs until they have finished having their way with them ... men of every age and description, boys, youths, old men, nobles, peasants and what is worse still and yet more distressing, clerics and monks and woe of unprecedented woes, even bishops are defiled with the sin of sodomy and it is now trumpeted abroad that one bishop has succumbed to this abominable sin.’22
It certainly made sense for Alexios to appeal to Flanders, having already received military support in the form of 500 knights shortly beforehand. Alexios hoped to attract further assistance from Count Robert, a man of similar character to himself – ascetic, pious and pragmatic. And while the desperate descriptions of the situation in the east have been dismissed by many as implausible, there is much to suggest that the letter genuinely reflects Byzantium’s dire position. Even the downbeat statement that ‘although I am emperor, I can find no remedy or suitable counsel, but am always fleeing in the face of the Pechenegs and the Turks’, is not out of place at a time when one of the highest clerics in the empire could state publicly that God had abandoned Alexios.23 The siege mentality that had begun to emerge in Constantinople strikes a closer chord with the letter than often presumed.
The recall of the Flemish garrison from Nikomedia may not have been solely responsible for the loss of the town to the Turks, but it certainly did not help. Soon after the defeat of the Pechenegs in 1091 a major effort was made to recover the town and to drive the Turks back from the areas closest to the capital. Assembling a substantial force, Alexios sent in an army which recovered territory as far as the Arm of St George, that is to say up to the Gulf of Nikomedia. Eventually the town itself was recaptured, with its conquerors immediately setting about restoring its defences to prevent it falling so easily in the future. A fortress was constructed opposite Nikomedia, designed in the first instance to provide additional protection for the town, but also built to act as a base from which to attack if it did fall to the Turks once again. In addition, grandiose work began on the creation of a giant ditch to act as a further barrier to defend Nikomedia. It was a sign of desperation and an indication of the limitations of Byzantine ambitions in Asia Minor in the early 1070s: rather than reconquest, attention was focused on retaining the few possessions still in imperial hands.24
A full six months were spent reinforcing the town. In the meantime, attempts were made to persuade its inhabitants to leave the ‘caves and hollows of the earth’ which they had escaped to during Abu’l-Kasim’s attack and return to Nikomedia. Their reluctance to return would suggest that many thought that the Byzantine recovery may not be permanent.25
While Nikomedia had been recovered, the situation worsened on the western coast and the islands in the Aegean. Once again, the chronology provided by the Alexiad is untrustworthy. A corpus of documents relating to a monk named St Christodoulos reveals the true escalation of the threat posed by the Turks. Christodoulos was a magnetic character with friends in high places. Alexios’ mother, Anna Dalassene, helped the monk secure land grants and tax exemptions for properties on the Aegean islands of Kos, Leros and Lipsos where Christodoulos had ambitious plans to build a series of monasteries. Anna’s support was instrumental in convincing the emperor to give his personal approval for the establishment of the monastery of St John on the island of Patmos in 1088.26