Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium and the Crusades

Alexius I and external relations before the First Crusade 

Page 6

Both the Patzinaks and Seljuqs were Turks who, thanks to their military and political relations, came to realize their ethnographic kinship. The Russian scholar V. Vasilievsky declared in the person of Tzachas there appeared a foe of Byzantium who combined with the enterprising boldness of a barbarian the refinement of a Byzantine education and an excellent knowledge of all the political relations of eastern Europe of that time; he planned to become the soul of the general Turkish movement and would and could give a reasonable and definite goal and general plan to the senseless wanderings and robberies of the Patzinaks. It seemed that on the ruins of the Eastern Empire a new Turkish state of the Seljuqs and Patzinaks would now be founded. The Byzantine Empire, as Vasilievsky continued, was drowning in the Turkish invasion. Another Russian historian, Th. Uspensky, wrote: In the winter of 1090-91 the condition of Alexius Comnenus can be compared only with that of the last years of the Empire, when the Ottoman Turks surrounded Constantinople on all sides and cut it off from outward relations.

Realizing the whole horror of the condition of the Empire, Alexius followed the usual Byzantine diplomatic tactics of rousing one barbarian against the others: he appealed to the Khans (princes) of the Cumans (Polovtzi), those allies in despair, asking them to help him against the Patzinaks. The savage and ferocious Cuman Khans, Tugorkhan and Boniak, very well known in the Russian chronicles, were invited to Constantinople, where they were received in the most flattering way and sumptuously entertained. The Byzantine Emperor humbly solicited the aid of the barbarians, who were very proud to be on an equal footing with the Emperor. The Cuman Khans gave Alexius their word and kept it. On the twenty-ninth of April, 1091, a bloody battle took place; in all probability, the Russians as well as the Cumans took part in it. The Patzinaks were crushed and mercilessly annihilated. Anna Comnena noted: One could see an extraordinary spectacle: the whole people, reckoning not in ten thousands but surpassing any number, entirely perished on that day with wives and children. This battle left its trace in a contemporary Byzantine song, The Scythians (so Anna Comnena calls the Patzinaks), because of one day did not see May. By their interference in favor of Byzantium the Cumans did an enormous service to the Christian world. Their chiefs, Boniak and Tugorkhan, must be justly reckoned among the saviors of the Byzantine Empire.

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