The Battle of Myriokephalon
Note: this flash-fiction story was originally published on 25 March 2023, on my Substack newsletter, The Traveller’s Literary Supplicant.
By Christopher Deliso
(ENCYCLOPEDIA CALLIMACHA, 1907)
The Battle of Myriokephalon
I.
With the threat from the Hungarians abated, and order restored in the Balkans, Emperor Manuel turned his old eyes eastward again: and for a time, God too seemed to approve. How it all ended up in the place known to the Greeks as ‘a million heads,’ God only knows.
Cilicia was retaken from the Armenians, and the Crusader despot of Antioch was subdued to vassal status. Perhaps, the emperor’s advisors suggested, it was time to rectify the century-old wrong at Mantzikert, that had let the barbarous heathen Seljuks in from the borders of Persia… After all, who did that insolent Sultanate of Rûm, Kilij Arslan, think he was? The treaty clearly stated that the latter must return to Constantinople the lands he had seized from the Danishmends. And yet he refused… it could only be solved by war. Manuel was confident of yet another Roman victory; some were doubtful, voicing caution; but in the end, all obeyed…
Should any man reign for almost four decades? It is no matter. To deepest Phrygia we go, accompanying the Byzantine army past Akrotiri and over the mountains. What Manuel never understood was that the long peace with the Seljuks had been a false one; that it had only allowed them time to prepare; but even could that be forgiven, what is more odd is the apparent forgetting of the treachery and uncertainty of Isavria and its peoples, dating well before the arrival of the Turks there, and indeed well before the Byzantine Empire’s establishment. It was something about those mountains that made the people there ungovernable and prone to deception…
Indeed, the land of the ancient Isavrians, those infamous marauders who burned their own city before Perdiccas’ siege; those same intractable sorts who were subdued only with great difficulty, and temporarily, by Rome…
Renamings and redistrictings could not reverse the old habits of the Isavrians, recorded as being the ‘scourge’ of Asia Minor into the fifth century due to their habits of raiding, pillage and concealing illegitimate rulers. The forces of Constantinople were even forced into a five-year war with Isavria, late in the century…
Still, Isavria did birth Byzantine emperors: Zeno, Leontios, and Leo III. But all of them were hundreds of years, and a strict theocratic divide, before the arrival of the restless Seljuk nomads…
II.
The fighting took place on unfavorable territory for the attackers, in deep mountain forests, between the lake of Akrotiri and the larger one of Karallis, which the Turks call Lake Beyşehir.
After its deceptive initial width, the forest shrank to an hourglass, and the Byzantines, trapped, searched in vain for the other side as the buzzing erupted; a hallucination of sun and hidden archers, arrows screaming through hoary leaved branches. The emperor- abandoning his men? Coward! a petty soldier cried…
In the counter-attack, the army of the right belief cut down many Seljuks. Yet by morning, songbirds chirped only to corpses. After the disaster at Myriokephalon, would deepest Anatolia too be lost?
The commanders were satisfied, surveying the forest of dead Romans.
But then (history does not record who) an unknown Seljuk warrior cried out; he condemned his fellow survivors: did not our god, the true god, love all which he created?
Silence; then a cheer. Yes. Let Allah’s will be done!
With short dull knives the Seljuks began, with gladness in their hearts, with great care and attention, to circumcise the infidel dead, so tat they too might be allowed into paradise.