Well, another update coming. A rather big, and, I believe, momentous one. Let's get back to Asia, where new Crusaders arrived after the recent Lombard massacre at the hands of the Seljuk Turks...
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As we have said previously, the Franks led by Count William II of Nevers had crossed the Adriatic Sea from the Greco-Italian emporium of Bari, and then traversed the ancient
Via Egnatia (connecting Dyrrachium [Durrës] and Constantinople) with his mixed contingent of Nivernois, Bourbonnais and Sancerrois, in a surprisingly peaceful journey.
As soon as he arrived in Constantinople, Count William II heard about Bishop Anselm’s and Duke Eudes Borel’s journey deep into the kingdom of the dreaded “
Skythikoi”, and, in a quick meeting with Emperor Alexios, expressed his hurry to join the Crusaders. By then he was, obviously, unaware that the Turks were about to counterstrike against the Latins and make the dry soil of Asia the graveyard of hundreds of their men and women. At the Basileus’ behest, however, the French seigneur decided to await in Nicomedia for the rest of the Europeans who were coming to Constantinople – the one comprised of French, Aquitanians, Gascons, Bavarians and Austrians which had merged in Hungary. Of course, the Emperor had been warned in advance about the approach of the third Frankish force whose allegiances were divided between William IX of Aquitaine, Hugh of Vermandois, Welf I of Bavaria and Ida of Babenberg, because their insubordinate troops provoked various incidents in the
Morava and
Strymon valleys.
Nevertheless, true to his reputation as a magnanimous suzerain, Basileus Alexios received the new arrivals with open arms, bestowing the stupefied Frankish marshals with many offerings of gold, jewelry and silk. Like many of their predecessors, the Franks, whose worldview was shaped by the idea that the monarch’s power had to be demonstrated accordingly, were amazed to gaze upon the gilded chambers of the Constantinopolitan palaces and basilicas, the impressive parade of the imperial guards, and the marvelous ostentation, and so were quick to provide their oaths of fealty to the Emperor. In this case, however, Alexios was in a hurry, and urged the Crusaders to cross the sea to continue the war in Asia, explaining to them that he intended to join their campaign to face the Turks.
In the last days of July 1101, the Latin army joined together in Nicomedia with the recently arrived Nivernois, as well as the Franconians of Count Conrad, the Burgundians of Count-Palatine Stephen and the surviving Lombards, led by minor
gastaldi and
rettori. Much like the auspicious unification of the princely hosts of the First Crusade, this combined host merged their forces and, after a week, were joined by the Basileus himself, who, after concluding his preparations, had mustered a force of thousands of Rhōmaîoi
skoutatoi, as well as his crack force of
Varangians and a number of Pecheneg and
Vardariotai auxiliaries.
From there, they immediately took the ancient Roman road directly to Iconium.
*****
Despite the fact that the immense size of the host would present a substantial numerical and resource advantage over the whatever Muslim opponents might appear in Asia, with the representatives of various nations assembled to undertake the holiest enterprise, the gathering of such disparaging companies of soldiers and pilgrims actually exacerbated the tensions between the Crusaders, and, like it happened with the veterans of the First Crusade, it threatened not only to dissolve the army, but also to provoke the failure of the whole expedition. For example, the Franconians and Bavarians, despite fostering some sort of solidarity by sharing the same language and the same customs, were enticed into factionalism by the rivalry between their leaders: Conrad was proud of his reputation as the Emperor’s most loyal vassal, while Duke Welf of Bavaria had previously warred against Henry IV in as a partisan of the anti-king
Rudolf of Swabia, in the height of the
Investiture Controversy. On the other hand, the lords of Nevers and Bourbon held a serious antagonism towards the feudal suzerains of Aquitaine and Burgundy, due to countless generations of petty warfare and grudges between their aristocrats. The Lombards felt alienated, having been reduced from the a large assembly of overjoyed pilgrims to a bunch of humiliated and mutilated beggars, whose apocalyptic demeanor was even now inflamed by delusional visions of Bishop Anselm’s ghost, who would allegedly appear in their camp near Iconium at midnight with a sword of fire to exhort vengeance upon the infidels.
The lack of a unifying spiritual authority such as Adhemar de Monteil threatened to break the Crusaders apart. Some of them argued that a maritime voyage from the Aegean Sea directly to Genoese Gaza would be safer, while others believed they should simply follow the same route used by the First Crusaders, while many cried for an immediate vendetta campaign against the Saracens.
In this phase of the expedition, thus, Emperor Alexios’ presence was fundamental. His paramount
status and dignity as monarch of the “golden city”, coupled with the perception that he was a patron and guide of the Crusade in Asia, as well as a suzerain of the Crusaders, made his solemn and stern voice to be heard above every agitated utterances, and so the great lords of Europe acquiesced to his command, having previously proclaimed their allegiance to him as liege in Constantinople.
*****
Like Alexios had foreseen, in fact, the Seljuks were indeed surprised by the arrival of yet another host of Franks in such a short span of time after the destruction of Bishop Anselm’s host. The Danishmend Bey had already departed back to his own court in Sivas, but immediately hurried back to Iconium to assist his ally, Kilij Arslan, who, once again, abandoned his capital to seek and hunt the invading combatants with his own crack force of horsemen, likely unaware about their composition and size (perhaps hoping that he would exterminate them with as much nonchalance as he had done with the Lombards).
Now, the Turcoman way of war depended on the presence of flat terrain and expansive fields – to capitalize on maneuverability and horsemanship tactics so practical to a nation that barely a couple generations earlier was still grazing in the unending steppes of Tartary – and so the Seljuk monarch never even considered the idea of entrapping his proud horsemen in a walled town, even if it was the seat of his court. This also explains why, as we will see later, his contingent in the subsequent battle was almost entirely devoid of heavy infantry; no sources (either Christian or Islamic) try to explain his strategy, so we can only assume that Kilij Arslan’s intention was to harass and possibly attract the brave but undisciplined host of Europeans to an ambush or at least a more useful terrain for his horsemen, like he had done before. His infantry forces (mostly constituted of Anatolian, Caucasian or Kurdish serfs as well as Turcoman and Arabic peons) were left to garrison Iconium. Indeed, the Turks had control over other Anatolian cities in the road to Syria, such as Philomelion and Heraclea Cybistra but the defenses of Iconium were much more dependable for a smaller infantry force to face such a large invading army.
Indeed, while the Latins and Hellenes advanced from Nicaea, passing through Dorylaeum, Polybotus [Bolvadin] and Philomelion [Akşehir], the Turkish raiding companies harassed their immense column, but their attempts of dissolving its cohesion or even attracting them to an ambush were in vain. By Alexios’ command, the whole army was divided in two unequal parts:
1. A smaller and more mobile contingent of heavy, light and archer cavalry (likely the Aquitanians and Gascon “jinetes”, as well as Pecheneg auxiliaries of the Empire, and some divisions of French and Burgundian cavaliers), led by
George Palaiologos – one of the Empire's finest generals –, Hugh of Vermandois – chosen because he was a veteran of the First Crusade and of all the European magnates was the one more familiar with Asian geography – and
Roger FitzDagobert – a Norman knight who had defected from the army of Robert Guiscard to Rhōmaîoi service decades before, and was likely one of the few Latins the Emperor trusted enough to assist and contain the urges of the westerners = their purpose would be to keep the Turks at bay, as well as to forage and scout for ambushes, and to chase them if necessary;
2. The rest of the army, led by the Emperor himself, and his son-in-law Nikephoros Bryennios, as well as separate divisions of other Frankish grandees, who only accepted the Basileus’ primacy because they could hardly accept one another as a leader of the whole expedition = they would try to march right behind the vanguard, obviously in a slower pace, with the Crusader men-at-arms distributed in cohesive regiments to protect the supply wagons (transported in the middle of the column).
In any case, it became clear that Kilij Arslan had merely been attempting to check their inexorable advance, but now that the Danishmends finally joined him with another substantial cavalry contingent, their attacks became even more aggressive, and he would command large sorties and offensives to attempt to assault their flanks and perhaps outmaneuver them, but were obstructed by the insistent forays of by the enemy vanguard. Nevertheless, his own delay in retreating back to the safety of Iconium and awaiting for the Crusaders to perhaps become vulnerable after mounting a siege camp, however, would in fact cause his undoing.
When the Turks attempted to cross the Lycus River, close to the unwalled city of Laodicea (from where the main Imperial and Crusader force was currently departing), they were surprised by a flash flood in the watercourse, which inundated the ford they had used to cross to this side. Now, they were effectively stranded on the same side as the Christians. George Palaiologos’ vanguard, chasing them to their heels, finally cornered them in a flooded plain further south near the river in that afternoon (and some kilometers south of Lake Ilgin), where the Turks were attempting to cross on foot and bringing the horses. Realizing they could not waste this opportunity of striking the vulnerable Mahometans, the Rhōmaîoi and Crusader cavalry vanguard attacked them before awaiting for the rest of the army, and, indeed, in this first phase of the battle, they had the edge due to the disorganization of the Turkish army, whose riders desperately tried to return from the elevated and agitated river, lest their own colleagues who had yet to enter the water would be massacred.
When the most advanced detachments of the main column of the Christian host arrived in a hurry, some five or six hours later, the battle had turned into a bloody stalemate of horseback melee, dark mud and agony cries, all of which only serves as a testament of Kilij Arslan’s tactical acumen, for a lesser leader could have failed to prevent the complete slaughter of his soldiers, surrounded as he was.
The arrival of the Basileus and his westerner coalition, however, made the scales of the balance fall in the Cross’s favor, as the much more numerous Christian host, even if disorganized by the forced march (and tired and hungry and thirsty and marred by diseases…) rapidly staged a pincer maneuver to envelop the paralyzed Crescent bannermen, pressing them against the margins of the flooded river, where one false step in the treacherous mud could literally end one’s life. Ironically enough, the tactic that the Muslims named “crescent maneuver” had been used to great effect by Alp Arslan to decimate Romanos Diogenes’ army in Manzikert, and even through a thousand years of distance one can conjure Alexios’ priceless visage as he contemplated his foes be submitted to the same grisly fate.
True enough, Alexios’ plan could have backfired, actually. The Frankish chronicler of the battle describes a phase in the engagement (omitted in
Anna Komnene’s report) in which a substantial portion of heavy-armored horsemen, led by the Seljuq Sultan himself, formed a wedge and escaped the reach of the infantry pincer, maneuvering swiftly to attack the vulnerable Christian rearguard as they advanced steadily against the main body of the Turks, held by Danishmend Ghazi. The Basileus was forced to mobilize his battlefield reserves – mostly the Burgundian and French heavy cavalry – targeting the Turkish detachment and breaking them after a violent and arduous horseback melee. After this, Kilij Arslan escaped from the heated engagement and rejoined the main Seljuq
corpus, hard-pressed by the frenzied assaults of the Lombard, Franconian, French, Bavarian and Rhōmaîoi spearmen, and the fearsome charge of the Varangian Guards, whose soldiers had wagered a prize of fifty
hyperpyra to the one that brought more severed Turkish heads back to their camp.
The Turks knew that the greatest advantage of the Franks were their mighty warhorses, so their archers were instructed to target the mounts first and the riders after, and, by the end of the day, the field would be littered with equine corpses, but once the double envelopment was concluded, the Turcomans had become so tightened up that most of them either dismounted or were also unhorsed, and tried desperate to create a defensive porcupine formations, but by then it was too late.
At the hour of the Moon’s apex, the slaughter had finally finished; the muddy margins of the Lycus River turned into a morass of blood and guts. The brave and young Turkish Sultan had stayed to the end, while his hitherto ally escaped with a handful of retainers across the river back to Sebasteia; alas, Kilij Arslan was painfully aware that the perfidious Danishmend Emir had not brought to assist him not even a third of his own cavaliers, and had made but a half-hearted attempt to oppose the Franks and Rhōmaîoi in honor of their alliance.
*****
Sultan Kilij Arslan, so covered in blood that his thin beard seemed dyed in red, was brought before the assembled Frankish magnates and threw his prized war bow before the Basileus, whose stern expression invoked the somber countenance of the marble statues of the palaces that the Turks had pillaged through this many years past. Now, in the bloodied grounds where his own men and their great horses had slain, the grandson of Alp Arslan the Great was forced to recognize suzerainty of the Emperor in Constantinople, and to relinquish most of his conquests. By his word as a vanquished warlord, he surrendered Laodicea in the Lycus, Iconium, Heraclea Cybistra and Tyana – which meant that the Empire had retaken a continuous territory in southern Anatolia, through the Taurus and the Antitaurus Mountains, securing the overland road to Antioch – but also Ancyra and Caesarea [m. Kayseri]. With this, Alexios intended to restore the defunct
themata of the
Bucellarians,
Anatolics and
Cappadocia, the very heart of Asia Minor.
To the surprise of the Crusaders, unacquainted with the thoughtful diplomacy of the “Greeks”, Kilij Arslan was to be released after but a brief period in captivity, and allowed to retain a rump fief in northern Asia Minor, corresponding to the former provinces of Paphlagonia, Armeniacon, and a fraction of Charsianon. The westerners, rhapsodic because what they regarded as an easy triumph – even if it owed more to Alexios’ leadership than their own valor – went as far as proposing, in an assembly summoned by Count-Palatine Stephen of Burgundy, that they march against the remaining Turks in the north of the peninsula to avenge the death of “Saint” Anselm and his pious pilgrims, but Alexios himself, with careful wording, affably remembered the Latins about their urgency to go to the Jerusalem, and the magnates, agreeing that they had no more time to waste there, simply complied.
The Basileus explained in private to the Crusade’s leaders that Kilij Arslan was worthy more alive than dead, for at least four reasons: (1) his martyr-like death might galvanize a more dedicated opposition from his remaining Seljuq kinsmen and vassals, or even from more powerful enemies, such as the Seljuqs of Iraq and Persia, who would be unwilling to negotiate in the future; (2) Kilij Arslan’s belief that Danishmend Ghazi had betrayed and abandoned him would only fester their mutual hatreds, and would prevent another alliance between them; (3) the remaining provinces of toothless Rûm Seljuqs would serve as a convenient buffer territory against any incursions from the other Anatolian conquerors, such as the Danishmends themselves, or the Mengujekids, or the Saltukids and others nearby, even more because the weakened Sultan would preserve his small principality with all obstinacy; (4) the complete removal of the Turks would create a dangerous and unpredictable power vacuum in eastern Anatolia, and could allow for the ascension of an even worse enemy in the near future – likely the Danishmends themselves.
Truth was that the Basileus was conscious about his own available resources, which were considerably strained. Central Anatolia had been seriously depopulated of Hellenic populations in the wage of the Seljuq invasions, and the imperial administration would take some time (and expenditure) to reallocate people from the Balkan territories, as well as reorganize the provincial communities, taxes, armies, transportation of supplies, communications and so forth. An attempt of simply reannexing the whole Rûm domain, still inhabited by a multitude of hostile and warlike infidels, could be disastrous, and foster rebellions in other parts of the Empire, even now as their forces were concerned with Pecheneg incursions in the Danube and Norman raids in the Adriatic littoral. Besides, there was another unspoken reason for Alexios’ decision: keeping a disjointed cordon of weakened Turkish polities in Asia could also contain the expansionist ambitions of the unruly
Armenians of Cilicia; a matter which the Emperor needed to address immediately.
Of course, the Rhōmaîoi had no intention of leaving the Turks unsupervised and apt to launch counterattacks; the new enlarged frontier was to be occupied with veteran regiments and new recruits levied from southern Asia Minor to garrison the strongholds such as Ancyra and Iconium itself.
Only time would tell if Alexios’ predictions were to become true, but, once the Crusaders were reminded of their pilgrimage, they gave up whatever poorly conceived plans of retaking Paphlagonia and Sebasteia from the Seljuqs and the Danishmends that they came to briefly discuss in the field encampment, and resumed their path to Syria, their goods only barely replenished by the frightened citizens of Laodicea and Iconium.
*****
Afterwards, Kilij Arslan – the recent victory against the Lombards and Burgundians apparently forgotten as a disconcerting memory – travelled to his new lair; ironically enough, it was the stronghold that used to be the dynastic manor of the Komnenoi family, called “Kastra Komnenon”, but which the Turks pronounced “
Kastamonu”, rendezvousing with his familiars and his vassals (which had been reallocated there before the Christians arrived in Laodicea), and sent messengers to the neighboring Islamic polities in search of alliances, excepting the Danishmends – to whom he promised only bloody revenge – but was refused by all of them, as the local Turkish strongmen relished in the ultimate humiliation of the Seljuq dynasty, in whose power vacuum they would be permitted to flourish.
Afterwards, abandoned but unwilling to give up, the Rûm Seljuks would indeed turn against the Danishmends – as Alexios had predicted –, making of their vendetta a violent war. As we said previously, a substantial portion of the Rûmi army, notably the heavy infantry and the conscripted Muslim levies was intact, having not participated in the battle, and, in late 1101, they already had been pulverized to replenish the garrisons of the Paphlagonian fortresses.
To ensure that both the Seljuks and the Danishmends were to remain low level threats, Alexios procured an agreement with minor Turkish princes in Anatolia, and also with the distant, but formidable King of Georgia,
David IV, whose political isolation among the Muslims in Armenia and the Cuman pagans in Alania made him a dependable friend of the Constantinopolitan monarchy.
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Comments and Notes: Just so you know: I actually had this chapter written some time ago, but became unsatisfied with the resulting draft. It was going going into a rather anticlimatic affair (in which I solved the battle with the Rûm Turks in barelly a paragraph), and, realizing this was a rather good opportunity of giving some insight in the "complicated" relationship between Eastern Romans and Crusaders, I rewrote the whole thing from scratch. For aspiring readers out there, this is a suggestion given by many renowned authors... if you are not satisfied with some piece of text, instead of trying to ammend it or reshaping it, it is better to copy and paste to a separate "may or may not throw away" document and simply rewrite it. Many times, it is good to start from the original point from where you went. Now, I gave more emphasis (and drama 
) to the battle itself, so you can remember that, IOTL, through the first three Crusades, Asia Minor witnessed some decisive military engagements between the Christians and the Turks, so I thought I would be doing a disservice to the Seljuqs by leaving them as a mere interlude chapter.
Well, I hope you don't find gimmicky that the Turkish defeat came into a "crossing river" battle, specially considering that this part of Anatolia is a bit dry, and as I don't really know about Turkish geography, I simply supposed that it could as well be subject to weather changes from the Pontic mountains than any other place in Asia Minor, implausible as it might appear. Anyway, just have in mind that the Rûm Seljuqs are not completely annihilated, even if the crême de la crême of their army has indeed been vanquished.
Also, I'm not really sure about the extent of the Rûm Seljuk territorial domain in 1101. The maps I found in the net are from very different periods (this one from Wiki is apparently an useful one), so I assumed that Kilij Arslan's "demesne" would orbit around Iconium and Ancyra, with a minor presence in Paphlagonia (easier to defend due to its more montainous geography), and not go well beyond Cappadocia in modern Central Anatolia Region of Turkey, especially considering that the Danishmends had an ostensibly even more expansive dominion in the middle of modern Eastern Anatolia Region.
I believe that Alexios would be rather overstretched by an attempt of munching the whole of the Seljuk dominion (and I tried not to underestimate nor overestimate the impact of the Turkish "migration", but the sources I've seen point me to the conclusion that, unlike the Arabic conquests of the 7th/9th Centuries, the Seljuk invasion caused a grave breakdown not only in imperial administration, but also in the very economic pattern of Asia Minor, so far agrarian-base, and which would turn [at least in some parts, central Anatolia possibly being one of them] to a more pastoral steppe-like economy. I might be exaggerating, but I think its impossible to know these details by now), so I found the reasons pointed out above rather coherent with the "Byzantine" diplomatic and military policies of preserving networks of mutually counterproductive neighbors (such as the Pechenegs and Cumans, in this same timeframe, or the Russians and the Khazars, earlier on), which could justify the preservation of a weakened Seljuk regime against a potential aggression from the less constrained eastern Anatolian Turkish conquerors. The Danishmends historically did not prove to be a substantial threat to "Byzantium" likely because the Rûm Seljuks became the preeminent Muslim power in Asia Minor, but now the circumstances have changed.
And don't worry, in future chapters we will see with more detail the situation of the Turkish, Armenian and Kurdish polities inhabiting the territory of the former Kingdom of Armenia (which was more or less balkanized by the Seljuk invasion). 
