Manzikert Disaster

[Pappy]

What if Manzikert turned out to be worse than it already was, how fast could the Turks have finished off the Byzantines, twenty years, thirty? Everyone always goes for the, Byzantines win at Manzikert. Well what if we swing the other way and completely annihilate them.

Lets say that two thirds of the the Byzantine Army is lost, along with Michael Doukas, and bother Co-Emperors are captured. Would there be enough chaos to allow the Turks to reach and potentially take Constantinople early?

 

[Basileus Giorgios]

Probably not, no. As far as I'm aware (though I could easily be wrong), the Turks had no fleet, and would have been unable to properly blockade Constantinople: they would even have had difficulties getting across the Straits. For this to be workable, you'd need a more determined Norman assault from the West too, and maybe a Bulgar uprising, to really throw the Empire off balance. Even then though, the ERE wouldn't have been in such a bad state as it was when it defeated the Caliphate in 718.