In Glory to the Turks!, Gary Brecher colorfully describes what happened when the Seljuk Turks met the Byzantines:
With great generals like Belisarius leading an army of Greek infantry and Hunnish mercenaries, the Byzantines had held the East and even, for a while, reconquered a good bit of the Western Empire from the Vandals and Visigoths.Then they ran into the Seljuks, and stock in Byzantium, Inc. fell faster than a dot-com in 2000. The decisive battle was at Manzikert in eastern Turkey in 1071, only five years after the battle of Hastings. Everybody knows Hastings, but nobody knows about Manzikert, a much more important battle.
Manzikert was typical of what happened when Western infantry faced Steppe warriors firing composite bows. The Byzantines spotted the Turks and advanced toward them. But the Turks refused to let them get close enough to use their swords. Instead they teased the Greeks — let them get close, then suddenly turned and dropped the front rank with a shower of armor-piercing arrows before galloping back out of range.
Time after time the Greeks slogged up close to the Turkish horsemen and were slaughtered by a sudden volley of arrows.
After marching for hours through the heat (it was August), pursuing an enemy who hit and ran before you could touch him, and watching men fall all around them with little feathered darts sticking out of their throats or eyes, the Byzantine troops began to get spooked. They stopped advancing and started to fall back uneasily, not sure what to do next.
This was the moment Steppe warriors lived for. As any war fan knows, it’s much harder to fall back in good order than to advance. The Turks started to herd the Byzantines the way Steppe nomads had been herding their flocks for centuries, driving small groups of foot soldiers into ravines that made perfect killing zones. It was Little Big Horn, but on a huge scale: the Turks had 100,000 horsemen in the fight, and the Byzantine army about 70,000.