Malazgirt

Malazgirt, known to Armenians as Manazkert and to Byzantines as Manzikert, stands on the high plain north of Lake Van. Its fortress guarded a town that had been a trading centre in the Armenian province of Turuberan. The surrounding plain became the setting for a battle whose memory would far outlast the armies that fought there.

In August 1071 the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes confronted the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan near Manzikert. The Byzantine army was defeated and the emperor captured, an event followed by civil war and the spread of Turkish power across Anatolia. The town continued under successive rulers; Ottoman forces took it during Süleyman's campaign in the 1530s. Later, local lords and tribes exercised authority in the district under hereditary arrangements recognised by the Ottoman state.