The Emperor Alexios I flees the Normans at Durazzo (MED0106)

Alexios I Komnenos and the defeat at Dyrrhachium, 1081

In October 1081, before Dyrrhachium on the Albanian coast, the Byzantine army of Alexios I was beaten by the Normans of Robert Guiscard. It was the first year of Alexios’s reign; he had taken the throne by coup in an empire losing Anatolia after Manzikert and unable to afford a second front in the west. Guiscard, having just completed the conquest of southern Italy, had decided to try for Byzantium as well.

The battle

Alexios fielded a composite army: Byzantine units, Turkish mercenaries, and the Varangian Guard, largely Anglo-Saxon after 1066 and therefore with a personal score to settle with Normans. It was the Varangians who broke the Norman wing, but they pressed the pursuit too far, became separated from the rest of the line, and were surrounded and destroyed. The imperial army disintegrated and Alexios escaped wounded.

Losing and staying in power

Alexios did not retake Dyrrhachium by force of arms: he paid the Duke of Swabia to attack Norman holdings in Italy, forcing Guiscard to return. This was the method he would use for thirty years — money, diplomacy, marriages, temporary alliances — and it allowed him to stabilise an empire that in 1081 looked finished. The same logic lies behind his request to the west for mercenaries, which, understood rather differently from what he intended, helped set the First Crusade in motion.

Equipment

Giuseppe Rava shows the contrast between Norman cavalry with couched lance, hauberk and kite shield, and Byzantine units in lamellar klibanion with mixed armament. These are the same Normans who had won at Civitate twenty-five years earlier and in England in 1066.