Before we start this video, I'd like to just give a quick shout out to my fellow history YouTuber, the Armchair historian.

He's just released a video on the Ottoman Siege of Vienna, so I highly recommend going and checking that out if you're interested in the dynasty that eventually arose from the ashes of the Seljuk Turks.

In 1016, dark omens hung over the remote Christian kingdom of Vaspurikhan, nestled on the southern edge of the Armenian plateau,

at the foot of the Holy Mountain Ararat, supposedly the site where Noah's Ark first made landfall

some 5,000 years before. This was Bible country, home to farmers and townspeople for almost

as long as farming had existed. The ruling Atsuni dynasty held sway here for a thousand years and more,

surviving foreign occupation by successive regimes of Persian and Arab conquerors.

And now, after all that history, hemmed in by the increasingly mighty Eastern Roman Empire on its western side,

and the collapsing Abbasid Caliphate to the east,

the future looked bleak for this small nation.

The neighbouring kingdom of Tao had already surrendered at the end of the 10th century, becoming

yet another province in the ever-growing empire of the Byzantine Emperor Basil II,

ascendant from his near perpetual wars of conquest in the Balkans,

and now Basporican was on the agenda.

But it wasn't to be from the West that the final death knell would come for the mountain kingdom.

Of late, shadowed horse riders had been spotted, making their way carefully across the eastern borderlands.

Just a few individuals at first, no threat to the multitudes of fortresses and 10,000 strong

artsrooney army that held sway in the region. Though the more astute would have noted that

these outriders were merely scouting out the land. Lo and behold, before long, seemingly endless columns of riders came thundering in across the plains,

raining down arrows to blot out the sky and leaving death in their wake.

These were horse nomads,

entire clans displaced from their original pasture lands

...