Battle of Myriokephalon

September 17, 1176

Manuel I Komnenos marched a huge Byzantine army into a steep Anatolian pass and found it blocked with felled trees. The Seljuk Sultan Kilij Arslan II's cavalry poured down from the heights and destroyed the column. The defeat ended Byzantine hopes of reconquering central Anatolia. Manuel compared the disaster to Manzikert a century earlier, and the parallel was apt: both battles marked irreversible stages in the Turkish absorption of Asia Minor.