Siege of Trebizond (1222–23)

Siege of Trebizond
Date 1222–1223 Location Trebizond Result Trapezuntine victory
Belligerents
Empire of Trebizond	Seljuq Turks
Commanders and leaders
Andronikos I Gidos	Melik

The Siege of Trebizond in 1222–1223 was an unsuccessful siege of Trebizond, the capital of the namesake empire, by the Seljuq Turks under a certain Melik. According to the late 14th-century Synopsis of Saint Eugenius of John Lazaropoulos, the city was close to being captured, but was saved by an unusually severe storm. The Seljuq assaults were repulsed, and their army was annihilated on its retreat through the attacks of the Matzoukaites, fierce mountain tribes under Trebizond's rule, and Melik was captured.

Historians of Trebizond have traditionally seen the failure of this siege as leading to the termination of Trebizond's vassal status to the Sultanate of Iconium, which had been in place since 1214. However, more recent scholarship that considers the context of Seljuk Turkish history suggests that this battle should be seen as one episode in a struggle between Trebizond and Iconium over control of Sinope, the northern coast of Anatolia, and access to the Black Sea and its hinterlands that lasted for most of the 13th century.

The details of the siege and the events leading up to it are preserved in four sources: the chronicle of Michael Panaretos, the Encomium of St Eugenius of Trebizond by Constantine Loukites, the chronicle of Ali ibn al-Athir, and most extensively, the Synopsis of John Lazaropoulos. A possible fifth one is the Syrian chronicler Ibn Natif, who refers to a conflict dated around 1230 between Sultan Kaykubad and "Laskari" where Kaykubad won the first battle but lost the second; R.M. Shukurov has tried to identify those conflicts with this one, but Peacock is probably right in identifying them as a confused report of the 1214 Siege of Sinope. In his edition of Lazaropoulos' work, Jon Olof Rosenqvist notes a number of problems in Lazaropoulos' account, which led Rosenqvist to argue that he used two sources, one he identifies as consisting of hagiographic materials, and a second Rosenqvist speculates was an "epic composition in verse" comparable to the Digenis Akritas. He suggests the image of his astrologers who, upon being asked for advice, consult an astrolabe, could have come from this lost epic, as it was "a standing element in medieval Turkish epics such as the fourteenth-century Melikdanismendnameh." Rosenqvist goes as far as to identify some words and phrases that may have come from the epic verse, although admitting "for purely statistical reasons a certain amount of such verse fragments—perhaps even complete verses—should be expected in an given amount of average Greek prose."

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