Turkish successes attract attention in West.
While the Byzantine armies had been defending Europe East, the more intelligent of the statesmen in the West had not failed to observe the danger to Christendom from the continual attacks of the Turks and the Saracens. Among such statesmen the popes were pre-eminent. They had their own quarrel with the Byzantine empire, a quarrel which was all the more bitter because it was founded mainly on the rejection of the claim of supremacy advanced by the elder Rome, but they nevertheless saw that the empire was fighting the battle of Christianity against Mahometanism, and that it was the interest of the West to help. Hence, as early as 1074, Pope Gregory the Seventh summoned all Christian rulers to unite their forces in favor of the Eastern emperor against the Turks. A few months later he again called upon all the faithful to go to the aid of the empire against the miscreants. Four years after the pope's summons the Turks had become more formidable than ever. On the one hand, they had received new strength from an irruption of fresh hordes from the East, who knew no other occupation than war, no other wealth than plunder, and, on the other, their power was strengthened by the appearance of another pretender to the imperial throne, who had applied for and obtained their assistance, and who, in return, delivered several fortified cities to them. An Armenian writer of the period[1] describes the kingdom of Roum under Suliman as extending from the Euphrates to Constantinople, and from the Black Sea to Syria. Anna Comnena, the daughter of the Emperor Alexis, says that every part of the empire was at this period attacked with mortal convulsions, that the Turks overran and ravaged the East, while Robert Wiscard lighted up the fire of war in the West, and that the empire had never been reduced to such a pitiable weakness.[2]
Suliman, who took the title of ghazi on account of his successes over the Christians, made Nicæa the base of operations against the Christian population all round him as far as the
