The Byzantines when dealing with the Turk incursions and expansion must have been aware of their military and logistical short-comings when facing the Turk methods, primarily mounted troops (and archers), hit and run and other non-conventional tactics, and the flaws in their approach to defending their borders and territory.
My understanding is the Turks were seen as a major if not existential threat, why was adaption to this new reality not seemingly forthcoming?
Hi there,
Firstly the Turkish means of warfare was by no means new to the Byzantines and it wasn't through new tactics that the Turks managed to conquer central Anatolia. The Pechenegs, Cumans and Avars before them had all come from central Asia with its nomadic horse archers and the Byzantines defeated them at times or assimilated them at others.
What the Turks presented was a militarized migration in very large numbers and without any real central authority. The eastern frontier had been weakened in the 1050s under Konstantine Monomachos and then the Doukai after him as it had not been a centre of real invasion for well over a century and beyond living memory. The reopening of this frontier coincided with a collapse of dynastic legitimacy and palace coups. Two campaigns by Romanos Diogenes in 1069 and 1070 were .moderately successful before half his army turned traitor and abandoned him.
On many occasions the Byzantines defeated the Turks through use of their infantry's hollow square which protected their own horse archers until the right time for a charge and in general refortification of Asia Minor under the Komnenoi and the Nicaean emperors. They did this mainly by recruiting other horse archers from the Pechenegs or cavalry from Latin mercenaries but take the battle of Antioch on the Meander as late as the early thirteenth century and the Byzantines under Theodore Laskaris enter personal combat with the Turkish sultan and succeed in decapitating him.
What the Turks eventually succeeded in doing, well after the reconquest of Constantinople in 1261 and their own defeats by the Mongols was in uniting under the Ottomans after the Byzantines had made the awful decision of disbanding their own fleet as they thought it no longer necessary as an expense. The Ottomans as soon as they were paid Gallipoli on the European shore (as help in a civil war) controlled the access to the provinces of Byzantium from Constantinople.
Plenty of Turks served in the Byzantine army, John Komnenos own favourite companion was called Axouch, a Turk by birth and who soon founded a strong family that was highly influential in the military.