Nikephoros Phokas retakes Crete: the siege of Chandax

Since Andalusian exiles had seized Crete in the 820s, Byzantium had repeatedly failed to recover it: the expeditions of 842–843, of 911 under the admiral Himerios (177 ships) and of 949 under the eunuch chamberlain Constantine Gongyles (128 ships) all ended in defeat. Christos Makrypoulias explains these failures by the difficulty of supplying a long siege far from home and by the Cretans’ strategy of waiting behind the walls of Chandax until the besiegers were exhausted. Constantine VII began preparing a new attempt before his death in 959; his son Romanos II, urged by the chief minister Joseph Bringas, entrusted it to the Domestic of the Schools of the East, Nikephoros Phokas, a veteran of the eastern wars. The expedition, which sailed in June or July 960, was far larger than its predecessors, and its fleet included, according to Leo the Deacon, many dromons equipped with Greek fire.

Leo the Deacon says that the Arabs met the landing in battle order and were driven back into Chandax; Theophanes Continuatus and the poet Theodosios the Deacon say that the landing was unopposed. The city, protected by the sea and by a broad rampart with two deep moats, withstood a first assault, and Nikephoros fortified a camp before its walls while the fleet blockaded it from the sea. A foraging column under Nikephoros Pastilas, strategos of the Thracesians, was ambushed and destroyed. Nikephoros then sealed off the landward side of the city with a line of works from shore to shore, fell by night on a relief army gathering on a nearby hill — some 40,000 men, according to Leo — wiped it out, and had the heads of the dead set on stakes before the walls or hurled into the city. A second assault was beaten off, and the Byzantines settled down to blockade Chandax through the winter. The emir Abd al-Aziz ibn Shu'ayb sought help from the Ikhshidids of Egypt and from the Fatimid caliph al-Mu'izz, who threatened Romanos with the end of their truce of 958 and proposed that the Egyptian and Fatimid fleets meet in May 961, but Chandax fell before any help could sail. In March 961, while a battering ram held the defenders’ attention, sappers brought down a long stretch of the wall, and on 6 March (7 March in some accounts) the Byzantines broke into the city, which was given over to three days of plunder.

The emir, his son al-Nu'man (Anemas) and their family were taken to Constantinople and paraded at the celebration of the victory; Romanos II gave them an estate, and Anemas, baptized, later served as a Byzantine officer and fell fighting the Rus’ at Dorostolon in 971. Muslim inhabitants were killed or enslaved; Crete became a theme with its strategos at Chandax, new settlers were brought in, and missionaries such as Nikon “the Metanoeite” converted the remaining population. The reconquest gave Byzantium back control of the Aegean, but while its forces were committed to Crete and the East, the Fatimids completed the conquest of Sicily, taking Rometta in 965. Nikephoros, the hero of the campaign, became emperor in 963 and carried the war into Cilicia and Syria. The main accounts — Leo the Deacon’s History, Theodosios’s poem The Capture of Crete (961/962) and the continuation of the chronicle of Symeon the Logothete — are near-contemporary, but Anthony Kaldellis has pointed out that the last borrows much of its narrative, often word for word, from Procopius’s account of Belisarius’s expedition against the Vandals.