The Conclusion of the Roman-Fatimid War
In the wake of the series of Roman defeats against the Fatimid invasion, the Roman Republic retrenched itself and braced for a long, protracted war, as opposed to the relatively quick affairs their recent engagements had been. Aleppo was exposed to the Fatimid army, and, along the coast to the south, the Republic’s authority did not extend even a day’s march from the city walls of the major port cities. The main Roman army still in the field focused on defending Aleppo, while the Romans hoped the ports that had just so recently thrown their lot in with Rome would hold out.
To keep those ports secure, the Romans took advantage of theirnear total control of the sea; the only other power in the region with any navy to speak of was the new kingdom of Egypt, and they were not interested in antagonizing Rome. In fact, the now-Christian court in Alexandria sought close ties to Constantinople, hoping to profit greatly from the key role Egypt had always played in the greater Roman trade network as the breadbasket of the capital. The true naval threat that the Romans face was the increase in piracy, now that the Abbasid Caliphate was no more. Many of the warships in the Caliph’s fleets were now without a government, and with much of Syria and Palestine in pure chaos, they quickly turned to piracy.
In point of fact, it was largely concerns about these pirates that compelled the cities along the coast that had invited the Romans in to do so; they hoped that the Roman fleet could protect them far more than they could on their own. Their calculation was correct, and the Roman fleets did, indeed, focus their efforts in the region on fighting the pirates. They also maintained convoys to the cities to supply their new garrisons, and the merchants were quick to take advantage of the free protection offered by these convoys.
Though the coast was largely out of play for the Fatimids, the interior regions were not so tough a nut to crack. The Fatimid Caliph, Nuh, was able to isolate Aleppo and maintain a force in the region around the city, stymieing efforts by the Romans to relieve it. Meanwhile, he sent a large portion of his army south, to accept the submission of the cities in the region. Cities such as Hama, Jerusalem, and Aqaba on the Red Sea all bowed to the Caliph. Envoys were sent to the remaining neutral coastal cities, but they showed little inclination in choosing a side, worried that they would become a bloody battleground between the two titans. Nuh, wary of pushing those cities into the Roman camp, did not press the issue, and returned his attention to Aleppo.
The siege was a drawn out affair, but the Fatimid army was able to breach the walls and storm the city, ravaging it much as the Romans had before them. The Fatimids then had a continuous front all throughout the region, with the Romans forced even more to the coastline. Antioch was Nuh’s next target, and he was hopeful that he could take the city and then secure peace with the Roman government, with the Fatimids in control of the entire area. However, the attempts to invest the city were frustrated by the Roman control of the nearby ports, such as St. Symeon. Reinforcements and supplies were brought in at a steady rate, and the Romans had fortified the port into little more than an armed supply depot. Any mistakes on the part of the Fatimids were quickly exploited, and, even though Antioch was nominally under siege, food and soldiers continued to arrive, with little to stop them.
Nuh decided that the best solution was to distract the Romans, and, so, he sent a massive raiding party, largely composed of his Turkic cavalry, into Anatolia. His logic was that, though the Roman Themes in the border regions were highly defended and full of citizen soldiers, the inner Themes were not as militarized as they used to be. If his men could get through the outer region, he could cause havoc in the Roman heartland. Particularly since the defenses of the border Themes were not at full strength, after the defeats the Romans had suffered so far. His gamble of splitting his army from his steppe cavalry paid off, with the Oghuz Turks smashing through the Roman fortification lines and plundering the Anatolian Plataeu, a region that had finally started to recover from the centuries of Arab raiding. The locals, however, were not quite as easy targets as the Turks had hoped, as they, themselves, had adopted a pastoral lifestyle in response to the history of raids, and the peasantry had most of their wealth tied up in livestock that could be hidden easily. The greatest success of the raid was an attack on the city of Ancyra, with the Turks sacking much of the city’s outer region. The raiding group didn’t linger, however, knowing full well that they could be cut off and picked to pieces before making it back.
However, they likely could have stayed longer, as the Republic was utterly shaken by the incursion. The government in the capital had staked much of its political legitimacy on the idea that their system was successful in defending the territories of the Republic, and such a vivid display of their impotence in that regard did not go over well at all. Further complicating matters were that the Magyars were stepping up their raids in the southern Balkans and even straight through the string of Roman allies into Roman territory itself. Bolstering the Magyar threat were the VarangianRus, the semi-slavicized Scandinavian raiders from further north, equally dangerous on land and at sea. Meanwhile, in far off Africa, the local Berbers were growing more assertive in their dealings with the Romans, consolidating into larger blocs despite the Republic’s hope that the region could be kept weak and divided. On all fronts, it seemed that the Roman power was waning yet again.
The solution to this problem came, as Rome’s solutions so often did, from the frontier, from those that weren’t entirely Roman themselves, but who were loyal to the idea of the Republic. It was little surprise that such loyalty would exist. An institution as old as the Roman state - however it organized itself – was bound to have some gravitas behind its name. Further, the army never ceased to be an avenue of integration and assimilation into the Roman order. Thus, it was an officer from the eastern, mountainous frontier, descended from one of the more noble of Armenian families, that became the embodiment of the Roman response.
AlexiosBagratoni, though a skilled general and statesman, was likely not exceptional in his circumstances or in his abilities. Nor was his idea all that novel: if Rome’s armies were not up to the task of winning the current war, then outsource the military. There were plenty of capable peoples bordering the Republic that would make excellent mercenaries. Or, if the Republican sensibilities of the Romans were offended by that notion, Alexios presented them as axillaries. His fellow Armenians were the most obvious recruits, in early AD 901, he already had a large contingent of Armenians mountain warriors ready. Slavic hill-fighters were also quickly recruited, and Alexios, now a Hypatos and one of the main Roman commanders, began to build his army around these groups, as well as the (for this era) traditional Roman light infantry and heavy cavalry.
Alexios’ first target was the Magyars, though he didn’t want to crush the steppe raiders, just remind them who the predominant power in the region was. After tracking down and inflicting a reasonable defeat on one of the larger Magyar bands, Alexiosoffered them employment in the Republic’s army. He also sought out the Rus, very impressed with their heavy infantry. Both groups were incorporated into the army, and the unwieldy but versatile force began to make its way eastward. They arrived gradually at the still-ongoing siege of Antioch, but their numbers began to tell, as the supply route from the coast was soon totally secured, with the road into the city receiving shipments daily, rather than every few weeks or so. Nuh grew concerned, and made one final push to assault Antioch, once he learned that even more troops were on their way, but it failed, and the Fatimids had to retreat. They regrouped at Tel Bashir, but that simply gave the Romans a place to fight the Fatimids, where Alexios was able to inflict a devastating blow. The fortress fell back into Roman hands, and then it was on to Edessa again.
Here, the Romans set up yet another siege of the city, but, this time, the siege was finally successful, and the Edessan Emir not only surrendered when he saw the Caliph’s army retreat into Mesopotamia to recover, but he even converted to Christianity. Alexios marched the Roman army south, toward Aleppo, which was also put back under siege. Here, the garrison, entirely Fatimid, held out far longer than the local of Edessa had, but Aleppo fell by spring of AD 902.
Unwilling to leave anything to chance, Alexios methodically marched to every city of note in Syria and Palestine, accepting submissions from those cities that would surrender, and sieging those that would not. The army was present even for the peaceful surrenders, as a demonstration of the renewed Roman might. Meanwhile, Isaac Kamateros, the brother of the slain commander, lead half the army into Mesopotamia, to tie up the Fatimids. His successes were not as dazzling by any measure as those of AlexiosBagratoni, but they were enough to hold of Caliph Nuh (and to win Kamateros an election the following year).
It was on Easter Sunday of AD 903 that Alexios officially accepted the surrender of Jerusalem (its leaders had actually sent envoys indicating their surrender months before), just for dramatic effect. By that summer, the entire region, all the way down to the Red Sea, was totally under Roman control, and the joint commanders of the Republic met with the Caliph himself to settle on a peace. The Republic would guarantee the right of Muslims to conduct pilgrimages to the Holy Land without molestation or injurious fees, and would allow the Caliphate’s traders to use the trade routes in their new lands. Those were the only major concessions the Romans gave, and Caliph Nuh accepted them.
End
