Paths of Armies Past - A.D. 958-959

It's difficult to know how to treat this time period, let's say late 957-959, with respect to Nikephoros. I've been through various secondary narratives and it's fair to say that Nikephoros doesn't seem to do a lot. Leo Phokas, John Tzimiskes, and even Basil Lekapenos all have a bit of time in the spotlight here, but Nikephoros doesn't.

Now, it's worth again that we struggle to know the size of various Byzantine actions so, whilst my annotated timeline states:

December 959: Leo raided Cilicia (Tarsos and al-Haruniyyah) to Diyar Bakr (as far as Cyrrhus/Qurus) and defeats Sayf (returned by February)

Leo may have only been leading one-two thousand men on a quick smash and grab or he could have been leading ten thousand. The optics of each are slightly different. The first is that damage is dealt, but this isn't driving the war, the second would be much more so that this was a very decisive action. I find myself at odds with this, as the contemporary/somewhat contemporary authors praise Nikephoros' military ability:

John Skylitzes, Romanos II the Younger, 4: "In this year (e.g. the year 960) Romanos sent the magister Nikephoros Phokas (who had already been promoted domestic of the scholai for the East by the emperor Constantine and had achieved many victories against the Saracens of the East, completely subduing Karamenes, emir of Tarsos, Chamdan, emir of Aleppo and Izeth, emir of Tripoli) against the Saracens of Crete.

Skylitzes is a somewhat anti-Phokas source on the whole. There's far less aggrandising of Nikephoros in Skylitzes than in Leo the Deacon, Nikephoros motives are made out to be more selfish, and a greater quantity of scorn on his policy is shown. Despite that, Skylitzes is attributing many victories to Nikephoros personally in this time period. We just don't know what they are, this will happen again at other points too. An example is in Nikephoros' letter to the calpih al-Muti, written in 964, which I've seen translated as, "At the battle of Kleisoura your warriors fled like a herd of animals..." I've checked in every way I can, there is no other record of any specific "battle of Kleisoura", but that would seem to just be a flaw in our other sources.

An element of this is that this timespan is still during the reign of Constantine VII, who had been under the thumb of the former admiral Romanos Lekapenos for twenty-five years. Constantine was hardly going to invest so much power into one individual that they could challenge him and so he spreads out the commands moreso perhaps. An example is the command he gives to the currently small-player Basil Lekapenos, a loyal eunuch who could never pose any threat to any person in power, except for ousting Joseph Bringas, couping Nikephoros II, reportedly poisoning John I, and finally sidelining Basil II. This could explain the lack of verifiable actions that Nikephoros had, as a political move. Or he could be training the armies still, in time, we'll talk about Nikephoros' military manuals and the references to training soldiers in the histories.

If I'm saying that Nikephoros was denied some of the limelight here by Constantine VII, the flipside is that Romanos II will soon be in charge. The young headstrong fun-loving emperor with a need to secure his own victorious credentials would invest increased amounts of consolidated power into one individual, Nikephoros, for the most spectacular campaigns that Byzantium had seen for several hundred years.

To go back to the chronology, our next military action is recorded to have occured in May 958: John Tzimiskes captures Dara and Nisibis and wins a crushing victory against the Naja al-Kasaki, Sayf's leading general, killing 5000 out of 10000 and capturing 2500 more. In the autumn of 958, he was joined by Basil Lekapenos' force and together they storm Samosata and the fortress of Raban. John and Basil win another battle (taking place between 18 October and 15 November 958) against Sayf al-Dawla with over 1700 of Sayf’s cavalry being captured.

This was one of the more significant set of events in the war and it gives us the title of our post, as Roman armies hadn't ranged as far as Dara in about three hundred years. For completeness, I will link you to my videos on the A.D. 530 Battle of Dara fought by Belisarius, as one of my previous history projects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgTE_nE9LpA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3sO1TR4ngM

That, along with Leo's raid we mentioned at the beginning, takes us to the death of Constantine VII, who died on the 9th of November A.D. 959. Constantine's son, Romanos II, is about to come take the purple and, with that, we will come to Nikephoros taking Crete.