On Sieges and Warfare

I've been doing some thinking and what I want to do is discuss the topics broadly and stay tightly focussed to the narrative. This is like mixing custard and port, maybe a very good chef could make it work, but I don't think I'm up to it. You might be able to tell that this specifric blog will be more conversational, in an attempt to less conversational in the narrative blogs.

This blog will be a deeper dive into warfare and Nikephoros. How does one carry out a siege? There are a time-tested few methods to carry out a siege.

The first is to break in before the enemy know that the siege has started, which is effectively the optimised outcome and something that Nikephoros would pull off at least once, at Manbij/Hierapolis. This is sort of the finesse move and it requires aggressive officers, a fast-moving army, and to actually visit the city/fortress in question. That's a one trick pony and can hardly be relied upon, although it's never hurts much to try it.

The second approach is probably Nikephoros' favourite strategy; I jokingly think of it as the "one-week-wonder"; take your army and rock up to a city, spend a week patrolling around the walls and look for weak spots, and, if you find a weak spot, take the city with an assault (e.g. Aleppo 962). But this is where it gets clever in the horrifyingly awesome way that medieval warfare often is. If you fail to take the city, you loot and burn the suburbs (the city outside the walls), displace the citizenry, cause mayhem, but you take measurements of the walls, notes on specific equipment that you may not have, but could the next time. The sources somewhat suggest that this happened at Mopsuestia from 964 to 965, but as, William Garrood writes about the conquest of Cilicia, the sources become confused by the intensity of Byzantine activity so there are also vagueries. Regardless, the next time that you come back, the city should be a bit easier to take; to some extent, sieges can be split over multiple seasons or even years. I suggest looking into the 1148 Siege of Damascus for an example of where one week of prior scouting would have changed the course of events. If you're interested in the "short-format" siege, the fortified hillside city of Carcasonne was impenetrable; I've been there and those walls simply could not be stormed by anything other than tens of thousands. During the Albigensian Crusade, the city lasted no more than two weeks because their internal water source was incapable of sustaining them.


Implicitly, cities are tough nuts to crack and not all cities are created equal; the best commanders in history still took many months to resolve some sieges. Occasionally, the best action to take when besieging is to sit there for months and to starve out the defenders. Simultaneously, the attacker can use this time to prepare siege works - Nikephoros Ouranos describes tunneling under walls as the most effective way to take cities, which is how the histories describe Nikephoros Phokas' actions. The prolonged siege isn't a disaster for an attacker, as long as they take the city. If one spends five months and fails to take the city, then that sets up a much poorer situation.


Accordingly, what's the most important aspect of a protracted siege in pre-modern times? I argue that it's the season the siege starts in because you want to have access to the surrounding harvest to feed your army and deny your opponents their ability to store their harvest inside walls. The Siege of Chandax started in July 960 and harvest season is roughly Autumn, which sounds like appropriately good planning.

The final method for sieges works better during civil wars, due to the similar cultures and/or languages, which is bribing locals/defenders to open gates.

Let's flip this, what does a defender see. A defender sees that they have soldiers, morale, water, food, and let's call it the strength of the barrier between them and the attackers. If any one of those five hit zero, the city will surrender or be taken (the attackers usually heavily outnumber the defenders so when the walls are breached then the attackers take the city almost every time). The reverse is true though. If the attacker's morale, water, food hit zero (or the number of soldiers drop to below the level of the defenders), then they will abandon the siege. This explains why defenders sally during sieges, as usually there comes a point where there's an excess of defenders for the quantity of (usually, but not exclusively) food in the city and lives are risked to sure up one of the city's failings. It's obviously why sallies are taken and siege towers/trebuchets are burnt because it's more valuable to risk lives than it is to allow the walls to be overcome.

Sometimes, cities surrender earlier. At Tarsos 965, Nikephoros crushed the undoubtedly smaller army the Tarsiots put on the field to prevent him from besieging the city. Nikephoros then attempted to storm the walls, but was repelled. Only after that did the city sue for peace on not unreasonable terms, which was that the citizenry could choose to leave with their belongings. What essentially happened here was that the morale of the city dropped to zero - they could have held out for a month or two more probably, but to what end? For the record, I don't hold it against a general for attempting to storm the walls and failing once, I will begin to hold it against them if they continue to dripfeed their forces into unfavourable situations, such as Witiges early during the 537-538 Siege of Rome.

Leo the Deacon, if I'm not mistaken, claims that he had taken sixty cities and fortresses by the time he became emperor in 963. John Skylitzes claims that, by the time Nikephoros died in 969, he had taken one hundred. It was a lot of grueling work to invert the border region, but one that Nikephoros shined at. The Caliphal border region were known as the "thughur" and the Caliphate, before the start of its collapse had fortified those border cities far beyond the resources of the individual cities -  Tarsus is describe as having a double-wall. 

To put it simply why I think Nikephoros Phokas was the best commander of his age is because he trained and equipped the armies to a much higher standard than any of his recent predecessors and appropriately selected aggressive and competent officers who he could work with. Whether he was present or not, he set up a system that drew out the forces of Sayf al-Dawla or the Tarsiots or any number of other small emirates and cities and eliminated them at a low cost to his armies. His aggressive year-round multi-year campaigns turned a semi-professional force into a crack military that was unrivalled even after his time for some thirty years. He could wield this incredible army, in a landscape where the enemy forces had been wiped out, to start cracking cities and fortresses open, a task that so many commanders struggled at, but one that Nikephoros had the mindset for.