Nikephoros II Phokas: the White Death of the Saracens

His wars were won more by sieges and blockades than by pitched battles: the winter-long siege of Chandax on Crete in 960 and 961, the capture of Aleppo in 962, the fall of Mopsuestia and Tarsus in 965 and the blockade of Antioch. Two Greek historians, Leo the Deacon and John Skylitzes, describe these campaigns, and this page draws on both.²

Where did Nikephoros Phokas come from?

Nikephoros was born around 912 into the Phokas family, one of the great military clans of Byzantine Asia Minor. His grandfather, Nikephoros the Elder, had fought the Arabs in southern Italy, and his father, Bardas Phokas, commanded the eastern armies in the early 950s. His brother Leo and his nephew John Tzimiskes also became leading generals.³

Little is known of his private life before the throne. His first wife died, and their only son, Bardas, was killed in an accident while riding at sport with a young relative, whose spear struck him. Nikephoros wore a hair shirt, gave up meat for years and spoke of becoming a monk, and he was a close friend of Athanasios, founder of the Great Lavra on Mount Athos.⁴

How did Nikephoros Phokas rise to command?

Nikephoros rose in the long war against Sayf al-Dawla, the Hamdanid emir of Aleppo. After the emir defeated Bardas Phokas in 953 and captured his son Constantine, Nikephoros, until then a provincial general, replaced his father as Domestic of the Schools, commander of the eastern armies, at the end of 954 or in 955.⁵

The tide then turned. In 958 John Tzimiskes took Samosata on the Euphrates, and George Dennis credits Nikephoros, his brother Leo and Tzimiskes with several major victories that laid waste parts of northern Syria. Leo the Deacon notes that, as a general and then as Domestic, Nikephoros sacked and burned many cities.⁶

How did Nikephoros Phokas win back Crete?

In 960 Romanos II sent Nikephoros with a large fleet and army against Crete, held by the Arabs since the 820s. He landed, drove the defenders into Chandax, the island’s fortress capital, and besieged it through the winter. In March 961 his troops broke in with siege engines, a ram and sappers; Skylitzes dates the fall to 7 March.⁷

The emir, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, called Kouroupas by the Byzantines, was taken prisoner with his son Anemas. Leo the Deacon describes a triumph in the Hippodrome in 961, with gold, armor and captives paraded before the people; Skylitzes says Nikephoros was kept out of the capital that year and held his triumph only in April 963. Ostrogorsky judged the recovery of Crete the greatest Byzantine victory in centuries.⁸

What were Nikephoros II Phokas’s greatest victories?

Besides Crete, his greatest successes came in the east. In December 962 he entered Aleppo, the Hamdanid capital, though not its citadel. As emperor he took Mopsuestia and Tarsus in 965, completing the conquest of Cilicia, while his fleet won back Cyprus the same year. His generals took Antioch in October 969, weeks before his death.⁹

Tarsus beat off his first attack in 964. Leo the Deacon says Nikephoros drilled his men through the winter, returned in the spring of 965 and starved the city into surrender, letting its people leave. The sources disagree on Mopsuestia: Leo places its fall in 964, while Skylitzes and the Arab chronicler Yahya of Antioch place it in the summer of 965.¹⁰

Leo puts the army of 965 at 400,000 men. Schlumberger thought the figure probably exaggerated, and Leo’s translators add that Warren Treadgold suspects exaggeration or a copyist’s slip for 40,000; since Leo repeats the number, they think exaggeration more likely. They also note that Leo’s account of the fall of Tarsus differs from the other sources.¹¹

In the west the news was bad. A fleet sent to Sicily in 964 or 965 was destroyed, and in his reign the last Byzantine strongholds on the island fell to the Muslims. In Syria he raided again in 966 and 968 and twice appeared before Antioch, seat of a patriarch and in Muslim hands since 636 or 637, after the Byzantine defeat at Yarmouk had opened Syria to the Arabs.¹²

On his way home in 968 he left forces to blockade Antioch. Skylitzes says he built a fortress on the Black Mountain for Michael Bourtzes and left his eunuch Peter in command of the troops in Cilicia. On 28 October 969, in his absence, Bourtzes and Peter took the city, which Ostrogorsky notes had been under Muslim rule for more than three centuries.¹³

How did Nikephoros Phokas become emperor?

Romanos II died on 15 March 963, leaving two small sons, Basil II and Constantine VIII, with the empress Theophano as regent. The minister Joseph Bringas tried to remove Nikephoros, but in July 963 the eastern army proclaimed him emperor at Caesarea. After street fighting in the capital he was crowned in Hagia Sophia on 16 August 963.¹⁴

He ruled as senior emperor beside the two boys, whose rights were left intact. On 20 September 963 he married Theophano. Patriarch Polyeuktos resisted the match, because it was a second marriage and because of a rumor that Nikephoros had been godfather to one of her children. He made his father Bardas caesar and his brother Leo kouropalates, and gave John Tzimiskes the eastern command.¹⁵

Why was Nikephoros II Phokas unpopular?

His wars were expensive. Nikephoros raised taxes and issued a lighter gold coin, the tetarteron; Skylitzes says he collected taxes in the heavy coin and paid out the light one. He and his brother Leo were accused of speculating in grain during a shortage, and a law of 964 banned new gifts of land to monasteries.¹⁶

Anger boiled over on Ascension Day, probably in 967. After a brawl between townspeople and his Armenian soldiers, a crowd jeered the emperor on his way back from the church of the Pege, and stones were thrown at him; Leo the Deacon names a woman and her daughter on a roof. He then walled off part of the Great Palace as a fortress.¹⁷

Leo, then a student in the city, says he watched Nikephoros ride on through the insults without losing his composure. Foreign envoys were less admiring. Liudprand of Cremona, sent by Otto I in 968 to seek a marriage alliance, was refused, kept almost as a prisoner, and told that his master was no Roman emperor but a barbarian king.¹⁸

In his report Liudprand described Nikephoros as “a monstrosity of a man, a pygmy, fat-headed and like a mole as to the smallness of his eyes”, in Ernest Henderson’s translation. Leo the Deacon, who had seen him, gives a calmer portrait: a swarthy, stooped man with thick dark hair, black eyes under bushy brows and a graying beard.¹⁹

He also left a dangerous legacy in the Balkans, a generation after the Bulgarian victory at Anchialus in 917. He refused the tribute Bulgaria had been paid and hired Sviatoslav, prince of Kiev, to attack it. The Rus invaded in 968 and in 969 took the Bulgarian capital, replacing a weak neighbor with a far more dangerous one.²⁰

How did Nikephoros II Phokas die?

Nikephoros was murdered in his bedchamber on the night of 10 to 11 December 969. The conspirators were led by his nephew John Tzimiskes, whom he had removed from command, and were helped by the empress Theophano, who hid armed men in the palace. Tzimiskes seized the throne the same night and ruled as John I until 976.²¹

Leo the Deacon tells how, in falling snow, Tzimiskes and his companions came by boat to the shore below the palace and were hauled up one by one in a basket. They found the emperor asleep, wounded him, taunted him and killed him. His body lay in the snow through the next day before it was buried in secret in the Church of the Holy Apostles.²²

Theophano’s part is told in different ways. Leo describes her as smuggling the killers in, and Ostrogorsky calls her the mistress and accomplice of Tzimiskes. According to Skylitzes, Tzimiskes, refused coronation by Patriarch Polyeuktos until he did penance, blamed two of the killers acting at the empress’s instigation, and Theophano was banished from the palace.²³

Why was Nikephoros called the White Death of the Saracens?

The name comes from the court. When Liudprand of Cremona watched Nikephoros go to Hagia Sophia in procession at Pentecost 968, the singers acclaimed him as “the pale death of the Saracens”. Historians such as George Ostrogorsky use the phrase, translated as “the white death of the Saracens”, for his record against the Arabs.²⁴

Did Nikephoros Phokas write military manuals?

Two military treatises carry his name. The Praecepta militaria, from around 965, gives instructions for campaigns against the Arabs, and its editor Eric McGeer argues that the emperor wrote it himself. The treatise On Skirmishing, on frontier guerrilla warfare, was written at his order by an officer close to the Phokas family, probably soon after his death.²⁵

McGeer and Leo’s translators point out how closely Leo’s account of the battle before Tarsus follows the Praecepta’s recommendations. George Dennis suggests that the author of On Skirmishing may have been Nikephoros’s brother Leo, whose victories it describes, though it does not name him.²⁶

What is Nikephoros II Phokas’s legacy?

Nikephoros broke through the Taurus frontier that had held for centuries. Crete, Cyprus, Cilicia and Antioch returned to the empire, and Aleppo became a tributary state soon after his death. Ostrogorsky counts his reign and his two successors’ as the height of medieval Byzantine military power, which Basil II, who ruled from 976 to 1025, carried furthest.²⁷

His epitaph, attributed to John, metropolitan of Melitene, and preserved in manuscripts of Skylitzes, calls on him to rise from the tomb against the Rus and ends with the man who “vanquished all but Eve”; Vasiliev renders the line as “vanquished all but woman”. Most of what is known about him comes from Leo the Deacon, whose History covers the years 959 to 976 and which Vasiliev calls the only contemporary Greek source for the reign.²⁸

Skylitzes’s editor, following the historian Rosemary Morris, distinguishes two traditions about Nikephoros: a favorable one in Leo the Deacon and a hostile one that Skylitzes used, which lists the reasons he was hated.²⁹ › The Greatest Battles of the Byzantine Empire

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Written from established histories; where the sources disagree we say so. See our editorial policy.