05 · Sozopetra, 837 — The Wound

Where it is, and what it is

Sozopetra — Greek Σωζόπετρα, Arabic Zibatra, sometimes Latinised as Zapetra — sits on the upper Tochma Su, a tributary of the Euphrates, in the foothills south of Melitene. The land here is dry, red, and worked thin by goats. From the walls you can see Mount Argaios on a clear morning, eighty miles to the north-west, and on a clearer one the snow on the Anti-Taurus. The town is a frontier town: a single ring of walls a mile around, a citadel of mudbrick and reused Roman stone, four mosques, a small Jacobite church kept open for the Armenian traders, and a population that has been Muslim for three generations and Arabic-speaking for five.

It is unremarkable in every way except one. It is, by the persistent and proud belief of every man in the army of the Caliph, the birthplace of al-Mu'tasim's mother. Whether this is true — the chroniclers disagree, and the genealogies are dynastic flattery as often as fact — does not matter. It is believed. It is believed in Samarra, it is believed in the messes of the regular regiments, and it is believed, with particular bitterness, in the household of the Caliph himself.

Why the Emperor went there

In the spring of 837 the Caliph's armies were in Azerbaijan, fighting the Khurramite rebel Babak, whom they had been fighting for twenty years and whom they had nearly cornered at last. The eastern frontier of the Empire was, for one summer, undefended.

Theophilus is twenty-eight years old, in the eleventh year of his reign, and he is — depending on the source you read — a man of letters who composes hymns for the choir of the Hagia Sophia, a tireless administrator who rides on circuit through his own provinces hearing the complaints of widows, or an arrogant young Caesar who has spent his reign losing battles to the Arabs and needs, urgently, to win one. All three are true.

His strategy is not absurd. Push east while the Caliph is committed against Babak. Take a frontier town. Burn it. Return with the prisoners. Mint a triumphal coin. The Empire has done this kind of raid every decade for two centuries; it is how the frontier breathes.

What the army did

The Roman field army crossed the Anti-Taurus in early July of 837. The strength, in the Greek chroniclers, is a hundred thousand; the strength, more soberly, was probably forty thousand. With it rode a contingent of Persian exiles — Khurramites — under their commander Nasr, who had converted to Christianity and taken the baptismal name Theophobos. The Khurramites had fled west to escape the very Caliphal armies they were now riding against. They had reason.

The town of Sozopetra was reached at the end of July. The walls were not strong. A breach was made in the eastern stretch on, by the best reading of Theophanes Continuatus, the third day. The town was sacked over the course of an afternoon and a night. The chroniclers — Roman and Arab both — agree on what happened next, and disagree only on whose fault it was.

The male inhabitants were killed. The number is reported, with the standard exaggeration of these things, at some thousands; the real figure was probably in the low hundreds. The women and children were taken. The Jacobite church was burned along with the mosques. The walls were thrown down. A delegation of the town's elders, who had come out before the assault to negotiate, was — by the Arab account, which the Greek does not contradict — held for the duration of the storming and then executed afterwards. They had offered ransom. The ransom had been taken. The negotiator was killed last.

When the army returned across the Anti-Taurus in mid-August, it had with it perhaps four thousand prisoners. They were paraded in Constantinople in September. Theophilus rode in triumph. He minted the coin.

The Caliph's letter

Al-Mu'tasim heard of Sozopetra in Samarra in the second week of August, having returned from Azerbaijan with Babak finally taken. The accounts of his reaction are theatrical and probably embellished, but the substance of them is consistent: he wept; he did not eat for a day; he sent for his historians; he sent for his commanders; and he sent, by fast courier, a letter to Theophilus.

The letter, which is preserved in three Arabic chroniclers in three slightly different forms, asked one question. It asked whether the Emperor of the Romans would prefer the Caliph to march on Constantinople or on Amorium. It explained, with the courtesy of a man who has decided a thing and is offering the appearance of a choice, that the Caliph had chosen Amorium because Amorium was the birthplace of the Emperor's father. Sozopetra had been the birthplace of the Caliph's mother. The exchange was equal. He was being, the letter said, fair.

Theophilus received the letter in late October. He did not reply.

What this means at your table

Players will not, on the whole, walk through Sozopetra. The events of this chapter happen a year before the sample campaign begins, and seven hundred miles south-east of Amorium. The GM's use of this chapter is therefore indirect and the more powerful for being so.

It is the thing the Muslim merchant Yusuf ibn Salim will not speak of, even to old friends. It is the thing the Armenian innkeeper across the street did speak of, once, when very drunk, in 837, and then never again. It is the reason the Paulician preacher Sergios is in Amorium at all — he was driven north out of Melitene by the chaos. It is the reason the Cappadocian wool merchant in room three of the inn is jumpy, because his cousin's caravan was stopped on the road by Khurramite outriders the year before and three of his men were taken. It is, above all, the reason the army is on the southern road.

Use it in passing. Use it in the silence of a man who used to be talkative. Use it in the eyes of a Syrian woman in the slave market on Thursday, who is from a town the players have never heard of, who arrived in Amorium six months ago and has not spoken since.

Three sentences a player might overhear

An Armenian carter at the East Gate, to his nephew: "There were elders. They came out under a white pennant. He took the money and killed them anyway. Tell me what kind of emperor."

Bishop Eustratios, in confession, to no one: "Lord. Lord. He was twenty-eight. He is twenty-nine now. Lord."

A regimental priest, drunk in the cathedral porch, to a young soldier who has not yet been south: "The thing the Khurramites do — they laugh while they do it. Remember that, when we are paying for Sozopetra. Remember the laughing."

If your campaign visits Sozopetra

Some campaigns will. A party that travels east — chasing the Forty-Second Martyr, escorting a Khurramite defector home, or simply because the GM wants to honour the symmetry — can be at the ruins of Sozopetra within four to six weeks' hard riding from Amorium.

What they find: a flat oval of scorched ground a mile across. The walls were thrown down systematically — every fourth course pried out, the rest collapsed inwards. The mudbrick has slumped back into the earth it came from. Three of the four mosques are visible only as rectangles of darker soil. The fourth, the smallest, was not burned, because the wind that night blew the wrong way, and it stands now without a roof, the qibla wall still legible. The Jacobite church is a pile.

Two things still live there. A spring on the northern edge, which the goats still come to. And a cemetery half a mile out on the road to Melitene, which the surviving women — those who walked back from Constantinople after the ransoms — have re-marked with field stones. There are perhaps two hundred such stones now, set out in seven rows. The names on them are scratched, not carved. Some are in Arabic. Two are in Greek. The GM should let the players read these last two in silence, and should not, on any account, tell them which Roman buried whom.

A note on the sources, for the GM who cares

The fullest Greek account is in Theophanes Continuatus, Book III, written under Constantine VII a century later and therefore polished. The Arabic accounts — al-Tabari, al-Mas'udi, the later Ibn al-Athir — are richer in detail and angrier; they should be. Modern scholarship has reasonable doubt about the claim that Sozopetra was specifically al-Mu'tasim's mother's birthplace (the claim is first attested decades after the event), but no doubt at all that the Caliph and his court believed it and acted on it.

For your table, the belief is what matters. The Caliph is marching on Amorium because of an injury, real or invented, that he can give a name to. That is a clean and human motive, and your players will understand it.