On 28 October 969 Michael Bourtzes seized a tower on the wall of Antioch with three hundred men and held it until the army came up. He had been ordered not to attack, and was dismissed for succeeding.
Antioch had been in Muslim hands since 638 — one of the great cities of the ancient world, a patriarchal see of the Christian church, and the place whose loss had symbolised the Arab conquest of the east more than any other.
It fell on 28 October 969 to a night escalade by Michael Bourtzes and about three hundred men, who seized a tower on the wall and held it for three days until the main army arrived.
The emperor had ordered them not to do it. Nikephoros II wanted Antioch to surrender on terms and had forbidden an assault, and when he learned the city had been stormed he dismissed Bourtzes from his command. Two months later Bourtzes was one of the men who killed him.
Nikephoros had been working towards Antioch for years. Cilicia was taken in 964–965, giving him a base and the passes; the Hamdanids had lost Aleppo in 962 and their emir in 967; and by 968 he was campaigning through Syria almost unopposed.
Rather than storm the city he blockaded it. He built a fort at Baghras commanding the road, left a covering force under Michael Bourtzes and Peter the Stratopedarch, and went back to Constantinople expecting hunger to do the work.
His reasoning was not squeamishness. A city taken by storm was, by the customs of the age, a city sacked — and Nikephoros wanted Antioch as a functioning provincial capital with its Christian population and its walls intact, not as a ruin. He is said to have forbidden an assault explicitly.
Bourtzes had been gathering intelligence from inside the city and had made contact with a man who indicated a weak point in the defences. On a cold night in late October, with the garrison thin, he took about three hundred men up scaling ladders and seized two towers on the wall above the slope of Mount Silpius.
Holding them was the hard part. The garrison counterattacked for three days while Bourtzes's men were cut off on the wall, and messages went back to Peter the Stratopedarch begging him to bring the army up.
Peter came, the walls were taken, and the city fell. The sack that followed was the one Nikephoros had tried to prevent, though the city and its population survived it well enough to become the empire's eastern capital within a few years.
Nikephoros's response was to dismiss Bourtzes. The order had been explicit and had been disobeyed, and the emperor was a disciplinarian who had built his career on doing what he had planned rather than what looked good at the time.
It was, as a matter of command, defensible. As politics it was catastrophic. Bourtzes was a great aristocrat of the eastern military class, publicly humiliated for the most celebrated feat of arms of the reign, and he did not accept it.
On the night of 10–11 December 969, six weeks after Antioch fell, Michael Bourtzes was among the conspirators who entered the palace with John Tzimiskes and killed Nikephoros II in his bedchamber. The emperor who had spent his reign taking cities was murdered by the man who took the greatest of them.
Antioch stayed Byzantine for 115 years. It became the seat of a duke, the anchor of the empire's Syrian position, and a great city again — Yahya of Antioch, one of the sources for this whole period, wrote there under Byzantine rule.
Aleppo became a tributary the following year rather than a conquest, and the frontier settled on a line the empire held comfortably until the Seljuk Turks arrived in the 1070s. Antioch fell to them in 1084 and was taken by the First Crusade in 1098.
Bourtzes prospered under the regime he had helped install, and much later commanded at Antioch himself as its duke.
Antioch is the high-water mark of the Byzantine reconquest in the east. Nothing taken afterwards mattered as much, and nothing was held as long.
For the archive it also carries the sharpest illustration of a theme running through this whole track: the gap between what an emperor decides and what his commanders on the spot actually do. The city fell because a subordinate disobeyed, and the empire gained a province and lost a ruler in the same season.
The chain of consequence is unusually tight. Crete made Nikephoros emperor; Cilicia gave him Antioch's approaches; Antioch made Bourtzes an enemy; and Bourtzes helped kill him nine weeks later.