Antioch on the Orontes was one of the great cities of the ancient world, a patriarchal see of the Christian church, and the prize both sides fought over for six centuries of Byzantine and Muslim warfare.
Antioch stands on the Orontes where the river cuts between Mount Silpius and the plain, on the road that joins Anatolia to Syria. That position made it one of the largest cities of the Roman empire and the reason it was fought over for a thousand years.
It was a Greek foundation, a Roman metropolis, a patriarchal see of the Christian church, a Persian conquest, an Arab frontier capital, a Byzantine province, a crusader principality and finally a ruin.
For this archive it is the great prize of the eastern reconquest — the city Nikephoros II spent years working towards and whose capture in 969 cost him his life nine weeks later.
Seleucus I founded it about 300 BC as a capital for the Seleucid empire, and under Rome it became the administrative centre of the province of Syria and, by most estimates, the third city of the empire after Rome and Alexandria.
Its Christian importance is older than its imperial importance. The Acts of the Apostles records that the followers of Jesus were first called Christians at Antioch, and its bishop became one of the five patriarchs of the early church alongside Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Jerusalem.
It was also catastrophically unlucky in its geology. The city sits near a major fault, and earthquakes levelled it repeatedly — in 115, in 526 when tens of thousands died, and many times since, including the destruction of much of modern Antakya in 2023.
In 540 the Sasanian king Khosrow I took and sacked the city and deported much of its population to a purpose-built settlement near Ctesiphon. Justinian I rebuilt it, but it never recovered its ancient scale.
In 638, six years after the death of Muhammad, it fell to the Arab conquest along with the rest of Syria. It became a frontier city of the caliphate, its walls maintained and its Christian population substantial but subordinate, and it stayed in Muslim hands for 331 years.
The Byzantine empire never stopped regarding it as its own. The patriarchate of Antioch continued in exile and in place, and every emperor who campaigned in the east had it in view.
Nikephoros II Phokas took Cilicia in 964–965 to open the road and then blockaded the city rather than storming it, wanting a working provincial capital rather than a sack. On 28 October 969 Michael Bourtzes disobeyed him, took the walls by escalade, and the city fell.
It became the seat of a Byzantine duke and the anchor of the empire's Syrian position for 115 years — a genuinely prosperous period in which the historian Yahya of Antioch wrote, and which supplied much of what this archive knows about the tenth-century east.
It ended with the Seljuk Turks, who took the city in 1084, thirteen years after Manzikert had opened Anatolia to them.
The First Crusade besieged Antioch for eight months in 1097–1098, took it, and was then besieged inside it by a relieving Muslim army — the episode that produced the discovery of the Holy Lance and one of the strangest reversals in crusading history.
Bohemond of Taranto kept the city rather than handing it to the Byzantine emperor as the crusade's agreements required, and the principality of Antioch that resulted was one of the four crusader states and a source of Byzantine grievance for a century.
The end came in 1268, when the Mamluk sultan Baibars took the city and destroyed it. The massacre and enslavement that followed were exceptional even by the standards of the period, and Antioch never again became a city of consequence.
What survives is a Turkish provincial city, Antakya, on a fraction of the ancient footprint, with the Habib-i Neccar mosque marking the conquest of 638 and long stretches of wall still visible on the slopes of Mount Silpius.
Its place in the archive is as a marker of where the frontier was. Antioch in Muslim hands means the empire is on the defensive; Antioch Byzantine means the reconquest has succeeded; Antioch crusader means the eastern Mediterranean has a new set of actors in it.
And its patriarchate outlived all of them. The see founded in the first century still exists, though its holders have not lived in the city for a very long time.