The Emirate of Crete was a corsair state founded by Andalusian exiles in the 820s that dominated the Aegean for 135 years, until Nikephoros Phokas took its capital in 961.
The Emirate of Crete existed from the 820s to 961 and was, in practice, a state organised around seaborne raiding. It held one large island, built one great fortress-city, and made itself the dominant naval power in a sea that belonged to the Byzantine empire on every map.
Its founders were exiles twice over: Andalusians driven out of Córdoba after a failed revolt, then out of Alexandria after another, who arrived in the Aegean looking for somewhere to settle and found an island the empire had left thinly defended.
For Constantinople it was a wound in the interior rather than on a frontier, which is why five expeditions were sent to remove it, and why the fifth is remembered as one of the great achievements of the tenth-century recovery.
The core group came from the suburb of Córdoba whose revolt against the Umayyad emir al-Hakam I was crushed in 818; the survivors were expelled. They went first to Alexandria, took part in the disorders there, and were expelled again in the early 820s.
Led by Abu Hafs Umar al-Iqritishi, they landed on Crete around 824 and had the island within a few years. The empire was preoccupied — the revolt of Thomas the Slav had just been suppressed and the Amorian dynasty was three years old — and the response was slow and unsuccessful.
They built their capital on the north coast and gave it the name al-Khandaq, "the ditch", after the fortification that defined it. The Greeks called it Chandax; the Venetians later called it Candia; it is modern Heraklion, and the city has been the island's capital ever since.
The emirate's economy was plunder, ransom and slaves, and its instrument was a fleet. From Crete a squadron could reach the Cyclades, the Peloponnese, Euboea, Thessaly or the coast of Anatolia within days, and for four generations it did.
The raids were not incidental. Aegean shipping had to be convoyed or armed, island populations moved inland or fortified, and the empire kept naval themes in being specifically to answer Crete. The slave markets of the eastern Mediterranean were supplied substantially from these raids.
Cretan power also worked in concert with other Muslim naval forces. The sack of Thessalonica in 904 — the empire's second city, taken and stripped by a fleet under the renegade Leo of Tripoli — belongs to the same maritime world, and Byzantine writers treated the two threats as one problem.
The emirs are known through Byzantine chronicles and their own coinage, and the sequence is reasonably secure even where the men are not.
Abu Hafs Umar I founded the emirate and the dynasty in the 820s and ruled until about 855. His descendants held it for the whole of its existence — an unusual continuity for a state of this kind, and a sign that the raiding economy worked well enough to keep one family in charge of it.
Abd al-Aziz ibn Shu'ayb, called Kouroupas by the Greeks, was the last of them. He was captured when Chandax fell in 961 and taken to Constantinople for Nikephoros's triumph; his son converted, entered Byzantine service, and died fighting for the empire at Dorostolon a decade later.
The empire tried four times before it succeeded, and the failures are as instructive as the victory.
An expedition in 843 achieved nothing. A far larger one was prepared in 866 by the Caesar Bardas, and ended before it sailed when Bardas was murdered in the camp by Basil the Macedonian — palace politics destroying a campaign before it began. In 911 a great fleet under Himerios reached the island and was then destroyed at sea on the return. A further attempt in 949 was beaten at the landing.
The common thread is that a fleet could reach Crete but an army could not stay. Every expedition faced the same problem — take the walls quickly or go home before winter — and until 960 every one of them went home.
Nikephoros Phokas landed in July 960 with a force built to remain, invested Chandax, and held the siege through the winter while his fleet kept the army supplied and the harbour closed. The city was mined and stormed on 6 March 961.
The sack was thorough and the emirate ended with it. There was no successor state and no attempt at reconquest: the fleet that had made Crete formidable was destroyed with the city that built it.
Crete was resettled and returned to Christianity over the following decades, with the missionary monk Nikon prominent in the process, and remained Byzantine until the Fourth Crusade sold it to Venice in 1204.