Melitene was the Muslim frontier emirate on the upper Euphrates, the most dangerous raiding power on the Byzantine border, until its army and its emir were destroyed at the Lalakaon in 863.
Melitene — Malatya in Arabic, and in Turkish since — stood on the upper Euphrates where the routes from Mesopotamia into Anatolia converge. Whoever held it could put an army into the Byzantine themes in a fortnight, which is why it was fortified, lost, retaken and refortified for three centuries.
Under the Umayyads and then the Abbasids it was the anchor of the Thughur, the belt of frontier cities that faced the empire across the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains. Its emirs governed with a good deal of independence and raided on their own authority.
In the ninth century it became the most dangerous of them, and its destruction at the Lalakaon in 863 is one of the clearest turning points in this archive: the raiding stopped, and within seventy years the city itself was Byzantine.
The Arab–Byzantine border was not a line. It was a depopulated zone of mountains and passes with fortified cities on both sides — the Thughur and al-Awasim facing the Byzantine themes — and it was designed to be raided across rather than settled.
Raiding was an institution with its own season and its own religious framing. Expeditions crossed in spring and summer, aimed at plunder, captives and the destruction of harvests rather than at holding ground, and volunteers came from across the Islamic world to take part.
For the empire the effect was constant attrition. The theme system existed largely to absorb it: soldiers settled on the land, fortified refuges for the population, and a doctrine of shadowing raiders rather than meeting them, which is set out in the Byzantine military manuals of the period.
Umar ibn Abdallah al-Aqta — the epithet means "the one-handed" — held Melitene from the 830s and made it the most effective raiding power on the frontier for thirty years.
His campaigns reached across Anatolia repeatedly, and in 863 as far as Amisos on the Black Sea coast, which is most of the way through the empire's Asian territory. Byzantine sources treat him as a standing emergency rather than an episode.
His most interesting alliance was with the Paulicians of Tephrike under Karbeas — a Christian sect the empire had persecuted, which had fled across the frontier and made common cause with the Muslim emirates against Constantinople. The frontier was not a religious line drawn tidily.
The emirs of Melitene are known mostly through the chronicles of the people they attacked, so the list is partial and the dates are approximate.
The dynasty of the Banu Sulaym held the city under Abbasid authority that grew more nominal as the ninth century went on. Umar al-Aqta, emir from the 830s until his death in 863, is the only one whose career can be followed in any detail, and he is the one every Byzantine source names.
After him the emirate continued under his descendants and then under Hamdanid influence, but as a target rather than a threat. The last emirs negotiated with Byzantine generals over terms of submission rather than launching campaigns.
The raid of 863 ended at the river Lalakaon in Paphlagonia, where Petronas surrounded the returning army with converging forces and destroyed it. Umar was killed. The emirate lost its field army and its leadership in an afternoon.
It could not be rebuilt, because the caliphate behind it was in the middle of the anarchy at Samarra and had no capacity to reinforce a frontier city. The Paulician allies at Tephrike were destroyed within a decade, and the whole eastern frontier began to move.
Melitene itself held out for another seventy years. John Kourkouas took it in 934 and the population was given the choice of conversion or removal; the city became Byzantine territory and a base for the campaigns that took Cilicia and Antioch in the following decades.
The emirate is remembered for what its fall marks rather than for what it built. It is the clearest single case of a frontier power that depended entirely on the state behind it, and collapsed the moment that state stopped functioning.
It also complicates the standard picture of the frontier. A Muslim emirate allied with a Christian sect against a Christian empire is not a religious war in any simple sense, and the double-named fortresses on the map are the residue of populations that changed rulers repeatedly.
The city survived everything. Malatya is a substantial Turkish city today, and the old walled town at Battalgazi carries the name of Abdallah al-Battal, the Umayyad raider killed at Akroinon two centuries before the emirate's own destruction.