Tarsus falls to the Byzantines, 354

In the year 354 AH the Byzantine king came to al-Sayyisa and took it. He carried out killings there and drove off the rest of its people, who numbered about two hundred thousand. Then he went on to Tarsus, seeking to besiege it. ¹

The people of Tarsus submitted and he gave them a guarantee of safety. He entered the town and ordered them to leave, and they left. He made the congregational mosque into a stable for his animals, carried its lamps off to his own country, and burned the pulpit. ¹

The Byzantine king then ordered the town rebuilt, and its people came back to it; some of them became Christian. Tarsus had been one of the greatest Syrian frontier towns and the gateway of holy war into Byzantine lands, so its fall, even if only for a time, was among the clearest signs of the frontier giving way in a period when the state at Baghdad was weak. ¹