Battle of Sebastopolis

Overview

The Battle of Sebastopolis was fought at Sebastopolis in the middle of the Armeniac Theme in 692 CE between the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate. With this battle, the long-standing peace between the two powers, established in 680, came to an end.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Significance

The Battle of Sebastopolis, fought in 692 CE at Sebastopolis in the Armeniac Theme, marked the formal rupture of the peace that had existed between the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate since 680. That truce had held for over a decade, representing a period of relative stabilization in the protracted Arab–Byzantine conflict. The engagement at Sebastopolis, commanded on the Umayyad side by Muhammad ibn Marwan and opposed by the Byzantine commanders Leontius and Neboulos, brought this interval to a close and resumed active hostilities between the two powers. Its primary significance within the wider Arab–Byzantine wars lies in this role as a turning point: the battle ended a negotiated pause and reactivated the contest over the frontier zones of Anatolia and Armenia that had defined the conflict across much of the seventh century.

Commanders (3)