The Sovereign Theophilus, Roman Autocrator and friend of letters, rode into the lands of the Caliph in the early spring with the tagmata of the East and the themes of Anatolikon and Armeniakon at his back. He took the town of Sozopetra and gave it to fire. It is said — though I have not seen it written in the imperial dispatches — that Sozopetra was the birth-town of the Commander of the Faithful in Samarra, and that he received the news of its ruin in the bath and rose dripping and unspeaking from the water.
The Caliph al-Muʿtasim has now sworn, before his father's tomb, to undo a Roman city of equivalent dignity. He has named it. It is Amorium, mother of the Amorian house, the Sovereign's own patria. From Samarra and from Khorasan he summons an army not seen in the lifetime of any man under sixty. He has commanded that the name Amorium be embroidered onto the shields and banners of his guard, so that no soldier should forget the purpose of the march.
You stand in Nicaea, which lies on the road that any army from the West must take if it would defend Amorium, and on the road that any messenger from the East must take if he would carry news the other way. The strategos of Opsikion is in residence. The metropolitan is in conference. The harbour is full of grain ships. Imperial couriers ride through the gate at all hours, and the price of horses has tripled in a fortnight.
This is where your house begins.