Historical sources on the revolt of Bardas Skleros differ on the sequence and location of the battles that ended it, one of which was fought at the plain of Pankaleia (Παγκάλεια), northeast of Amorium.
[1][2] The history of John Skylitzes, written in the late 11th century, reports that Skleros won a first battle near Amorium, as well as a second at Basilika Therma (modern Sarıkaya), and that it was in a third engagement at Pankaleia that Phokas triumphed.
[1][2] What is undisputed is that after his defeat, Skleros fled to his Arab ally, the Hamdanid emir Abu Taghlib, and thence sought refuge in the Buyid court in Baghdad, where he remained for the next seven years.
[6] Based on Georgian sources, P.M. Tarchnichvili suggested in 1964 that the victory of Phokas took place at a site called "Sarvenis" in Georgian, which he identified as Aquae Saravenae (modern Kırşehir), north of Caesarea, and that Skylitzes's third battle (who erroneously places Pankaleia near the river Halys, which corresponds to the site of Kırşehir) is a fictionalized mixture of the real first and second battles,[1] a view shared also by John Forsyth in his 1977 critical edition of Yahya's chronicle in English.
[7] According to Catherine Holmes, Skylitzes' account, although doubtlessly embellished, probably relies on an actual source given its level of detail, but that in the end "adjudicating between these possibilities is all but impossible" and that the only certain thing is that the decisive final battle took place in March 979.