The city, whose garrison was absent at the time, was sacked and plundered, yielding not only many captives but also large quantities of weapons and supplies intended for the Emirate of Crete.

The Byzantine attack, which was repeated in the subsequent years, shocked the Abbasid authorities, and urgent measures were taken to refortify the coasts and strengthen the local fleet, beginning a revival of the Egyptian navy that culminated in the Tulunid and Fatimid periods.

[3][4] In 853 the Byzantine government tried a new approach: instead of attacking Crete directly, they tried to sever the island's lines of supply, principally from Egypt, which was, in the words of Alexander Vasiliev, "the arsenal of the Cretan pirates".

[5][6] The Arab historian al-Tabari reports that three fleets, totalling almost 300 ships, were prepared and sent on simultaneous raids of Muslim naval bases in the Eastern Mediterranean.

[8] In a later work in 1952 he suggested that he might be identified with the parakoimomenos Damian, considering the Arabic name a rendering of the Byzantine title epi tou koitonos ("in charge of the imperial bedchamber").

[15][16] Despite these successes, Saracen piracy in the Aegean continued unabated, and reached its height in the early 900s, with the sack of Thessalonica, the Byzantine Empire's second city, in 904, and the activities of the renegades Leo of Tripoli and Damian of Tarsus.

Most seamen were forcibly conscripted from among the Copts and the Arabs of the interior, which earned Anbasah a bad reputation in contemporary sources, and complaints against him were directed to Caliph al-Mutawakkil.