Siege of Patras (805 or 807)

The siege's failure, attributed to the miraculous intervention of the city's patron, Saint Andrew, marked the consolidation of Byzantine control over the Peloponnese peninsula after two centuries of Slavic occupation over its western half.

Imperial authority across Greece was greatly restored by the campaign of the logothete Staurakios in 783, who ventured from Constantinople overland to Thessalonica and from there south to the Peloponnese, subduing the Slavs of those regions.

[3][4] Patras, on the northwestern coast of the Peloponnese, is claimed by the Chronicle of Monemvasia—a work of highly disputed accuracy and chronology, but an essential source for the period[5][6]—to have been one of the cities abandoned c. 587/8 as a result of the Slavic depredations, its population fleeing to Rhegion in Calabria.

The rider found out that the strategos was not coming or was delayed — Constantine VII writes that he arrived three days after the siege had ended — but on his return to the city, his horse slipped and both he and the flag fell down.

As a punishment, Constantine VII records that the Slavs were thereafter obligated to maintain at their own cost all officials or envoys passing through Patras, relieving the local see of this burden.

[5][16][17] Some scholars have tried to reconcile the conflicting accounts of the Chronicle and the De administrando imperio as implying a first recovery of Patras c. 805 as the result of Skleros' campaign, which was probably concurrent with the establishment of the Peloponnese as a separate theme from Hellas, if this had not been done slightly earlier.

[18] Whatever the exact course of events in the early 9th century, the failure of the Slavic attack on Patras consolidated the recently re-established Byzantine control over the Peloponnese, and Nikephoros I's policies led to the successful re-Christianization and Hellenization of the peninsula.