Following the fall of Syracuse to the Aghlabids of Ifriqiya (roughly present day Tunisia) in 878,[1][2] Byzantine presence in Sicily had been limited to the northeastern third of the island (the "Val Demone").

[3][6] From c. 890 on, the raids ceased, chiefly due to the outbreak of internal quarrels among the Muslims of Sicily, which even resulted in full civil war between the Arab and Berber factions of the Aghlabid army in 898.

[7][8] The civil war in Sicily prompted the dispatch of Abu'l-Abbas Abdallah, son of the Aghlabid emir Ibrahim II, as the island's governor in 900.

[11][12] Abu'l-Abbas, however, did not tarry and as soon as he had suppressed the rebellion, marched against the Byzantines, ravaging the environs of Taormina and launching an unsuccessful siege of Catania before returning to winter in Palermo.

[17] Ibrahim, in turn, resolved to make an armed pilgrimage, and took up the mantle of the holy war, aiming to go to Mecca after first conquering Byzantine fortresses in Italy.

According to the Muslim sources, the battle that followed was fiercely contested, and the Byzantines were beginning to gain the upper hand, when Ibrahim ordered the recitation of a line from the al-Hajj sura of the Quran.

[23] According to an Arab source, the Byzantine emperor Leo VI the Wise mourned the fall of Taormina by refusing to wear his crown for seven days, but the Byzantine sources—Patriarch Nicholas Mystikos and the Continuator of George Hamartolos—are explicit in attributing the loss of Taormina to negligence: according to the latter, the fleet was not sent to relieve the city because it was busy carrying material for the construction of two churches founded by the emperor in Constantinople.

The locals were encouraged to convert to Islam, or, where they had left their forts and fled for the mountains, the walls were torn down and the wells blocked with stones to make them uninhabitable.

[30][31] Although a few strongholds in the northeast remained unconquered and in Christian hands, the fall of Taormina marked the effective end of Byzantine Sicily, and the consolidation of Muslim control over the island.