The war has been rather back and forth. There have been several sieges of Constantinople, none successful. At one time al-Andalus landed north of Corfu; these troops were driven back into the sea by the Theme of Hellas. A hundred thousand screaming Cossacks invaded Thrace; the cataphractoi stood like rocks against the tide, and the waters flowed and receded around them. Only a few thousand survived to limp back north to the steppes. Corfu has been reduced to obedience; Rhodos is occupied. Against this must be set the loss of Zeta to the Croatians and of two Black Sea provinces to the Russians, as shown in black on this map:
That's the Balkan front; in the east things are very different. Rome and the Caliphate have traded blows; Famagusta, Teluch, and Beirut are again Roman, against which must be set the loss of Baalbek and the occupation of large swathes of Roman Syria. But these are pinpricks. The real news here is the defeat of the much-vaunted Fatimid Banners in the inland deserts:
The red smears indicate areas held by the Caliphate before the war, as also shown in this prewar map:
This, presumably, is the complete disaster that the Caliphate so-blithely refers to as the loss of "the sand" and "some border vassals". Persia on the Red Sea, and within striking distance of the wine-dark water!
Some battles. I did not jest when I spoke of a hundred thousand screaming Cossacks:
Observe that the Russian army (defending) has much light cavalry and light infantry, while the Romans have, proportionately, a much larger fraction of heavy infantry and cavalry. Likewise in the Granny-Slaughter at Epirus:
Note that, while the armies are similar in size, the Romans (here defending) have half the light cavalry and twice the heavy infantry. In this case there was no morale bug, in fact the Croatians very kindly stood in their ranks to be killed instead of running away, so I suspect that this disparity was the cause of the slaughter.
