The Sack of Aleppo in December 962 was carried out by the Byzantine Empire under Nikephoros Phokas. Aleppo was the capital of the Hamdanid emir Sayf al-Dawla, the Byzantines' chief antagonist at the time. Background In October 944, the Hamdanid emir Sayf al-Dawla captured Aleppo and soon extended his control over northern Syria, from Homs in the south to the frontier lands with the Byzantine Empire in the northwest and parts of western Upper Mesopotamia. Under Sayf al-Dawla's patronage, Aleppo grew into the chief city of northern Syria, and was the site of major buildings, notably the great palace of Halbas outside Aleppo, endowed with splendid gardens and an aqueduct. The Hamdanid court of Aleppo also became a major centre of cultural activity; as the historian Stephen Humphreys comments, "in his time Aleppo could certainly have held its own with any court in Renaissance Italy". Due to the geographical position of his realm, the Hamdanid ruler also emerged as the champion of the Muslim world against the recent advances of the Christian Byzantines in the eastern Anatolian borderlands. From 945/6 until the end of his life, he was said to have fought against the Byzantines in over forty battles. The first decade of warfare with the Byzantines was largely in Sayf al-Dawla's favour, with the Hamdanid ruler able to parry the Byzantine attacks and launch counter-raids of his own, resulting in the dismissal of the Byzantine Domestic of the Schools (commander-in-chief), Bardas Phokas, and his replacement with his son, Nikephoros Phokas. Assisted by capable lieutenants such as his brother Leo and nephew John Tzimiskes, Nikephoros began to turn the tide of the conflict. In 960, trying to take advantage of Nikephoros' absence with the bulk of his army in the reconquest of Crete, Sayf al-Dawla launched a major invasion of Byzantine Cappadocia, but was attacked and almost annihilated in an ambush by Leo Phokas. Sayf al-Dawla managed to escape, but most modern historians consider that his military power was broken. Nikephoros' 962 campaign and the sack of Aleppo In 961, Nikephoros returned and led his troops to sack the town of Anazarbus in Cilicia, killing a part of its population and expelling the rest, and then demolishing its walls. Modern historians have seen this as a deliberate scorched-earth strategy that "created a wasteland between Syria and Cilicia that broke the lines of supply between the two regions", and that opened