era Already weakened by the Slavic invasions at the end of the 6th century – which ruined the agrarian economy of Macedonia – and probably also by the Plague of Justinian in 547, the city was almost totally destroyed by an earthquake around 619, from which it never recovered. There was a small amount of activity there in the 7th century, but the city was now hardly more than a village. The Byzantine Empire possibly maintained a garrison there, but in 838 the Bulgarians under kavhan Isbul took the city and celebrated their victory with a monumental inscription on the stylobate in Basilica B, now partially in ruins. The site of Philippi was so strategically sound that the Byzantines attempted to recapture it around 850. Several seals of civil servants and other Byzantine officials, dated to the first half of the 9th century, prove the presence of Byzantine armies in the city. Around 969, Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas rebuilt the fortifications on the acropolis and in part of the city. These gradually helped to weaken Bulgar power and to strengthen the Byzantine presence in the area. In 1077 Bishop Basil Kartzimopoulos rebuilt part of the defenses inside the city. The city began to prosper once more, as witnessed by the Arab geographer Al Idrisi, who mentions it as a centre of business and wine production around 1150. After a brief occupation by the Franks after the Fourth Crusade and the capture of Constantinople in 1204, the city was captured by the Serbs. Still, it remained a notable fortification on the route of the ancient Via Egnatia; in 1354, the pretender to the Byzantine throne, Matthew Cantacuzenus, was captured there by the Serbs. The city was abandoned at an unknown date. When the French traveller Pierre Belon visited the area in the 1540s there remained nothing but ruins, used by the Turks as a quarry. The name of the city survived – at first in a Turkish village on the nearby plain, Philibedjik (Filibecik, "Little Filibe" in Turkish), which has since disappeared, and then in a Greek village in the mountains. Archaeological excavation of the site Although the site was briefly noted by earlier travellers, first modern archaeological description, based on a visit in 1856, was published in 1860 by Georges Perrot. This was followed by the more extensive investigations of the French Mission Archéologique de Macédoine in 1861, led by