a synod against the Patriarch. This too was to take place away from the capital, somewhere in Thrace, with Psellos, who had himself been earlier persecuted by Keroularios, as the chief accuser. In the event, Keroularios died on 21 January 1059, before the synod could take place. Isaac appointed the bureaucrat Constantine Leichoudes as the new patriarch. Military situation The rebellion and civil war that brought Isaac to the throne had concentrated Byzantium's military might away from its borders. The contemporary Armenian historian Aristakes Lastivertsi reports that the Georgian lord Ivane took advantage of this opportunity to capture two Byzantine frontier forts as well as an imperial tax collector, and lay siege to Theodosiopolis. The Byzantine doux at Ani drove him off, but Ivane then called upon some Turks for assistance. About a month after Isaac's coronation, these raiders reached Melitene, whose inhabitants were allowed to depart before the city was plundered by the Turks. Local Byzantine troops managed to blockade the mountain passes, forcing the raiders to winter in the region of Chorzane. In spring 1058, the Turks were ambushed and defeated while they attacked the fort of Mormrans, leaving most of their captives behind. At about the same time or shortly after, another Turkish raid into Taron was heavily defeated by the Byzantine defenders. Melitene was repaired and refortified, and made the seat of a doux. Constantine IX had famously abolished the military obligations of the Armenian thematic troops in exchange for cash payments, a step widely regarded, both by contemporaries and modern historians, as having catastrophic consequences for Byzantium's eastern defences, especially against the mounting Turkish threat. The Turks had taken Vaspurakan during the regency following Constantine's death, exposing the Anatolian interior to their raids. While Isaac does not appear to have acted to restore the thematic armies, according to Kaldellis, the reaction of the local forces to these events does not appear to indicate a degradation of Byzantium's defensive abilities in the East, but rather the continued and successful application of old-established counter-raiding principles as codified in Nikephoros Phokas' De velitatione bellica a century earlier. Isaac led only one military expedition, in late summer of 1059, into the Balkan provinces that had been suffering raids by the Hungarians and the Pechenegs. The details of the campaign are obscure, but the two had possibly entered into an alliance. At Serdica, the emperor made a treaty with the