oct 15, 721 - Battle of Alexandria of 721

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With Emperor left for Alexandria, Tagmata was under the led of Emperor's younger brother Nikephoros, who had stayed behind in Greece to gather the Thematic armies to him. He raised seventy-thousand soldiers and a fleet of a thousand ships in total, then separated the armies into two groups, one numbered about forty thousand, and the other thirty thousand. He took command of the larger group, and gave the smaller to a personal friend named Narses. Narses was ordered to march from Anatolia into the Caliphate to distract the Arabs by causing chaos and destruction. Narses later returned from his expedition successfully, having taken both Amida and Samosata and installed garrisons there.

Nikephoros then sailed for Egypt, specifically for Pelusium, and retaken the fortress was without a fight due to the local Arab garrison fled as the walls of Pelusium had been ripped down by order of Caliph. After the city retaken Nikephoros sent the fleet to Alexandria, then began marching west.

The Roman fleet met Arabs' fleet near Pharos, this time, Romans use a modified the mixture of liquid fire, which still burned even when it touched the sea. In the record, Arab and Syrian sailors seems to think that liquid fire was a mere myth, as there hadn’t been many times that it was truly demonstrated due to the lack of an Arab fleet; that let the Arab fleet makes a huge mistake, "brave" Arab sailors crewed the ships were straight into, and confronted with the fires of hell itself set by the Roman fleet. The battle of Pharos lasted for only six hours, but end with five hundred Arab ships destroyed, against only one hundred Roman ships destroyed. The blockade was thoroughly broken.

At the same time, the Nikephoros’ army completed the march across Egypt and showing up directly behind the Caliph's army, means the Arabs had been surrounded by a larger Roman army while they surrounded the city of Alexandria. Seen the Imperial army arrived, emperor Maurice II ordered the army in the city of Alexandria marched out with him self to try and break out. The bloodly battle that followed would see twenty-thousand Arabs dead, fifteen thousand taken prisoner, and the rest escape through the confusion and flee back toward Palestine. Emperor Maurice II had died in the battle, while the Caliph captured by Nikephoros in the fighting.

Because the death of Emperor, instead of release the Caliph with a punishing peace deal, Nikephoros ordered to sailed back Constantinople, where the prisoners marched through the capital in chains, and the Caliph was impaled and his corpse has been left out to be eaten by the crows.

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