The war between Simeon I and the Byzantine Empire had begun, almost accidentally, in 913, when the Byzantine emperor Alexander died and left a child — Constantine VII — on the throne. Simeon seized the moment. His forces reached Constantinople's walls that same year and extracted recognition of his imperial title from the regency government. When a palace coup reversed those concessions the following year, Simeon went back to war.

What followed was a decade of Bulgarian victories. At the Battle of Achelous in 917, Byzantine forces were annihilated — the worst Byzantine military defeat in a generation. Bulgarian raiding parties reached the Isthmus of Corinth. Subsequent Byzantine attempts to stop them at Katasyrtai, Aquae Calidae, and Pegae all ended in defeat. By 922, Simeon controlled most of the Balkans. His annual campaigns reached the outskirts of Constantinople almost as a matter of schedule. The city's legendary walls had never been seriously threatened because Simeon had no fleet, but the psychological and political pressure was immense.

Simeon knew what he lacked. In 922 he sent envoys secretly to the Fatimid caliph Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi Billah in Mahdia, in what is now Tunisia, proposing a joint assault on Constantinople. The terms were audacious: the Bulgarians would keep Constantinople itself; the Fatimids would receive Byzantine territories in Sicily and southern Italy. It was the kind of proposal that, if it had succeeded, would have redrawn the map of the medieval world.

To mask the secret negotiations, Simeon launched a diversionary campaign in Eastern Thrace during the summer of 922. Bulgarian forces captured and garrisoned fortified towns, including Bizye. In June, they reached the outskirts of Constantinople and burned the Palace of Theodora, which stood on the shores of the Golden Horn — a vivid demonstration of how little the city's hinterland was protected. Emperor Romanos I Lekapenos responded by summoning his tagmata commanders to a feast and urging them to action. The next day, one of them — a general named Saktikios — led an assault on the Bulgarian camp.

The Byzantine attack began well. Saktikios's forces stormed the Bulgarian camp and initially drove the enemy back. Then they encountered the main Bulgarian army. The result was swift. The Byzantines were defeated, and in the retreat, Saktikios was mortally wounded. He died the following night.

Simeon had won again. After the victory, he sent letters to the Ecumenical Patriarch Nicholas Mystikos and to the co-emperor Constantine VII proposing peace negotiations. His real intention was to delay — to buy time for his Fatimid envoys to return with an alliance in hand. While those letters were exchanged, Bulgarian forces kept moving. Within weeks they captured Adrianople, the most important city in Byzantine Thrace. Constantinople braced for what appeared to be an imminent assault. The Byzantines threatened to mobilize the Magyars, Pechenegs, and Kievan Rus' against Bulgaria from the northeast. Simeon was not impressed; he knew the empire was in no position to make good on those threats.

The Fatimid alliance never materialized. The ship carrying the Fatimid caliph's emissaries back to Simeon was intercepted by the Byzantines, who — in a diplomatic coup — outbid the Bulgarians and neutralized the threat. Without a fleet, Simeon could not take Constantinople. The war ground on for five more years, until Simeon I died in 927. His son Peter I concluded the peace treaty that year: Byzantium recognized the imperial title of the Bulgarian monarchs and the full independence of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as an autocephalous Patriarchate, in exchange for most of the Thracian conquests.

The Battle of 922 appears in the historical record through the continuation of George Hamartolos's Chronicle and John Skylitzes's Synopsis of Histories — Byzantine sources, understandably more interested in explaining survival than in celebrating a lost commander. What they record is a city that held not because of military genius, but because water — the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmara — made the final step impossible. The walls helped. The sea was decisive.