In 598 CE, a massive Avar–Slavic army surrounded the Byzantine stronghold of Tomis on the Black Sea coast. The city was cut off, the siege tightened, and it looked like another Byzantine frontier city was about to fall.

But the battle for Tomis didn’t end with a dramatic charge or a broken wall — it ended with disease spreading through the Avar army. As plague tore through the camps, their leader Bayan I was forced to abandon the siege and retreat north of the Danube.

In this episode of Baked Battlefields, we talk frontier warfare, steppe empires, Byzantine survival strategy, and how some of history’s biggest military defeats didn’t come from enemy armies — but from logistics, disease, and time.

Precise history.
Imprecise sobriety.
Sometimes the most powerful army loses to something it can’t even see.