Battle of Maranga
The Battle of Maranga near today's Samarra on the Tigris on June 22, 363 was a battle between the Persian Sassanids and the attacking Roman troops under Emperor Julian .
prehistory
Julian had invaded the Persian Empire on April 6th as part of the largest military operation in all of late antiquity and, after initially advancing rapidly , had reached the Sassanid capital, Ctesiphon , which he was unable to capture. The Persians had expected the Roman attack farther north; there the great king Shapur II had assembled an army, for whose arrival the Sassanid troops under the general Surenas were waiting. They evaded open battle and instead adopted a scorched earth tactic .
When Emperor Julian had to realize that a siege of Ctesiphon was hopeless and too risky, he had the Roman fleet burned and wanted to withdraw. During this retreat the Battle of Maranga broke out.
The battle
The historian Ammianus Marcellinus , who himself took part in Julian's Persian campaign, described the event about 30 years later in his res gestae (Amm. 25,1,10-19): The battle developed unexpectedly from the encounter of the Roman vanguard with units of the main royal army. The Persians were commanded by two Sassanid princes who used not only numerous archers but also the dreaded armored riders and war elephants . After the surprise of the Romans had subsided, Julian and his subordinates managed to organize the foot troops - in the manner of a phalanx . In this way the losses from arrow fire were limited. The cavalry on both sides hardly intervened in the battle, and in the hand-to-hand combat of the foot troops the Roman legionaries proved to be superior. They were able to push back the Persians after hard fighting and finally force them to withdraw in an orderly manner.
It is unclear how high the losses on both sides were. Ammianus emphasizes, however, that significantly more Persians than Romans fell, even though some of the train of the imperial army fell into the hands of the enemy. A three-day truce was concluded in the evening. Ultimately, the Battle of Maranga did not bring a decision, its importance is probably often overestimated in connection with Ammianus.
Just four days after the battle, Julian was fatally wounded in another clash between the two armies; thus the Roman campaign had finally failed.
See also
literature
- Klaus Rosen : Julian. Emperor, God and haters of Christians . Stuttgart 2006, p. 363.