Battle of Dara
The Battle of Dara in northern Mesopotamia in 530 marked a victory for the Eastern Roman Empire under Justinian I over the Sassanid king Kavadh I. Neither of the two rulers took part in the battle personally.
prehistory
Dara (Daras) was a strategically important Roman fortress near Nisibis , which was fought over again and again in the Roman-Persian wars of the 6th century . Emperor Anastasios I had the place expanded from 506 in violation of older contracts with the Sassanids . In the year 526 a war broke out again between the two empires, which was sparked, among other things, by the fact that the Persian great king had tried to enforce the Zoroastrian doctrine in the empire of Iberia (in today's Georgia ) . A first Eastern Roman campaign against Persia in 529 failed.
The following year the Persian king ordered a major attack on Dara to decide the war. Justinian's general Belisarius , the new magister militum per Orientem , therefore decided to launch a new campaign to repel the Persian offensive, although with his 25,000 men, including Romans as well as Hunnic and Herulian cavalry , the 40,000 Persians who were under the command of the Ferouz (Peroz) were clearly outnumbered. However, a large part of the Persian army consisted of apparently quite weak infantry. The Eastern Roman army was concerned with protecting the Dara fortress, the fortifications of which were currently under construction and not ready for defense. Belisarius was therefore not forced to take a position in Dara, but instead raised his troops in front of the city and had deep trenches dug in advance in order to limit the fighting to a few points and thus compensate for his numerical inferiority. This procedure was not uncommon in the Middle East in late antiquity , but it also involved risks, as it restricted the freedom of movement of one's own army.
The battle
The battle of Dara dragged on for two days. On the first day the Persians attempted an attack on the right Roman wing, where the federated Herulian cavalry was standing; Although they initially backed away, they were then able to initiate a counterattack without forcing a decision. On the second day, another 10,000 reinforcements from Nisibis arrived at the Persians . But Belisarius succeeded in enclosing the Persians in a pincer attack, in which the Hunnic troops were involved on one wing and Eastern Roman cavalry on the other wing, which had been hidden from the Persians by a hill until then. This brought the decision, breaking out of the ambush. Although the Persians still succeeded in inflicting heavy losses on the troops of Belisarius by deploying their elite troops, this could not change anything at the end of the battle. The surviving Persian troops withdrew while over 5,000 Persians remained dead on the battlefield. The number of Eastern Roman victims is unknown.
consequences
This was the first significant Roman victory over the Persians in open field battle in almost 100 years. For Justinian this success meant a great gain in prestige, which the emperor allowed to spread through monuments and victory poems. With the victory, Roman rule over important parts of northern Mesopotamia was secured for the time being, even if Belisarius suffered a serious defeat in the battle of Callinicum on the Euphrates in the following year . In 532 the Romans and Persians made a peace based on the status quo.
The Eastern Roman historian Prokop , who served as secretary in Belisarius's staff in 530, offers in the first book of his histories a detailed, but highly literary, eyewitness account of the battle.
literature
- Geoffrey Greatrex : Rome and Persia at War, 502-532 (= Arca. Vol. 37). Cairns, Leeds 1998, ISBN 0-905205-93-6 , pp. 169-185.
- Hartmut Leppin : Justinian. The Christian experiment. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-608-94291-0 , pp. 130 f.
