Battle of Kunaxa

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Battle of Kunaxa after the painting by Adrien Guignet

The Battle of Kunaxa was held in 401 BC. BC slightly above Babylon on the Euphrates between the armies of King Artaxerxes II and his brother Cyrus for control of the Persian Empire.

prehistory

The dispute for the throne between Artaxerxes II and his brother Cyrus, supported by Sparta, had triggered a war between Persia and Sparta. Due to the poor performance of Artaxerxes II (king from 404 BC) in the fight against Egypt's aspirations for freedom , but above all because of his own ambition, his younger brother Cyrus wanted to take over the government of the Achaemenid Empire . In agreement with his mother Parysatis , he first tried an assassination attempt , but it failed. Thereupon she arranged for him to be transferred to Asia Minor , where he could safely prepare a campaign against his brother.

With the support of Sparta , whose partisan he had been in the Peloponnesian War (431 BC to 404 BC), he won an impressive army of Greek mercenaries : 10,400 hoplites , 2,500 peltasts (lightly armed) and local contingents.

course

In the autumn of the year 401 BC Cyrus clashed with his brother's army at Kunaxa. The Persian forces were defeated. But despite his military superiority, Cyrus himself fell in battle and his officer corps was killed in an ambush leaving Artaxerxes in power.

Under the leadership of the Athenian Xenophon , the army fought its way through the entire Persian Empire and reached the southern coast of the Black Sea , which was occupied by Greek cities . This miraculous rescue of the Greek mercenaries went down in history through Xenophon as the train of the ten thousand (see Anabasis ). This venture showed the Greeks for the first time that the mighty Persian Empire was not invincible after all. Finally, Alexander the Great actually succeeded in succeeding his father Philip II to defeat the Persians in a mighty campaign ( Alexanderzug , 334 to 324 BC).

In the aftermath of the Battle of Kunaxa, relations between Sparta and the great king were rather cool. Ktesias of Knidos served in 398 BC. As a mediator between the great king and the Athenian general Konon , who operated in the Aegean Sea , who later led the Persian fleet and used his position to tie Athens more closely to Persia.

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