Battle of Edessa
| date | Early summer 260 |
|---|---|
| place | Edessa , Northern Mesopotamia (present-day Turkey ) |
| output | Persian victory |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
| Commander | |
| Troop strength | |
| approx. 40,000 | approx. 70,000 |
| losses | |
|
insignificant |
completely |
The Battle of Edessa was 260 between the armies of the Roman Empire under the command of Emperor Valerian and Persian Sassanidenreichs under Great King Shapur I. instead. The Romans were crushed, while the Persians suffered only minor losses.
In the run-up to the battle, Shapur had invaded Roman territory several times, with Antioch on the Orontes in Syria being captured and sacked in 253 or 256. In order to stop and retaliate the Persian attacks, Valerian personally fought against Shapur with an army of supposedly 70,000 men, including the Praetorian Guard . After initial successes - the Romans initially succeeded in retaking the Syrian provinces - the battle broke out in the wide lowlands between Carrhae and Edessa in the early summer of 260.
The Roman army suffered a catastrophic defeat against the Persian army, which mainly consisted of heavy cavalry, whereby Emperor Valerian was captured during or after the battle - a unique and extremely humiliating event for the Romans, which Shapur in his deed (so-called res gestae divi Saporis in Greek , Middle Persian and Parthian ) in Naqsch-e Rostam as well as on other rock reliefs (such as in Bischapur ):
- In the third campaign, when we advanced against Karrhai and Edessa and besieged Karrhai and Edessa, Emperor Valerian marched against us, and with him there was an army of 70,000 men. And on the other side of Karrhai and Edessa a great battle took place for Us with Emperor Valerian, and We captured Emperor Valerian with our own hands and the rest of them, the Praetorian prefects and senators and officers, all whoever were leaders of that army, all of them We took these with our hands and deported them to Persis.
The emperor and the surviving Romans, including the Praetorian prefect Successianus , were abducted from Shapur to the Sassanid Empire. According to Lactantius , the great king humiliated his inferior rival by using him as a human footstool when mounting his horse. According to Persian tradition, Roman engineers and slave laborers were posted to southwest Iran, where they built the Band-e Kaisar dam in Shushar and the Dezful bridge.
After the Battle of Edessa, the Roman defense of the East temporarily collapsed. Shapur took several cities, in particular Antioch was sacked for the second time. The generals Macrianus and Ballista apparently succeeded in gathering the remaining Roman troops and defeating Shapur at Korykos . The Persians then withdrew behind the Euphrates . Macrianus then had his sons Macrianus Minor and Quietus proclaimed emperors and turned against the legitimate emperor Gallienus , the son of Valerian; he found death like his sons. After the Palmyrenian prince Septimius Odaenathus had defeated Quietus and Ballista in Emesa in 261 and his talks with the Sassanids were unsuccessful, he took over the leadership of the remaining Roman troops in the east as the emperor's deputy. Nominally on behalf of Gallienus, Odaenathus surprised the Persian troops on the march back, beat them and in the following even briefly penetrated as far as Ctesiphon , but without being able to free Valerian - the emperor died in captivity. Due to the defeat against Odaenath and problems on their eastern border, the Sassanids could not ultimately exploit the victory at Edessa, even if Schapur exploited his success for propaganda purposes. However, it was to be more than 20 years before the Romans under Emperor Carus 282 could go on the offensive again against the Persians.
swell
- Eutropius , Breviarium ab urbe condita 9 , 7
- Lactantius , De mortibus persecutorum 5
- Johannes Zonaras , Epitome historiarum 12.23
- Zosimos , New History 1 , 36
literature
- Andreas Goltz, Udo Hartmann : Valerianus and Gallienus. In: Klaus-Peter Johne (Ed.): The time of the soldiers' emperors. Crisis and transformation of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century AD (235–284). Volume 1. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-05-004529-0 , pp. 223-295.
- Erich Kettenhofen : The year 7 of Emperor Valerian . In: Nāme-ye Irān-e Bāstān 1, 2001, pp. 17-22.
- Engelbert Winter , Beate Dignas: Rome and the Persian Empire. Two world powers between confrontation and coexistence. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-050-03451-3 (Study books History and Culture of the Old World).
Remarks
- ↑ ŠKZ, §§ 18–22, Greek version; Translation taken from: Winter / Dignas, Rom und das Perserreich , p. 98. This representation is basically confirmed by Roman sources such as Eutropius and later historians such as the Byzantine Zonaras . Zosimos delivers another version, according to which Valerian only fell into the hands of the Persians through betrayal during subsequent peace negotiations.