Zemarchus

Zemarchus was an Eastern Roman military and diplomat in the 6th century.

Zemarchus came from Cilicia and served as magister militum . After a delegation of the Kök Turks under the leadership of the influential Sogdier Maniakh had previously arrived in Constantinople to establish relations with the Eastern Roman Empire, Zemarchus went to the court of the Turkish ruler Sizabulos in Sogdia on behalf of Emperor Justin II in August 569 . The fact that Zemarchus made the long journey as a high-ranking military man testifies to the seriousness of the Eastern Romans in establishing good relations with the powerful Turkish khaganate in the east. Sizabulos is often identified with the western Turkish Khagan Istami, but this is not without problems.

Zemarchus was kindly received by Sizabulus. Sizabulus received Zemarchus in a tent made of dyed silk, seated on a golden throne with two wheels. On the second day he sat on a gilded couch, on the third day on a couch made of hammered gold, which was carried by four golden peacocks . Sizabulos wanted to encourage the Eastern Romans, to whom he gave rich gifts, to attack their common enemy, the Sassanid Persia . Even if the Eastern Romans had signed a peace treaty with Persia in 562, the tensions between the two empires remained (see Roman-Persian Wars ), which is why Emperor Justin II, who wanted above all to free himself from the obligation to pay tribute agreed in 562, also entered into an alliance was interested with the Turks.

According to Theophanes of Byzantium , the Sassanids are said to have been very worried about the sending of Zemarchus. It is said that this is one of the reasons why the Persian great king Chosrau I acted against the Aksumites in southern Arabia, who were allies of Eastern Europe. According to John of Epiphaneia , the Persians wanted to hinder Zemarchus' journey by bribing the Alans through whose territory Zemarchus had to travel.

Zemarchus's journey had lasted two years when he finally returned to Constantinople in 571. Just a little later, Justin II saw the occasion for a new Persian war: when there was an uprising against the Sassanids in Persarmenia in the same year , Eastern Roman troops intervened. In 572 the open war broke out again between Ostrom and Persia. The Roman hopes that arose from the alliance with the Turks, however, were badly disappointed, as the Sassanids, contrary to expectations, succeeded in repelling both the imperial troops and the Turks who invaded a little later.

literature

• Agustí Alemany: Sources on the Alans: Critical Compilation . Brill, Leiden-Boston-Cologne 2000, pp. 179f., 183ff.
• Mihály Dobrovits: The Altaic world through Byzantine eyes: Some remarks on the historical circumstances of Zemarchus' journey to the Turks (AD 569-570). In: Acta Orientalia 64, 2011, pp. 373-409.
• Hans Wilhelm Haussig : Byzantine sources about Central Asia in their historical statement. In: J. Harmatta (Ed.): Prolegomena to the Sources on the History of Pre-Islamic Central Asia. Budapest 1979, pp. 41-60.
• Richard Hennig : The introduction of silkworm breeding into the Byzantine Empire . In: Byzantinische Zeitschrift 33, 1933, pp. 295-312.
• AD Lee: Information and Frontiers: Roman Foreign Relations in Late Antiquity . Cambridge 1993, pp. 38f., 102.
• John Martindale: The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire . Vol. IIIb, Cambridge 1992, pp. 1416f.

Remarks

1. ↑ On the location of the ruler's seat cf. the discussion in Alemany, Sources on the Alans , p. 185.
2. ↑ See (with further references) Clifford Edmund Bosworth: Ṭabarī . The Sāsānids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen . Albany / NY 1999, pp. 153f., Note 394.
3. ↑ The report has come down to Menander Protektor (fragment 20 [Frag. 10 after Roger Blockley's edition]). See also John of Ephesus , Church History , Part 3, 6:23.
4. ^ Theophanes, fragment 3.
5. ↑ John, fragment 2.