Sasanian Empire

Legacy

Sasanian art, court culture and administration deeply influenced the Islamic caliphates, Byzantium and lands as far away as China.

Timeline of Sasanian Empire

1. 224
   Ardashir I defeats Artabanus IV at Hormozdgan, ending Parthian rule

   In the early 3rd century the Parthian Empire was weakened by a long struggle between the brothers Vologases VI and Artabanus IV. Meanwhile Ardashir, a prince of the Sasanian family in Pars (Persis, south-western Iran), was conquering neighbouring provinces such as Kirman. On 28 April 224 Artabanus finally marched against him and was defeated and killed on the plain of Hormozdgan, whose exact site has never been found. The battle ended almost five centuries of Parthian rule, and Ardashir took the title 'King of Kings', founding a new Persian empire that soon held the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia.

2. 260
   Shapur I captures the Roman emperor Valerian at Edessa

   Shapur I, Ardashir's son, repeatedly invaded Rome's eastern provinces and plundered Antioch in 253 or 256. The ageing emperor Valerian marched east to stop him, and in 260 the two armies met between Carrhae and Edessa (modern Urfa, in Turkey). The Romans were defeated and besieged, and when Valerian tried to negotiate he was captured: the first Roman emperor ever taken prisoner. He died in Persian captivity, while Shapur's troops raided Cilicia and Cappadocia and deported their people. The victory made the Sasanians the equal of Rome and left its eastern frontier open to Persian raids.

3. 299
   Peace of Nisibis after Narseh's defeat: Rome gains five provinces east of the Tigris

   In 296 or 297 the Sasanian king Narseh went to war with Rome and at first defeated the Caesar Galerius near Carrhae. In 298, however, Galerius surprised Narseh's camp at Satala in Armenia, capturing his treasury, wives and children, and then marched south to take the Persian capital Ctesiphon. To recover his family, Narseh accepted the terms agreed at Nisibis in 299. Persia handed over five provinces east of the Tigris, recognised the river as the border and gave up control of Iberia in the Caucasus. The frontier held for some forty years, and the Sasanian map shrank back from northern Mesopotamia and Armenia.

4. 363
   Shapur II repels Emperor Julian's invasion at Ctesiphon

   In 363 the Roman emperor Julian invaded Persia with a large army and a river fleet, aiming to take the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon and humble Shapur II. He advanced quickly down the Euphrates and won a battle outside Ctesiphon, but the city's defences looked too strong and his northern army never arrived. Julian burned his fleet and marched inland, where Shapur's scorched-earth tactics and constant raids forced a retreat, and Julian died of wounds from a skirmish near Samarra. His successor Jovian bought peace by handing Nisibis, Singara and other frontier lands to Persia and abandoning Armenia, regaining much of what Narseh had lost.

5. 484
   Peroz I is killed by the Hephthalites

   By the 5th century the Sasanians' greatest danger lay in the north-east, where the Hephthalites, a Hunnic people, had risen in Bactria in place of the Kidarites. Peroz I (459–484) had already been defeated and captured by them twice. Against the advice of his nobles and priests he launched a third campaign in 484; according to later accounts, the Hephthalite king Akhshunwar dug a hidden trench, and Peroz and much of his army fell into it and were killed. The Hephthalites seized Nishapur, Herat and Merv, and for years Persia paid them tribute, one of the lowest points in the empire's history.

6. 540
   Khosrow I invades Syria and sacks Antioch

   Khosrow I (531–579) had made a 'Perpetual Peace' with the Byzantine emperor Justinian in 532, but angered by Byzantium's Arab clients, the Ghassanids, and urged on by envoys from Ostrogothic Italy, he broke it in 540. In May he invaded Byzantine Syria, sacking Sura and Beroea (Aleppo) and taking silver from towns that paid to be spared. In June he reached Antioch, the greatest city of the Roman East; when it refused to pay, he captured and sacked it. Khosrow resettled its captives in a new city near Ctesiphon called 'Khosrow's Better Antioch', and the raid showed that Persia could again strike deep into Roman lands.

7. 570
   Khosrow I's forces under Vahriz occupy Yemen

   In the 6th century Yemen, at the southern end of the Red Sea trade routes, was ruled by Ethiopians from the Christian kingdom of Aksum, allies of Byzantium. When an exiled Yemeni prince asked for help, Khosrow I sent the general Wahrez (Vahriz) by sea in about 570 with a small force; the sources give anything from 800 to 7,500 men. Wahrez killed the Aksumite ruler Masruq in battle, took San'a and restored a Himyarite king, Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, as a Persian vassal. After a second invasion in the later 570s Yemen became a Sasanian province, stretching Persian power to the southern tip of Arabia.

8. 614
   Khosrow II's armies take Jerusalem

   The Byzantine emperor Maurice had helped Khosrow II regain his throne, so when Maurice was murdered by Phocas in 602, Khosrow declared war, ostensibly to avenge him. In 613 his general Shahrbaraz won victories at Antioch and Caesarea Maritima, and Jewish rebels, long persecuted under Byzantine rule, joined the advance; between 20,000 and 26,000 are said to have fought alongside the Persians. By mid-614 Jerusalem had fallen, after a siege of about three weeks according to one eyewitness account. The Persians carried the True Cross off to Ctesiphon, and with Palestine annexed, Persian rule now reached the Mediterranean coast.

9. 619
   Alexandria falls; Egypt is taken by 621

   After taking Syria and Palestine, Khosrow II's armies turned on Egypt, one of the Byzantine Empire's richest provinces. The invasion began in 617 or 618; the governor Nicetas, a cousin of Emperor Heraclius, could not resist and fled to Cyprus. According to the Khuzistan Chronicle, Alexandria was betrayed to the Persians in June 619, and by 621 they securely held the Nile valley. Egypt stayed in Persian hands for about ten years, ruled by Shahrbaraz from Alexandria. It was the first time the Sasanians had ruled Egypt, and with the Levant and parts of Anatolia also theirs, the empire was at its widest.

10. 626
    Persian and Avar siege of Constantinople fails

    By 626 the Byzantine emperor Heraclius had been raiding deep into Persian territory for several years, so Khosrow II tried to end the war by striking at Constantinople itself. A Persian army under Shahrbaraz camped at Chalcedon, across the Bosphorus, while the Avars and their Slav allies, perhaps 80,000 strong, attacked the city's land walls from the European side from 29 June. The defenders under Patriarch Sergius and the patrician Bonus held the walls, and on 7 August Byzantine ships destroyed the rafts meant to ferry Persian troops across the strait. The siege collapsed, and its failure saved the Byzantine Empire from collapse.

11. 627
    Heraclius defeats the Persians at Nineveh

    Heraclius now carried the war into the heart of Persia. In September 627, allied with Turkic (Göktürk) troops who soon deserted him, he invaded Sasanian Mesopotamia in a risky winter campaign. On 12 December, near the ruins of ancient Nineveh, he met the Persian army of Rhahzadh; after about eight hours of fighting Rhahzadh was dead and his troops fell back. Heraclius plundered Khosrow II's palace at Dastagird, and soon afterwards the Persian army overthrew Khosrow and his son Kavad II sued for peace. The Sasanians gave up their conquests, the frontier returned roughly to where it had been around 590, and Persia slid into civil war.

12. 636
    Arab armies win at al-Qadisiyyah

    Exhausted by the long Byzantine war and years of civil war, the Sasanians now faced the armies of the new Islamic state in Arabia, the Rashidun Caliphate. Caliph Umar sent Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas to Iraq with about 30,000 men, and from July 636 they faced a Persian army of perhaps 60,000, with war elephants, at al-Qadisiyyah, south of modern Kufa. In November 636, after several days of fighting, the Persian commander Rustam Farrokhzad was killed and his army collapsed. The defeat left the Sasanians unable to defend Mesopotamia and opened the road to their capital, Ctesiphon.

13. 637
    Ctesiphon falls to the Arabs

    After al-Qadisiyyah the Arab army of Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas advanced on Ctesiphon, the Persian capital on the Tigris since Parthian times. They besieged it from January to March 637, and when the defenders abandoned the city, King Yazdegerd III had already withdrawn to Hulwan in the Zagros foothills with much of the imperial treasure. Arab columns caught many of the refugees and seized huge booty. The fall of Ctesiphon consolidated Muslim rule over all of Mesopotamia, the empire's richest farmland, and confined the Sasanian state to the Iranian plateau.

14. 642
    Defeat at Nahavand opens the Iranian plateau to the Arabs

    Yazdegerd III still hoped to win back Mesopotamia, and gathered a large army in the Zagros Mountains. In 642 (some accounts say December 641) it met the Rashidun army of an-Nu'man ibn Muqarrin near Nahavand in western Iran. The battle was a catastrophic defeat for the Persians and marks the end of organised Sasanian resistance. Isfahan and other cities soon fell, and Yazdegerd escaped to the Merv region but could never raise another large army. The Iranian plateau now lay open, and over the following years the Arabs conquered it province by province.

15. 651
    Yazdegerd III is murdered near Merv: the empire ends

    After his defeats Yazdegerd III fled from province to province, through Kirman and Sakastan (Sistan) to Khorasan, hoping to raise new armies; he even asked Tang China for help, without success. He quarrelled with the local governors whose support he needed, and in 651, beaten once more, he took refuge with a miller near Merv. The miller murdered him, either for his jewels or, by another account, on the orders of the governor Mahoe Suri. His death ended the Sasanian dynasty after more than four centuries, and its lands passed to the caliphate, though Tabaristan by the Caspian held out for about a century.

Periods and reigns

• Ardashir I 224–240
• Shapur I 240–270
• Hormizd I and Bahram I–III 270–293
• Narseh 293–302
• Hormizd II 302–309
• Shapur II 309–379
• Ardashir II, Shapur III, Bahram IV 379–399
• Yazdegerd I 399–420
• Bahram V 420–438
• Yazdegerd II 438–457
• Peroz I 459–484
• Balash 484–488
• Kavad I 488–531
• Khosrow I 531–579
• Hormizd IV 579–590
• Khosrow II 590–628
• Civil war (Kavad II, Ardashir III, Boran and others) 628–632
• Yazdegerd III 632–651

Rulers

• Ardashir I 224 – 242

  Founder; overthrew the Parthians

• Shapur I 240 – 270

  Captured the Roman emperor Valerian

• Shapur II 309 – 379

  Long reign of wars with Rome

• Khosrow I Anushirvan 531 – 579

  Reformer and patron of learning

• Khosrow II 590 – 628

  Conquered Egypt and the Levant, then lost them

• Yazdegerd III 632 – 651

  Last shah, killed after the Arab conquest

Realms on the map

• Sasanian Empire 215–643
• Alliance between Sasanian Empire and Byzantine Empire 633–643

Chapters

• The world in 300: Rome of Four Emperors
• The world in 400: Rome Divided, Huns Advancing
• The world in 500: Kingdoms After Rome
• The world in 600: Sui China Reunited