Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
At a spring on their route, the trio found a deep well. All three of them stripped off their military tunics and tore them into strips to make a length of rope. One of the soldiers then removed the cap he wore under his helmet for comfort’s sake, and this was tied to the end of the rope, which was lowered into the well. With this device they were able to quench their burning thirst. They reached the Euphrates river north of Edessa, and, after spotting a detachment of Roman cavalry being hotly pursued by a large force of Persian riders, realized that some Persian units had advanced as far as the Euphrates.
Keeping to the cover of trees and undergrowth, the trio made their way north, following the river, to the city of Melitene, then capital of the province of Armenia Minor and longtime base of the 12th Fulminata Legion. From there, Ammianus and his companions accompanied an officer heading to Antioch, where Ammianus would report the fall of Amida. Ammianus would go on to become a noted Roman historian.
At Amida, King Shapur crucified Count Aelianus and the surviving Roman tribunes. Persian troops scoured the city for any soldiers from east of the River Tigris who had served with the Romans, and these men were executed no matter what their rank. Several officers who had served on the staff of the Master of the Cavalry in
the Roman east and with the Protectors were marched away with their hands bound behind their backs, as were the surrendered men of the numerous units that had defended Amida. All would become slaves of the Persians.
Seven legions had taken part in the defense of Amida, and with the city’s fall all seven ceased to exist. Legions such as the 30th Ulpia, created by Trajan in
AD
103, and the more recently raised 5th Parthica, were removed at a stroke from Rome’s list of serving legions. With them went short-lived legions raised for the unsuccessful defense of Singara, and the Gallic rebellion of Magnentius. Their men were now either dead or slaves of the Parthians. This was a defeat that in its scope exceeded the shame of Crassus’ 53
BC
defeat at Carrhae and the shock of the annihilation of Varus’ three legions at the Teutoburg in
AD
9.
Once, Roman historians had boasted of how Roman legions had successfully conducted sieges, from Alesia to Jotapata. In
AD
70, four legions had achieved the capture of Jerusalem after a bloody summer’s siege. Now, 289 years later, the tables had been turned. Now it was the barbarians, having learned siege skills taught to them by the Romans, who applied those skills to become the victors.
The Persians marched many thousands of Roman prisoners from Amida and looted the city before burning it to the ground. But the seventy-three days taken to complete the siege had robbed Shapur of the summer, and of many thousands of men—Ammianus noted that a Roman official estimated that 30,000 Persians lost their lives during the siege of Amida. [Ibid., 9, 9] By the time it was all over it was October, and too late for Shapur to continue the advance to the Euphrates. Taking their prisoners and their plunder with them, the Persians and their allies crossed back to the eastern side of the Tigris, and went home. But they would be back.
AD
360–363
LXXII. LOSING MESOPOTAMIA
Singara and Bezabde fall
With the emperor Contantius rushing troops to the East to try to fill the void left by the seven lost legions, Antoninus’ plan for the Persians to invade all the Roman East was held in abeyance. But in the spring of
AD
360, the Persians and their allies returned to Roman Mesopotamia, their numbers bolstered by new recruits and bringing new
siege equipment with them. Shapur and his men had acquired a taste for victory and for plunder, and before they looked beyond the Euphrates there were many Roman fortresses with which to deal.
The first objective was Singara, which Shapur had besieged several times in the past fourteen years. This time, he was determined to deprive the Romans of the city permanently. The 1st Parthica Legion had been based at Singara ever since the end of Septimius Severus’ Parthian campaign in
AD
199. After the Persian wars had begun in
AD
337, the 1st Parthica was joined by the 1st Flavia Legion, a probable creation of Constantius or his father Constantine—the first name of both was Flavius—and more recently also joined by a few cavalry.
After several days of fighting at the walls of Singara, Shapur brought up “a ram of uncommon strength” at twilight. This went to work against a round tower that had been breached in the last Persian assault on Singara, twelve years before. The breach had been repaired by the Romans since then, but Shapur reasoned that the tower would have been weakened by the previous destruction, and this proved to be the case. The massive battering ram brought the tower tumbling down, and Persian hordes poured through the wreckage. The city was quickly taken. Most of the men of the 1st Parthica and 1st Flavia legions were taken alive. They were “led off with their hands bound” to become slaves in the farthest reaches of Persia. [Ibid.,
XX
, 6, 6; 8]
The Persians then moved on to the town of Bezabde near the Tigris (today’s Cizre in southeastern Turkey), which was then a hilltop town with strong walls. Bezabde was defended by the 1st Parthica’s brother legion, the 2nd Parthica. This unit had been tipped out of its comfortable base at Alba Longa, outside Rome, by Constantine the Great in
AD
312, following his victory at the Milvian Bridge. They were then sent to the farthest reaches of the empire in punishment because of their support for Constantine’s opponent Maxentius. At Bezabde, the 2nd Parthica was joined by the 2nd Flavia, and another relatively new legion, the 2nd Armenia. The garrison also included a large number of archers of the Zabdiceni tribe, whose territory around Bezabde this was.
After a surrender offer was rebuffed by the Roman defenders, the Persians launched a siege of Bezabde, and attempted to bring a number of battering rams into action. On the difficult sloping ground, and against determined opposition from defenders raining down stones, arrows and firebrands, it was only the largest of the rams, which had a covering of wet bull hides that could not be set alight, that
succeeded in doing damage to the wall. Inevitably, the ram, “with its huge beak,” weakened a tower in the wall, which crumbled and fell. [Ibid.,
XX
, 7, 14]
As usual, Persians attackers surged through the opening created by the fallen tower. “Bands of our soldiers fought hand-to-hand with the enemy,” said Ammianus. [Ibid.] Vastly outnumbered, the defenders were overwhelmed, as the Persians ran amok in the city, killing everyone who fell into their path, male and female, as Bezabde was mercilessly plundered. But unlike Amida and Singara, the city was not leveled; Shapur decided to retain and strengthen Bezabde as a Persian fortress. Meanwhile, from the surrendered legions and civilian survivors of Bezabde, “a great throng of captives” was led off to the Persian camp. The 2nd Parthica Legion and the other units with it ceased to exist.
The Notitia Dignitatum, which is believed by some scholars to have been updated, in part, in around
AD
420, still showed the 1st Parthica and 2nd Parthica legions as part of the garrison under the Duke of Mesopotamia at that time, together with twelve cavalry units and two cohorts of auxiliary foot soldiers including the Zabdenorii. Ammianus shows that these legions perished at Amida and Singara. The listing in the Notitia Dignitatum for Mesopotamia actually appears to reflect the situation there prior to Constantius’ Persian wars—that is, prior to
AD
337. Because, at the time the Notitia Dignitatum was said to have been last amended, the Roman province of Mesopotamia had not existed for many years.
In
AD
361, Constantius arrived in the East with a large army. Having blamed Count Ursicinus for the losses in Mesopotamia and dismissed him from office, Constantius personally led his army into Mesopotamia. He wept over the ruins of Amida, and attempted to lay siege to Persian-held Bezabde. But unlike the Romans before them, the Persian defenders held out. With the rainy season approaching, the Roman army, unable to achieve what the Persians had achieved at the very same place a year earlier, gave up the siege of Bezabde and withdrew to Syria.
Constantius died in
AD
361. He was on his way back to the west at the time, for his cousin and deputy Julian had been hailed as emperor by the troops in Gaul in opposition to Constantius. Julian, victor against the Germans at Argentoratum in
AD
357, became the undisputed new emperor. Called Julian the Apostate by later historians because he personally renounced Christianity, he removed Christians from the Roman army, with whom he was enormously popular. Julian would take up where Constantius left off in the East, leading an army to recover Mesopotamia.
But on June 26,
AD
363, after just twenty months as emperor, 31-year-old Julian died while leading a Roman army of 65,000 men in a bloody but ultimately indecisive battle against Shapur the Great’s army deep inside Persia. Rushing into the fight without his armor, Julian was mortally wounded by a flying spear from a Persian cataphract that pierced his liver.
Finding itself in the heart of Persia with neither leader nor direction, the Roman army hastily hailed as Julian’s successor 30-year-old Jovianus, or Jovian, who had little claim to the throne, being a middle-ranking commander of the bodyguard and son of a retired count. Jovian immediately agreed to the demands of those around him that the Roman army pull out of Persia and Mesopotamia.
So it was that, in the summer of
AD
363, four years after the end of Amida and three years after the fall of Singara and Bezabde, the new Roman emperor Jovian surrendered five Roman provinces in Mesopotamia and southern Armenia to King Shapur the Great, and gave up all claim to fifteen key fortress locations including those at Nisibis and Singara. Harried by the Persians all the way, the Roman army withdrew beyond the Euphrates.
Eight months after ascending the throne, Jovian himself was dead, to be succeeded in turn by Valentinian, who had served as a cavalry tribune under Julian at the Battle of Argentoratum. But the damage in the East had been done; Roman Mesopotamia ceased to exist, just as the legions that had unsuccessfully attempted to defend it ceased to exist.
In just three sieges in
AD
359 and 360, the Persians had deprived Rome of twelve legions. Many authorities believe that by this time the number of men in each legion was substantially less than had been the case in early imperial times. Gibbon spoke of legions of this time being “of the diminutive size to which they had been reduced in the age of Constantine.” Legions of 2,000 to 3,000 men by this time seem the norm. [Gibb.,
XIX
]
Such losses of manpower and equipment to the Persians, combined with the number of Roman fighting men lost in the interminable revolts within the empire in the fourth century, could not be sustained. Within half a century, the drain on Roman resources would mean that there would not be the men to spare from distant provinces when crises arose in the west. The Roman East had its own battles to fight. Only brilliant generalship would keep the empire’s countless enemies off the road to Rome.
AD
378
LXXIII. BATTLE OF ADRIANOPLE
Valens’ legions destroyed
“The diminished legions, destitute of pay and provisions, of arms and discipline, trembled at the approach, and even the name, of the barbarians.”
E
DWARD
G
IBBON
,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
,
XIX
Ever since
AD
364, Flavius Valens had been Rome’s co-emperor for the East, based at Antioch in Syria, while his elder brother Valentinian I had been emperor in the West. Valentinian had spent most of his reign based in Gaul fighting off Germanic invaders.
Valens had led Roman armies with mixed success in the past. Twice, in
AD
367 and 369, he had defeated the Visigoths north of the Danube, in what had once been the Roman province of Dacia. And in the East he had won a victory against the Persians in Mesopotamia before having to concede territory and withdraw. Now, 49-year-old Valens was intent on defeating the Visigoths once again, as they ravaged Thrace and threatened nearby Constantinople.
Driven across the Danube river by the territorial expansion of the Hun people from beyond the Volga river, the Visigoths had in
AD
376 come to an arrangement with Valens’ generals, who had permitted them to settle in Roman Moesia and Thrace south of the Danube. But in Thrace the locals had resented their presence, and Valens had decided to move the refugees to Asia. The Visigoths, whose religion was anchored to the Danube, which they considered sacred, had refused to move. So the people of Adrianople in Thrace decided to take matters into their own hands. Adrianople, also called Hadrianopolis—it was named after the emperor Hadrian—is the modern-day town of Edirne in European Turkey. The Adrianopolese attempted to forcibly remove the Visigoths who were settled nearby. This backfired, badly, with the Visigoths rising up, laying siege to Adrianople for a time, and ravaging rural Thrace.
Twice, Valens’ generals fought the itinerant Visigoths, with bloody but indecisive results. As the Visigoths received reinforcements from their cousins the Ostrogoths and other allies from north of the Danube, and turned their attention to Constantinople,
Valens marched from Antioch to Constantinople with much of the eastern army, sending to the west for Roman reinforcements.
The Roman emperor in the west by this time was Valens’ nephew Gratian, who had succeeded Valentinian on his death in
AD
375. Now 29 years old, Gratian had been making a name for himself in Gaul by leading his army in repelling the Alemanni, who had recently made a fresh incursion across the Rhine. Just prior to receiving his uncle’s plea for support, Gratian had decisively defeated the Lentiensi, a branch of the Alemanni, at Horburg beside the Rhine. From the Rhine, young Gratian set off for Thrace, planning to lead part of his army to link up with Valens in Thrace for a decisive combined offensive against the Goths.