"Victory" of Bahram II over Roman Emperor Carus is depicted in the top panel, and the victory over Hormizd I Kushanshah is depicted in the bottom panel at Naqsh-e Rostam[1]
In 282 the army acclaimed the praetorian prefect Carus as emperor: the sources are divided between those who maintain that his elevation to the throne occurred after the unexpected death of Probus, and those who instead affirm that Carus usurped the purple and revolted while Probus was still alive. Probus sent some troops against the rebel, but they went over to his opponent's side; between September and December of that year Probus was assassinated and Carus had no rivals. Although he never went to Rome to ratify his election by the Roman senate, nevertheless he respected the ancient and prestigious organ of the state.[5]
He probably assumed the consulate for the remainder of 282, replacing Probus; he appointed his sons Carinus and Numerianus Caesars and designated himself and Carinus consuls for 283. At the beginning of 283 he associated Carinus to the throne, naming him Augustus and entrusting him with the administration of the western provinces, while with his son Numerian he left for the eastern limes (frontier), with the intention of waging war on Sassanid Persia and recovering the province of Mesopotamia; In this way Carus resumed the plans of his predecessor Probus, who was busy preparing for war against Persia when he was assassinated by his own soldiers.[6] According to Aurelius Victor, moreover, Carus went to Mesopotamia with his son Numerian to protect it from the continuous incursions of the Persians.[7] If we want to believe the Armenian historians, who are not always reliable from the chronological point of view, the aim was also to reinstate Tiridates III on the throne of Armenia.[8]
During the journey he inflicted a memorable defeat on the Sarmatians:[9] With 36,000 total casualties,[10] 16,000 enemy warriors were killed, while others 20,000 were taken prisoner.[11][12] After crossing Thrace and Asia Minor, the Emperor reached, together with his son Numerian, the eastern limes.
The war took place in 283. According to Synesius of Cyrene (who however confuses Carus with Carinus), the shah of Persia Bahram II, having learned of the Emperor's warlike intentions, he tried to convince him to sign a peace. His ambassadors then reached the Roman camp, which at that time was located near Armenia, and asked to speak with the Emperor. They found Carus while he was having dinner: he took off his cap, which hid his baldness, and swore to the ambassadors that if the Persians did not recognize the supremacy of Rome, he would have made Persia as treeless as his head was hairless. The ambassadors returned trembling to Persia.[13]
The surviving sources do not allow us to reconstruct in detail or with accuracy Carus' military campaign against the Sassanids. They report laconically that the emperor devastated Mesopotamia, taking possession of the cities of Seleucia and Ctesiphon,[14] and leading the Roman army beyond the Tigris.[15] The Romans' successes were facilitated by the fact that the bulk of the Sassanid army was at that time engaged in suppressing Hormizd's rebellion, brother of the legitimate shah Bahram II; the rebel intended to carve out a semi-independent state in the eastern part of the Sassanid empire.[16][17] According to Zonaras, at one point in the campaign the imperial army was camped in a farm and the Persians decided to take advantage of this by attempting to dig a canal to let the river water flow into the valley; However, Carus managed to foil the plan by defeating the Persians in battle and putting them to flight.[15] Upon returning from Persia a triumph was planned to celebrate the victories in the Sassanid campaign, e l'imperatore assunse anche i cognomina ex virtute di Parthicus e di Persicus Maximus.[15][18] According to the "vulgate" version, however, Carus fell ill and died during a thunderstorm, presumably killed by lightning.[15] The Historia Augusta reports a letter that Carus' secretary wrote to the praefectus urbi in which the circumstances of the Emperor's death are described (however, many letters reported in the Historia Augusta turn out to be forgeries and therefore their authenticity is doubtful):
«Dear, our most beloved Emperor, he was confined to his bed by illness, when a furious storm broke out on the field. The darkness that covered the sky was so thick that it prevented us from seeing each other, and the continuous flashes of lightning took away our knowledge of everything that was following in the general confusion. Immediately after a very violent clap of thunder, we heard a sudden cry that the Emperor was dead; and it was immediately seen that his courtiers in a transport of grief had set fire to the royal tent; circumstance for which it was said that Carus was killed by lightning. But as far as we can investigate the truth, his death was the natural effect of his illness.» (translated)
According to Zonaras (who reports John Malalas' version adding some details), Instead, Carus would have returned to Rome with a multitude of prisoners and the spoils of war, he would have celebrated sumptuously the triumph against the Persians and would have subsequently been killed during a military campaign against the Huns (Zonara also reports the version of death by electrocution).[15] Regardless of the groundlessness of Caro's alleged return to Rome, Some modern authors argue that it cannot be excluded that during the continuation of the Sassanid campaign Carus died in battle against the Huns (perhaps mercenaries in the pay of the Persians), according to them, a more plausible version than that of death by electrocution.[19] The latter may have been artfully created by Roman propaganda to hide the defeats of Carus and Numerian in the final phase of the campaign handed down by some late Byzantine and Armenian chroniclers (whose reliability has however been questioned).[20] However, it is necessary to take into account the substantial unreliability of Malalas and the fact that Zonaras was writing in the 12th century. Many modern scholars prefer to discard or ignore the version of Carus' death against the Huns, arguing that the emperor died of illness or because of alleged intrigues of the praetorian prefectArrius Aper.[21]
DIVO CARO PARTHICO, radiate head of Emperor Marcus Aurelius Carus and draped bust facing right.
Following the death of Carus (July or August 283), Numerian succeeded him to the throne as colleague of Carinus. According to Latin sources there was hope that the young Numerian would continue his father's campaign and succeed in the enterprise of subjugating Media, but these hopes were dashed by the superstition of the army: in fact the soldiers interpreted the killing of the Emperor by lightning as a sign of bad omen and divine disfavor; furthermore, an oracle indicated Ctesiphon as the maximum border of the Roman Empire and the belief had spread that Carus had been punished by the gods because he had tried to go beyond it.[22] For this reason the soldiers asked the Emperor to withdraw from the occupied areas, a request that Numerian was unable to oppose, and so, at least according to the "vulgate" version, the campaign ended with the unexpected withdrawal of a victorious army.
Bas-relief at Naqsh-e Rostam depicting a conflict between Shah Bahram II and the Romans, in which the latter appear to have had the worst of it.
However, the excessive slowness of the ride during the retreat (1,200 miles traveled in 16 months) It appears suspicious, and could indicate a possible continuation of the war against the Persians, which is also suggested by the poet Nemesianus' Cynegetica (which hints at the intention of writing in the future also about Numerian's Persian deeds, something which however never happened) and from the numismatic evidence (which, for propaganda purposes, would seem to suggest that Numerian had successes over Persia, which however, if there were any, must have been only partial, judging from the fact that the coins never attribute to him the cognomina ex virtute of Parthicus and Persicus).[23] Furthermore, one of the bas-reliefs of Naqsh-e Rostam would seem to depict a military victory of the Shah Bahram II achieved against the Romans, which however is completely silent in the "vulgate" version. According to some modern scholars, similarly to what had happened for the Battle of Misiche a few decades earlier, the version of the spontaneous withdrawal of the Romans would have been artfully handed down by Roman propaganda in order to hide the defeat of Numerian at the hands of the Sassanid ruler Bahram II divulgated by Byzantine and Armenian chronicles.[24]
According to Joannes Zonaras, Numerian continued the campaign against the Persians and was defeated.[15] Zonaras also reports that according to some of his sources Numerianus attempted to escape but was captured and killed by the enemy and his skin was used to make a wineskin; according to other sources, however, during the retreat he was killed by the prefect of the praetorium Arrius Aper.[15]
According to the often unreliable John Malalas, Emperor Numerian, defeated in battle by the Persians, was besieged by them at Carrhae, then taken prisoner and finally executed and his skin used to make a wineskin (Malalas himself). However, he reports an alleged and "invented" Sassanid campaign by Carinus to avenge the death of his brother in which the Persians, after being defeated several times, they would have asked for a three-month truce, granted by Carinus because of the harsh winter and the tiredness of his army; the emperor, after having wintered in the Cyrrhestica, he would have resumed the campaign during which he would have died of natural causes.[25]
The Chronicon Paschale, instead, in an attempt to reconcile the official Roman version (Carus and Numerian killed respectively by lightning and by Aper) with Malalas' story, he "invents" that it is Carinus who accompanies his father in the Persian campaign; Following the death of Carus by lightning, Carinus is defeated, captured and flayed by the Persians, but his death is avenged by his brother Numerian who defeats the Persians before being killed near Perinthus by Aper.[26]
The Armenian story of Movses Khorenatsi reports a similar version, with some variations and additions, to that of Malalas and the Chronicon Paschale: Carus defeats the Persians for the first time and returns to Rome in triumph, but the Shah of Persia (called "Artashir") counterattack with reinforcements received from the allied nations including desert peoples, defeating the army of Carus in battle on the banks of the Euphrates, who finds death; subsequently Carinus, while he was marching in the desert with the pretender to the throne of Armenia Tiridates, he is massacred with his army, and Tiridates manages to save himself by swimming across the Euphrates; finally Numerian is killed in Thrace and Diocletian succeeds him to the throne.[27]
These sources present significant problems of accuracy. Malalas, in addition to filling the story with lies (such as that the province of Caria and the city of Carrhae were named after the emperor Carus), falsely attributes to Numerian the martyrdom of Babylas of Antioch (which actually occurred under Decius thirty years earlier) and in a similar manner he may have mistakenly attributed to him the death by flaying that actually happened to Valerian (also considering that the latter, according to Malala, would have been killed in Mediolanum).[28] Note the fact that some historians (the author of the Chronicon Paschale and the Armenian Movses Khorenatsi), faced with the dilemma of two irreconcilable versions of Numerian's death, they made the arbitrary choice to have Carinus killed by the Persians and Numerian killed near the Bosphorus for betrayal.[29] Zonaras, more methodically honest, reported both versions without alterations. Burgess considers the account of Moses of Chorene to be completely fictitious considering that Carinus died in battle against Diocletian, not against the Persians (Porena, instead, considers it plausible that Numerian and Tiridates may have suffered a defeat in the desert against the Persians).[30][11] Even with all these problems of accuracy, it is plausible that at least the figure of Numerian's defeat is correct, making the spontaneous renunciation of conquered lands useless and explaining some inconsistencies in the "vulgate" version. According to Porena's reconstruction, Numerian initially had to face a counterattack by mercenaries in the pay of the Persians against whom Carus died, then, after a truce of several months during which he would have wintered in Syria, apparently at Emesa (where he promulgated two rescripts dated September 283 and March 284), in the course of 284 he would suffer a serious defeat on the Euphrates, followed by the definitive Roman withdrawal.[31]
According to Zonaras,[33]Eugropius[34] and Festus,[35] the campaign ended in a Roman victory, with the conquest of Seleucia and the Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon (near modern Al-Mada'in, Iraq), cities on opposite banks of the Tigris[36][37][38][39] In celebration, Numerian, Carus, and Carinus all took the titlePersici maximi.[40][41] and with, however, the withdrawal of the Roman armies. According to the traditional reconstruction, the way back, 1,200 miles along the Euphrates River, was traveled in an orderly and slow manner: in March 284 they were at Emesa, in Syria, in November again in Asia Minor. Two imperial rescripts attest that Numerian was in Emesa on 8 September 283 and 18 March 284, which would seem to suggest a long stay of the emperor in the Syrian city.[42][43]
During his campaign, Carus proceeded through Thrace and Asia Minor, annexed Mesopotamia, pressed on to Seleucia and Ctesiphon, encountering little resistance due to the Sasanian Empire's internal instability,[44][45] and marched his soldiers beyond the Tigris.[33]
The Sassanid KingBahram II, limited by internal opposition and his troops occupied with a campaign in modern-day Afghanistan, could not effectively defend his territory.[46] The Sasanians, faced with severe internal problems, could not mount an effective coordinated defense at the time; Carus and his army may have captured the Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon.[3] The victories of Carus avenged all the previous defeats suffered by the Romans against the Sassanids, and he received the title of Persicus Maximus.[21]
Carinus declared Diocletian a usurper and moved with his army towards the East. In the Battle of the Margus River (July 285) Diocletian defeated Carinus in battle, who was killed by one of his officers. With this victory Diocletian unified the Empire under his rule.[15] At the beginning of his reign, between 286 and 287, Diocletian concluded a truce with Persia and managed to reinstate Tiridates III on the throne of Armenia. Diocletian, during his 20-year reign, reformed the Roman government with the famous Tetrarchy and succeeded, with the Sassanid campaigns of Galerius, to reconquer Mesopotamia.
↑ Burgess, Richard W.; Witakowski, Witold (1999). Studies in Eusebian and Post-Eusebian Chronography. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. pp.85–86. ISBN978-3-515-12040-1.
Porena, Pierfrancesco (2003). The origins of the late antique praetorian prefecture. Rome: The Herm of Bretschneider. ISBN88-8265-238-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
Edward Gibbon, Storia del declino e della caduta dell'Impero romano, Capitolo 12.
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