| Sasanian - Kidarite Wars | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||||
Alchon Huns Hepthalites | Kidarites | ||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
| Shapur II Bahram IV Yazdgard II Peroz Mehama | Grumbates Kidara Varhan | ||||||||
The Sasanian-Kidarite Wars were a series of military confrontations between the Sassanid Empire and the Kidarites.
Around 350 C.E, the emperor of the Sassanids had to abandon his military expedition to the city of Nisibis because of the arrival of various central Asian nomadic tribes on their east and had struggles against them. During this period, the Xionite/Huna tribes who are likely to be the Kidarites, appeared as a threat to the Sassanids and even to the Guptas. [1] After a long struggle, the Kidarites were forced to align with the Sassanids against the Romans.They agreed to enlist their light cavalry into the Persian army for accompanying Shapur II. The presence of the Kidarites in the Persian Campaign of the Western Caspian areas has been described by the Contemporary Eyewitness Ammianus Marcellinus. [2] [3] The presence of Grumbates is also observed at the Siege of Amida in 359, in which Grumbates lost his son. [1] [4]
The alliance between the Sassanid Empire and the Kidarites strained and during the reign of Bahram IV, the Sasanians suffered numerous defeats against the Kidarites [1] which allowed the Kidarites to settle in Bactria by replacing the Kushano-Sasanian Kingdom. [5] The Kidarite King Kidara proclaimed himself as the "Kidara King of the Kushans" on his coins as because the area was similar as of the western Kushans or Kushanshahr. [6] [7] According to Priscus, the Sasanians were forced to pay tributes to the Kidarites until the reign of Yazdgird II who had refrained from paying further tributes. [6]
As Yazdgird II refused to pay tribute, this became a reason for the Kidarites to invade the Sasanian dominions and therefore during the reign of Peroz I the Kidarites invaded the Sassanian domains. [8] Yazdgird II spent most of his life waging inconclusive military expeditions against the Kidarites but his last conflict on the seventeenth year of his reign, suffered fatality according to two Armenian historians and ended up as a tributary to the Kidarites. [8] Peroz I lacked in manpower and hence asked the Byzantines for financial aid which was refused.Peroz I then sought peace and offered marriage his sister in marriage to the Kidarites but instead sent a women of lower status, after a while when the Kidarites came to know about the fact, they in turn wanted to do the same to the Sassanids by asking for military experts in the hunnic army from Persia. [9]
As soon as the 300 military experts arrived at the Kidarite court, they were either disfigured or killed and were sent back to Persia along with the information that the reason of the act was nothing except for the fake promise of Peroz I. During this period Peroz I allied himself with Mehama who was either an Alchon Hunnic ruler of eastern Bactria, together they put an end to the Kidarite power by 466 [8] and the Sassanids took control of Bactria and Peroz I issued his coins at Balkh [10] which were based on the Kidarite coins. The victory against the Kidarites were announced by the Sasanian embassy in Constantinople. [11]
Yazdegerd II, was the Sasanian King of Kings of Iran from 438 to 457. He was the successor and son of Bahram V.
Shapur II, also known as Shapur the Great, was the tenth Sasanian King of Kings (Shahanshah) of Iran. He took the title at birth and held it until his death at age 70, making him the longest-reigning monarch in Iranian history. He was the son of Hormizd II.
The Kushan Empire was a syncretic empire formed by the Yuezhi in the Bactrian territories in the early 1st century. It spread to encompass much of what is now Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eastern Iran and Northern India, at least as far as Saketa and Sarnath, near Varanasi, where inscriptions have been found dating to the era of the Kushan emperor Kanishka the Great.
Xionites, Chionites, or Chionitae were a nomadic people in the Central Asian regions of Transoxiana and Bactria.
The Kidarites, or Kidara Huns, were a dynasty that ruled Bactria and adjoining parts of Central Asia and South Asia in the 4th and 5th centuries. The Kidarites belonged to a complex of peoples known collectively in India as the Huna, and in Europe as the Chionites, and may even be considered as identical to the Chionites. The 5th century Byzantine historian Priscus called them Kidarite Huns, or "Huns who are Kidarites". The Huna/Xionite tribes are often linked, albeit controversially, to the Huns who invaded Eastern Europe during a similar period. They are entirely different from the Hephthalites, who replaced them about a century later.
The Kushano-Sasanian Kingdom was a polity established by the Sasanian Empire in Bactria during the 3rd and 4th centuries. The Sasanian Empire captured the provinces of Sogdia, Bactria and Gandhara from the declining Kushan Empire following a series of wars in 225 CE. The local Sasanian governors then went on to take the title of Kushanshah or "King of the Kushans", and to mint coins. They are sometimes considered as forming a "sub-kingdom" inside the Sasanian Empire.
The siege of Amida was a military investment of the Roman fortified frontier city of Amida by the Sasanian Empire. It took place in AD 359 when the Sasanian army under king Shapur II invaded the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. Shapur wanted to exploit the absence of the Roman Emperor Constantius II who was overseeing affairs in the western part of the Empire. The city fell, but the strategic gain was little.
The Sasanian Empire, officially Ērānšahr, was the last pre-Islamic Iranian empire. Named after the House of Sasan, it endured for over four centuries, from 224 to 651, making it the second longest-lived Persian imperial dynasty after the directly preceding Arsacid dynasty of Parthia. It fell to the Rashidun Caliphate during the early Muslim conquests, which marked the beginning of a monumental societal shift by initiating the Islamization of Iran.
Kipunada, also Kipanadha, was probably the last ruler of the Kushan Empire around 335-350 CE. He is known for his gold coinage. He succeeded Shaka I. Kipunada was probably only a local ruler in the area of Taxila, in western Punjab, and he may have been a subject of Gupta Emperor Samudragupta.
The Hephthalite–Sasanian War of 484 was a military confrontation that took place in 484 between an invading force of the Sasanian Empire under the command of Peroz I and a smaller army of the Hephthalite Empire under the command of Khushnavaz. The battle was a catastrophic defeat for the Sasanian forces who were almost completely wiped out. Peroz, the Sassanid king, was killed in the action.
Peroz I Kushanshah was Kushanshah of the Kushano-Sasanian Kingdom from 245 to 275. He was the successor of Ardashir I Kushanshah. He was an energetic ruler, who minted coins in Balkh, Herat, and Gandhara. Under him, the Kushano-Sasanians further expanded their domains into the west, pushing the weakened Kushan Empire to Mathura in North India.
The Alchon Huns, also known as the Alkhan, Alchono, Alxon, Alkhon, Alakhana, and Walxon, were a nomadic people who established states in Central Asia and South Asia during the 4th and 6th centuries CE. They were first mentioned as being located in Paropamisus, and later expanded south-east, into the Punjab and Central India, as far as Eran and Kausambi. The Alchon invasion of the Indian subcontinent eradicated the Kidarite Huns who had preceded them by about a century, and contributed to the fall of the Gupta Empire, in a sense bringing an end to Classical India.
Kidara I fl. 350–390 CE) was the first major ruler of the Kidarite Kingdom, which replaced the Indo-Sasanians in northwestern India, in the areas of Kushanshahr, Gandhara, Kashmir and Punjab.
BahramKushanshah, was the last Kushanshah of the Kushano-Sasanian Kingdom from 330 to 365. He was the successor of Peroz II Kushanshah.
Mehama, ruled c.461-493, was a king of Alchon Huns dynasty. He is little known, but the Talagan copper scroll mentions him as an active ruler making a donation to a Buddhist stupa in 492/93. At that time, it is considered that the Alchon Huns were firmly in charge of the Buddhist region around Taxila, but had not yet started to conquer the Indian mainland.
The term Iranian Huns is sometimes used for a group of different tribes that lived in Central Asia, in the historical regions of Transoxiana, Bactria, Tokharistan, Kabul Valley, and Gandhara, overlapping with the modern-day Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Eastern Iran, Pakistan, and Northwest India, between the fourth and seventh centuries. They also threatened the Northeast borders of Sasanian Iran and forced the Shahs to lead many ill-documented campaigns against them.
Peroz, was according to modern scholarship an early Kidarite ruler in Gandhara, right after the end of Kushano-Sasanians.
Kirada, is considered by modern scholarship as the first known ruler of the Kidarite Huns in the area of Gandhara in northwestern India, possibly at the same time as another Kidarite ruler named Yosada.
Hind was the name of a southeastern Sasanian province lying near the Indus River in modern-day southern Pakistan. The boundaries of the province are obscure. The Austrian historian and numismatist Nikolaus Schindel has suggested that the province may have corresponded to the Sindh region, where the Sasanians notably minted unique gold coins of themselves. According to the modern historian C. J. Brunner, the province possibly included—whenever jurisdiction was established—the areas of the Indus River, including the southern part of Punjab.
The Sasanian–Kushan Wars were a series of wars between the newly established Persian Sasanian empire, under Ardashir I and later his successor Shapur I, against the declining Kushan empire. These wars resulted in the eastward expansion of the Sasanians who conquered much of the Kushan territory including Bactria, Gandhara and Sogdia. The Sassanids, shortly after victory over the declining Parthian empire, extended their dominion to most of former Parthian lands, including Bactria, during the reign of Ardashir I around 230 CE, then they further expanded to the eastern parts of their empire in what is now western Pakistan, at the expense of warring against the declining Kushan empire, during the reign of his son Shapur I (240–270). Thus the Kushans lost their western territory to the rule of Sassanid nobles, who eventually established their own states and were collectively referred to as Kushanshahs or "Kings of the Kushans". At their greatest extent, these Kushano-Sasanians also seem to have expanded eastwards all the way to Gandhara, however do not seem to have crossed the Indus River, since almost none of their coinage has been found in the city of Taxila, just beyond the Indus.
