Battle of Edessa (260): Shapur I Captures Emperor Valerian

The Battle of Edessa was fought in AD 260 in northern Mesopotamia between the Roman emperor Valerian and the Sasanian King of Kings Shapur I. The Roman army was defeated and Valerian himself was taken prisoner, the only time a Roman emperor fell into the hands of a foreign enemy. Shapur celebrated the triumph in rock reliefs that still stand in Iran, while Rome plunged deeper into the political and military turmoil historians call the Crisis of the Third Century.

Background: Rome and the new Persian power

In 224 the Sasanian dynasty replaced the Parthians as rulers of Iran (see the Battle of Hormozdgan). Ardashir I and his son Shapur I claimed the lands once held by the ancient Persian kings and pressed hard on Rome’s eastern frontier.

Shapur, who became sole ruler around 240, won a series of victories. In 244 a Roman invasion under the young emperor Gordian III ended in defeat near Misiche on the Euphrates, and Gordian died. His successor, Philip the Arab, made peace by paying a large sum, which Shapur’s inscription gives as 500,000 denarii.

In a second campaign in the early 250s, Shapur destroyed a Roman army at Barbalissos and sacked many cities in Syria, including Antioch. The frontier town of Dura-Europos on the Euphrates fell to him around 256.

Valerian’s eastern war

Valerian became emperor in 253, an experienced senator already in his sixties. He made his son Gallienus co-emperor and divided the burden of defence: Gallienus took charge of the West, threatened by Germanic invaders, while Valerian took the East.

Valerian worked to restore Roman control in Syria and Asia Minor, but his reign was troubled. Goths raided the coasts of the Black Sea and Asia Minor, and plague spread through the empire. He is also remembered for ordering persecutions of Christians in 257 and 258, during which Bishop Cyprian of Carthage and Pope Sixtus II were executed.

Around 260 Shapur launched a third campaign into Roman Mesopotamia and besieged Edessa and Carrhae. Valerian marched to relieve them.

The battle and the capture

The sources for the battle are brief and partly contradictory. The most important is Shapur’s own trilingual inscription (in Middle Persian, Parthian and Greek) carved on the monument known as the Ka’ba-ye Zartosht at Naqsh-e Rostam. Historians often call it the Res Gestae Divi Saporis, “the deeds of the divine Shapur”.

According to this inscription, Valerian led an army of 70,000 men drawn from across the empire, from Germany to Syria. A great battle was fought “beyond Carrhae and Edessa”, and Shapur says he took Valerian prisoner with his own hands, together with the praetorian prefect, senators and officers.

Roman and Byzantine historians tell the story differently. The Greek historian Zosimus, writing around 500, says that Valerian’s army had been weakened by plague and that the emperor, seeking terms, went to meet Shapur with a small escort and was seized. Other writers blame treachery. The two versions are not necessarily exclusive: a defeated and trapped army may have been forced to negotiate before the emperor’s capture.

The exact place and date are not known. Most historians place the battle in 260, probably in the spring or early summer.

Key people

• Shapur I (reigned c. 240–270): Sasanian King of Kings, one of the most successful rulers in Persian history.
• Valerian (reigned 253–260): Roman emperor, captured and never released.
• Gallienus (reigned 253–268): Valerian’s son and co-emperor, who ruled alone after his father’s capture and made no attempt to free him.
• Odaenathus: ruler of Palmyra, who attacked Shapur’s army on its return and became Rome’s chief defender in the East.
• Macrianus and Quietus: Roman officers’ sons proclaimed emperors in the East after Valerian’s capture.

Valerian’s fate

Valerian never returned. He was taken deep into Iran and appears to have died there, probably within a few years. The details of his captivity are the stuff of legend.

The Christian writer Lactantius, writing around 315, claimed that Shapur used Valerian as a mounting block, stepping on his back to climb onto his horse. After his death, Lactantius says, his skin was flayed, dyed red and hung in a temple as a trophy. Lactantius wrote to show that persecutors of Christians came to terrible ends, so most historians treat these stories with great caution.

The Persian sources say nothing of humiliations beyond the capture itself, while late Iranian tradition suggests the Roman captives were treated as useful labour.

Consequences

The capture was a political shock without precedent. In the East, Roman authority collapsed for a time. Shapur’s forces raided Syria, Cilicia and Cappadocia. Two sons of the officer Macrianus were proclaimed emperors; they were soon defeated.

The Palmyrene ruler Odaenathus harassed Shapur’s army as it withdrew and then fought for Rome against the Persians. His success laid the foundation for the short-lived Palmyrene Empire of his widow, Zenobia, in the 270s.

In the West, the general Postumus seized power in Gaul around 260 and founded the breakaway Gallic Empire. Gallienus, sole emperor, held together what remained, and he ended his father’s persecution of Christians.

Shapur deported large numbers of Roman soldiers and civilians, including engineers and craftsmen, and settled them in Iranian cities such as Bishapur and Gundeshapur. Roman captives are traditionally credited with helping to build the Band-e Kaisar (“Caesar’s dam”), a bridge-dam at Shushtar, although how much they built is debated.

Legacy in stone

Shapur ensured that his victory would be remembered. At Naqsh-e Rostam, near the tombs of the Achaemenid kings, a great rock relief shows him on horseback holding Valerian by the wrist, while another Roman, usually identified as Philip the Arab, kneels in submission. Similar scenes were carved at Bishapur and Darabgerd.

A large sardonyx cameo in the Bibliothèque nationale de France also shows Shapur and Valerian on horseback, with the Persian king seizing the emperor by the arm. Together these images became some of the most famous propaganda monuments of the ancient world.

The Romans had their own long memory of defeat in this region. Carrhae, which Valerian had tried to relieve, was the place where Crassus had been destroyed by the Parthians three centuries earlier, at the Battle of Carrhae.

Myths and facts

Myth: Valerian was stuffed and displayed for centuries. This claim grew out of Lactantius’s story of his flayed skin. No Persian or neutral source confirms it.

Myth: Valerian was the only emperor to die fighting Persia. Gordian III died during the Persian campaign of 244 and Julian was killed in Mesopotamia in 363. Valerian is unique only in having been captured alive.

Fact: the victory is recorded by both sides. Shapur’s inscription and the Roman historical tradition agree that an emperor was captured, which makes this one of the best-attested events of the 3rd-century crisis.

Timeline

• 224: Ardashir I overthrows the Parthians and founds the Sasanian Empire.
• 244: Gordian III’s invasion fails; Philip the Arab makes peace with Shapur.
• c. 252–253: Shapur defeats the Romans at Barbalissos and sacks Antioch.
• 253: Valerian becomes emperor with his son Gallienus.
• c. 256: Dura-Europos falls to the Sasanians.
• 257–258: Valerian orders persecutions of Christians.
• 260: Valerian is defeated and captured near Edessa.
• 260–261: Revolt of Macrianus and Quietus; Postumus founds the Gallic Empire.
• c. 262: Odaenathus of Palmyra campaigns against the Persians.

Why it matters

The capture of Valerian was the most humiliating moment in Rome’s long rivalry with Persia. It showed the strength of the new Sasanian Empire, helped fragment the Roman world into rival regimes in the 260s, and left a lasting image of a Roman emperor at the mercy of a Persian king.