[HN Gopher] Byzantine-Sassanian War (602-628 CE): The Last Great...
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Byzantine-Sassanian War (602-628 CE): The Last Great War of
Antiquity (2023)
Author : teleforce
Score : 97 points
Date : 2025-01-17 00:00 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thecollector.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thecollector.com)
| mezod wrote:
| For anyone enjoying this type of content, I just happen to be
| reading The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan and damn, I never
| thought I could be so interested in all its cultural and
| religious context. So much to learn from history... but this time
| is different hehe ;)
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Such an excellent book. I get that it's a summary of 2,000
| years in one medium sized book, but every single page was new
| to me.
| johngossman wrote:
| Tom Holland's "Shadow of the Sword" covers this and the broader
| context. "Justinian's Flea" is set a century earlier, but
| provides some grimly fascinating background: both these empires
| were still suffering the economic and demographic consequences of
| a plague. It's an under appreciated period of history, just as
| interesting as the Roman civil war imho.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Anything off of the beaten track of Pharoahs -> Greece -> Rome
| -> GoT -> WWII is pretty under-appreciated. I've been reading
| more about Byzantium, the Ottomans, and the Persians and it's
| been fascinating. We never really scratched the surface of any
| of that in school.
| fstarship wrote:
| What does GoT stand for?
| p3rls wrote:
| Gulf of Tonkin incident and the iron throne of Saigon.
| bobosha wrote:
| The rise of islam was only possible due to the fight to
| exhaustion by the Byzantines and Sassanids. If not for the
| timing, Muhamad and his religion would have been but an obscure
| cult in the sands of Arabia. Just goes to show that timing is
| everything in history.
| antupis wrote:
| yes and no then you have characters like Genghis Khan who
| change history even if everything is stacked against them.
| namdnay wrote:
| "The Mule"
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Not sure the downvote. I assume it's a reference to
| Asimov's Foundation, which even the illiterate have a
| chance of knowing now
| machinekob wrote:
| Not sure if this is true, he got "lucky" with technological
| advantage of warfare (Mongol bows) compared to other nations
| close to him as horse archers were literally "meta" to fight
| vs heavy/peasant infantry same case as Crassus fighting
| Parthians.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Not really true. Horse archers were a thing before him and
| after him. And many of the people he thought were either
| horse archers themselves, or allied with horse archers, or
| had fought horse archers for centuries.
| machinekob wrote:
| Yes and no Mongol Bow was a thing that was just a lot
| better for this era compared to rest of Eurasia
| especially with combination with mongols tactics and rest
| of the regions didn't fight horse archers much for
| centuries but ofc. you can disagree.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The "mongol bow" was a traditional central asian design
| that had been in use for over a thousand years. It was
| even known to the Huns.
| Kamq wrote:
| Horse archers had been a thing before him, though they were
| quite powerful.
|
| His great accomplishment was marrying that with the ability
| to besiege walled cities. Nobody expected barbarian horse
| archers to be able to do that.
| empiricus wrote:
| You mean you only need better bows to conquer the world?
| What about millions of warriors already trained in battles
| and already winning against the biggest and most competent
| military force in that world (China) after hundreds of
| years iterated tactics and strategies?
| ETH_start wrote:
| This may have had to do with rainfall more than anything
| else:
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140310-ge.
| ..
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The rise of Islam through military conquest perhaps, but as a
| religion it is difficult to say. It spread in (East) Asia
| mostly through peaceful means all the way to China and South
| East Asia, for example.
| alephnerd wrote:
| But the spread of Islam into China (in reality Central Asia -
| there's a reason Xinjiang has historically been called
| Turkestan, Uyghur is the closest living language to Chagatai,
| and why a Kashgari family has managed the Jama Masjid in
| Delhi for centuries) and South East Asia was itself because
| of Islam's prominence in Central and South Asia.
|
| The early Islamic preachers in what became Indonesia and
| Malaysia were South Asian or Iranian in origin, and a major
| reason why Persianate motifs are prominent in Southeast Asian
| Islam. Same with much of Central Asia.
|
| That would have not happened if the Byzantine-Sassanid War
| did not happen, because what became Yemen and Oman would have
| remained under Sassanid suzerainity and much of the Levant
| would have remained Byzantine. And thus, Khorasan, Gujarat,
| Sindh, and Punjab would have not become Muslim.
|
| That said, I agree with you that the spread of Islam was
| HEAVILY dependent on trade.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Yes Islam went into China through trade and missionaries
| via the silk road and sea routes.
|
| There is a one thousand year old mosque in Beijing. There
| are ethnic Hans who converted (now the Hui minority). There
| was a sizeable Muslim community in Guangdong in the Tang
| Dynasty.
|
| The same holds true, as far as I know, throughout South
| East Asia.
|
| My point is simply that Islam could and did spread
| peacefully, like Christianity did before it. So it is
| difficult to draw drastic conclusions, IMHO.
| ImageLonging wrote:
| > It spread in Asia mostly through peacful means all the way
| to China
|
| The spread of Islam to China was only made possible through
| the spread of Islam first to Sogdiana, and that happened
| through quite violent means as we know from the written
| record.
| alephnerd wrote:
| But Sughd, Khorasan, and much of Central Asia didn't become
| almost entirely Muslim overnight - it still took centuries
| for it to become the dominant religion with Buddhism,
| Nestorian Christianity, Mancheanism, Zoroastrianism,
| Hinduism, Tengriism and folk traditions remaining common.
|
| Even in the 16th century if you read the Baburnama, pagans
| and non-Muslims were common across Central Asia and even
| Muslims like Babur were lax in their religiosity (drinking
| wine, eating pork, etc).
|
| In most cases, religion didn't largely solidify until the
| 19th-20th century with the rise of the nation state and
| nationalism.
|
| Religious nationalism in the modern sense (eg. Political
| Islam, Political Christianity, Hindutva, etc) only really
| began in the late 19th century when Rationalist (in the
| actual philosophical sense - not the tech bro bullcrap) and
| Enlightenment era thought began spreading.
| ImageLonging wrote:
| The arrival of Islam in Sogdiana resulted in an immediate
| decline in written transmission of other major religions,
| and they were gone by approximately the year 1000 CE.
| Even the Pamirs, always a relative backwater, were Muslim
| by the middle of the medieval era. Of course Islam in the
| region, just like the world religions preceding them, was
| mixed with age-old pagan beliefs or laxly observant, but
| in terms of politics and society, Islam of some form
| certainly became the dominant religion early, and that
| was due to the violent overthrow of the preceding regime
| by Qutaya b. Muslim al-Bahili and the installment of one
| that chose Islam as an official religion.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Yet neighboring Nuristan (19th), Kohistan (18th), and
| Kashmir (17th) didn't fully islamize until the 17th-19th
| century - 7-10 centuries after Islam arrived in those
| regions.
|
| > they were gone by approximately the year 1000 CE
|
| Absolutely not.
|
| Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism remained common in
| inner Asia until the 13th century with the Mongol
| invasions.
|
| Depending on where you draw the line for Central Asia,
| non-Muslim religions remained significantly practiced in
| Central Asia well beyond that era as well.
|
| At one point, the Tibetan empire even controlled Kabul
| during that era, and the Turk Shahis remained Buddhist or
| Hindu (depending on the leader) well beyond that era.
|
| Even the leader of the Ghurid dynasty (Muhammad ibn Suri)
| was a Buddhist or Hindu Turk despite using a Muslim name.
| ImageLonging wrote:
| > Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism remained common in
| inner Asia until the 13th century with the Mongol
| invasions.
|
| I was talking about Sogdiana, not other regions of
| Central Asia, and 1000 CE is a standard cutoff date in
| scholarship for the end of the other world religions
| there.
| zkry wrote:
| Wouldn't it be more correct to say that _Muslims_ spread
| through conventional warefare and _Islam_ spread through
| proselytization and incentivising conversion? I would
| imagine Muslim empires could expand without conversion (as
| they most definitely did in some areas) and Islam spread
| without a political presence.
|
| Like, I always thought that the Umayyad elites sometimes
| didn't even want people to convert, lest their privilege
| become diluted.
| qwytw wrote:
| The plague and climate change probably also had a massive
| impact. The latter giving an edge to decentralized nomadic
| societies.
| Tsarbomb wrote:
| Yea they were absolutely exhausted in terms of economics and
| demographics but it is so much more than that too which the
| article touches on.
|
| The lands in the middle east changed hands so many times that
| you had a generation be born and grow into adulthood without
| having being firmly associated with one empire or the other.
|
| You had the nomadic tribes grow rich from their mercenary work
| for either empire.
|
| You also had the fact that both Christian and Zoroastrian
| faiths took huge blows as the true cross was stolen by the
| Persians and then the Roman army destroyed the most important
| Zoroastrian fire temple and snuffed out the eternal flame
| there.
|
| And finally after the Persians were defeated by the Caliphate,
| you the the Romans, against their well established strategies,
| gather their forces for a decisive battle, and then make
| tactical mistakes allowing for defeat.
|
| It was the perfect storm of the right place, at the right time,
| with rolling nat 20s.
| duxup wrote:
| There does seem to be a tipping point where a place tips from
| a fairly organized society and constant warfare / conflict
| just becomes the norm and social and economic forces evolve
| to supply it ... and effectively keep it going even if it is
| not in society's best interest. Not a lot of peaceful
| alternatives at that point that aren't highly vulnerable to
| the cycle of conflict.
| machinekob wrote:
| If someone is interested in Byzantium fall and why this war was
| so bad for both empires, read some more about Justinian's Plague
| which killed ~35-50% of population and also halved economical
| output. It took about 200 years to get to the same place
| population wise for most of the empire.
|
| Weirdly it didn't hit Persia as much outside of Mesopotamia, most
| historians estimate "only" ~20-30% of population died and shifted
| balance of power to Persian side, from almost renewed Roman
| Empire at 540 which most likely was getting back to ruling
| mediterranean world once again.
| bwanab wrote:
| It should be noted, though, that by the time of Basil II in the
| 900s, the Eastern Roman Empire (aka Byzantium - a name neither
| they nor anyone else uses until the 19th century) had again
| become the most powerful military actor in the western world.
| segasaturn wrote:
| The Plague of Justinian was also the first recorded major
| outbreak of bubonic plague. Black death seems to be the pivot-
| point at a lot of important moments in history.
| Khaine wrote:
| If you are interested in learning more about Byzantium there is a
| fantastic podcast The History of Byzantium[1] that follows on
| from Mike Duncan's The History of Rome Podcast.
|
| [1] https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com
| anonnon wrote:
| Iran could possibly still be predominantly Zoroastrian today, and
| perhaps much of central Asian still Nestorian Christian, had this
| war not taken place or gone differently.
| ImageLonging wrote:
| It is also possible that Central Asia would be still Buddhist
| or Manichaean, as those were the major pre-Islamic world
| religions in the region alongside Nestorian Christianity.
| aryonoco wrote:
| And much of Central Asia and Anatolia would probably still be
| speaking an Indo-Iranian language as opposed to becoming Turkic
| speakers later on.
| avodonosov wrote:
| So many interesting events in history. But why a random one of
| them is at the HN top page?
| duxup wrote:
| It happens a lot. It's not a judgment call about all of them vs
| this one, it's just an interesting article.
| avodonosov wrote:
| I haven't finished it as it's long. Seems OK. But is it much
| better than the wikipedia one?
|
| Interesting photos of artefacts. But no maps at all. Two or
| three maps would make it much more informative.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| YC in-group fixation on "Roman stuff."
| avodonosov wrote:
| No, such random articles pop up often, and not necessary
| about Roman stuff.
| coldtea wrote:
| It's the "liking Roman stuff is something modern bros do,
| and thus beneath me" card, from the hollier-than-thou board
| game...
| coldtea wrote:
| Because somebody posted it && people found it interesting and
| voted for it.
|
| Same as with anything else. Did you ever ask "lots of posts
| about all programming languages on the web, but why a random
| one is on the first page on HN?"
| rawgabbit wrote:
| This is an excellent summary of the beginning of the end of two
| great empires. The Arabs would destroy the Persian Sassanids
| completely. The Byzantine with the loss of their bread basket of
| Egypt and Africa would be permanently weakened. The Crusades of
| later centuries did not help the Byzantines. The Fourth Crusade
| where the Crusaders sacked Constantinople left the empire even
| weaker. The Fourth Crusade is why many of the treasures of
| Constantinople were brought to Venice.
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(page generated 2025-01-20 23:01 UTC)