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Ascan
Ascan (died 19 April 531) was a Byzantine ''dux'' of Hunnish descent. He fought at the Battle of Dara in 530, and at the Battle of Callinicum one year later, where he put up a brave fight when his flank was exposed, dying on the field. Biography He was one of several warriors of Hunnic descent fighting for the Byzantine Empire; the Huns were known to "fight like tigers when driven to bay" and to "die sword in hand". Ascan fought at the Battle of Dara in 530 AD, where he commanded 600 horsemen (constituting the right-hand Hunnic cavalry force) together with fellow Hunnic commander Simmas. He, Simmas and the other two Hunnic commanders, Sunicas and Aïgan, played a fundamental role in the Roman victory of this battle. He led the greater part of the Byzantine cavalry, made up of cataphracts, at the Battle of Callinicum. Here, the Persians tried to defeat the Romans as they had in vain attempted at Dara, by deploying their cavalry to try and attack a weak spot in the Roman army. Beli ...
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Simmas
Simmas () was a Hunnic general in the service of the Byzantine Empire, serving as ''dux'' (regional military commander). Active in the early 6th century, he fought at the Battle of Dara, commanding six hundred horseman along with fellow Hun commander Ascan, and played a fundamental role in the Byzantine victory. Biography He fought for the Byzantines against the Sasanian Empire at the Battle of Dara in 530 AD, alongside fellow Hun commanders Aïgan, Ascan, and Sunicas. He and Ascan commanded the right-hand Hunnic cavalry force, whereas Aïgan and Sunicas commanded the left wing of the Hunnic cavalry. During the battle, the Sasanian commander, Perozes, had concentrated his Immortals against the Byzantines to his left. The Byzantine generals countered this by stopping the action of Aïgan and Sunicas on the left and sending them to the right, where they joined Simmas and Ascan. The Huns were also backed by drafts from the center of the army. The Persians charged on, driving the ...
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Battle Of Callinicum
The Battle of Callinicum took place on Easter Saturday, 19 April 531 AD, between an army of the Byzantine Empire under Belisarius and a Sasanian cavalry force commanded by Azarethes. After being defeated at the Battle of Dara, the Sasanians moved to invade Roman Syria in an attempt to turn the tide of the war. Belisarius' rapid response foiled the plan, and his troops pushed the Persians to the Syrian border through maneuvering before forcing a battle in which the Sasanians won a Pyrrhic victory. Prelude In April 531 AD, the Persian king Kavadh I sent an army under Azarethes, consisting of a cavalry force numbering about 15,000 Aswaran with an additional 5,000 Lakhmid Arab cavalry under Al-Mundhir, to invade Syria, not through the heavily-fortified frontier cities of Roman Mesopotamia, but through the less conventional but also less-defended route in Commagene in order to capture Syrian cities such as Antioch. The Persian army crossed the frontier at Circesium on the Euphrat ...
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Battle Of Dara
The Battle of Dara was fought between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sasanians in 530 AD. It was one of the battles of the Iberian War. Procopius's account of this engagement is among the most detailed descriptions of a late Roman battle. Background The Byzantine Empire was at war with the Sassanids from 527, supposedly because Kavadh I had tried to force the Iberians to become Zoroastrians. The Iberian king fled from Kavadh, but Kavadh tried to make peace with the Byzantines, and attempted to have Justin I adopt his son Khosrau. Justin agreed, but on the terms that he would do so only in a rite reserved for barbarians. This failed to satisfy Kavadh, who attacked Byzantine allies, so Justin sent his generals Sittas and Belisarius into Persia, where they were initially defeated. In 529, the failed negotiations of Justin's successor Justinian prompted a Sassanian expedition of 40,000 men towards Dara. The next year, Belisarius was sent back to the region alongside Hermogenes ...
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Pannonia
Pannonia (, ) was a province of the Roman Empire bounded on the north and east by the Danube, coterminous westward with Noricum and upper Italy, and southward with Dalmatia and upper Moesia. Pannonia was located in the territory that is now western Hungary, western Slovakia, eastern Austria, northern Croatia, north-western Serbia, northern Slovenia, and northern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Name Julius Pokorny believed the name ''Pannonia'' is derived from Illyrian, from the Proto-Indo-European root ''*pen-'', "swamp, water, wet" (cf. English ''fen'', "marsh"; Hindi ''pani'', "water"). Pliny the Elder, in '' Natural History'', places the eastern regions of the Hercynium jugum, the "Hercynian mountain chain", in Pannonia and Dacia (now Romania). He also gives us some dramaticised description of its composition, in which the proximity of the forest trees causes competitive struggle among them (''inter se rixantes''). He mentions its gigantic oaks. But even he—if the passage in ...
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George Philip Baker
George Philip Baker (Plumstead, 21 May 1879 – 19 April 1951) was a British author, who published several popular history books in the 1920s and 1930s. Life As Baker was deaf from eight years old, he couldn't serve in the English army, but he would be almost all of his adult life serve as a civil servant in the Royal Artillery. He had an interest for military history and would stress the importance of political and economical developments as underlying causes for the military capacities that would cause the rise and fall of empires. Although he wasn't a professional scholar, he always read the contemporary scientific literature in order to be well informed to talk about his subject. He wrote books about several historical figures (Sulla, Hannibal, Tiberius, Constantine the Great, Justinian I, Charlemagne, the warrior kings of Wessex la, Regnum Occidentalium Saxonum , conventional_long_name = Kingdom of the West Saxons , common_name = Wessex , ...
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People Of The Roman–Sasanian Wars
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. The defining features of personhood and, consequently, what makes a person count as a person, differ widely among cultures and contexts. In addition to the question of personhood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about personal identity and self: both about what makes any particular person that particular person instead of another, and about what makes a person at one time the same person as they were or will be at another time despite any intervening changes. The plural form "people" is often used to refer to an entire nation or ethnic group (as in "a people"), and this was the original meaning of the word; it subsequently acquired its use as a plural form of per ...
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Generals Of Justinian I
A general officer is an officer of high rank in the armies, and in some nations' air forces, space forces, and marines or naval infantry. In some usages the term "general officer" refers to a rank above colonel."general, adj. and n.". OED Online. March 2021. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/77489?rskey=dCKrg4&result=1 (accessed May 11, 2021) The term ''general'' is used in two ways: as the generic title for all grades of general officer and as a specific rank. It originates in the 16th century, as a shortening of ''captain general'', which rank was taken from Middle French ''capitaine général''. The adjective ''general'' had been affixed to officer designations since the late medieval period to indicate relative superiority or an extended jurisdiction. Today, the title of ''general'' is known in some countries as a four-star rank. However, different countries use different systems of stars or other insignia for senior ranks. It has a NATO rank sc ...
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Huns
The Huns were a nomadic people who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe between the 4th and 6th century AD. According to European tradition, they were first reported living east of the Volga River, in an area that was part of Scythia at the time; the Huns' arrival is associated with the migration westward of an Iranian people, the Alans. By 370 AD, the Huns had arrived on the Volga, and by 430, they had established a vast, if short-lived, dominion in Europe, conquering the Goths and many other Germanic peoples living outside of Roman borders and causing many others to flee into Roman territory. The Huns, especially under their King Attila, made frequent and devastating raids into the Eastern Roman Empire. In 451, they invaded the Western Roman province of Gaul, where they fought a combined army of Romans and Visigoths at the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields, and in 452, they invaded Italy. After the death of Attila in 453, the Huns ceased to be a major thr ...
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Pyrrhic Victory
A Pyrrhic victory ( ) is a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat. Such a victory negates any true sense of achievement or damages long-term progress. The phrase originates from a quote from Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose triumph against the Romans in the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC destroyed much of his forces, forcing the end of his campaign. Etymology ''Pyrrhic victory'' is named after King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans at the Battle of Heraclea in 280 BC and the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC, during the Pyrrhic War. After the latter battle, Plutarch relates in a report by Dionysius: In both Epirote victories, the Romans suffered greater casualties but they had a much larger pool of replacements, so the casualties had less impact on the Roman war effort than the losses of King Pyrrhus. The report is often quoted as or Examples War This list comprises examples of b ...
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Raqqa
Raqqa ( ar, ٱلرَّقَّة, ar-Raqqah, also and ) (Kurdish languages, Kurdish: Reqa/ ڕەقە) is a city in Syria on the northeast bank of the Euphrates River, about east of Aleppo. It is located east of the Tabqa Dam, Syria's largest dam. The Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine city and bishopric Callinicum (formerly a Latin and now a Maronite Catholic titular see) was the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate between 796 and 809, under the reign of Harun al-Rashid. It was also the capital of the Territory of the Islamic State, Islamic State from 2014 to 2017. With a population of 531,952 based on the 2021 official census, Raqqa is the sixth largest city in Syria. During the Syrian Civil War, the city was captured in 2013 by the Syrian opposition and then by the Islamic State. ISIS made the city its capital in 2014. As a result, the city was hit by airstrikes from the Syrian government, Russia, the United States, and Military intervention against ISIL, several other countries. Mos ...
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Phoulkon
The ''phoulkon'' ( gr, φοῦλκον), in Latin fulcum, was an infantry formation utilized by the military of the late Roman and Byzantine Empire. It is a formation in which an infantry formation closes ranks and the first two or three lines form a shield wall while those behind them hurl projectiles. It was used in both offensive and defensive stances. Etymology The term ''phoulkon'' is first attested to in the ''Strategikon of Maurice'', a military manual written in the 590s. Written in Greek, the author of the ''Strategikon'' "also frequently employed Latin and other terms which have been in common military use", as Latin continued to be the language of the army at that time. Therefore, the word, like other military terminology found in the manual, is likely a Greek transliteration of the Latin word ''*fulcum'', though this Latin term is not attested to in any surviving texts. The only other early Byzantine author to use the term was Theophanes the Confessor, who describe ...
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Ghassanids
The Ghassanids ( ar, الغساسنة, translit=al-Ġasāsina, also Banu Ghassān (, romanized as: ), also called the Jafnids, were an Arab tribe which founded a kingdom. They emigrated from southern Arabia in the early 3rd century to the Levant region. Some merged with Hellenized Christian communities, converting to Christianity in the first few centuries AD, while others may have already been Christians before emigrating north to escape religious persecution. After settling in the Levant, the Ghassanids became a client state to the Byzantine Empire and fought alongside them against the Persian Sassanids and their Arab vassals, the Lakhmids. The lands of the Ghassanids also acted as a buffer zone protecting lands that had been annexed by the Romans against raids by Bedouin tribes. Few Ghassanids became Muslim following the Muslim conquest of the Levant; most Ghassanids remained Christian and joined Melkite and Syriac communities within what is now Jordan, Israel, Palesti ...
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