Stuff To Blow Your MindHistory. Science. Dethroned emperor. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe travel back to the third century CE to discuss the Battle of Edessa, in which the Sasanian Empire not only defeated the Roman army but also took its Emperor as a prisoner of war. How did the emperor’s capture impact the already crisis-ridden Roman Empire, what do scientists make of his alleged grisly fate and how was Valerian’s fall possibly mythologized by Christian historians? Find out… (originally published 07/19/2022)
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to bring an episode out of the vault for viewing. I guess it wouldn't be viewing because it's audio for listening. This is part one of our series on the Fall of Valerian. This was originally published on July nineteenth, twenty twenty two. Let's jump right in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And Rob what's that sound? Is that the sound of us digging down a historical rabbit hole that you got interested in? What are we doing today?
Oh? In this episode we are going to talk about the fall of Valerian, Emperor Valerian of Rome. This is this is this is going to be I think a fun one, even though this is certainly going to be more of a historical direction, not the first time that we've we've gone down a historical rabbit hole, as you say, but I think, as always it's important to remember in this context, you know what histories are. It's kind of like you have you have, you know, histories with capital aging, histories with the lower case H. Histories in general, written histories, oral histories, passed down histories, resurrected histories are accounts of the past that very often have viewpoints, biases, agendas. They're constructed from memories, evidence, and pre existing accounts, all of which are subject to error. In short, interest in history is not only a matter of what happened, but also why did this version of what happened happen? Why is this the account that was written down or told to others? And these are all interesting questions to ask about the fall of Emperor Valerian, questions that still remain today about what actually happened to him, also how did the defeat go down? But mostly what was his ultimate fate?
Ah. So here you're interested not only in a question of history, as in what's the best we can figure out what happened in the past, but a question of historiography. Why did certain historians of the past write about history in a certain way?
Yeah? And I think ultimately this is a story that is interesting on both counts because it's also fascinating to look at the various histories and piece together in your mind this story of just countless on the Roman imperial side, you know, just constant overthrow and backstabbing, this era of chaos that sees just emperor after emperor fall, to all of the infighting in Rome as well as to some of the the fighting on the borders of the Roman Empire as well. And yeah, then there's also this question of well, what are these different stories regarding the fate of Valarian, what do they mean, and how are we supposed to interpret them from our modern standpoint.
So I'm just curious, how did you get interested in this, in particular, this question about what happened to Emperor Valerian.
I think this was one of those kind of just tangentsteering research where I just I was working on something else and then I was curious. I was looking into maybe various emperors and the fall of various emperors, and then I started I think I initially just clicked on on just like a basic page about Valerian and read some grizzly details about what might have happened to him, and that got me thinking. It was like, well, this sounds this is really severe. You know, what were the ramifications of this, and then I started digging in a little.
Deeper, classic rabbit hole dynamic.
All right, yeah, yeah, all right. So to begin with, let's talk about where we're going to go in what time period we're traveling to. For the most part, here we have to journey to the Roman Empire during a time that is known as the Crisis of the third Century, a period of decades lasting from two thirty five to two eighty four CE, during which the Roman Empire was just defined by anarchy and strife, a time during which it nearly collapsed. One of the books that I was looking to for this is actually it's an older history book, a series of popular history books came out many decades ago from Will Durrant. This is the Story of Civilization. And there's one section in the book that deals with primarily with the Romans, titled the Collapse of the Empire. And there's a great quote I want to read from that quote, we shall not repeat in bloody detail the names and battles and deaths of these emperors of anarchy. In the thirty five years between Alexander Severus and Aurelian, thirty seven men were proclaimed emperors.
I'm going to say it, that's too many emperors, that's too many.
It is it is, it's that is just that is that has a lot of emperors to go through in such a short period of time, And like Will Durrant, we are not going to go through all and we're going to mention some of them, just to give you a little color for just how much turmoil, how much turnover there was. This was the time period during which there was there was really not any job security to being the emperor of Rome.
You know, one thing that's always interesting to me about Roman history is not just that basically that all Roman emperors are bad leaders by modern morals and modern standards, but that most Roman emperors were bad leaders by Roman standards.
Yeah, there's when you start talking about, well, who are the worst emperors, it's you can draw up a pretty exhaustive list, and then they're actual. There are actually some pretty pretty fun lists of this show you can find on the internet. But a number of really bad ones do occur during this time. Some of the other really famous bad ones occur prior to this period. But yeah, the Crisis of the Third Century runs from two thirty five to two eighty four. So that race is the question. What do these dates mean. Let's start with two thirty five. In the year two thirty five, the Emperor Severus Alexander is assassinated by his own troops. So Alexander had been named emperor at age fourteen, and he was a progressive figure in many respects who sought to restore the power of the senate and the aristocracy and to weaken the dominance of the Roman military. So he built libraries, public baths, and other works in the empire. He engaged in various economic programs to bring down interest rates and also help the poor. Now I say progressive in many respects because he also enforced various morality based laws that saw the arrest of prostitutes the deportation of homosexuals. Still, consider that previous emperors included the likes of Caligula, Nero, and Comitas. These are all names that probably ring a bell in everyone's head, you know some of the stories about these individuals.
Even if that scene from the movie where Caligula chops off people's heads with a lawnmower didn't really happen in history, Caligula was a really bad guy.
Yeah, it's still kind of in the spirit of Caligula. So Alexander's immediate predecessor was an emperor by the name of Elagabalus who had died at age eighteen, following a short reign that's noted mostly for scandals and excess, though Durant notes that something you have to keep in mind, I guess with a lot of these individuals is that at least some of these scandals were probably fabricated by enemies, of which Elagabalas had many in the senatorial class of One of the many examples will be pointing to in this episode where history and the truth is of course tweaked to serve some sort of an agenda, but by by all accounts, still not a great emperor. He hosted weird lotteries, and there's actually an excellent horrible history sketch from the historical comedy show on British television about this.
Oh you shared this with me, but I'm sorry I did not have time to watch it yet. I can't wait too once we're done here.
Basically, I mean the story is that, yeah, he was like, well let's have a lottery, let's have some fun romans, but you might win some money or a house, but you also might win just a whole bunch of flies or a poisonous snake things. So it's weird, you know, in a way. It was kind of like very strange reality television of this time period.
So I remember Eli Gabolis has come up on the the show at least once before, because it was in our invention episode on the history of air conditioning, and there's a story told by I'm sorry, I forget the Roman historian, but somebody tells a story about Eligabolis cooling his orchard or his you know, the courtyard at his palace by having people bring down snow from the tops of a nearby mountain and pile it up just to like keep things cool in the summer, which overall is very inefficient. But I think we decided, well, if there's a huge block of snow, that would actually sort of cool off the area, especially if there's like breeze blowing over it. So I guess, if that's true clever but also kind of excessive. But then again, we also addressed the question of whether or not that was true, because I think the historian who told that story was a marked adversary of the legacy of this emperor. Yeah, it may have just been trying to make him look stupid, right.
And also, if you happen to be this teenage emperor of Rome, I mean maybe you just asked that they bring snow to your house once and then your enemies find out about it and they're like, he brings snow to his house every day. It's the most extravagant thing I've ever heard of.
Oh yeah, remember when he created ice town.
At any rate, that that's the only good thing to say about him, it seems, is that he did seem interested in bol spring religious freedom in the empire. I have only so he could keep worshiping the Syrian god ball himself. So when Severus Alexander becomes emperor at age fourteen, the same as his predecessor, things I guess seem to be moving in a different direction, and his rule proved stable, lasting thirteen years, the longest reign of a single emperor in decades. At that point. He was a temperate figure, and especially early on, his mother compandied it commanded a great deal of power through him, and I think was always a powerful figure in his administration, if you will, Together they showed a certain amount of openness to the practice of Judaism and Christianity within the empire. They even lowered taxes. But of course he courted a powerful enemy in attempting to reduce the power of the Roman military, and Rome had many external enemies during this time, including the Sasanian Empire, sometimes referred to as the Sassanid Empire or sometimes referred to as a dynasty rather than an empire. This is located in Persia and at this point in time only recently established in two twenty four by the founder Adashir the First So about eight years into Alexander's rule, the Sasanian army under Adashir invades Mesopotamia and threatens Roman held Syria. So Alexander initially responds by basically sending him a statement condemning the violence of the invasion and telling look, everyone should be content with current borders and domains, and also kind of warning him if you're gonna mess with Rome, you're not going to find it as easy as the wars you've been waging previously. Now. Adashir, perhaps interpreting this as weakness, then follows up by demanding all of Syria and Asia minor from Rome and This results in a direct military response from Alexander, and he manages to push Sasanian forces out of Mesopotamia by two thirty three. But that's when Rome's Germanic enemies to the north, the Alemanni and the Marcomanni, attack, taking advantage of depleted northern forces to attack Gaul. So Alexander and his mother they rejoined the army, having only just briefly celebrated a sort of victory over the Sasanians, and he leads the army to meet this new threat. On his mother's advice, he pushes for peace with the Germanic tribes, offering annual payments to keep them in check. His own troops reportedly see this as weakness. They also seem to have issues with his mother's presence, and so they and of course, on top of all this, they still hate him for his work against the military, and so they mutiny against Alexander and they assassinate him, his mother and some of his key people. And this is the point where we begin these decades of chaos. This is when we begin the crisis of the third century.
Okay, so the young emperor his mom are dead. They're they're they're they're out of power. Who's coming up next? Who do they put in?
Well, a military man, of course, they lift up Maximinus Thracks, a sixty two year old commander, and his rule would last a mere three years because everything just descends into civil war and death at this point, beginning the Crisis of the third century in earnest and immediately bringing about the what is sometimes called the Year of Six Emperors in two thirty eight, when six different men claim to be Emperor of Rome.
Man, you thought two popes at the same time was too much.
Yeah, so the following decades, Yes, we're in fact bloody and chaotic, with again thirty seven different proclaimed Roman emperors during just a thirty five year time period. Internal factors weakened the state, foreign enemies threatened on every front. This period of crisis lasted until two eighty four, when the Empire was stabilized once more with the reign of Diocletian, who reigned twenty one years and then voluntarily retired and died of get this natural causes. All of this stands in start contrast to the short, bloody and doomed reigns of most of the emperors preceding him.
Diocletian is an interesting figure. I'm certainly no expert on his life, but I know one thing about him is that he actually had the the unusual seeming insight that maybe hereditary rule is stupid and causing a lot of problems because if you're just like trying to hand power off to your son, your son might not actually be good at anything, it might not be very smart. So instead, what you should have is a system where power is shared between I think the idea came up with was the tetrarchy, that there would be four rulers who would rule over different parts of the empire. They would make decisions together, and then then after they were in charge, they would pass on their office not to their sons, but to like basically people they're mentees, people who they had trained allegedly on the basis of merit. Though I think that pretty quickly devolved into hereditary rule again with Constantine's father trying to pass stuff on to Constantine.
Yeah. Yeah, this whole question over hereditary rule is interesting because I mean, from a modern perspective, we look at it and we say, well, this is off is a bad idea. There's so much that can go wrong with and you look at these historical examples of fourteen year old emperors and it just seems insane. Like, my son, I have to realize with horror, will be fourteen in four years. I cannot imagine him as a fourteen year old emperor.
But your son is so much nicer than any Roman emperor that ever lived.
Well, at this point, he hasn't become emperor yet, he.
Has a tasted power.
But you know, the other interesting side of this is I mentioned earlier that Severus Alexander and his mother, one of their ideas was, all right, let's put the power back in more in the hands of the aristocracy, let's get it away from from the military a bit. And apparently one of the arguments in this is, well, hey, at least with hereditary rule, there's a structure. You know, if you're looking at an alternative that involves just sort of endless parades of soldier kings, then how are you supposed to work with that? And indeed, I guess you could look at the Crisis of the third century as an example of what happens when you're ruled mostly by soldier kings trying to murder each other or trying to nearly avoid being murdered by your own soldiers. Not saying hereditary rule is a great idea, but I'm just saying you can see where people can maybe waffle back and forth as these different systems results in chaos.
I think all of these stories are just a brilliant advertisement for liberal democracy.
Yeah, all right, So these various imperial stories we've looked at so far, these are mostly just to set the stage for the story of Emperor Valerian, who reigned two fifty three through two sixty right in the middle of the crisis of the third century, and his two is a tale of blood and doom, but also a good deal more. And don't worry. If you're out there right now listening to the show and thinking, well, I wonder if there'll be any science, don't worry. We do have a short science paper that ties into everything later on. All right, I'm going to read another quote from Will Durant, because this is another one that I thought was rather nice, And this is again from the Collapse of the Empire and the Story of Civilization Part three. Quote the new Emperor Valerian already sixty and facing war at once with the Franks, The Alemanni, the Marcomanni, the Goths, the Scythians, and the Persians, made his son ruler of the Western Empire, kept the East for himself, and led an army into Mesopotamia. He was too old for his tasks and soon succumbed.
Okay, so he's going east to fight.
Right, and it's not going to end well. And granted, Durant's covering a lot of territory in these books, so this is basically all he has to say about the episode with Valerian right there. But there are other histories, of course that give us a lot more details and also some questionable details as we'll get into. So the crisis, so the third century against a number of would be emperors rise up through the military ranks, and a lot of them were purely of military stock. Valerian, however, actually came from the senatorial class, so he was essentially a nobleman, and his roles in the state were largely more political for the most part earlier on, and it was only later that he was appointed as a ducks or leader in the military. And he had two sons, Galienus and Licinius. Now to set the stage for Valerian's rule. Here's how the three previous rules ended. First of all, there's Emperor Decius, who reigned two forty nine through two fifty one. Died at the Battle of Verona, one of the worst military disasters in Roman history. According to Durant, either of wounds sustained against the enemy or he was assassinated by his own troops. There's some discussion over which it was. At home, he had sought to restore Roman moraley and ordered the destruction of Christianity. This will become important later on.
Oh yeah, because so there has long been a sort of meme among Christians that Christianity was just fundamentally like illegal in the Roman Empire and constantly totally persecuted, which is not actually true.
I mean, the.
Romans were absolutely evil, and you wouldn't say tolerant generally, but they were broadly religiously tolerant. They didn't care what people's religion was most of the time. But there would be occasional, sporadic outbreaks of persecution of Christians for various reasons. They were accused of being responsible for various calamities because they were accused of being atheists, as in not believing in the Roman gods and not making sacrifices to them, and so you know, not contributing basically to the quid pro quo that kept the gods happy and kept everybody's fate good. But also I think they were sometimes accused of sort of disloyalty to the emperor if they wouldn't make a burned offering to Caesar. So occasionally these persecutions would break out, and I think under Deshis was if I recall some of the worst persecution of Christians.
Yeah, yeah, but yeah, like you say, it kind of goes emperor to emperor. So you'll have a period of some of these periods. These rules are pretty brief, especially during this period, this time period. But yeah, one emperor may just be like, uh, you know, it's all right whatever, Judaism, Christianity, it's all good. I'm busy with other things. And then someone will come along and say, well, one of the problems here is we have to return to Roman moral values or Roman traditions and Roman rights need to be preserved, all right. So that was one of the three preceding Valerian. The other was Gallis, who not lived but reigned two fifty one through two fifty three. He was definitely murdered by his own troops. He also had two co emperors that died of plague or murder, We're not sure which. And then there's a Milianus who reigned June through September in the year two fifty three. That's a nice short one. He was, guess what, murdered by his own troops. So this is just a taste of how unstable again the position of emperor was at this time, as Valerian himself is named emperor by Amalanius, his own defecting legions. But even as internal strife at least temporarily slightly settled around this new emperor Valerian, and you have a I guess, a cessation of just open civil war, there are still plenty of would be usurpers in the Roman ranks. Plus Rome still faces threats from all of its external enemies, including the Sasanian Empire in the east. So Valerian he puts his son Galienus in charge of the West and occupies himself with the East and the threat posed by the Sasanians in Persia. Okay, and meanwhile at home, we should also know coming back to the issue of Christian persecution. That Valerian is also remembered for the persecution of Christians in Rome. He had ordered that all must conform to Roman ceremonials and that Christian assemblages are forbidden. And then when Pope Sixtus the Second resists, the Pope is beheaded and seven of his deacons are executed as well. Christians at the time and even in times thereafter, really have a hard time letting this one go.
Yeah, yeah, no pity for the pope killer.
Now, at this point, I'd like us to turn to the Sasanian Empire, because a number of you might not be very familiar with what we're talking about here, and I wasn't that familiar with the Sasanian Empire either prior to this research. So I turned in part to a book titled Sasanian Iran two twenty four through six fifty one CE by Turaj Dhari On Iranian irenologist and historian at the University of California, Irvine. He's published a number of books over the years, and you also can find various speaking engagements and whatnot that he's done concerning not only ancient Iran but also the modern state of Iran and global affairs and so forth. So in the openings of the book, Dary points some things out about our understanding of ancient history that I thought were very illuminating. He points out, of course, that ancient history in the West especially is often very Eurocentric, with excessive energy focused on European, Greek and Roman cultures and histories, which can of course come at the expense of understanding other powerful and important cultures. And this is often, he says, utilized to set up this narrative that European and Western power is a kind of continuous success story that extends back through these cultures. But Dhary points out that not only is such a focus detrimental to understanding, say, the nation's bordering the Roman Empire during this time period, but you also can't look at the Roman Empire in a vacuum. You have to look at you have to understand the nations that it's interacting with and that it's warring with. Otherwise you're also denying yourself a full understanding of say Rome.
Well, yeah, that's true in many ways. I'd say one of the most baseline is remembering that the Roman Empire when it during its great expansion. Most of the people in the Roman Empire were not Romans. They were people living in conquered territories who were under Roman rule.
Yeah, and in many cases, individuals fighting for the Roman military are auxiliary troops that are that are brought in from regions outside of Rome proper. Yeah, but I love this. I mean it's kind of one of these things where once it's stated, it seems so obvious. But yeah, it's like it's like if you were to ask somebody, hey, what's your favorite boxer and they're like, oh, Muhammad Ali, and then you're like, oh, what was your favorite opponent and they're like, oh, I don't know any other boxers, I just know mommeter. How much can you really understand this athlete if you don't understand the athletes he competed against and with and so forth. You know, that's an oversimplification. But the Yeah, I think this is a really valid point. And I have to say, when I think back about when I was first learning about, say, the decline of Rome, I feel like there was this feeling that Holy Rome is this wounded lion, and you have all these other kingdoms that are sort of snapping at its heels like hyenas. But this is certainly not the case with the Sasanian Empire. So what was the Sasanian Empire sometimes called the Empire of the Iranians or the Neo Persian Empire. Well, it all begins with the reign of Adashir the First, also known as Adashir the Unifier, who indeed unified the Iranian Plateau in two twenty four. You'll remember him from just a little bit earlier as the ruler who tangles with Severus Alexander. So de Rey writes that it was an enormous undertaking to unite the Iranian plateau under one rule at this time. But the exact origins of the House of Sasain and Adashir the First are somewhat shrouded in mystery. He apparently picked Ssaine as the name for his house, as it may have been the name of a protective deity, but I don't think we know for sure. And it seems that while Adashir may have had a background in Zoroastrianism, so his father Pabog may have been a fire temple priest, he was still essentially an upstart. And I thought this passage from Dare is rather eliminating quote. Furthermore, it was claimed that Adashir was Adashir the Kayanid, the son of Pabag of the race of Sosain, from the family of King Dare. When looking at this line, one gets the sense that every possible connection to divinity, royalty, and nobility was evoked by Ardashir, which can only that he was none of them. So another example of the powerful tinkering with history, right, the falsification of one's lineage to tie in with the noble, the royal, and the divine.
You know, sometimes when I look at these ancient rulers and I see the I know there's a specific term for this, I forget what it is, you know, the list of prestigious things that would be said after their name, so it's king whatever, you know. And then all these associations with nobility, lineage, deity, royalty and stuff. It reminds me of keyword stuffing in the like. You know that that era where you and I first started getting into digital content on the Internet, and all these companies that we were competing with, We're doing this thing where they would try to rank higher and Google results by just loading tons of irrelevant metadata garbage into every page, So it's like, is this page really about Metallica? No, but it's in the meta.
Yeah, yeah, the meta keywords. That list is longer than the actual post, right, So ought to share the first is definitely bringing the metadata to hear, but I should drive home he does have the power to back it up. This is just about securing the power, supporting the power by making these perhaps making these claims to divinity, royalty, and nobility now in gaining this power, though, Ardashir the First possibly won his rule through conflict, not only with rival Iranian kings, perhaps even family members. So in piecing together the histories, Daara mentions that Ardashir's father may have dethroned an important king, and Ardashir then may have taken to the field of battle against his own brother, but his brother died unexpectedly before this battle could occur. This raises the specter of possible assassination. We will never know for sure, but yeah, he's seemingly perhaps rebelled against his own father and against or against his own brother after his father's death, So there's inviting in the family on this ascension toward becoming the king of kings. He also has this decade long war against Artiwan the Fourth, further expansions across the Iranian plateau challenges from other local war lords. Some of these warlords are fighting on Artiwan the Fourth be half. Ardashir the First also has to deal with challenges from other brothers, and finally, Artiwan the Fourth, his main rival, takes the field with his armies against Ardashir the First and perishes. Ardashir the First becomes the King of Kings and the Sasanian Empire is born. Now, as we already alluded to, Ardashir the First expands his territory from here and eventually enters into conflict with Rome over Syria and Asia Minor. And there's there's really no clear winner to this conflict. Certainly, Alexander Severus and his mother, you know, celebrate that they have some sort of a victory here, but it sounds like both sides were somewhat reduced and exhausted by this whole series of battles, and no one was truly victorious. But Alexander Severus is able to hold onto Roman territory here in the Asia Minor, but after his death, the Sasanians are able to then annex several regions. Daray notes, however, that Ardashir the first challenged to Rome was probably not mere expansionist hubris, as Alexander's letter alleges that it is, but that it was probably an attempt to stave off further Roman expansion into their region.
This is one of the nasty problems of the imperial mindset, right. So you have empires with borders touching, you can always justify conquest and expansion of borders, which means killing people, you know, military expansion as defensive because it's like, well, I got to get more of a buffer out from my territory because what if they do it to me exactly.
And so you have all these these peoples in between these empires that are that are really seeing some of the worst of it. And yeah, the imperial mindset on both sides, Like you say, so the important thing to keep him. I know I'm throwing a lot of names out there, but yeah, Ardashir the first, this is the beginning of the Sasanian Empire. He consolidates power, he is a true threat. He's already engaging in warfare against the Romans. But then Ardashir the first does again is what seems may seem unthinkable at the time. He retires and passes leadership on to his son, and his son is Chahbur the First, and he, Shahbur the First, becomes the leader of the Sasanian Empire in two forty and this is the ruler that comes into direct conflict with Emperor Valerian.
Okay.
Now, note that it would be twenty years before Valerians fall at this point at the Battle of Odessa, and thirty years before Shahbur's reign ends due to death from illness. So while Rome is racked by instability and infighting during this time period, the Sasanian Empire is actually incredibly strong. Now that's not to say that there aren't dynastic squabbles going on in the Sasanian Empire under Shahbur. There are. He's still having to deal with challenges from even some of his other brothers, you know, the other potential usurpers. So it's not saying that the kingdom is one hundred percent peaceful, but during this time period when there's so much turmoil, especially going on in the Roman Empire, the Susanian Empire is pretty solid. Now, Shahbur the First had been well prepared for rule. According to the sources I was reading here, especially Dare, he had accompanied his father on the battlefield, ensuring that he was just ready to take the fight to his enemies, including whoever happened to be calling themselves Roman Emperor, at any given moment, And of course it changes a lot, and of course battles continue between the two empires in Mesopotamia. In fact, in two forty three, Roman Emperor Gordian the Third invades Mesopotamia in an attempt to retake territory that had been previously held by Rome under Alexander Severus with an auxiliary army of mostly Gothic and German soldiers, and that following year Gordian the Third is dead. A Shabur the First claims that he killed the emperor in battle, but it seems like possibly the truth here, as the emperor died away from any known battles and might have been guess what killed by his own soldiers. But again we see the fluid and power serving nature of histories here. If you're Shabur the First and you know that during the conflicts that you're engaging in against the Roman Emperor, that the Roman emperor is dead, might as well go ahead and claim that kill for at least your troops, if not you personally. And that was only Yeah, yeah, that'll back up your power. And then after this the following emperor makes concessions, essentially becomes a tributary, if you will. And this is the way that the Sasanians end up framing it. And in two sixty Shabur pushes further into Mesopotamia and comes into conflict with Emperor Valerian. So at this point, yeah, we're going to get to the Battle of Edessa. This is the crucial battle in this whole scenario. It counts among the worst Roman military disasters in history. On one hand, again, we have the forces of the Sasanian Empire under Shabur the First and here we have Roman forces under Emperor Valarian. So one of my chief sources here was Udo Hartman's The Third Century Crisis from the Encyclopedia of Ancient Battles that came out in twenty seventeen, which provides a nice summary of what we know and what some of the histories say concerning the Battle of Edessa and its aftermath. So let's go ahead and hit the basics here. Okay, so where is this taking place? For the most part, we're talking about Odessa, an ancient city, and what is now Turkey. More precisely, this battle may have occurred somewhere between the cities of Care and Edessa. When did this occur? This is again the year two sixty and it's spring. And then we have the two forces. Well, so let's start with the Roman forces. This is the one we actually have some numbers on. Whether those numbers are correct or not. As a matter of discussion, we don't know for sure exactly what the troop count was, but Shabur the first puts it at seventy thousand, which is probably an exaggeration to enhance his victory, but Dare gives us sixty thousand. It does seem that Valerian had pretty strong numbers, bolstered by troops originally stationed to the north of Rome to deal with Germanic threats, and so essentially the troops here under Valerian it's going to be some makeup of Roman, Germanic and Gothic troops. That seems a safe assumption.
Okay, so tens of thousands at least, this is They're not playing around.
Yeah. No, I haven't seen any body suggesting that this is just a small, ragged group. Now this is this is a large army led by an emperor of Rome, so you know it's it's not to be underestimated. On the other hand, we have the Susanian forces here, and this numbers here seem to just be unknown. I haven't even run across a source that ventures a guess at what the numbers were, though I suppose we You know, you could probably loosely speculate if you roll through some of the possible scenarios, about just how large the force might need to be to pull off the victory. Though we have to remember that troop size alone is not necessarily determinant for victory, nor is fighting strength. I try to go back to some of the writings of Brett Devereaux, who has a wonderful history blog about ancient battles, and he always points out, quote the question is always achieving strategic objectives and that that is ultimately more important than the fighting strength. So you'll have certain ancient armies, for example, that you can say their fighting strength was was greater than this other force, but are they able to pour a pull off strategic objectives are the other mechanisms of warfare working in their favor. Devereux's blog, by the way, is a collection of unmitigated pedantry, well worth checking out if you're interested in ancient warfare, as well as sort of the echoes of ancient warfare that you find in things like The Lord of the Rings, the books, in the movies, or the movie three hundred, for example, things of that nature. He does a great job dissecting them and talking about like what the history actually tells us. You know.
This also reminds me of something that came up in episodes we did a few years ago about warfare between ant colonies, which is a principle in warfare scholarship sometimes known as Lanchester's laws, Lanchester's linear law and Lanchester's square law. They're not actually laws, they're not laws of nature. They're just approximations modeling how different types of battles tend to work in reality. And I'm going to gloss over some of the details here, but basically my memory is that it found that, you know, really like the individual effectiveness of units and tactics are usually more decisive in ancient combat than they are in modern combat, because in shooting wars where where individual you know, tanks or soldiers can basically shoot in any direction at any time, can engage in any direction at any time. What you always want is to have overwhelming numbers. You know, you would rather defeat the enemy in detail, so attack small units of theirs with larger units of yours, so you suffer minimal losses, and do that over and over again. But in ancient combat, like individual little tactical decisions could swing things wildly in the favor of smaller armies.
Yeah, and then if you throw in additional factors that are definitely in play during this time, including potential mutinies from your own troops, plague and illness, and some of the other factors that we'll get into that may have been in play, particularly at the Battle of Odessa.
Go back and listen to the ant Work episodes if you want more detail on the Lanchester's laws.
All right, so at this point, you know, you might you might wonder, like, Okay, are they're going to really get into the nitty gritty here about the movements of the troops and so forth. This is going to be like one of those battles that they teach where they talk about, all right, this is where Valarian went wrong. Here and here this is these are the advantages that the Sasanians had tactically. No, this is one of those battles where, even if we wanted to get into those sorts of details, we just don't have them. We don't know exactly how the battle proceeded. There are some different versions of how it might have gone, and we'll get into that. However, the immediate outcome is not in question. The Sasanians secure absolute victory over the Roman forces. Emperor Valerian and some of his senators and soldiers are taken as prisoners. And while the Sasanians seem to have suffered minimal casualties, the Roman losses, I mean some estimates put them at like sixty thousand or so. So it's just again a complete military disaster for the Roman forces. And so you're probably wondering, Okay, even in an age full of emperors and kings, and in which emperors and kings are often present at the battles and sometimes die in battles, we've already looked at an example or two of that, how is it that a disaster of this magnitude can take place. How can you wind up with your emperor in the hands of the enemy forces without them having actually invaded Rome or something of that nature. Well, as Hartman summarizes, we basically have three different accounts in the Western histories of what happened, and again we have to acknowledge that some or all of them have agendas in their telling. So, first of all, there's the Zowsamous accounts Ossamus is riding at the dawn of the sixth century. This version goes basically, Valerian is cowardly. He wants to settle things financially, which we have to mention is a tool that had been used by the Romans before. You know, just meet with the enemy, pay the enemy, and we can put this off for a while. But this story goes that Shahbur the first rejects Valerian's envoy and says, hey, I'm only going to deal with the emperor himself, and then Valerian says, okay, that sounds fine. They meet and Valerian is taken prisoner.
Okay. So scene based on this that this account is attempting to make Valerian look weak and cowardly, and Shabur look devious.
Right, And apparently this is a common trend, and we can see as well. Hartman points this out that like this is a classic way of trying to take the blame away from Rome and the Roman military itself, a way to sort of excuse the loss by saying, well, the Rome is strong, the military is strong, but unfortunately we had a cowardly emperor here and we had a very daystardly opponent. What can you do now? A couple of later, this is centuries later, historians give us a different version. This comes to us from George Sincellus, who died sometime after eight ten, and Zonaras who lived something like ten seventy through eleven forty. And in these accounts, Valerian's forces were actually besieged in Edessa and they were facing starvation there. Valerian, fearful of a military mutiny, chose to surrender to the Susanian forces and only went through the motions of resistance casually. Has ended up being pretty low because some of the Roman forces recognized the deception and flee.
Oh so, is it possible again, if there's any truth to this, is it possible that Valerian's like I might actually have a better chance of surviving personally if I'm taken prisoner by the enemy than if I'm left here with my own troops.
Yeah, that's ms to be the idea that they're getting out of here. And and again this this is so brief. It seems like there are a number of plot holes that might emerge here, like, well, how are they how are the Roman forces fleeing? Are they are the how what are the exact conditions of the siege, et cetera. We don't know. Uh, this is just one idea. But Zanaris has another account that's interesting that again Hartman shares here. And in this one, Shahbor the first has Edessa besieged, but Valerian's forces are not in the city of Odessa. They're arriving outside of all of this. They see the siege going on, and they see that the Sasanian forces are really, really big, perhaps larger than their own. It's a very imposing force. So they're reluctant to attack. But then they get intelligence that tells them that the Odessian forces are mounting a promising counter attack against the besiegers, against the Sasanians, and so Valerian decides well, this is our chance, this is our opportunity, and they need to attack now. But then they end up routed and surrounded by the Susanian army and taken prisoner. So it's kind of interesting to look at these different things and sort of try and piece together the sort of situation that might have happened. Again, thinking about these tensions involving a potential besiegement either of Roman forces or of another player in the conflict, the possibility then of Valerian having to deal with potential mutinies occurring within his own ranks, potential desertions, and perhaps weighing like who he has a better chance of survival with, perhaps the situation where he's dealing with potential mutinies and wants to work out some sort of a deal but do so without getting himself killed by his own troops. It seems like there may have been a lot of factors at play here, but as again as Hartman points out, when it comes to Western sources, the two main narratives seem to have agendas. One is that yeah, we're going to cover for the Roman loss by putting the blame on Valerian and the enemy, And then for Christian historians, some in like the essentially the immediate aftermath of all of this, this is a situation where God is punishing Valerian. Valerian was hostile towards Christians and the Roman Empire, you know, he was, he persecuted Christians. And so the idea here is that God himself is punishing Valerian for what he has.
Done, a trope that remains popular up until today. There is always the temptation within a within a you know, a belief in a system of divine justice, to say that when my enemy has suffered a bad fate, it's because of the bad things they did. There they're finally getting their comeuppance.
Right, right, And again that can be not only foreign enemies, but they can be domestic enemies. They can be you know, rival or previous emperors. When you say, well, they weren't right with God. So this is what happens when to get an emperor in there who is right with God. And of course any of these kings, especially in this age, there's going to be some degree of religious tinkering of their stories. Like I'm king because I'm right with God. I mean, I've got divine blood inside my body. I harken back to divine kings, et cetera. So there's a lot of this going around.
Well, looking at the time, I think we're going to have to call this episode right here and say this is part one of this talk. But we will get into some surprising territory next time, not only about history and historiography, about the idea of the dethroned prisoner Emperor of Rome, but also into some surprising microbiology territory.
Yeah, I was really surprised this came up as well, but I look forward to talking about this in the next episode. But for now, yes, this is a good stopping point, kind of a cliffhanger because at this point the Roman Army has been defeated and Emperor Valerian is a captive of the Sasanian Empire. What's going to happen next, Well, there's a lot of discussion about what happens next. All right, So come join us again on Thursday as we continue this historic and ultimately scientific investigation. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you'll find them in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. Our core science and culture episodes published on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Wednesday we do a short form artifact or monster fact. On Mondays we do listener mail, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film.
Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact that Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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