THE CROSS AND THE SACRED FIRE - BYZANTIUM AND THE SASSANIDS (4th-7th CENTURIES)

The present monograph attempts an overall survey of Byzantine-Sassanid contacts and relations (political, diplomatic, religious and cultural), discussing several older and more recent views on crucial topics and taking into account a large body of bibliography, which in recent decades has been significantly supplemented. Although Byzantines and Persians between the early 4th and the first part of the 7th century A.D. shared a mutual respect for their states and cultures, the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman Empire or Empire of New Rome, found in Sassanid Persia an inherited adversary from the Past. Indeed, upon its definitive foundation between A.D. 324 and 330 the Byzantine Empire had to count the neo-Persian Empire (by then almost a century old) as perhaps its potentially most menacing neighbouring state, since it was only in the close of the 3rd century that Rome had inflicted a heavy defeat on it, following its former humiliation by it in previous decades. For more than three centuries these two most powerful Empires of Eurasia in the closing stages of late Antiquity and the beginnings of the early medieval centuries, fought each other with fluctuating results and an apparent inability to inflict a mortal blow on each others chief adversary. It was only in the last eight years of this long struggle (A.D. 622-629/630) that the Byzantines succeeded in gaining the upper hand by decisively defeating the Sassanids, though the permanent extinction of the Sassanid kingdom was effected between A.D. 636/637 and 651/652 by the forces of first Moslem Arab Caliphate. In early Byzantine eyes the neo-Persian Empire of the Sassanids was the ceaseless Oriental challenge, a most efficiently organized military power and a worthy opponent who had to be reckoned with for about four centuries both on the political/military/institutional and on the religious spheres. A significant number of early Byzantine/Greek narrative sources, often complemented and supported by various Oriental