THE SIEGE OF AMIDA (359 AD): When Persia Tried to Crush Rome’s Eastern Bulwark скачать в хорошем качестве

THE SIEGE OF AMIDA (359 AD): When Persia Tried to Crush Rome’s Eastern Bulwark

In the autumn of three fifty-nine AD, according to the eyewitness account of Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, twenty thousand Roman soldiers trapped inside the black basalt walls of Amida faced a Persian army that outnumbered them five to one. For seventy-three days, they held. When the city finally fell, the attackers had lost thirty thousand men—more dead than the entire garrison they came to destroy. Think about those numbers. Contemporary chronicles document thirty thousand Persian casualties to capture a city defended by twenty thousand. The attackers lost more men than the defenders had soldiers. This appears in both Roman military records and later Persian historical traditions. A pyrrhic victory so complete that Shapur the Second—the greatest Persian king in three hundred years—won the city but lost his invasion. Source Link: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hi...