Shapur II the Great

Shapur II (309 to 379 CE), called “the Great”, reigned for seventy years, longer than any other Sasanian king. Proclaimed king as an infant, he led a punitive war into Arabia as a teenager, fought Rome for a quarter of a century, held off nomad invaders in the east and, after the death of the emperor Julian in 363, won back everything his grandfather Narseh had lost.

The king crowned in the womb

When Hormizd II died in 309, the nobles set aside his adult sons. One was killed, another blinded, and a third, also named Hormizd, later escaped to the Roman Empire. They chose instead a baby, perhaps not yet born. Al-Tabari tells the famous story that the crown was placed on the belly of the pregnant queen. Whether or not that happened, the choice shows the power of the great families, who preferred a long regency to a strong adult king. For the first sixteen years of Shapur’s life, Iran was ruled in his name by the nobility and the court.

The Arab war

Around 325, when Shapur was about sixteen, he took personal command for the first time. Arab tribes from eastern Arabia had been raiding across the Persian Gulf into Fars and the lower Euphrates. According to al-Tabari, Shapur crossed the Gulf with a fleet, attacked Bahrain and the coast of eastern Arabia, and pushed inland as far as Yamama and even the approaches to Medina, killing large numbers of tribesmen. Arabic tradition gave him the nickname Dhu’l-Aktaf, said to come from his practice of piercing or dislocating the shoulders of captives, though the name may originally have meant something less grim, such as “broad-shouldered”.

To protect the Mesopotamian frontier from future raids, he is credited with building a line of ditches and forts west of the Euphrates, remembered in Arabic as the Khandaq Sabur, “Shapur’s trench”.

Twenty-five years of war with Rome

Shapur considered the Peace of Nisibis of 299 a humiliation (see Narseh and the Peace of Nisibis). After Constantine the Great died in 337, while preparing his own campaign against Persia, Shapur began a long war with Constantine’s son Constantius II.

The sieges of Nisibis

The fortress city of Nisibis, the key to Roman Mesopotamia, was Shapur’s main target. He besieged it three times, in 337 or 338, in 346 and in 350, and failed each time. In the last siege he dammed the river Mygdonius and released the water against the walls, bringing down part of them, but the defenders rebuilt the breach overnight. The Syriac poet and theologian Ephrem was in the city, and his hymns are among our sources. Persian and Roman armies also fought a hard night battle at Singara in 344 (some date it 348), which neither side clearly won.

The eastern front

In the 350s Shapur had to break off the Roman war to deal with the Chionites and other nomad peoples on his eastern frontier, in the old Kushan lands. He fought them for several years and then made them allies. In 359 their king, Grumbates, marched west with Shapur when he invaded Roman Mesopotamia again.

Amida, 359

The siege of Amida (modern Diyarbakır) is the best-described siege of antiquity, because the Roman officer and historian Ammianus Marcellinus was inside the walls. He describes how the son of Grumbates was killed by a Roman bolt early in the siege, how the Persians built siege mounds and brought up elephants, and how the city fell after 73 days. Ammianus escaped through a postern gate. Shapur went on to take Singara and Bezabde in 360. The costly victory, however, delayed his advance, and the decisive confrontation came only three years later.

Julian and the treaty of 363

In 363 the emperor Julian invaded Persia with a large army and reached the walls of Ctesiphon, but failed to take it and was killed during the retreat. His successor Jovian, trapped with a starving army on the wrong side of the Tigris, accepted Shapur’s terms: the five regions beyond the Tigris, the cities of Nisibis and Singara, and Rome’s withdrawal of support for Armenia. It was a reversal of the treaty of 299. The full story is on Julian’s Invasion of Persia (363).

Armenia

With Rome out of the picture, Shapur turned on Armenia. He lured its king, Arshak II, to his court, imprisoned him in the “Fortress of Oblivion” in Khuzestan, where Arshak later died, and invaded the country. Armenian historians remember these years as a time of destruction, deportation and resistance. Rome soon broke the spirit of the treaty by supporting Arshak’s son Pap, and the question of Armenia was settled only after Shapur’s death, by the partition of 387 described on Shapur III and the Partition of Armenia.

Religion under Shapur II

Zoroastrian tradition remembers the reign as the time when the high priest Adurbad-i Mahraspandan defended the orthodox faith against its critics by undergoing an ordeal of molten metal poured on his chest, and when the religious canon was put in order. Historians treat the story of the ordeal as legend, but the period does seem to have been one of consolidation for the Zoroastrian church.

It was also the time of the first great persecution of Christians in Iran. After Constantine made Christianity a favoured religion of the Roman state, Persian Christians were suspected of sympathy with the enemy. From around 340 Shapur imposed a double tax on them and, when the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, Simeon bar Sabba’e, refused to collect it, had him executed. Persecution continued, with intervals, for decades. See Christians in the Sasanian Empire.

Shapur II in legend

The Shahnameh and Arabic histories turned Shapur II into a folk hero. In Ferdowsi’s version he travels to Rome in disguise to spy on the Caesar, is recognised, sewn into a donkey’s skin and imprisoned, and escapes with the help of a Roman slave girl, before returning to defeat the Romans. The tale has no historical basis but shows how his long struggle with Rome was remembered. Some of his deeds were also merged with those of his ancestor Shapur I.

Shapur II died in 379. In a small rock-cut grotto at Taq-e Bostan near Kermanshah, his figure stands beside that of his son Shapur III, with inscriptions naming them both.

1. 309 Shapur proclaimed king as an infant
2. c. 325 Campaign against the Arabs across the Persian Gulf
3. 337/338 War with Rome begins; first siege of Nisibis
4. c. 340 Persecution of Christians begins
5. 346, 350 Second and third sieges of Nisibis
6. 350s Wars with the Chionites in the east
7. 359 Siege and capture of Amida
8. 363 Julian’s invasion and death; treaty with Jovian
9. 379 Death of Shapur II