The great civilisations of Rome and Persia warred for centuries, with both gaining glorious
victories and suffering some humiliating defeats. Many fans of history know about Crassus’
catastrophe at Carrhae in 53 BC and the stunning success of Belisarius five centuries later,
but the wars in between these famous conflicts are often overlooked. During the reign of
the Severan dynasty, border friction caused the Roman Emperor to attack the Parthian Empire.
This war would rage for only a year, and would be decided at the Battle of Nisibis.
The two-century old Roman Empire was beginning to decline from its second-century golden
age in the year 192. At the end of that year, deranged Emperor Commodus was strangled to
death, ending the grandeur of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty.
What followed was the notorious Year of the Five Emperors. At the beginning of 193, the
urban prefect Pertinax was declared emperor, but unfortunately for him, he was unable to
placate the military and Praetorian guard, and was killed soon after. The famous and
shameful auctioning of the empire followed, when Didius Julianus purchased the post in
March 193. His reign was not to last long; a civil war broke out when the Imperial office
was claimed by three more commanders. Clodius Albinus claimed the emperorship in
Britain and Gaul, Pescennius Niger in Syria and Septimius Severus in Illyricum and Pannonia.
The conflict first flared up between Niger and Severus, when the former occupied Byzantium.
However, a Severan army under the command of Publius Cornelius Anullinus quickly gained
the upper hand and managed to win a decisive battle at Issus in 194. Afterwards, Niger
was captured and executed. Leaving Byzantium under siege, Severus himself
turned his attention towards the eastern kingdoms which had supported Niger - Osrhoene and Adiabene.
In Spring of 195, Septimius Severus marched directly to Nisibis, gained victory against
Osrhoene and swiftly made it a Roman province, all the while seeking to maintain peace with
the greater empire on Rome’s eastern borders - the Parthians.
The Roman civil war instigated by Commodus’ death finally ended when Severus travelled
west and won a decisive battle against Clodius Albinus at Lugdunum - modern day Lyon, in
February of 197. With his internal enemies dealt with, Severus was now alerted to an
opportunity in the east, which he could not resist. In 197, the Parthian Empire was internally
divided and beset by rebellion in much the same manner that Rome had been - a state of
affairs which Rome could exploit. When Severus invaded Parthia proper in 197,
this weakness led the king - Vologases V - to retreat before the advance of the Roman legions.
After reaching Nisibis once again, this large army sailed down the Euphrates, facing little
resistance, before occupying Seleucia, Babylon and plundering the capital of Ctesiphon.
Though the eastern campaign of Severus had been a stunning victory and had led to the
creation of a province in Mesopotamia, Cassius Dio stated that it was ‘expensive, destructive
and even dangerous’. In the aftermath of the campaign, new dynastic arrangements were
also made. Severus’ oldest son Caracalla - the ‘emperor designate’, was made a
joint Augustus, while his younger son Geta was proclaimed Caesar. After another decade
of stable rule during which Geta also gained the rank of joint Augustus, Septimius Severus
died in York during February of 211 whilst campaigning against the Picts, wishing that
both his sons should succeed him as joint Emperors.
This arrangement quickly unraveled, despite the dowager empress Julia Domna’s attempts
to hold the family together. Caracalla became impatient with the restrictions placed upon
him and the influence of his father’s advisors. A tense situation developed in which each
of the two brothers, Geta and Caracalla, had his own courtiers, advisors and his own section
of the imperial palace. The historian Herodian even tells us that there was even a plan to
split the empire into east and west, but this was quelled by Julia.
It was clear that this situation could not go on for long, and it concluded on the 26th
of December 211, when Caracalla had his mother organise a meeting between the two. During
the meeting, the elder sibling had Geta murdered. This brutal act and the subsequent purge of
Geta’s supporters unnerved the senate, and Caracalla was forced to look to the praetorians
and military to secure the empire. This set the trend for his reign.
Like many of the ‘barracks emperors’ who came after, Caracalla was unpopular with the
senate but felt comfortable with his soldiers. Despite his many failings, a campaign against
the Alemanni tribe was undertaken in 213. After gaining a victory against them, the
new sole Emperor advanced up the Rhine and engaged the Cenni tribe. He was proclaimed
Imperator, victorious general, in this campaign, but an illness meant that he had to withdraw
to Rome before it concluded.
After this brief recuperation in the capital, the Emperor travelled to the Danube frontier
in 214, probably in order to break up some of the local tribes in the region. Not much
is known about what happened here, but hostages were taken back to Rome. By Spring of 215,
Caracalla had moved east, establishing a headquarters in the great city of Antioch, in order to
begin solving the administrative problems of the east. He did this with his usual energy,
but ended up massacring the inhabitants of Alexandria during a visit to Egypt.
Tensions between Rome and the eastern empire of Parthia also needed seeing to, as the usual
issue of Armenia’s throne was one again flaring up. Caracalla followed the traditional
Roman practice of nominating a candidate for said throne and disrupting Parthia’s ability
to interfere in turn. Opportunely for Caracalla, while Vologases VI ruled in Ctesiphon, his
younger brother Artabanus V was rebelling, and controlled Media and Susiana. This internal
strife provided Caracalla with the perfect opportunity to exploit.
The Emperor made common cause with Artabanus, and even offered to marry his daughter. When
this offer was declined, it provided the Romans with a pretext to flex their muscles, so they
invaded northern Mesopotamia in 216. An attempt to subjugate Armenia also failed due to an
anti-Roman insurrection. Caracalla’s future intentions in the east are unclear, but whatever
plans he had were frustrated by his assassination in April of 217 by a praetorian prefect named
Macrinus, who subsequently seized power for himself, due to the necessity and urgency
of the impending crisis - that Artabanus was approaching the Romans with a huge army, seeking
legitimate revenge for the Parthians whom Caracalla had murdered in a time of peace.
The army with which Artabanus marched towards the Roman forces was typically Parthian. Just
like at the Battle of Carrhae two and a half centuries earlier, it consisted almost entirely
of mounted troops, possessing good mobility and range. The exact unit proportions are
not known, but it is likely that the army of Artabanus was composed mostly of light
horse archers and a smaller aristocratic force of Cataphractii heavy cavalry. In addition,
Herodian reports that there was a unit of dromedary riding troops in the Parthian army
which threw spears from camelback. The always predictable Romans relied on their
excellent legionary heavy infantry to form the core of their army at Nisibis, supported
by cavalry and Moorish javelinmen auxilia on the wings. In the gaps between the cohorts
were placed additional light infantry, which could skirmish forward and retreat to the
safety of the heavy infantry formations if they needed to. The numbers of troops at the
Battle of Nisibis are not known, but it is thought that the Parthians slightly outnumbered
the Romans on this occasion.
As the sun rose on an unknown date in the summer of 217AD, the Parthian troops saluted
the sun god Mithra and, with a deafening cheer, charged the Roman line. Remaining in their
defensive position, the first line of Roman legionaries and the auxilia between them received
the initial Parthian mounted charge. While the famous Parthian horse archers constantly
wheeled and hailed arrows down on the legionaries, the cataphractii and dromedary riders struck
them head on. The Parthians had the better of the fighting
at range, inflicting heavy casualties with their barrages, but when the two armies closed
the distance, the Roman heavy infantry cut through their lightly armed enemy with ease.
Realising that melee fighting was not going to benefit them at this stage of the battle,
the Parthians began to pull back to a distance where their missile units and cavalry tactics
were superior. As the mounted archers loosed their arrows
and the dromedary riders threw their javelins, the Romans now employed a clever tactic. As
they were beginning to suffer increasing losses, the Romans feigned a retreat to the rear,
with their infantry throwing down metal spikes and stakes in order to kill the enemy mounts.
In the desert terrain, these obstacles quickly became obscured by the sand and invisible
to the charging Parthians. When they passed over this ancient minefield of obstacles,
the Parthian horses and camels threw off their riders and were injured. Seeing the weakness,
the legionaries turned and charged, chewing up the disorganised and dismounted Parthian
troops.
Herodian states that this was the course of battle on both the first and second days,
with both sides returning to their camps in the evening claiming victory - the Parthians
having inflicted many casualties at a distance, and the Romans grinding down the enemy in
close quarters fighting. On the third day of battle, the numerically
superior forces of Artabanus attempted to use his swift mounted troops to encircle the
densely packed Roman cohorts, which were formed up for depth, rather than width. However,
Macrinus saw what was happened and reacted swiftly, sacrificing the depth of the triplex
acies formation, and instead extending the line’s width to meet that of the Parthians.
With this lengthened line, as well as the light infantry and cavalry on the wings serving
as flank guards, all attempts at outflanking the Romans were stopped, not without massive
casualties on both sides. The length of the battle had led to a massive
slaughter, and at this point the entire plain was covered with mounds of both animal and
human corpses. Macrinus realised that Artabanus was making such a strong stand and was battling
so fiercely because he believed he was fighting against the treacherous Caracalla. Seeking
to end the battle, a Roman embassy was sent to the Parthian leader, telling him that the
Emperor who had wronged him by breaking treaties and violating oaths was dead, and had paid
the penalty for his crimes. Friendship was offered to the Parthian leader and the two
signed a treaty of peace, in which Parthian captives were given back and 200 million sesterces
were granted to Artabanus in compensation for his previous losses.
Macrinus would not be the Roman Emperor for long. Caracalla’s mother Julia Domna had
died after Macrinus ascended to the throne, but her sister, Julia Maesa, now conspired
to restore the Severans to the throne. A grandchild, known as Elagabalus, was proclaimed Emperor
by Legio III gallica, and Macrinus was executed in June 218.
Though the Parthians had managed to gain a favourable peace with the Romans, their reign
was about to end violently as well. The constant internal conflict, dynastic disputes and the
destructive wars with Rome weakened the Parthian Empire, and in 224AD Artabanus was defeated
and killed at the Battle of Hormozdgan. The victors were the Sassanids, a native Persian
dynasty led by Ardashir I. In the coming crisis of the Third Century, this new Persian Empire
would continue to be an even greater threat than the Parthians were.
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