Rouran epochGöktürk epochUyghur epochKirghiz epoch
RouranFirst GöktürkTang ruleSecond GöktürkUyghurKirghizHunsWestern GöktürkTürgeshKarlukKhazar
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The Caucasus campaign was the war that a northern army and the emperor Heraclius fought together against Sasanian Persia in the last years of Khosrow II.[1] The northern army broke through the Caspian gates. It put the defenders of the Albanian capital Partaw to flight and besieged Tiflis, where its commander met the emperor.[2] Troops of the northern ally then marched with Heraclius into Persia.[3] The cooperation has been called unprecedented, because Christian Byzantium and the Tengrist Göktürks allied for the first time against Zoroastrian Persia.[4]

The sources

The Armenian History of the Caucasian Albanians describes the negotiations and the invasion in considerable detail. It goes under the name of Movsēs Dasxurancʿi.[1] Its compiler worked in the tenth century. He took over passages written by men who had lived through the war.[5] The writer of the passage on the flight from Partaw came from the province of Uti. The narrator of the embassy to the northern camp carried gifts behind the catholicos of Albania.[6] The compilation gives these passages out of their order. As a result, the siege of Tiflis stands before the treaty that led to it.[7]

Two Greek writers tell of the alliance more briefly. One is Theophanes, whose chronicle was finished by 815. The other is the patriarch Nikephoros, whose Short History may be older.[8] For the reign of Heraclius, Nikephoros followed a chronicle written at Constantinople. That chronicle knew little of distant campaigns. His points of contact with Theophanes there are very slight.[9] Theophanes shows no sign of having used that chronicle, except in one episode of the Avar war.[10] His account of the campaigns of 627 and 628 rests mainly on Heraclius’s war dispatches. They reached him in the form of an official history.[11] The two Greek accounts of the meeting are therefore separate witnesses. They differ in almost every detail.

The Armenian history attributed to Sebeos was written in the middle of the seventh century.[12] Its prologue promised to tell of “the invasion of Heraclius into the northern regions to the king of the Tʿetals”.[13] What survives of that promise is a single sentence. It seems to stand out of its place and names no people.[14] The Georgian chronicle, the Kartlis Tskhovreba, tells the siege of Tiflis in a version of its own. It lacks the raising of the siege that the Armenian account reports.[15] None of these sources names the northern commander by a personal name. The Armenian, the Greek and the Georgian forms render one Göktürk title.[16]

The Roman offer

Heraclius wanted the Caucasus opened. He set out to breach the mountain wall that shut off the lands of the north-east and to open the gates of Čoł. His aim was to let many barbarian peoples through and conquer the Persian king by their means.[17] He sent a capable noble named Andre north with promises of immense and countless treasure.[17] Theophanes has the emperor at Lazica, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, invite “the eastern Turks, who are called Chazars” to become his allies.[18] Nikephoros says that from Lazica Heraclius sent gifts to “the chieftain of the Turks” and urged him to an alliance against the Persians. The chieftain accepted the gifts and promised to be an ally.[19]

According to the Armenian history, the man who answered was the viceroy of the king of the north, second to him in kingship. He was called Jebu Xak’an.[17] Theophanes calls the commander Ziebel. He says that the commander was second in rank after the khagan.[20] The Armenian form joins two Göktürk titles, yabgu and khagan. The Greek form renders the first of them.[21] The Georgian chronicle has a Jibghu. Sebeos has a Chepetukh. Both may be further forms of the same title.[22]

Whether the man was Tong Yabgu, khan of the western Göktürks, is disputed. Josef Marquart identified the Georgian, the Armenian and the Greek forms with Tong Yabgu.[23] Édouard Chavannes found the equation tempting and rejected it. He argued that Theophanes and the Armenian history both make the man a chief of the Khazars. The Khazars, he added, might depend on the western Göktürks without being the same people.[24]

Jebu Xak’an accepted. He promised to avenge the emperor on his enemies and to come to his aid in person with his army.[17] To confirm the treaty he sent the envoy back with about a thousand picked horsemen and archers. They rode through the gates of Čoł and ignored the Persian garrison at the great gate. They came down on the Kur and crossed Georgia and Egeria and the sea. They swore oaths with the emperor, each by his own law.[17] The embassy belongs to the spring or summer of 626.[15]

The Caspian gates

A first raid followed soon after the treaty.[25] The northern army fell on Albania at Heraclius’s command. Khosrow sent envoys to ask at whose command they had entered his country.[26] He offered them twice what the emperor could give and threatened to turn his western armies against them. For that year the raiders went home through the same gates.[27] At the beginning of the thirty-seventh year of Khosrow, the king of the north sent his nephew to raid Albania and part of Atrpatakan. They called the nephew Šat after his princely rank. From a camp on the Araxes the raiders sent Khosrow a demand in the name of the king of the north. Khosrow was to give back the Roman lands, the prisoners and the wood of the Cross.[28] Khosrow answered that their two houses had long been allied through sons and daughters. The khagan, he said, should not let himself be led astray by “the hothead of the Romans, a slave who belongs to me”.[29]

In the thirty-eighth year of Khosrow, the year of his murder, Jebu Xak’an came himself with his son and with forces no one could count.[30] The Persian kings had built walls between the Caucasus and the Caspian, at great expense and with architects and materials gathered from the whole country. At the very outset, the invaders struck them down and destroyed them to their foundations.[30] Gaysak, Khosrow’s governor of Albania, had gathered the people of the surrounding cantons into the capital, Partaw.[30] The defenders saw “broad-faced, eyelashless” men “with flowing hair”, whose arrows rained down “like heavy hailstones”.[31] They broke out through the four gates and fled to the mountains of Arcax. Gaysak escaped to Persian territory.[32]

In Theophanes, “the Chazars broke through the Caspian Gates and invaded Persia, that is the land of Adraigan, under their commander Ziebel”. They burnt the towns and villages on their way.[20] Adraigan is Azerbaijan.[33] Sebeos has an army pass “through the Pass of Chor with many troops” to assist the king of the Greeks.[34] The Pass of Chor is the pass at Derbent.[35]

Before Tiflis

The northern army turned west into Georgia. It besieged Tiflis, “the luxurious, prosperous, famous, and great commercial city”.[36] Heraclius brought up all his forces and joined his ally. The two kings exchanged royal gifts and rejoiced to see each other.[36] Khosrow sent his general Sahraplakan with a thousand horsemen of his palace guard to relieve the city.[36] Roman engineers built four-wheeled ballistae and other engines for the besiegers. The besiegers also filled great hides with stones and sand, to make the Kur overflow against the wall. The townspeople repaired every breach.[36]

Theophanes gives the meeting itself. When Ziebel saw the emperor, he rushed to meet him. He kissed the emperor’s neck and did obeisance, while the Persians looked on from the town of Tiflis.[20] In Theophanes’s words, “the entire army of the Turks” fell flat on their faces before the emperor. Their commanders climbed on rocks and fell down in the same way.[20] Ziebel presented his adolescent son. Then he picked forty thousand brave men and gave them to the emperor as allies. He went back to his own land.[20]

Nikephoros tells the meeting at greater length. The chieftain of the Turks came to meet Heraclius with a great multitude. He dismounted and prostrated himself, and his whole host did the same.[19] The emperor told him that he might come near on horseback and called him his son. He took the crown from his own head and set it on the chieftain’s.[19] After a banquet, Heraclius gave the chieftain the vessels of the table, an imperial robe and earrings set with pearls. With his own hand he put earrings on the chieftain’s nobles.[37] Heraclius feared that he might be deceived as he had been by the Avar ruler. He showed the chieftain a portrait of his daughter Eudokia and promised her to him in marriage if he helped against his enemies.[38] The chieftain was taken with the picture. He handed over a multitude of Turks under a commander.[38] Nikephoros’s source was poorly informed about the war in the east. The order of his chapter is confused.[39]

The first siege wore both armies down. Not a few of their foot soldiers fell.[36] Heraclius told his ally to go home with his army for that year and to come back when the hot months had passed. A man reared in a cool climate, he said, could not endure the summer in Asorestan, where the Persian capital lay on the Tigris.[40] The townspeople saw the besiegers exhausted. They fetched a huge pumpkin and drew on it the image of the king of the Huns, as the Armenian text calls him.[40] They gave him a thin line where the eyelashes should be and left the beard ignominiously bare. They made the nostrils a span wide, with a few hairs beneath for a moustache. They set it on the wall and called out to the armies to behold their emperor and worship him, for it was Jebu Xak’an. They drove a spear into it. They called the other king a foul sodomite.[40] The two kings withdrew, swearing that not one soul of that kingdom would be spared.[40] The caricature is the only physical description of the northern ruler in any source. It is a piece of abuse.

The Georgian chronicle tells the siege differently. According to it, Heraclius brought “Turks of the west”. He marched with an innumerable army against Persia to recover the wood of the Cross.[41] Stephanos, the prince of Kartli, ruled from Tiflis but obeyed the Persians and would not rise against them. He fortified his towns and held Tiflis. He fell in one of his daily sorties, and after that the emperor took the city.[42] The commander of the citadel still held out. He called down from the rampart that the emperor had the beard of a goat. Heraclius found in the book of Daniel that the goat of the west would break the horns of the ram of the east. He took the insult as an omen.[43] Heraclius called Adarnase, the eristavi of Kakheti and a descendant of the old kings. He gave him Tiflis and made him prince of Kartli. With him he left an eristavi, a commander of the rank of duke, named Jibghu, to take the citadel.[43]

The march into Persia

From Tiflis Heraclius marched south. Theophanes has him invade Persia with the Turks from the month of September. Because of the winter and the constant Persian attacks, the Turks began to slip away little by little. In the end all of them had gone home.[3] The Göktürk force is said to have accompanied the Roman army as far as the Zagros mountains.[11] Nikephoros has the Turks with Heraclius while he destroyed cities and fire temples. He also has Khosrow write to his general Sarbaros that the Turks were fighting on the emperor’s side.[38] Heraclius defeated the Persian army near Nineveh in December 627.[44]

In the Georgian chronicle the siege of the citadel went on behind him. While Heraclius marched on to “Baghdad”, Jibghu and Adarnase attacked the citadel. Jibghu took it within a few days.[45] He filled the commander’s mouth with gold for the words that had pleased the emperor. Then he had him flayed for his insolence and sent the skin to Heraclius.[45] The chronicle’s Baghdad stands for Nineveh.[46]

The fall of Tiflis

In the Armenian account Tiflis fell to the northern army alone, in a second invasion. The ruler came down again with his son Šat. There were no longer brave defenders in the city.[47] The siege lasted two months. Then the besiegers stormed the walls. They climbed on one another until they topped them, and killed all whom they found.[48] The Persian governor and a native Georgian prince were brought before the king. The king had them blinded for having drawn his image as a blind man. He had them strangled and flayed, and their skins, stuffed with straw, were hung from the wall.[49] The king carried the treasure home. He left the army to Šat, with orders to spare the nobles of Albania who submitted and surrendered their towns, fortresses and markets.[49]

According to a modern account, Tong Yabgu returned after the victory at Nineveh, entered Tiflis with the army of Börü Shad and had the city plundered.[50] The Georgian chronicle has the city taken by Heraclius before Nineveh and the citadel by Jibghu while the emperor marched on.[51]

Chronology

The sources date the war in different ways. Some scholars take Theophanes at his word and place the meeting before Tiflis in 626.[52] Others set the invasion and the meeting in 627.[1] A third group follows the Armenian count of Khosrow’s regnal years and puts the first siege of Tiflis in 628.[53] The second siege probably came in the spring of 629 on that count.[54] Another dating puts it soon after the accession of Khosrow’s son Kavadh in February 628.[55]

The claim on the Caucasus

The army of Šat camped near Partaw. The catholicos of Albania came with the nobles and their gifts. The men of the camp drank from silver cups and beakers chased with gold, taken in the plunder of Tiflis.[56] In his tent Šat swore by the life of his father Jebu Xak’an. He swore that whatever was asked would be granted, that the raiding would stop, and that he would repay the damage twofold in men and beasts.[57] His father, he said, had received the three kingdoms of the Albanians, the Lpʿinkʿ and Čoł as his royal patrimony for ever.[57] The catholicos answered that they were his slaves and asked to serve him as they had served the Sasanian.[57] Afterwards Šat sent officers called tʿnduns through the camps to free the prisoners.[58] The word is the Göktürk title tudun.[59] The speech is a steppe ruler’s claim to hereditary title over three Caucasian principalities, recorded by the people who had to live under it.

In the second year of Artashir, king of Persia, the prince of the north sent officials to the craftsmen in gold, silver, iron and copper. He took heavy tribute from the merchants and from the fishers of the Kur and the Araxes. He also took didrachms according to the Persian cadastre.[60] That year ran from June 629 to April 630.[61] He sent a commander called Čorpan Tarxan ahead into Armenia with about three thousand men.[60] Tarxan is the Göktürk title tarkhan.[61] A Persian army of ten thousand sent against them was surrounded and destroyed on the shore of Lake Sevan.[62]

Consequences

Persia fought Heraclius in the south and the northern army in the Caucasus in the same seasons. Khosrow II was deposed and killed in February 628.[44] The Sasanian state did not survive the next years intact. The Chinese histories give the western Göktürks a share in the fall. The Xin Tang Shu says that at the end of the Sui the Yabgu Khagan of the western Göktürks ravaged Persia. He killed its king Kusahe, that is Khosrow, and set commanders over his son Shili to supervise the country.[63] Some scholars consider the statement inexact. In their view, Khosrow was put to death at the instigation of his son Shiroe.[64]

The alliance ended with its northern leader. In the Armenian account a message came from Jebu Xak’an to Šat after the victory at Lake Sevan: “Brigands have fallen upon me, and you shall never see my face again”.[65] Nikephoros records that Heraclius sent his daughter Eudokia from Constantinople to the lord of the Turks, to whom he had betrothed her. He called her back when news came that the Turk had been killed.[66] The detail is found in no other source.[67] The Cefu Yuangui dates the murder of Tong Yabgu by his uncle to the first year of the Zhenguan era, 627.[68] The Xin Tang Shu, in its notice on the Xueyantuo, puts his death in 628.[69] Some scholars keep him alive into 630, when the pilgrim Xuanzang met him near Tokmak.[70]

On the Göktürk side the gain did not outlast the man. The western khaganate fell into civil war. The country north of the Caucasus passed to the Khazars, who are the successors of this campaign whether or not they fought in it.

© Emre-E Yavuz 2026 The Caucasus campaign of the western Göktürks and Rome and the march of Heraclius into Persia, 626–630, in eight time slices. Modern map on a base of Natural Earth, after the Armenian History of the Albanians, Theophanes, Nikephoros, Sebeos and the Georgian chronicle. The stations are those the sources name; the way between them is drawn. The realms are drawn as areas: the Göktürks after the Turkic Atlas map of the civil war, Persia and Byzantium after Cliopatria (Seshat, CC BY 4.0); no source describes their borders in these years, which stand as soft edges. KhazarsCaucasian AlbaniaGeorgiaEgeria (Lazica)KurSasanian PersiaByzantium Advance guard, 626 Derbent KhazarsCaucasian AlbaniaGeorgiaAtrpatakanByzantium Šat, 626/627 Derbent Camp on the Araxes KhazarsCaucasian AlbaniaGeorgiaEgeria (Lazica)AtrpatakanArcaxByzantium Jebu Xak'an, 627Heraclius, 627 Derbent Partaw Tiflis Atsqur GeorgiaShirakGogovitHer and ZarewandAtrpatakanAsorestanGreat Zab Heraclius, 627 Tiflis Chamaetha Ganzak Nineveh Great ZabLesser ZabAsorestanAtrpatakan Heraclius, 627–628 Nineveh Dastagerd Ctesiphon AsorestanAtrpatakan Heraclius, 628 Dastagerd Ctesiphon Siazouros Barzan Ganzak KhazarsGeorgiaCaucasian AlbaniaAtrpatakan Jebu Xak'an, 628/629Šat, 628/629 Tiflis Partaw Caucasian AlbaniaArmeniaGeorgiaArcaxAtrpatakan Čorpan Tarxan, 629/630 Partaw Lake Sevan Tiflis

  1. 626 The Roman offer

    Heraclius wanted the Caucasus opened. Theophanes and Nikephoros place him in Lazica, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, when he sought allies in the north. The Armenian History of the Albanians has him send a noble named Andre north with promises of immense treasure. Jebu Xak'an, the viceroy of the king of the north, accepted and sent about a thousand picked horse archers back with the envoy. They rode through the gates of Čoł past the Persian garrison, came down on the Kur, crossed Georgia and Egeria and swore oaths with the emperor face to face. The source takes them across the sea to the royal palace and names no place; the way between its stations is drawn.

  2. 626–627 Šat's raid

    Soon after the treaty a first raid fell on Albania at Heraclius's command. Khosrow asked the raiders at whose command they had entered his country and offered them twice what the emperor could give. For that year they went home through the same gates. Then the king of the north sent the promised army under his nephew, called Šat after his princely rank. Šat raided Albania and part of Atrpatakan and camped on the Araxes. From there the raiders demanded that Khosrow give back the Roman lands, the prisoners and the wood of the Cross. Khosrow answered that their houses had long been allied through sons and daughters, and called the emperor a slave of his. The Armenian History of the Albanians dates Šat's raid to the beginning of Khosrow's thirty-seventh year; one reckoning reads this as the summer of 626, a second as the summer of 627.

  3. 627 Before Tiflis

    Jebu Xak'an came himself with his son. The wall that the Persian kings had built between the Caucasus and the Caspian fell at the very outset, and the defenders of Partaw fled to the mountains of Arcax. The northern army then swept over Georgia and laid siege to Tiflis. Theophanes has Ziebel break through the Caspian gates into Adraigan and the emperor set out from Lazica to join him; the Georgian chronicle brings Heraclius by way of Atsqur in Upper Kartli. Before the town Ziebel kissed the emperor's neck while the Persians looked on, and Nikephoros has Heraclius set his own crown on the chieftain's head. Sahraplakan brought a thousand horsemen of the palace guard to relieve the city. The besiegers wore themselves out, and Heraclius sent his ally home for the summer. The townspeople hung a pumpkin drawn as Jebu Xak'an on the wall and drove a spear into it. One reckoning puts the meeting in 626, a second in 627, a third in 628.

  4. Sept. 627 The march to Nineveh

    Ziebel picked forty thousand men for the emperor and went back to his own land. From September Heraclius marched south with them. Sebeos traces the way through Shirak, across the Araxes at Vardanakert and through Gogovit and Her and Zarewand into Atrpatakan. The winter and the constant Persian attacks wore the northern allies down, Theophanes says, and they slipped away little by little until all had gone home. On 9 October the Roman army rested for a week in the land of Chamaetha, while the Persian general Razates reached Ganzak behind it. On 1 December Heraclius crossed the Great Zab and camped near Nineveh. On 12 December the armies met there, and Razates fell with nearly all his officers.

  5. 627–628 Dastagerd and Ctesiphon

    After the battle Heraclius crossed the Great Zab. His officer George seized the four bridges of the Lesser Zab by night, and on 23 December the army crossed them and kept Christmas in the mansions of Iesdem. The emperor destroyed the palaces of Dezeridan and Rousa, crossed the bridge of the Tornas and spent New Year's Day in the palace of Beklal. Khosrow fled from Dastagerd to Ctesiphon and crossed the Tigris. Heraclius kept the Epiphany at Dastagerd and pulled down its palaces. On 7 January he marched on and camped twelve miles from the river Narbas, which lay twelve miles from Ctesiphon; its bridges were cut, and it had no ford. Sebeos has him camp outside Ctesiphon and burn the royal palaces around the city.

  6. 628 The return to Atrpatakan

    From there Heraclius went on to Siazouros and through February burnt the villages and towns of the district. In March he spent seven days at the village of Barzan. There, Theophanes says, a Persian officer came over to him with word that Khosrow's eldest son was ready to rise against his father. Khosrow was deposed by that son, Kavadh, whom Theophanes calls Siroes, and put to death in February 628. The new king made peace with the emperor. Sebeos brings Heraclius back to Atrpatakan. The way from Barzan to Ganzak is drawn after a lost dispatch of the emperor, sent from the camp near Ganzak on 15 March.

  7. 628–629 The fall of Tiflis

    In the Armenian History of the Albanians the storm from the north came down a second time. Jebu Xak'an returned with his son Šat and laid siege to Tiflis, which no longer had brave defenders. After two months his men climbed on one another, topped the wall and killed all they found. The Persian governor and a Georgian prince were blinded for having drawn the king as a blind man, then strangled and flayed. Jebu Xak'an went home with the treasure and sent Šat with the army to the land of the Albanians. The Georgian chronicle tells it differently: Heraclius took the town after its prince Stephanos fell in a sortie, and his officer Jibghu took the citadel while the emperor marched on by way of Gardaban. One reckoning puts the fall in the spring of 629, a second soon after the accession of Kavadh in 628.

  8. 629–630 Šat in Albania

    Šat's bands fell on every canton of Albania on the same day. The catholicos of Albania, hunted through the mountains of Arcax, came at last with the nobles and their gifts to Šat's camp north of Partaw. There Šat swore by the life of his father Jebu Xak'an that the raiding would stop. His father, he said, had received the three kingdoms of the Albanians, the Lpʿinkʿ and Čoł as his royal patrimony for ever. In the second year of the Persian king Artashir the prince of the north taxed the craftsmen, the merchants and the fishers of the Kur and the Araxes after the Persian cadastre. He sent Čorpan Tarxan ahead into Armenia with about three thousand men, and a Persian army of ten thousand was destroyed on the shore of Lake Sevan. The northern army halted in the passes of Armenia, Georgia and Albania. There a message came from Jebu Xak'an to Šat: “Brigands have fallen upon me, and you shall never see my face again.”

  • Place named in a source (position as commonly identified)
  • Position disputed or approximate
  • Extent of a realm, inferred; border uncertain (soft edge)
  • Caucasian Albania and Iberia, fought over in the war (hatched)
  • Movement named in a source (route drawn)
  • Route between the stations a source names (way inferred)
  • Route after a modern reconstruction
The Caucasus campaign of the western Göktürks and Rome and the march of Heraclius into Persia, 626–630, in eight time slices. Modern map on a base of Natural Earth, after the Armenian History of the Albanians, Theophanes, Nikephoros, Sebeos and the Georgian chronicle. The stations are those the sources name; the way between them is drawn. The realms are drawn as areas: the Göktürks after the Turkic Atlas map of the civil war, Persia and Byzantium after Cliopatria (Seshat, CC BY 4.0); no source describes their borders in these years, which stand as soft edges.

References

  1. ^ a b c Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 188
  2. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 83–85
  3. ^ a b Theophanes the Confessor; Scott 1997, p. 448
  4. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 361
  5. ^ Dowsett 1961, xviii
  6. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 84, 100
  7. ^ Dowsett 1961, xiv–xv
  8. ^ Mango 1990, p. 12
  9. ^ Mango 1990, p. 12, 14
  10. ^ Scott 1997, lxxxi
  11. ^ a b Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 218
  12. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, lxi
  13. ^ Sebeos, ch. 7
  14. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 54
  15. ^ a b Dowsett 1961, p. 86
  16. ^ Chavannes 1903, p. 255–256
  17. ^ a b c d e Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 87
  18. ^ Theophanes the Confessor; Scott 1997, p. 446
  19. ^ a b c Nikephoros; Mango 1990, p. 55
  20. ^ a b c d e Theophanes the Confessor; Scott 1997, p. 447
  21. ^ Dowsett 1961, p. 83; 256; Chavannes 1903, p. 83; 256
  22. ^ Chavannes 1903, p. 255; 187; Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 255; 187
  23. ^ Marquart 1903, p. 394
  24. ^ Chavannes 1903, p. 256
  25. ^ Dowsett 1961, p. 82
  26. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 81–82
  27. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 82
  28. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 87–88
  29. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 88
  30. ^ a b c Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 83
  31. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 83–84
  32. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 84–85
  33. ^ Scott 1997, p. 448
  34. ^ Sebeos, ch. 29
  35. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 148
  36. ^ a b c d e Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 85
  37. ^ Nikephoros; Mango 1990, p. 55, 57
  38. ^ a b c Nikephoros; Mango 1990, p. 57
  39. ^ Mango 1990, p. 180
  40. ^ a b c d Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 86
  41. ^ Kartlis Tskhovreba; Brosset 1849, p. 225
  42. ^ Kartlis Tskhovreba; Brosset 1849, p. 224–226
  43. ^ a b Kartlis Tskhovreba; Brosset 1849, p. 226
  44. ^ a b Scott 1997, p. 455
  45. ^ a b Kartlis Tskhovreba; Brosset 1849, p. 228
  46. ^ Brosset 1849, p. 228
  47. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 94
  48. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 94–95
  49. ^ a b Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 95
  50. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 370
  51. ^ Kartlis Tskhovreba; Brosset 1849, p. 226–228
  52. ^ Mango 1990, p. 181
  53. ^ Dowsett 1961, p. 83
  54. ^ Dowsett 1961, p. 94
  55. ^ Chavannes 1903, p. 254
  56. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 99
  57. ^ a b c Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 100
  58. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 101
  59. ^ Dowsett 1961, p. 101
  60. ^ a b Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 104
  61. ^ a b Dowsett 1961, p. 104
  62. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 105
  63. ^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 221; Chavannes 1903, p. 171
  64. ^ Chavannes 1903, p. 171
  65. ^ Movsēs Dasxurancʿi; Dowsett 1961, p. 106
  66. ^ Nikephoros; Mango 1990, p. 67
  67. ^ Mango 1990, p. 184
  68. ^ Cefu yuangui; Chavannes 1904, p. 4
  69. ^ Chavannes 1903, p. 25
  70. ^ Chavannes 1903, p. 194

Sources

Literature

  • Charles J. F. Dowsett (trans.), The History of the Caucasian Albanians by Movsēs Dasxuranci (1961)
  • Wang Qinruo 王欽若; Yang Yi 楊億 et al., 冊府元龜 Cèfǔ Yuánguī (1013)
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Related

What links here24

Persons
Börü Shad · Chorpan Tarkhan · Heraclius · Tong Yabgu
Conflicts
Göktürk Expansion along the Silk Road · Göktürk Expansion into Europe
Battles & Events
Battle of Lake Sevan (629–630) · Meeting of Heraclius and Ziebel (627) · Murder of Tong Yabgu (630) · Siege of Tiflis (627–629) · The Göktürk–Byzantine alliance
Places
Lake Sevan · Partaw
Peoples
Alans
Institutions and Titles
Chepetukh · Göktürk Dress and Hair · Göktürk Ironworking · Göktürk Weapons · Raw Materials and Trade among the Turkic Peoples · Shad · The Göktürk Oath
Foods
Bread
Customs & Pastimes
The Göktürk Feast
Sources
Sebeos

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “The Caucasus campaign, 627–629.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/conflicts/caucasus-campaign-627/

Last revised: 8 November 2026