Maniakh's embassy to Constantinople, 568

At the beginning of the fourth year of Justin II’s reign, an embassy from the Göktürks reached Constantinople.^[1] That year began in November 568. The embassy arrived in late 568 or early 569.^[2] Some scholars place the arrival in the summer of 568.^[3] The embassy was led by Maniakh, a Sogdian in the service of Istemi.^[1] It took the long route. The envoys crossed mountains that reached near the clouds, then plains, woods, marshes and rivers, and at last the Caucasus.^[1] The short route ran through Persia. Persia was also the reason for the journey.

Causes

The Göktürks had destroyed the Hephthalite realm in concert with Khosrow I. The two victors then met on the Oxus as neighbours.^[4] The Sogdian cities that had passed to the khaganate lived by selling silk. The nearest great market lay to the south.

The Sogdians tried that market twice, in the quarrel over the silk.^[1] In the embassies to Persia, a Sogdian embassy saw Khosrow buy its silk and burn it. A second embassy, of Göktürks, lost most of its members to poison.^[1] Maniakh then advised Istemi to seek the friendship of the Romans. Istemi should sell them the raw silk, since they used more of it than other people.^[1] Istemi sent Maniakh with greetings, a valuable gift of raw silk and a letter.^[1]

At the court of Justin II

Maniakh entered the palace and handed over the letter and the gifts. He asked that the toil of his journey should not be in vain.^[1] Justin II had the letter read to him through an interpreter. Menander says it was written in Scythian.^[1] Which language that was is disputed. Some scholars hold that the letter was written in Old Turkic.^[3] Others take “Scythian” as Menander’s loose word for the languages of Central Asia. They think Sogdian more likely.^[5]

The emperor questioned the envoys about the rule and the country of the Göktürks.^[1] The envoys said that the Göktürks had four principalities. Power over the whole people, however, lay with Istemi alone.^[1] Some scholars take the four principalities as the four divisions of the western Göktürks, over which Istemi was the senior khan.^[5] The envoys added that the Göktürks had conquered the Hephthalites and made them tributary. All their power was now subject to Istemi.^[1] Justin asked whether the Hephthalites lived in cities or in villages.^[1] The envoys answered that they lived in cities. Justin concluded that the Göktürks had become masters of those cities.^[1]

Rome had a second reason to listen. The emperor asked how many Avars had broken away from Göktürk rule.^[1] The envoys answered that some Avars still held to the Göktürks. Those who had fled numbered about twenty thousand.^[1] By then the Avars were on the Danube.

The envoys named the peoples subject to the Göktürks. They asked for peace and an alliance, offensive and defensive.^[1] They offered to crush any enemy of the Romans who pressed on the Göktürks’ own lands.^[1] Maniakh and his companions raised their hands and swore their greatest oath. They called curses on themselves, on Istemi and on their whole people if they lied.^[1] The Göktürks thus became friends of the Romans.^[1]

The account of Theophanes of Byzantium

Theophanes of Byzantium was a contemporary. His history survives only in the summary of the patriarch Photios, and that summary records an embassy from the Turks who live east of the Tanais.^[6] He says that the Persians call them Kermichiones in their own language. They were formerly called Massagetae.^[6] Menander, for his part, says that they were formerly called Sacae.^[7] The Turks of Theophanes brought gifts. They asked Justin not to receive the Avars.^[6] Justin accepted the gifts. He sent the envoys home with every courtesy.^[6] Later the Avars asked to settle in Pannonia and to have peace. Justin refused them a treaty because of his word to the Turks.^[6] The summary gives no date.^[6] The editor of the fragments set the embassy in 568.^[8] Some scholars connect it with Maniakh’s.^[5]

Theophanes adds that Justin afterwards showed the Turks how silkworms were bred and how their silk was worked. The Turks were astonished.^[9] The eggs had been brought to Byzantium in the reign of Justinian by a Persian, hidden in a hollow stick.^[9] At that time the Turks held the markets and harbours of the Seres. The Persians had held them until the Hephthalites took them.^[9]

Later reports

John of Epiphania recorded a Roman grievance, and Theophylact Simocatta repeated it. On the very first Turkish embassy to the Romans, the Persians had tried to bribe the Alans to kill the envoys as they passed through.^[10] The passage does not say whether it means Maniakh’s journey or the Göktürk embassy that came back with Zemarchos. Theophanes the Confessor, writing in the ninth century, turned it into an embassy of the Huns, “whom we are accustomed to call Turks”. He has it sent to Justin through the land of the Alans.^[11] His source was Theophylact, so the notice adds no independent witness.^[12]

Consequences

Justin sent an embassy back under Zemarchos. It left Constantinople at the beginning of August 569.^[7] An older count puts the departure in 568.^[13] Istemi took Zemarchos with him on his campaign against Persia. He then sent him home with a Göktürk embassy under Tagma Tarkhan.^[14] Menander names the Göktürks, who had invaded Media, as the power that most encouraged Justin to go to war with Persia.^[15]

By Menander’s account, the alliance broke at Bosporos in 576.^[16] According to some scholars, Tardush renewed it in the same year with the envoy Valentinos.^[17] Fifty years later, under Tong Yabgu and Heraclius, the two powers fought Persia together in the Caucasus.

Significance

Through Maniakh the Göktürks spoke to Constantinople in their own name, through their own envoy, about their own interests. The interests were commercial before they were military. A state that had just taken the middle of the silk road wanted the market at its western end. Menander’s record of the audience is plain. It is a series of short answers to the emperor’s questions, with little of the rhetoric of the schools.^[18] The embassy shows the Göktürks from a third side. The Chinese annals describe them as a frontier problem. The inscriptions describe them from within. The Roman account shows them negotiating as one great power with another.

References

^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Menander Protector; Blockley 1985, fr. 10.1
^ Blockley 1985, p. 262
^ a b Yavuz 2025, p. 285
^ Yavuz 2025, p. 272–274
^ a b c Blockley 1985, p. 263
^ a b c d e f Theophanes of Byzantium; Müller 1851, p. 270
^ a b Menander Protector; Blockley 1985, fr. 10.2
^ Müller 1851, p. 270
^ a b c Theophanes of Byzantium; Müller 1851, p. 270–271
^ Theophylact Simocatta; Whitby 1986, III.9.7
^ Theophanes the Confessor; Scott 1997, p. 362
^ Scott 1997, p. 363
^ Yavuz 2025, p. 290
^ Menander Protector; Blockley 1985, fr. 10.3
^ Menander Protector; Blockley 1985, fr. 13.5
^ Menander Protector; Blockley 1985, fr. 19.2
^ Yavuz 2025, p. 321
^ Blockley 1985, p. 10

Sources

Menander Protector
Theophylact Simocatta
Theophanes the Confessor (after Theophylact Simocatta)
Theophanes of Byzantium

Literature

R. C. Blockley, The History of Menander the Guardsman: Introductory Essay, Text, Translation, and Historiographical Notes (1985)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Cyril Mango, Roger Scott (trans.), The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284–813 (1997)
Karl Müller (ed.), Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, Bd. IV (darin: Menandri Protectoris fragmenta, griechisch mit lateinischer Übersetzung) (1851)
Michael Whitby, Mary Whitby (trans.), The History of Theophylact Simocatta (1986)