Rouran epochGöktürk epochUyghur epochKirghiz epoch
RouranFirst GöktürkTang ruleSecond GöktürkUyghurKirghizHunsWestern GöktürkTürgeshKarlukKhazar
  • 400
  • 500
  • 600
  • 700
  • 800
  • 900

Byzantium is the modern name for the eastern Roman empire. Its people called themselves Romans. Its historians called the Göktürks Turks and Scythians. For the Göktürks it was the third and most distant of the three sedentary powers. The two realms touched only in the Crimea. From 568 it was an ally against Persia. After 576 it was an enemy for a few years. Under Heraclius in 627 it was an ally again. Thereafter it was the partner of the Khazars, who succeeded the Göktürks in the west. Menander Protector is the witness for the sixth century. The seventh century rests on Armenian and Greek accounts.

Before the Göktürks

The empire had known the steppe since the Huns. The first great Hunnic offensive against the eastern Roman empire came in 395. The Huns conquered Thrace and ravaged Armenia and Cappadocia. They approached Syria and Antioch. In the same year a Hunnic siege of the Sasanian empire came near Ctesiphon.[1] In 542 Byzantium, “Ostrom”, held Asia Minor and Syria. The Sasanians held Iran and Iraq, the Hephthalites held Central Asia, and the divided Tuoba state held northern China.[2] At that moment, the Onogurs in the Pontic steppe and the Rouran in Mongolia may have been the only steppe powers that held their own.[2] The Sogdians, who had once been subjects of the Hephthalites, carried the raw silk that the Göktürks received as Chinese tribute. Since 555 the empire had silkworms of its own, smuggled from the east through the young khaganate.[3]

Maniakh and Zemarchos (568–571)

Menander tells the opening. Khosrow had burned the Sogdians’ silk and poisoned a Göktürk embassy. Maniakh then advised Istemi to turn to the Romans. Istemi sent him to Constantinople with gifts and a letter in Scythian letters. The emperor Justin II had the letter read to him by interpreters.[4] The letter described a realm of four parts under the sole command of Dizabulus, that is Istemi. It reported that the Hephthalites were subdued and lived in cities. It added that some twenty thousand Avars had fled from Göktürk rule. The letter offered an alliance.[4] The envoys swore by their own customs and called down curses on themselves if they lied. The Romans and the Göktürks became friends and allies.[4] In return the emperor sent Zemarchos. He left the capital toward the end of the fourth year of Justin’s reign, at the beginning of August, which is 569.[4] An older count puts the departure in August 568.[5]

In Sogdiana the Göktürks offered the Romans iron, a sign that they had mines of their own. The embassy was purified by fire, with incense, bells and drums.[6] At Ektag, the Golden Mountain, Istemi received the embassy in a tent of silk, seated on a throne with two wheels. Zemarchos addressed him as “leader of so many peoples”.[6] On the following days Istemi showed him a golden couch on four peacocks and silver animals on wagons. Zemarchos thought the animals the equal of Roman work.[6] Istemi took Zemarchos with him on a campaign toward Persia. At Talas a Persian envoy met them. There Istemi seated the Roman above the Persian.[4] Maniakh had died. The new envoy was Tagma, whose title was Tarkhan. Maniakh’s son, still a very young man, inherited his father’s rank and came next after him. Menander thought this was because the father had been the dearest and most loyal to Istemi.[4]

On the way home the Uguri, who were under Istemi’s authority, warned the embassy that four thousand Persians were waiting at the Kuban.[4] The embassy sent ten horses laden with silk down a false road as a decoy. It came home by the Caucasus and the Black Sea.[4] Menander names the Göktürks as the chief cause of Justin’s war with Persia. They invaded Media and ravaged the land. They also sent an embassy urging Justin to attack the Persians from the other side.[4] By contrast, the account from the Persian side says that the Romans incited the Göktürks without cease. This was one of the causes of the twenty years’ war between Persians and Romans that began in 572.[7] Gregory of Tours records that in 571 Armenian envoys brought a great store of raw silk to the emperor. By one count, five further embassies to the Göktürks followed before 576. With them came the crumbling of the empire’s relations with the Avars, once the Göktürk alliance stood.[3]

Valentinos and Bosporos (576)

Menander’s second account describes the failure of the alliance. In 576, the second year of Tiberius Caesar, the envoy Valentinos went out. A hundred and six Göktürks went with him. They had gathered at Constantinople over the years from the successive embassies.[4] He found the Göktürk realm divided among eight rulers. The eldest of them was Arsilas.[4] He came to Turxanthos, Türk-shad, one of the Göktürk leaders, in the days of mourning for Istemi. The envoys cut their faces with knives, as the custom of the dead required.[4] Turxanthos reproached the Romans for making a treaty with the Avars, his fugitive slaves. He boasted that the whole earth obeyed him, from the rising of the sun to its setting.[6] He named the Alans and the Utigurs as peoples that had resisted and been made subject.[6] He sent Valentinos on to Tardush at the Golden Mountain Ektel. While the envoy was still in the country, Turxanthos sent Bochan with a very large army against the Roman city of Bosporos in the Crimea. Anagai of the Utigurs was already encamped there.[4] The city fell while the envoys were still with the Göktürks. From then on there was open war between the Göktürks and the Romans. Valentinos was held and mocked.[4] The fall of Bosporos has been dated to about 579.[8] Another account makes Turxanthos a governor under Tardush. According to it, Tardush and Valentinos confirmed the alliance, and the Göktürks kept the Crimea.[9] The Göktürks never came further west than the Crimea. The Avars, not the Göktürks, were the steppe power the empire fought on the Danube.

Heraclius and Tong Yabgu (627–628)

The alliance was made again half a century later. This time an emperor and a khan met. Heraclius had been at war with Persia since 602. By 619 he had been driven to the edge of surrender. He turned the war around. In 627 he sought the Göktürks of Tong Yabgu for a pincer attack. The Romans were to advance through Armenia and the Göktürks through the Caucasus.[1] A Göktürk embassy a thousand strong came through Persian territory to the emperor’s camp. Börü Shad appeared before Derbent with a force of forty thousand. The allies besieged Tiflis.[1] Before its walls the yabgu dismounted and kissed the emperor’s shoulder. Heraclius embraced him and called him his son. He crowned him with his own diadem and feasted both armies. He promised him his daughter Eudoxia Epiphania.[1] The siege dragged. The yabgu withdrew to Suyab. The emperor marched on to Nineveh, where the Persians lost six thousand men. The Göktürks came back to storm and sack Tiflis.[1] Tabari, writing from the Persian side, has the Roman emperor moving with eighty thousand men in the crisis of 588. This figure is plainly exaggerated. Tabari does not reach the war of 602 to 628.[10] The alliance contributed significantly to the Byzantine victory and the collapse of the Sasanian state.[11] The Jebu Khagan of the Armenian sources and the Sir Yabgu of the Greek sources have been identified with Tong Yabgu himself, the Yabgu Khagan. In that case the Khazars were still part of the Göktürk state.[11] It treats the descent of the Khazar ruling house from the western Göktürks as a hypothesis.[11] The meeting was probably the first between leaders of the Graeco-Roman and the Turkic worlds since the Huns. The Armenian historian who tells it lived under the Khazars. He calls the Göktürks Khazars.[1] Tong Yabgu was murdered before the marriage could take place.[12]

The Khazars

After 630 the empire’s steppe ally was the Khazar khaganate, which grew from the western Göktürks. The relation continued.[11] Justinian II made a Khazar marriage. The Khazars helped against the Arabs in the Caucasus. In 732 Constantine, heir of Leo III, married Čiček, daughter of the Khazar khagan. She was baptised Irene.[11] The Romans called themselves Romaioi. East Rome is the name preferred by some.[1]

Assessment

Byzantium was the one great power that the Göktürks chose as an ally and did not meet as a neighbour. The choice was first the Sogdians’, then the khan’s. The silk that Persia would not buy went to Constantinople, and the embassy went with it. The alliance produced a treaty, a war over the Crimea, a diadem on a yabgu’s head before Tiflis, and a Khazar princess on the imperial throne. It outlived the khaganate that made it.

Rulers

  1. Justin II565–578Emperor
  2. Heraclius610–641Emperor

Relations with other states

Red is war, blue alliance, gold trade. Where several held at once, the line shows what prevailed; alliance and trade can run side by side. Each line rests on an article. Point at a state to see its weightiest relation, select it to see its events. The slider shows what stood in a given year, and Play runs through the years.

  1. Sasanian Persia395 to 629

  2. Hunnic Empire441 to 452

  3. Western Roman Empire452

  4. Western Göktürk Khaganate553 to 629

  5. First Göktürk Khaganate568 to 576

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Yavuz 2025
  2. ^ a b Yavuz 2025, p. 118
  3. ^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a; Yavuz 2025
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Menander Protector
  5. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 290
  6. ^ a b c d e Menander Protector; Golden 1992
  7. ^ Nöldeke 1879
  8. ^ Golden 1992, p. 131
  9. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 321
  10. ^ Tabari; Nöldeke 1879
  11. ^ a b c d e Golden 1992
  12. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 371

Sources

Literature

  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
  • Theodor Nöldeke, Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden. Aus der arabischen Chronik des Tabari übersetzt und mit ausführlichen Erläuterungen und Ergänzungen versehn (1879)

Related

What links here33

Persons
Anagastes · Anankhast · Askel · Bigilas · Chelchal · Gaiseric · Heraclius · Hormizd IV · Justin II · Marcian · Maximinus · Tagma Tarkhan · Theodosius II · Valamir · Valentinos
States
First Göktürk Khaganate
Conflicts
Arab–Khazar Wars (642–737) · Attila's Balkan wars · Göktürk Expansion along the Silk Road · Göktürk Expansion into Europe · Hunnic invasion of 395 · The Göktürk–Sasanian Trade Conflict
Battles & Events
Fall of the Khazar Khaganate (about 965–969) · Peace of Anatolius · Siege of Bosporos, 576 · Siege of Naissus · The Göktürk–Byzantine alliance · Treaty of Margus
Places
Bosporos · Cherson · Margus · Xihai
Peoples
Sabirs

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Byzantium.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/polities/byzantine-empire/

Last revised: 8 November 2026