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John of Ephesus wrote a church history in Syriac, the language of his countrymen in northern Mesopotamia.[1] Only its third part survives in substance. Its sixth book holds almost everything he says about the two steppe peoples that concerned Byzantium in his time, the Avars and the Göktürks.[2]

The author

John was born at Amid in northern Mesopotamia.[1] One reckoning puts his birth about 516.[1] A second puts it about 507.[3] He was a Monophysite, one of those who rejected the council of Chalcedon.[4] Under Justinian he lived at Constantinople and enjoyed the emperor’s favour for thirty years. In 542 he was sent to convert the pagans of Asia, Lydia, Caria and Phrygia, and from that mission he took the title of bishop of Ephesus.[5] From 571 he and other Monophysite leaders were imprisoned, banished or held under house arrest. He died in 588 or 589.[6]

The work

The history had three parts. The first began with Julius Caesar and is lost. The second survives in extracts in later Syriac chronicles.[1] The third part covers the years from 571 to 588.[2] John began it before the end of Justin II’s reign in 578.[2] He wrote it under persecution and entrusted the finished leaves to friends. They hid the leaves for two or three years, so he could rarely go back over what he had written.[2] He never found the time to put the work together again, and it is fragmentary in places.[1] The sixth book once had forty-nine chapters. The one complete manuscript ends with the thirty-seventh.[2]

The English translator joined broken passages with lines of his own. He brought scattered chapters on the same event together and broke up John’s long sentences. The book and chapter in the margin mark where John’s own words begin.[7]

Zemarchus among the Göktürks

In book VI, chapter 23, John gives two causes for the war between Rome and Persia. The first was that the Persarmenians had gone over to Rome. The second was that the Roman emperor had sent ambassadors “to the barbarous tribes, who live in the interior of the Persian dominions, and whom they call Turchios”.[8] Justin II sent this embassy in the seventh year of his reign, and at its head was “a prince named Zemarchus”. Never before, John writes, had a Roman embassy gone to these numerous and powerful peoples.[9]

After a year on the road, the ambassadors reached the Göktürk lands. One of the Göktürk kings learned that envoys of the Romans had come, and he began to weep bitterly. The Göktürks had eight other chiefs further inland. None of his nobles dared to speak to him.[9] At last he explained. It was a tradition among them from of old that when Roman ambassadors entered their lands, the whole world was coming to an end and all its kingdoms would destroy one another.[10] Then the envoys spread out their gifts of gold and silver, pearls and robes of state. The king chose the finest pieces and said: “These are indeed the gifts of a great king.”[10]

Persian envoys were at the court at the same time. The king asked the Romans whether it was true, as the Persians said, that the Roman emperor was the Persian king’s slave and paid him tribute. Zemarchus answered that Roman emperors had often invaded Persia. He added that the Persians still trembled before the statue that the emperor Trajan had set up in their land. The Persians were summoned and admitted it, and the king sent them away in anger.[11] When the Persian king heard of this, he ordered the statue thrown down. He suspected the Romans of stirring up these peoples against him.[12] The ambassadors returned after two years. They told of the numbers of these peoples, of their country, of their military order and of the uprightness of their morals.[13]

Relation to the Greek sources

Five sources of the late sixth century tell of Zemarchus’s embassy. John and Menander tell it at length. Theophanes of Byzantium, John of Epiphania and Theophylact Simocatta tell it in brief.[14] It is not settled who borrowed from whom. John’s account, finished before 581, must have been written before the others.[14] Menander dates the embassy to Justin’s fourth year, 569, where John has the seventh.[14] For the reign of Justin II, Theophanes the Confessor has a few items curiously close to John’s history, perhaps through a later Syriac writer.[15]

Reliability

John wrote while the events were recent, at Constantinople, from what the ambassadors reported on their return. He gives what the Greek fragments do not: the weeping king, the prophecy of the end of the world, and the dispute with the Persian envoys over the statue of Trajan. He also tells of the two thousand captive maidens whom Khosrow I sent to the Göktürks after the fall of Dara.[16] He does not name the Göktürk ruler.[17]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Smith 1860, vi
  2. ^ a b c d e Dickens 2021, p. 535
  3. ^ Dickens 2021, p. 534
  4. ^ Smith 1860, viii
  5. ^ Smith 1860, vi–vii
  6. ^ Dickens 2021, p. 534–535
  7. ^ Smith 1860, ix
  8. ^ John of Ephesus
  9. ^ a b John of Ephesus
  10. ^ a b John of Ephesus
  11. ^ John of Ephesus
  12. ^ John of Ephesus
  13. ^ John of Ephesus
  14. ^ a b c Dickens 2021, p. 539
  15. ^ Scott 1997, lxxxvii
  16. ^ John of Ephesus; Smith 1860, p. 387–390
  17. ^ John of Ephesus

Sources

Literature

  • R. Payne Smith (trans.), The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of John, Bishop of Ephesus (1860)
  • Mark Dickens (Turkish trans.), Zemarkhos'un elçiliği hakkında Efesli Yuhanon (John of Ephesus on the Embassy of Zemarchus) (2021)
  • Cyril Mango, Roger Scott (trans.), The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284–813 (1997)

Articles resting on this source 7

Captives and the Unfree · Diplomacy of the Steppe Empires · Envoys and Embassies · Istemi · Khosrow's gift of maidens (573) · The embassy of Zemarchos, 569 · Zemarchos

Related

What links here3

Persons
Istemi
Sources
Theophanes of Byzantium · Theophanes the Confessor

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “John of Ephesus.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/john-of-ephesus/

Last revised: 8 November 2026