Abstract
The present paper deals with a little-studied military campaign of the Persian king from the Sasanian dynasty Khosrow I Anushirvan (531–579) against the Abkhazians (Abasgoi), a people who lived then at the north-eastern coast of the Black Sea, mainly on the territory between modern cities of Pitsunda and Ochamchire in Abkhazia. This military campaign is mentioned only in one source, that is a famous “History of the Prophets and the Kings” by Arabic-spoken historian al-Ṭabarī (838–923), who borrowed his evidence from an offi cial Sasanian Persian chronicle Khwaday-Namag, which has not been saved up to the present days. The aim of the paper is to defi ne a dating and reasons of Khosrow I’s military expedition against the Abkhazians, to consider the events within a broader context of Byzantine-Persian confrontation for the Western Caucasus in the mid-6th century. The author attracted evidence of Procopius of Caesarea about the Byzantine-Persian struggle for Western Caucasus and compared them with the evidence of al-Ṭabarī’s work. As a result, the author opened new, earlier absolutely neglected peculiarities of geopolitical state of Abkhazia within Byzantine-Persian Wars of the mid-6th c. At the same time, thanks to al-Ṭabarī’s evidence, the author traced a connection between Khosrow I’ military expedition against the Abkhazians and his invasion in Byzantine Syria in 540. As the author supposes, it was strictly the year 540 when Byzantium for the fi rst time started to perceive Abkhazia as the region of strategic signifi cance, important for control over Western Caucasus, before 540 Byzantium considered as the such regions only Lazika, a kingdom stood between rivers of Chorokh and Rioni, at the west of modern Georgia, and Kartli, a kingdom stood in the Kura river’s valley, at the east of modern Georgia.
Keywords
Abkhazia, Lazika, Byzantium, Khosrow I Anushirvan, Justinian I, a master of soldiers of Armenia, frontier troops, expeditionary troops, the Persians.
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