Vasil Zlatarski
Vasil Nikolov Zlatarski was a Bulgarian historian-medievalist and epigraphist. Vasil Zlatarski was born in Veliko Tarnovo in 1866, the youngest child of the teacher Nikola Zlatarcheto, a prominent activist in the educational movement and the religious and national struggle in the Tarnovo region before the Liberation. Zlatarski obtained his education in Veliko Tarnovo and in the Peter and Paul Seminary at Liaskovets, near Tarnovo where he was preparing for priesthood. After the early death of his father, he went to his brother in Russia, where in 1887 he graduated the First Classical Lyceum in St. Petersburg. Studied History at the University of St. Petersburg in 1891 and as a post-graduate in Berlin in 1893-1895, he returned to Bulgaria and became a secondary school teacher in Sofia and Lecturer in the Higher School. He was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1906. Between 1926 and his death Zlatarski was vice-president of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Zlatarski is a historical objectivist, close to the positivist school.
He contributed to the development of Bulgarian historical science by becoming the first professor of history at the Sofia University who conducted original research and by creating the field of Bulgarian medieval history proper, within the parameters in which it still exists today. Between his first appointment at the university in 1893 and his death in 1935 he worked on his monumental History of the Bulgarian State in the Middle ages - a comprehensive study of the political history of the medieval Bulgarian state with long discussions of cultural and religious problems and meticulous analysis of broad source evidence. Zlatarski popularised historical research in the country and established contacts with major Russian and Western medievalists and Byzantinists such as A. A. Vasiliev or Henri Grégoire, he was the chairman of the Fourth International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Sofia, 1934. Works by or about Vasil Zlatarski in libraries
Gutian people
The Guti or Quti known by the derived exonyms Gutians or Guteans, were a nomadic people of West Asia, around the Zagros Mountains during ancient times. Their homeland was known as Gutium. Conflict between people from Gutium and the Akkadian Empire has been linked to the collapse of the empire, towards the end of the 3rd Millennium BCE; the Guti subsequently formed the Gutian dynasty of Sumer. The Sumerian king list suggests that the Guti ruled over Sumer for several generations, following the fall of the Akkadian Empire. By the 1st Millennium BCE, usage of the name Gutium, by the peoples of lowland Mesopotamia, had expanded to include all of western Media, between the Zagros and the Tigris. Various tribes and places to the east and northeast were referred to as Gutians or Gutium. For example, Assyrian royal annals use the term Gutians in relation to populations known to have been Medes or Mannaeans; as late as the reign of Cyrus the Great of Persia, the famous general Gubaru was described as the "governor of Gutium".
Little is known of the origins, material culture or language of the Guti, as contemporary sources provide few details and no artifacts have been positively identified. As the Gutian language lacks a text corpus, apart from some proper names, its similarities to other languages are impossible to verify; the names of Gutian-Sumerian kings, suggest that the language was not related to any languages of the region, including Sumerian, Hurrian and Elamite. W. B. Henning suggested that the different endings of the king names resembled case endings in the Tocharian languages, a branch of Indo-European known from texts found in the Tarim Basin dating from the 6th to 8th centuries CE, making Gutian the earliest documented Indo-European language, he further suggested. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov explored Henning's suggestion, as supporting their proposal of an Indo-European Urheimat in the Near East. However, most scholars reject the attempt to connect two groups of languages and Tocharian, that were separated by more than two millennia.
Since Gutian appears to have been an unwritten language, for information about the Guti, scholars must rely on external sources – highly biased texts composed by their enemies. For example, Sumerian sources portray the Guti as an "unhappy", barbarous and rapacious people from the mountains – the central Zagros east of Babylon and north of Elam; the period of the Gutian dynasty in Sumer is portrayed as chaotic. According to the Sumerian king list, "in Gutium... no king was famous. This may indicate that the Gutian kingship was rotated between tribes/clans, or within an oligarchical elite; the Guti appear in texts from Old Babylonian copies of inscriptions ascribed to Lugal-Anne-Mundu of Adab as among the nations providing his empire tribute. These inscriptions locate them between Subartu in the north, Marhashe and Elam in the south, they were a prominent nomadic tribe who lived in the Zagros mountains in the time of the Akkadian Empire. Sargon the Great mentions them among his subject lands, listing them between Lullubi and Akkad to the north.
According to one stele, Naram-Sin of Akkad's army of 360,000 soldiers defeated the Gutian king Gula'an, despite having 90,000 slain by the Gutians. The epic Cuthean Legend of Naram-Sin claims Gutium among the lands raided by Annubanini of Lulubum during the reign of Naram-Sin. Contemporary year-names for Shar-kali-sharri of Akkad indicate that in one unknown year of his reign, Shar-kali-sharri captured Sharlag king of Gutium, while in another year, "the yoke was imposed on Gutium"; as the Akkadians went into decline, the Gutians began a campaign, decades-long of hit-and-run raids against Mesopotamia. Their raids crippled the economy of Sumer. Travel became unsafe; the Gutians overran Akkad, as the King List tells us, their army subdued Uruk for hegemony of Sumer, in about 2147–2050 BCE. However, it seems that autonomous rulers soon arose again in a number of city-states, notably Gudea of Lagash; the Gutians seem to have overrun Elam at around the same time, towards the close of Kutik-Inshushinak's reign.
On a statue of the Gutian king Erridupizir at Nippur, an inscription imitates his Akkadian predecessors, styling him "King of Gutium, King of the Four Quarters". The Weidner Chronicle, portrays the Gutian kings as uncultured and uncouth: Naram-Sin destroyed the people of Babylon, so twice Marduk summoned the forces of Gutium against him. Marduk gave his kingship to the Gutian force; the Gutians were unhappy people unaware how to revere the gods, ignorant of the right cultic practices. Utu-hengal, the fisherman, caught a fish at the edge of the sea for an offering; that fish should not be offered to another god until it had been offered to Marduk, but the Gutians took the boiled fish from his hand before it was offered, so by his august command, Marduk removed the Gutian force from the rule of his land and gave it to Utu-hengal. The Sumerian ruler Utu-Khegal, Prince of the Summerian city of Uruk is credited on the King List with defeating the Gutian ruler Tirigan, removing the Guti from the country in circa 2050 BCE.
Following this, Ur-Nammu of Ur ordered the destruction of Gutium. However – according to a Sumerian epic – Ur-Nammu died in battle with the Gutians, after having been ab
Utigurs
Utigurs were nomadic equestrians who flourished in the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the 6th century AD. They were similar to the Kutrigurs to their west; the name Utigur, recorded as Οὺτρίγουροι, Οὺτούργουροι and Οὺτρίγου, is considered as a metathecized form suggested by Gyula Németh of Turkic *Otur-Oğur, thus the *Uturğur mean "Thirty Oğurs". Lajos Ligeti proposed utur-, while Louis Bazin uturkar and qudurmaq. There has been little scholarly support for theories linking the names Kutrigur and Utigur to peoples such as the Guti/Quti and/or Udi/Uti, of Ancient Southwest Asia and the Caucasus which have been posited by scholars such as Osman Karatay, Yury Zuev. No evidence has been presented that the Guti moved from their homeland in the Zagros Mountains to the Steppes, they are believed to have spoken an Indo-European language; the Udi were mentioned by Pliny the Elder, in connection with the Aorsi, the Sarmatians and a Scythian caste/tribe known as the Aroteres, who lived "above the maritime coast of Albania and the...
Udini" on the western shores of the Caspian Sea. Neither is there general acceptance of Edwin G. Pulleyblank's suggestion that the Utigurs may be linked to the Yuezhi – an Indo-European people that settled in Western China during ancient times; the origin of relative tribes Utigurs and Kutrigurs is obscure. Procopius wrote; the land is called Evlisia and barbarians populate the sea-coast and the inland up to the so called lake of Meotida and the river Tanais. The people living there were called Cimmerians, now they are called Utigurs. North of them are the populous tribes of the Antes." They occupied the Don-Azov steppe zone, the Kutrigurs in the Western part and the Utigurs towards the East. Procopius recorded a genealogical legend according to which:...in the old days many Huns, called Cimmerians, inhabited the lands I mentioned already. They all had a single king. Once one of their kings had two sons: one called another called Kutrigur. After their father's death they shared the power and gave their names to the subjected peoples, so that nowadays some of them are called Utigurs and the others - Kutrigurs.
This story was confirmed by the words of the Utigur ruler Sandilch, "it is neither fair nor decent to exterminate our tribesmen, who not only speak a language, identical to ours, who are our neighbours and have the same dressing and manners of life, but who are our relatives though subjected to other lords". Agathias wrote:..all of them are called in general Scythians and Huns in particular according to their nation. Thus, some are Koutrigours or Outigours and yet others are Oultizurs and Bourougounds... the Oultizurs and Bourougounds were known up to the time of the Emperor Leo and the Romans of that time and appeared to have been strong. We, however, in this day, neither know them, will we, they have perished or they have moved off to far place. When the Kutrigurs invaded the lands of the Byzantium Empire, Emperor Justinian I through diplomatic persuasion and bribery dragged the Kutrigurs and Utigurs into mutual warfare. Utigurs led by Sandilch attacked the Kutrigurs. According to Procopius and Menander, the Kutrigurs and Utigurs decimated one another, until they lost their tribal names.
Some Kutrigur remnants were swept away by the Avars to Pannonia, while the Utigurs remained in the Pontic steppe and fell under the rule of the Türks. Their last mention was by Menander Protector, who recorded among the Türk forces that attacked Bosporos in 576 an Utigur army led by chieftain Ανάγαιος. Bosphoros fell to them c. 579 AD. In the same year, Byzantine embassy to the Türks passed through the territory of Ἀκκάγας, "which is the name of the woman who rules the Scythians there, having been appointed at that time by Anagai, chief of the tribe of the Utigurs". Kutrigurs Onogurs Bulgars SourcesGolden, Peter Benjamin. An introduction to the History of the Turkic peoples: ethnogenesis and state formation in medieval and early modern Eurasia and the Middle East. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. ISBN 9783447032742. Karatay, Osman. In Search of the Lost Tribe: The Origins and Making of the Croation Nation. Ayse Demiral. ISBN 9789756467077. Golden, Peter B.. Studies on the Peoples and Cultures of the Eurasian Steppes.
Editura Academiei Române. ISBN 9789732721520
Justinian I
Justinian I, traditionally known as Justinian the Great and Saint Justinian the Great in the Eastern Orthodox Church, was the Eastern Roman emperor from 527 to 565. During his reign, Justinian sought to revive the empire's greatness and reconquer the lost western half of the historical Roman Empire. Justinian's rule constitutes a distinct epoch in the history of the Later Roman empire, his reign is marked by the ambitious but only realized renovatio imperii, or "restoration of the Empire"; because of his restoration activities, Justinian has sometimes been known as the "last Roman" in mid 20th century historiography. This ambition was expressed by the partial recovery of the territories of the defunct Western Roman Empire, his general, swiftly conquered the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa. Subsequently, Belisarius and other generals conquered the Ostrogothic kingdom, restoring Dalmatia, Sicily and Rome to the empire after more than half a century of rule by the Ostrogoths; the prefect Liberius reclaimed the south of the Iberian peninsula, establishing the province of Spania.
These campaigns re-established Roman control over the western Mediterranean, increasing the Empire's annual revenue by over a million solidi. During his reign, Justinian subdued the Tzani, a people on the east coast of the Black Sea that had never been under Roman rule before, he engaged the Sasanian Empire in the east during Kavad I's reign, again during Khosrow I's. A still more resonant aspect of his legacy was the uniform rewriting of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, still the basis of civil law in many modern states, his reign marked a blossoming of Byzantine culture, his building program yielded such masterpieces as the church of Hagia Sophia. Justinian was born in Tauresium, around 482. A native speaker of Latin, he came from a peasant family believed to have been of Illyro-Roman or Thraco-Roman origins; the cognomen Iustinianus, which he took is indicative of adoption by his uncle Justin. During his reign, he founded Justiniana Prima not far from his birthplace, which today is in South East Serbia.
His mother was the sister of Justin. Justin, in the imperial guard before he became emperor, adopted Justinian, brought him to Constantinople, ensured the boy's education; as a result, Justinian was well educated in jurisprudence and Roman history. Justinian served for some time with the Excubitors but the details of his early career are unknown. Chronicler John Malalas, who lived during the reign of Justinian, tells of his appearance that he was short, fair skinned, curly haired, round faced and handsome. Another contemporary chronicler, compares Justinian's appearance to that of tyrannical Emperor Domitian, although this is slander; when Emperor Anastasius died in 518, Justin was proclaimed the new emperor, with significant help from Justinian. During Justin's reign, Justinian was the emperor's close confidant. Justinian showed much ambition, it has been thought that he was functioning as virtual regent long before Justin made him associate emperor on 1 April 527, although there is no conclusive evidence of this.
As Justin became senile near the end of his reign, Justinian became the de facto ruler. Justinian was appointed consul in 521 and commander of the army of the east. Upon Justin's death on 1 August 527, Justinian became the sole sovereign; as a ruler, Justinian showed great energy. He was known as "the emperor" on account of his work habits, he seems to have been amiable and easy to approach. Around 525, he married Theodora, in Constantinople, she was by some twenty years his junior. In earlier times, Justinian could not have married her owing to her class, but his uncle, Emperor Justin I, had passed a law allowing intermarriage between social classes. Theodora would become influential in the politics of the Empire, emperors would follow Justinian's precedent in marrying outside the aristocratic class; the marriage caused a scandal, but Theodora would prove to be a shrewd judge of character and Justinian's greatest supporter. Other talented individuals included his legal adviser. Justinian's rule was not universally popular.
Justinian recovered. Theodora died in 548 at a young age of cancer. Justinian, who had always had a keen interest in theological matters and participated in debates on Christian doctrine, became more devoted to religion during the years of his life; when he died on 14 November 565, he left no children, though his wife Theodora had given birth to a stillborn son several years into his reign. He was succeeded by Justin II, the son of his sister Vigilantia and married to Sophia, the niece of Empress Theodora. Justinian's body was entombed in a specially built mausoleum in the Church of the
Thermopylae
Thermopylae is a place in Greece where a narrow coastal passage existed in antiquity. It derives its name from its hot sulphur springs; the Hot Gates is "the place of hot springs" and in Greek mythology it is the cavernous entrances to Hades". Thermopylae is world-famous for the battle that took place there between the Greek forces and the invading Persian forces, commemorated by Simonides in the famous epitaph, "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, That here obedient to their laws we lie." Thermopylae is the only land route large enough to bear any significant traffic between Lokris and Thessaly. This passage from north to south along the east coast of the Balkan peninsula requires use of the pass and for this reason Thermopylae has been the site of several battles. In ancient times it was called Malis, named after the Malians, a Greek tribe that lived near present-day Lamia at the delta of the river, Spercheios in Greece; the Malian Gulf is named after them. In the western valley of the Spercheios their land was adjacent to the Aenianes.
Their main town was named Trachis. In the town of Anthela, the Malians had an important temple of Demeter, an early center of the Anthelan Amphictiony; the land is dominated by the coastal floodplain of the Spercheios River and is surrounded by sloping forested limestone mountains. There is continuous deposition of sediment from the river and travertine deposits from the hot springs which has altered the landscape during the past few thousand years; the land surface on which the famous Battle of Thermopylae was fought in 480 BC is now buried under 20 metres of soil. The shoreline has advanced over the centuries because of the sedimentary deposition; the level of the Malian Gulf was significantly higher during prehistoric times and the Spercheios River was shorter. Its shoreline advanced by up to 2 kilometers between 2500 BC and 480 BC but still has left several narrow passages between the sea and the mountains; the narrowest point on the plain, where the Battle of Thermopylae was fought, would have been less than 100 metres wide.
Between 480 BC and the 21st century, the shoreline advanced by as much as 9 km in places, eliminating the narrowest points of the pass and increasing the size of the plain around the outlet of the Spercheios. A main highway now splits the pass, with a modern-day monument to King Leonidas I of Sparta on the east side of the highway, it is directly across the road from the hill where Simonides of Ceos's epitaph to the fallen is engraved in stone at the top. Thermopylae is part of the infamous "horseshoe of Maliakos" known as the "horseshoe of death": it is the narrowest part of the highway connecting the north and the south of Greece, it has been the site of many vehicular accidents. The hot springs from which the pass derives its name still exist close to the foot of the hill. Thermopylae means "hot gates" and the name is related with its hot sulphur springs; this is in Greek mythology, the place of the cavernous entrance to Hades. The first mentioned Amphictyony was centered on the cult of Demeter, located at the city of Anthela near Thermopylae.
The delegates to the Amphictiony were dubbed the Pylagorai, since Demeter was a local goddess in many of her older local cults, a reference to the gates of Hades. A Greek myth mentioned that Heracles had jumped into the river in an attempt to wash off the Hydra poison infused in the cloak which he could not take off; the river has become hot and stayed that way since. Thermopylae is known for the battle that took place there in 480 BC, in which an outnumbered Greek force of seven thousand held off a larger force of Persians under Xerxes. One thousand Greeks remained in the pass when most of the army retreated. For three days they held a narrow route between hills and the sea against Xerxes' vast cavalry and infantry force, before being outflanked on the third day via a hidden goat path named the Anopaea Pass. According to the Greek legend, a traitor named; the following epitaph by Simonides was written on the monument: "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie."
In 353 BC/352 BC during the Third Sacred War, fought between the forces of the Delphic Amphictyonic League, principally represented by Thebes, latterly by Philip II of Macedon, the Phocians. The war was caused by a large fine imposed on the Phocians in 357 BC for cultivating sacred land; the Spartans, who were fined in that war never fought in it as they were pardoned. In 279 BC a Gallic army led by Brennus engaged the Aetolians who were forced to make a tactical retreat and who were routed by the Thessalians and Malians by the river Spercheios. In 191 BC Antiochus III the Great of Syria attempted in vain to hold the pass against the Romans under Manius Acilius Glabrio. In 267, the Germanic tribe of Heruli were defeated by the Roman force. In 997, the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel advanced as far as the Peloponnese. On his return, he was met by a Byzantine army under Nikephoros Ouranos
Constantinople
Constantinople was the capital city of the Roman Empire, of the Byzantine Empire, of the brief Crusader state known as the Latin Empire, until falling to the Ottoman Empire. It was reinaugurated in 324 from ancient Byzantium as the new capital of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine the Great, after whom it was named, dedicated on 11 May 330; the city was located in what is now the core of modern Istanbul. From the mid-5th century to the early 13th century, Constantinople was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe; the city was famed for its architectural masterpieces, such as the Greek Orthodox cathedral of Hagia Sophia, which served as the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the sacred Imperial Palace where the Emperors lived, the Galata Tower, the Hippodrome, the Golden Gate of the Land Walls, the opulent aristocratic palaces lining the arcaded avenues and squares. The University of Constantinople was founded in the fifth century and contained numerous artistic and literary treasures before it was sacked in 1204 and 1453, including its vast Imperial Library which contained the remnants of the Library of Alexandria and had over 100,000 volumes of ancient texts.
It was instrumental in the advancement of Christianity during Roman and Byzantine times as the home of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and as the guardian of Christendom's holiest relics such as the Crown of Thorns and the True Cross. Constantinople was famed for its complex defences; the first wall of the city was erected by Constantine I, surrounded the city on both land and sea fronts. In the 5th century, the Praetorian Prefect Anthemius under the child emperor Theodosius II undertook the construction of the Theodosian Walls, which consisted of a double wall lying about 2 kilometres to the west of the first wall and a moat with palisades in front; this formidable complex of defences was one of the most sophisticated of Antiquity. The city was built intentionally to rival Rome, it was claimed that several elevations within its walls matched the'seven hills' of Rome; because it was located between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara the land area that needed defensive walls was reduced, this helped it to present an impregnable fortress enclosing magnificent palaces and towers, the result of the prosperity it achieved from being the gateway between two continents and two seas.
Although besieged on numerous occasions by various armies, the defences of Constantinople proved impregnable for nearly nine hundred years. In 1204, the armies of the Fourth Crusade took and devastated the city, its inhabitants lived several decades under Latin misrule. In 1261 the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos liberated the city, after the restoration under the Palaiologos dynasty, enjoyed a partial recovery. With the advent of the Ottoman Empire in 1299, the Byzantine Empire began to lose territories and the city began to lose population. By the early 15th century, the Byzantine Empire was reduced to just Constantinople and its environs, along with Morea in Greece, making it an enclave inside the Ottoman Empire. According to Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, the first known name of a settlement on the site of Constantinople was Lygos, a settlement of Thracian origin founded between the 13th and 11th centuries BC; the site, according to the founding myth of the city, was abandoned by the time Greek settlers from the city-state of Megara founded Byzantium in around 657 BC, across from the town of Chalcedon on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus.
The origins of the name of Byzantion, more known by the Latin Byzantium, are not clear, though some suggest it is of Thraco-Illyrian origin. The founding myth of the city has it told that the settlement was named after the leader of the Megarian colonists, Byzas; the Byzantines of Constantinople themselves would maintain that the city was named in honour of two men and Antes, though this was more just a play on the word Byzantion. The city was renamed Augusta Antonina in the early 3rd century AD by the Emperor Septimius Severus, who razed the city to the ground in 196 for supporting a rival contender in the civil war and had it rebuilt in honour of his son Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, popularly known as Caracalla; the name appears to have been forgotten and abandoned, the city reverted to Byzantium/Byzantion after either the assassination of Caracalla in 217 or, at the latest, the fall of the Severan dynasty in 235. Byzantium took on the name of Kōnstantinoupolis after its refoundation under Roman emperor Constantine I, who transferred the capital of the Roman Empire to Byzantium in 330 and designated his new capital as Nova Roma'New Rome'.
During this time, the city was called'Second Rome','Eastern Rome', Roma Constantinopolitana. As the city became the sole remaining capital of the Roman Empire after the fall of the West, its wealth and influence grew, the city came to have a multitude of nicknames; as the largest and wealthiest city in Europe during the 4th–13th centuries and a centre of culture and education of the Mediterranean basin, Constantinople came to be known by prestigious titles such as Basileuousa and Megalopol
Sabir people
The Sabirs were nomadic people who lived in the north of the Caucasus beginning in the late-5th century, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, in the Kuban area, came from Western Siberia. They used siege machinery, had a large army and were boat-builders, they were referred to as Huns, a title applied to various Eurasian nomadic tribes in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe during late antiquity. Sabirs led incursions into Transcaucasia in the late-400s/early-500s, but began serving as soldiers and mercenaries during the Byzantine-Sasanian Wars on both sides, their alliance with the Byzantines laid the basis for the Khazar-Byzantine alliance. Gyula Németh and Paul Pelliot for the Sabir/Sabar/Sapar/Savar considered Turkic etymology for "to go astray", i.e. the "wanderers, nomads", placed in a group of semantically similar names Qazar, Yazar, Qačar. Al-Masudi recorded that the Khazars name is in Persian, while in Turkic it is Sabir, implying the same semantic meaning, related ethnogenesis. Walter Bruno Henning considered to have found them in the Sogdian Nafnamak long after the 5th century.
Some scholars related their name to the name of Siberia, with the far Eastern Xianbei, Finno-Ugric origin. The ancient historians differed them from the Huns, implying their mixed descent. Byzantine documents refer to Sabirs as Sabiroi, although the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos writes in his De Administrando Imperio that he was told by a Hungarian delegation visiting his court that the Tourkoi used to be called "sabartoi asphaloi" considered to mean "steadfast Sabirs", still sent delegations to those who stayed behind in the Caucasus region near Persia; some Hungarian group derived from the Sabirs as their name is reflected in Szavard, personal clan name Zuard. In 463 AD, Priscus mentions that the Sabirs attacked the Saragurs and Onogurs, as a result of having themselves been attacked by the Avars, it has been suggested that the nomadic motion began with the Chinese attack in 450-458 against the Rouran Khaganate. In 504 and 515, they held raids around the Caucasus, the Sasanian northern frontier during the rule of king Kavadh I, causing problems to the Persians in their war against the Byzantine Empire.
It is considered. They made treaties with both Justin I and Kavadh I, but decided for the former, which resulted with mutual agreement between Justin I and Kavadh I, the former devastating attack on Zilgibis and his army. In 520s, the Queen Boareks, widow of the Sabir chieftain Balaq through Justinian I's diplomacy came closer to the Byzantines, attacked two Hunnic leaders Astera/Styrax and Aglanos/Glones, she ruled over 100,000 people, could field 20,000 strong-men army. At the Battle of Satala, a mixed Persian army led by Mihr-Mihroe consisted of circa three thousand Sabirs. In December 531, many Sabirs were summoned by the Persians to plunder around Euphratesia, Cilicia, but some of the booty had been returned by the Roman magister militum. During the Lazic War, in 548, along the Alans they allied with Gubazes II of Lazica and conquered the Petra from the Persians. In 551, some Sabirs were allied to Bessas in the successful attempt to wrest Petra from the Persians, other four thousand led by Mihr-Mihroe were part of the unsuccessful siege of Archaeopolis.
In 556, two thousand Sabirs served as heavy infantry mercenaries of the Byzantine Empire against the Sasanian Empire. They were led by Balmaq and Iliger, they won against the three thousand Dilimnites near Archaeopolis. Eight hundred Dilimnites were killed in a failed rush. In the same year, some five thousand Sabirs allied to the Persians were killed by three thousand Roman horsemen; as part of the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 572–591, in 572–573, Sabirs lost as part of the Sasanian mixed army against the Marcian near Nisibis. In 578, some eight thousand Sabirs and Arab allies were on the side of the Persians, raided territory around Resaena and Constantia; the Syriac translation of the Pseudo–Zacharias Rhetor's Ecclesiastical History in Western Eurasia recorded thirteen tribes, including the sbr. They are described in typical phrases reserved for nomads in the ethnographic literature of the period, as people who "live in tents, earn their living on the meat of livestock and fish, of wild animals and by their weapons".
The Armenian and Arabic sources placed them in the North Caucasus, near Laks, Filān, Masqat, Sāhib as-Sarīr and the Khazar town Samandar. By the late 6th century, the coming of the Pannonian Avars into Europe terminated the Sabir union in North Caucasus. According to Theophylact Simocatta, when the Barsils and Sabirs saw the invading Var and Chunni they paniced because thought the invaders were the Avars. Menander Protector placed the events between 558-560, he mentioned them last time in connection with the Byzantine conquest in Caucasian Albania during the reign of Tiberius II Constantine, but the large sums were not enough to stop them to rejoin the Persians. They were assimilated into the Bulgars confederations; the tribe Suwāz in Volga Bulgaria is related to the city Suwār in the same state, North Caucasian kingdom Suwār. However, it is uncertain whether these Suwār i.e. Sawâr are the Sabirs who gone to the North Caucasus and after 558 retreated to the Volga, came there as the result of the
