Battle of Ganzak
624 battle
The Battle of Ganzak was a clash between the Byzantine and Sasanian armies. The emperors of both empires personally took part in this battle. The Persians suffered a crushing defeat, and Khosrow fled leaving his army. As a result of this, Heraclius was able to move deeper into Persia.
Background
After Khosrow refused the peace treaty, sending an insulting letter in response, Heraclius marched on Caucasus, using Khosrow's letter as a tool of inspiration and propaganda for his army. Already on the way, he learned that Khosrow was with 40,000 soldiers in Ganzak.
Khosrow's letter looked like this:
Khosrow, honored among the gods, lord and king of all the earth, offspring of the great Aramazd, to Heraclius, our senseless and insignificant servant. You have not wished to submit yourself to us, but you call yourself lord and king. My treasure which is with you, you spend; my servants you defraud; and having collected an army of brigands, you give me no rest. So did I not destroy the Greeks?
“Battle of Ganzak” enters the record as 624 battle. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Battle, Ganzak and battle can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Ganzak” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.