Ctesiphon

So you have Trajan's conquest of Parthia.

Trajan is one of the few Roman emperors to conquer the Parthian Empire, successfully captures and sacks the Parthian capital, Ctesiphon, um, and then probably the only Roman emperor who got all the way through to put his toes in the Persian Gulf.

And then on his way back, he suffers rebellion after rebellion after rebellion as he's going back through newly conquered Roman territory.

Now, remember that the, the, the huge continental river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates have got these amazing Hellenistic cities, which are fabulously rich.

Mani lived most of his life in the Sasanian Empire, a Persian empire that covered much of Mesopotamia and modern-day Iran.

He was born around 216 CE, among the Aramaic-speaking populations near the city of Ctesiphon on the Tigris River, and here in the marshlands of Mesopotamia.

Surrounded by a multi-religious population of Syriac Christians, Mandaeans, and Jews, Mani was raised within some sort of religious sect that practiced baptism.

We know this from one of the most consequential discoveries for the study of Manichaeans, the Mani Codex, a credit card-sized book discovered in Egypt in the 20th century, and it dates to the 5th century.

Meanwhile, Constantinople had a population between five hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand at this point in history.

Only the cities of Nanjing in China and Ctesiphon in Persia rivaled Constantinople's population, but it is doubtful that they equaled Constantinople's grandeur.

If I could choose anywhere in the world to visit in the year five hundred AD, I would pick Constantinople without a moment of hesitation.

Enthroned in the great imperial palace ruling over the Balkans, Asia Minor, Palestine, Greece, Syria, and Egypt, you would find the emperor Anastasius I Dicorus, an elderly civil servant turned emperor in the ninth year of his reign.

With their arrival, Greek influence remained, but the balance tilted once again toward Eastern traditions.

Seleucia persisted, but new cities like Ctesiphon grew, eventually eclipsing it as centers of power.

The Hellenistic transformation of Mesopotamia was not destruction but layering.

Greek culture did not erase Mesopotamian traditions.

They established a centralized bureaucracy, enforced taxation, and elevated Zoroastrianism as the state religion.

Mesopotamia became one of their core provinces, its fertile fields feeding armies, its cities serving as administrative and commercial centers.

Ctesiphon, across the river from Seleucia, grew into a magnificent capital filled with palaces and markets.

Its most famous structure, the Taq Kasra arch, still stands in ruins today, a testament to Sassanian architectural daring.

He did it with brutal efficiency.

He crossed the Euphrates, drove into the heart of enemy territory, and took Seleucia and Ctesiphon, the great cities of the Parthians.

Ctesiphon was their capital, and Cassius burned its royal palace.

He came home a hero.

The soldiers respected him for his iron discipline.

Caliph Umar's army met with the Persian armies in the Battle of Cardassia in the year 636 AD.

In early January 637, the Muslim advance guard reached the outskirts of Ctesiphon and laid siege to the city for two months.

Eventually, the city fell and the Muslims occupied it.

During the fighting, the palaces and the library at Ctesiphon were deliberately burned.

In the end, the only book that managed to survive in Arabia was the glorious Quran.

When it comes to the history of the Quran, historians have struggled.

You know, like sometimes you have an inhabitation.

You hear about the Persians, you hear about this great city they had called Madain, Ctesiphon.

You're looking for that on the map, you won't find it today.

Baghdad is a very recent city in, you know, in the history of things.

But before we get to the city, because that's what Constantinople was known as in antiquity, it was, there were cities and then there was the city.

Before we go there, we need to go to Tisfun, or Ctesiphon, capital of Persia.

To the mind of the man who set all this in motion, Mr. Khosrow.

Khosrow II, Khosrow Parvez the Wise.

So things like, even, like, the choice of battles as a, as a starting point.

I was saying to, to both of you, like, I just, I do not believe that most people who are kind of vaguely interested in, in the First World War know about the Battle of Ctesiphon or in depth about the Ottoman raid of the Suez Canal.

I just don't believe that that is, that that is true.

So first of all, by having these types of battles in the game, we kind of immediately increase an understanding of the nature of some of the, of some of the, the fighting in this area, and also the, some of the landscape for it.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

They, they, they understand that, um, you know, they're not, they're not gonna be, if they win this map, they're not gonna sail on a march on Constantinople, um, or, or, or push on from Ctesiphon onto Baghdad, um, as, as fun as that would be.

Because they haven't wor- you just haven't worked out how to gamify dysentery.