Nusaybin
Nusaybin is a municipality and district of Mardin Province, Turkey. Its area is 1,079 km2, and its population is 115,586. The city is populated by Kurds of different tribal affiliation.
Nusaybin is separated from the larger Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli by the Syria–Turkey border.
The city is at the foot of the Mount Izla escarpment at the southern edge of the Tur Abdin hills, standing on the banks of the Jaghjagh River, the ancient Mygdonius. The city existed in the Assyrian Empire and is recorded in Akkadian inscriptions as Naṣibīna. Having been part of the Achaemenid Empire, in the Hellenistic period the settlement was re-founded as a polis named "Antioch on the Mygdonius" by the Seleucid dynasty after the conquests of Alexander the Great. A part of first the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire, the city was mainly Syriac-speaking, and control of it was contested between the Kingdom of Armenia, the Romans, and the Parthian Empire. After a peace treaty contracted between the Sasanian Empire and the Romans in 298 and enduring until 337, Nisibis was capital of Roman Mesopotamia and the seat of its governor. Jacob of Nisibis, the city's first known bishop, constructed its first cathedral between 313 and 320. Nisibis was a focus of international trade, and according to the Greek history of Peter the Patrician, the primary point of contact between Roman and Persian empires.
Nisibis was besieged three times by the Sasanian army under Shapur II in the first half of the 4th century; each time, the city's fortifications held. The Roman soldier and Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus described Nisibis, fortified with walls, towers, and a citadel, as "the strongest bulwark of the Orient". After the defeat of the Romans in Julian's Persian War, Julian's successor Jovian was forced to cede the five Transtigritine provinces to the Persians, including Nisibis. The city was evacuated and its citizens forced to migrate to Amida – which was expanded to accommodate them – and to Edessa. Nisibis remained a major entrepôt; one of only three such cities of commercial exchange allowed by Roman law promulgated in 408/9. However, despite several Roman attempts to recapture Nisibis through the remainder of the Roman–Persian Wars and the construction of nearby Dara to defend against Persian attack, Nisibis was not returned to Roman control before it was conquered in 639 by the Rashidun Caliphate during the Muslim conquest of the Levant.
Under Sasanian rule and after, Nisibis was a major centre of the Christian Church, and the bishop of Nisibis attended the Council of Seleucia-Ctesiphon convened in 410 by the emperor Yazdegerd I. As a result of this council, the Church of the East was established, and the bishop of Nisibis became the metropolitan bishop of the five erstwhile Transtigritine provinces. Narsai, formerly a theologian at the School of Edessa, founded the famous School of Nisibis with the bishop, Barsauma, in the 470s. When the Roman emperor Zeno closed the School of Edessa in 489, the scholars migrated to Nisibis's school and established the city as the foremost centre of Christian thought in the Church of the East. According to the Damascene monk John Moschus, the city's cathedral had five doors in the 7th century, and the monastic and later bishop of Harran, Simeon of the Olives, was recorded as having renewed several ecclesiastical buildings in the early period of Arab rule. The monasteries of the nearby Tur Abdin, led by the reforms of Abraham the Great of Kashkar, founder of the "Great Monastery" of Mount Izla, underwent substantial revival in the years after the Muslim conquest. However, besides the baptistery known as the Church of Saint Jacob and built in 359 by bishop Vologeses, little remains of ancient Nisibis, probably because of ruinous earthquake in 717. Archaeological excavations were conducted in the vicinity of the 4th-century baptistery in the early 21st century, revealing various buildings including the 4th-century cathedral.
History
Antiquity
First mentioned in 901 BCE, Naṣibīna was an Aramean kingdom captured by the Assyrian king Adad-Nirari II in 896. By 852 BCE, Naṣibīna had been fully annexed to the Neo-Assyrian Empire and appeared in the Assyrian Eponym List as the seat of an Assyrian provincial governor named Shamash-Abua.It was under Babylonian control until 536 BCE, when it fell to the Achaemenid Persians, and remained so until taken by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE.
Hellenistic period
The Seleucids re-founded the city as Antiochia Mygdonia, mentioned for the first time in Polybius' description of the march of Antiochus III the Great against Molon. The Greek historian Plutarch suggested that the city was populated by descendants of Spartans. Around the 1st century CE, Nisibis was the home of Judah ben Bethera, who founded a famous yeshiva there.File:Near East ancient map.jpg|thumb|The Roman Near East under Pompey in 63 BCE, showing Nisibis in Parthian territory south of Roman Corduene
In 67 BCE, during Rome's first war with Armenia, the Roman general Lucullus took Nisibis from the brother of Tigranes.
Like many other cities in the marches where Roman and Parthian powers confronted one another, Nisibis was often taken and retaken. In 115 CE, it was captured by the Roman Emperor Trajan, for which he gained the name of Parthicus, then lost to and regained from the Jews during the Diaspora Revolt. After the Romans again lost the city in 194, it was once more conquered by Septimius Severus, who made it his headquarters and re-established a colony there. The last battle between Rome and Parthia was fought in the vicinity of the city in 217.
Late Antiquity
With the fresh energy of the new Sassanid dynasty, Shapur I conquered Nisibis, was driven out, and returned in the 260s. In 298, by a treaty with Narseh, the province of Nisibis was acquired by the Roman Empire.During the Roman–Persian Wars Nisibis was unsuccessfully besieged by the Sassanid Empire thrice, in 337, 346 and 350. According to the Expositio totius mundi et gentium bronze and iron were forbidden to be exported to the Persians, but for other goods, Nisibis was the site of substantial trade across the Roman–Persian frontier.
Upon the death of Constantine the Great in 337 CE, the Sassanid Shah Shapur II marched against Roman held Nisibis with a vast army composed of cavalry, infantry and elephants. His combat engineers raised siege works, including towers, so his archers could rain down arrows at the defenders. They also undermined the walls, dammed the Mygdonius River and constructed dikes to direct the river against the walls. On the seventieth day of the siege, the water was released and the torrent struck the walls; entire sections of the city walls collapsed. The water passed through the city and knocked down a section of the opposite wall as well. The Persians were unable to assault the city because the approaches to the breaches were impassable due to floodwater, mud and debris. The soldiers and citizens inside the city worked all night and by dawn the breaches were closed with makeshift barriers. Shapur's assault troops attacked the breaches, but their assault was repulsed. A few days later the Persian lifted the siege.
Nisibis was besieged a second time in 346 CE. The details of the second siege have not survived. Shapur besieged the city for seventy-eight days and then lifted the siege.
In 350 CE, while the Roman Emperor Constantius II was engaged in a civil war against the usurper Magnentius in the West, the Persians invaded and laid siege to Nisibis for the third time. The siege lasted between 100 and 160 days. The Persian engineers tried several innovative siege technics; using the River Mygdonius to bring down a section of the walls, and creating a lake around the city and using boats with siege engines to bring down another section. Unlike the first siege, as the walls fell, Persian assault troops immediately entered the breaches supported by war elephants. Despite all this they failed to break through the breaches and the attack stalled. The Romans, experts at close-quarter combat, and supported by arrows and bolts from the walls and towers checked the assault and a sortie from one of the gates forced the Persians to withdraw. Shortly after the Persian Army, suffering heavy casualties from combat and disease, lifted the siege and withdrew.
The Syriac poet Ephrem the Syrian witnessed all three sieges, and praised Nisibis's successive bishops for their contributions to the defences in his, while the Roman caesar Julian described the third siege in his panegyric to his senior co-emperor, the augustus Constantius II. The Roman historian of the 4th century, Ammianus Marcellinus, gained his first practical experience of warfare as a young man at Nisibis under the magister equitum, Ursicinus. From 360 to 363, Nisibis was the camp of Legio I Parthica. Because of its strategic importance on the Persian border, Nisibis was heavily fortified. Ammianus lovingly calls Nisibis the "impregnable city" and "bulwark of the provinces".
Sozomen writes that when the inhabitants of Nisibis asked for help because the Persians were about to invade the Roman territories and attack them, Emperor Julian refused to assist them because they were Christianized, and he told them that he would not help them if they did not return to paganism.
In 363 Nisibis was ceded to the Sassanian Empire after the defeat of Julian. Before that time the population of the town was forced by the Roman authorities to leave Nisibis and move to Amida. Emperor Jovian allowed them only three days for the evacuation. Historian Ammianus Marcellinus was again an eyewitness and condemns Emperor Jovian for giving up the fortified town without a fight. Marcellinus' point-of-view is certainly in line with contemporary Roman public opinion. According to the Latin historian Eutropius, the cession of Nisibis was supposed to last 120 years.
According to Al-Tabari, some 12,000 Persians of good lineage from Istakhr, Isfahan, and other regions settled at Nisibis in the fourth century, and their descendants were still there at the beginning of the seventh century.
The School of Nisibis, founded at the introduction of Christianity into the city by ethnic Assyrians of the Assyrian Church of the East, was closed when the province was ceded to the Persians. Ephrem the Syrian, a Syriac Christian poet, commentator, preacher and defender of orthodoxy, joined the general exodus of Christians and re-established the school on more securely Roman soil at Edessa. In the fifth century, the school became a center of Nestorian Christianity, and was closed down by Archbishop Cyrus in 489. The expelled masters and pupils withdrew once more, back to Nisibis, under the care of Barsauma, who had been trained at Edessa, under the patronage of Narses, who established the statutes of the new school. Those that have been discovered and published belong to Osee, the successor of Barsauma in the See of Nisibis, and bear the date 496; they must be substantially the same as those of 489. In 590, they were again modified. The monastery school was under a superior called Rabban, a title also given to the instructors. The administration was confided to a major-domo, who was steward, prefect of discipline and librarian, but under the supervision of a council. Unlike the Jacobite schools, devoted chiefly to profane studies, the School of Nisibis was above all a school of theology. The two chief masters were the instructors in reading and in the interpretation of Holy Scripture, explained chiefly with the aid of Theodore of Mopsuestia. The free course of studies lasted three years, the students providing for their own support. During their sojourn at the university, masters and students led a monastic life under somewhat special conditions. The school had a tribunal and enjoyed the right of acquiring all sorts of property. Its rich library possessed a most beautiful collection of Nestorian works; from its remains Ebed-Jesus, Bishop of Nisibis in the 14th century, composed his celebrated catalogue of ecclesiastical writers. The disorders and dissensions, which arose in the sixth century in the school of Nisibis, favoured the development of its rivals, especially that of Seleucia; however, it did not really begin to decline until after the foundation of the School of Baghdad. Notable people associated with the school include its founder Narses; Abraham, his nephew and successor; Abraham of Kashgar, the restorer of monastic life; and ArchbishopElijah of Nisibis.
As a fortified frontier city, Nisibis played a major role in the Roman-Persian Wars. It became the capital of the newly created province of Mesopotamia after Diocletian's organization of the eastern Roman frontier. It became known as the "Shield of the Empire" after a successful resistance in 337–350. The city changed hands several times, and once in Sasanian hands, Nisibis was the base of operations against the Romans. The city was also one of the main crossing points for merchants, although elaborate counter-espionage safeguards were also in place.