The calls Medical Wars constitute one of the best known conflicts of Antiquity. In fact, one of the most famous episodes of the Ancient Age, the Battle of Marathon, took place in the context of the Persian Wars. But what exactly were the Persian Wars? If you want to know, keep reading!
The Persian Wars: a 50-year conflict
The Medical Wars is the name given to a series of conflicts that pitted the Achaemenid or Persian Empire against a confederation of Greek polis between 499 and 449 BC. C. The fundamental problem that gave rise to this war was the expansionist desires of the Persian Empire who was conquering territories in the Anatolian peninsula until reaching Ionia. The Ionian territory was closely linked to Greece and when it fell into Persian hands in 545 BC. C., the Greeks began to see how the Persians could become an increasingly real threat to them. In fact, legend has it that Spartathe only Greek city that dared to reproach the Persians for their conquest of Ionia, warned King Cyrus of Persia to stay away from Greece, to which Cyrus replied that he did not know who the Spartans were, that is, laughing at such threat.
Persian expansionism continued and by 514 B.C. C., the Persians had already conquered Thrace and Macedonia and they were dangerously close to mainland Greece. By this time, the Persians had become a threat that the polis could not ignore. Finally, in the year 499 a. C., exploded a far-reaching rebellion in Ionia against Persian rule. The Ionian rebels asked the Greek polis for help in fighting the Persians and the cities of Athens and Eretria they answered his call. However, the revolt failed and the wrath of the Persians was soon felt. The Persians razed the Ionian cities and besieged the prominent city of Miletus, which was also almost completely destroyed. Enraged, the Persians set their sights on the city of Athens, which they wanted to punish for its help to the Ionian rebels, but also because the Athenian politician Hippias was at the Persian court, trying to encourage the Persian king to to attack Athens and finally place it under his command. The first Medical War thus began.
The First Persian War (499-490 BC)
The first medical war You can have two timelines. The first indicates that it began in the year 499 a. C., with the Ionian revolt that we have described in the previous lines. The second indicates that its beginning was in the year 492 a. C. when, once that revolt was suffocated, Mardonio launched what is considered the first military campaign specifically linked to this conflict. Be that as it may, it was the second Persian military campaign against Greece, launched in 490 BC. C., the one that became more famous during this first stage of the medical wars. During this campaign, the Persians invaded the island of Naxoswhich ended up being practically destroyed and the city of erethriawhich also lent aid to the Ionians, was raided and looted.
The next stop for the Persians was Athens and the fleet headed for Attica, landing in the mythical territory of Marathon. According to herodotus, Athens sent an army to face the invader. In Marathon 10,000 Greek hoplites face the Persians, who were more than twice as many. The Athenians won the battle and the Persians were forced to withdraw, while Marathon went down in history as one of the great battles of the Ancient World.
After the forced Persian withdrawal, Athens decided to take advantage of the opportunity and the defeat of its enemies to expand its power around the Aegean Sea, with different luck. However, the Persians were far from defeated and began to prepare a new attack on the Greek territories. Seeing the Persian threat resurface, Athens and Sparta signed a pact of mutual support against the Persians in 481 BC. C. which took just a year to be required.
The Second Persian War (480-479 BC)
In the year 480 a. C., the Persian king Xerxesson of Darius I, the monarch defeated at Marathon, decided to finish the work started by his father and ordered the invasion of greece. Herodotus describes in his works the magnificent and numerous Persian army that goes to Greece through Thrace and Macedonia. 31 Greek cities unite to face the invader on the famous pass of Thermopylae. In command was the king Leonidas of Sparta and his 300 warriors, at the same time that an allied fleet was attacking the Persians through the passage of Artemisio. The Greeks heroically held off the Persians for two days, and the Achaemenid army suffered heavy losses. However, according to Herodotus, an ambitious Greek named Ephialtes told the Persians that there was a secret path that allowed them to cross the pass. Knowing this, Leonidas and his warriors tried to prevent his advance, but, attacked from both sides of the pass, they ended up being exterminated, selling their skin dearly and achieving great fame that lasts to this day.
Although the fleet held, after the thermopylae, the Persians devastated Attica, coming to take the city of Athens itself. The fleet withdrew to Salamis and the Greeks concentrated their forces in the area of the Isthmus of Corinth, with the aim of halting their advance and preparing for a new assault. This occurred precisely in salamis, where the most famous naval battle of Antiquity took place. The Greeks, knowing the terrain well, were victorious and Xerxes withdrew with what he could salvage, leaving only a few elite troops in the Attica territory under his command. Isolated and unaided, however, these troops soon succumbed to the Greek confederation in the Battle of Plataea and the Greek fleet recovered the territories invaded by the Persians during the previous months.
Later years and the Third Medical War
The Second Medical War ended in 479 BC. C. and later a process was opened in which Athens and her allies tried to recover the colonies that were under Persian domination. However, dissension within Greece soon set in and many polis, including Sparta, watched with suspicion as Athens’ power grew.
Before the attack of the call delian league to their conquered territories in Asia Minor, the Persians, this time commanded by Artaxerxes I, sought its weakening. On this occasion, the objectives of the Persians were much more limited and the clashes between the Delian League and the troops of Artaxerxes were also limited, so some experts do not consider that this period should be considered as part of the Persian wars, where other factors are included.
before the growing problems with Sparta and other Greek poleis and the impasse that had been reached, where neither the Delian League nor the Persians achieved important advances, the so-called Peace of Callias in 449 BC. c. The peace of Callias stipulated, among other things, that the Greeks would not attempt to expand into Greece again, while the Delian League also renounced any attack against the Achaemenid Empire, including the recovery of the territories considered to be Greek that were still under his command in Asia Minor. With this peace, a definitive end was given to the Persian Wars, although the Peloponnesian War It wouldn’t take long to explode.
Video about the Persian Wars
If you want to know more about the Medical Wars, we recommend that you watch the following video:
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