User:Kansas Bear/Battle of Singara

The Battle of Singara was fought in 348 between Roman and Sassanid Persian forces. The Romans were led in person by Emperor Constantius II, while the Persian army was led by King Shapur II of Persia. The Romans were decisively defeated, suffering heavy casualties.

Battle
In 348, Shapur crossed the Tigris, and captured Singara, a strongly fortified Roman outpost situated in the middle of the Mesopotamian desert.

Shapur next erected a formidable entrenched camp near the village of Hilleh, in which to encounter Constantius, who had meanwhile rushed up in personal command of his army to relieve Singara. Shapur's camp was located on the banks of a river, and the plain between the stream and some nearby hills became the scene of battle. With a part of his army, which was reportedly as eager for battle as the Roman, Shapur met the Roman infantry in the level plain, while a reserve detachment was placed behind the hills, concealed from the Roman scouts. The veteran legions of Constantius advanced with martial discipline over the plain, and routed the Persians before the camp, including a strong body of cavalry which Shapur had held back as contingency should require: either to complete the rout of the enemy or facilitate the retreat of his own army. In the event it was capable of neither, and the Romans drove all before them to storm the camp.

At this juncture Constantius, attempted to sound the retreat, thinking his troops were exhausted, but in the chaos of the pursuit of the fleeing Persians his commands were not executed, and the Roman legionaries stormed the camp.

Unexpectedly, however, the Romans met complete success. The astonished Persians, thinking themselves secure when they had retired on their fortifications, proved incapable of defending them, and were driven in a rout from this last bulwark. In the disorder, the Romans made captive Shapur's son, the crown prince of Persia.

Shapur II, though he could not fail but be disheartened by these reverses, had yet one resource left in the portion of his army which he had held in a reserve behind the hills, which the Romans were not yet aware of. In the meantime the Romans, their military formations broken up in the disorder of the attack, fell to plundering the enormous booty which fell into their possession with the camp. Night had already fallen before the Legions could regroup, and Constantius II was forced to wait anxiously for the dawn before the extent of his victory could be ascertained.

But Shapur, taking full advantage of the unwearied state of his reserves and the chaos of the enemy, utilized the darkness of night to add the additional ascendency of surprise, and led his skilled archers to the verge of the camp, before he ordered the slaughter to begin. In the massacre which ensued of the unprepared Romans, the outcome of the battle was totally reversed. Losses were almost totally one-sided as the Romans with their campfires became sitting ducks for the skilled Persian archers, before being assaulted by refreshed enemy skirmishers. Constantius had the mortification of seeing his adversary snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and retreated in haste with what forces could be collected back to the safety of the eastern fortress cities.

Outcome and Aftermath
Immediately in the aftermath of the battle, Constantius, incapable of gratifying by any other means his mortified vengeance, retaliated his loss on the Persian crown prince, who was executed later in the Roman camp. This would not have facilitated an amicable settlement of the conflict, and the war dragged on several years later. Shapur, however, notwithstanding the extent of his victory, proved unable to turn the Roman Emperor's rout to his advantage. Two years later, he became bogged down in a third siege of Nisibis, but was again repelled with loss, and was obliged to temporarily break off the war to meet the threat of nomadic barbarian invasions in Sogdiana in the far east. The war resumed in 359 A.D. but ended with no conclusive result. In 363 it was taken up energetically by Julian, who died and suffered a decisive defeat. His successor, Jovian, was forced to cede extensive Roman territory in the disgraceful treaty of Dura, and thus Shapur's ambitions were at length accomplished.