Fall of the Kidarites and rise of the Hephthalites

The Hephthalites, the “White Huns” of Byzantine and Indian writers, rose to power in Bactria in the mid-5th century. The Liang shu, a Chinese history, says that they were at first a small people subject to the Rouran and only later grew strong. When they came to Bactria is disputed: some historians think they arrived early in the 5th century and drove the Kidarites into Gandhara, others that they became a political force around 450 or rose against the Kidarites from 457; at the time of the Sasanian civil war of 457–459 they seem to have been vassals of the Kidarites in eastern Bactria. Peroz fought his brother Hormizd III from the eastern provinces, and later Persian sources say that he fled to the Hephthalites and won the throne with their help. Some modern historians (Shahbazi, Bonner) regard this as legendary and, like Pourshariati, prefer the contemporary Armenian historians, who credit the Mihranid family; others, such as Grenet, accept that Peroz took refuge with the Hephthalites and obtained their military help.

Peroz’s father Yazdegerd II had already fought the “Kidarite Huns”, and Peroz’s own war with them, which Priscus of Panium presents as a quarrel over tribute, broke out about 464. The Persians asked Constantinople for money for the war and were refused. Peroz then offered the young Kidarite king Kunkhas peace and his sister in marriage but sent a woman of low birth instead; when she revealed the deception, Kunkhas asked for Persian officers to lead his army and killed or mutilated the 300 nobles who came, and the war flared up again. Allied with the Hephthalites and with other Hunnic lords such as Mehama of Kadag in eastern Bactria, Peroz finally prevailed and struck gold coins with his portrait at Balkh. A Persian embassy boasted in Constantinople of a victory over the Kidarite Huns and of the fall — or, in one translation, the siege — of their city of Balaam: possibly Balkh, though another identification places it at Er-Kurgan in the Karshi oasis of Uzbekistan.

The Kidarites withdrew to Gandhara and north-western India, where a remnant kingdom sent embassies to China until 477 and small Kidarite states survived for some time; they may also have kept Sogdiana, where a dynasty that may have been Kidarite ruled Samarkand until 509. In Bactria the Hephthalites, based in the east of the country, filled the vacuum: they took Balkh from Persia, extended their rule over all of Tokharistan — a Bactrian document of 484 already mentions a tax paid to them — and turned against Peroz himself, who was twice defeated and captured and was killed in battle with them in 484. The date is uncertain: modern works place the victory over the Kidarites in 466 or 467, while Destunis’s Russian translation of Priscus (1861) puts the Persian embassy under 468, and some Russian accounts date the fall of the Kidarite capital to that year — hence the interval.