The Turks and Sasanians destroy the Hephthalite Empire (Battle of Gol-Zarriun)

In the mid-6th century the Hephthalites, who had replaced the Kidarites in Bactria and killed the Sasanian king Peroz in 484, still ruled Tokharistan and Sogdiana. Khosrow I, after coming to terms with Byzantium in the west, turned east to avenge his grandfather, while the Turks, having destroyed the Rouran — once the Hephthalites’ overlords — pushed west under Istämi, whom Byzantine writers call Sizabul and Arabic ones Sinjibu. The two powers allied and attacked the Hephthalites from two sides, the Turks from the north, the Persians from the south.

The decisive defeat is placed either near Bukhara — the battle of Gol-Zarriun, which A. D. H. Bivar calls an epic battle — or near Nakhshab (Qarshi), where Lev Gumilev and others describe an eight-day battle. Firdausi’s Shahnameh names the defeated Hephthalite king Ghatfar, al-Tabari calls him Waraz. The date is disputed: 557 in Michael Maas and in the Encyclopaedia Iranica article on Khosrow II, 558–561 in Bivar’s Iranica article on the Hephthalites, 557–561 in Denis Sinor, 560–563 in Boris Litvinsky, 563 in Michael Decker; Gumilev dated the war to 560–565, with the decisive battle in 565, and Édouard Chavannes put its end between 563 and 567. The interval covers the range of these datings. The Chinese histories record the last Hephthalite embassy to China in 558, and at the end of 568 Turkic envoys told Justin II in Constantinople that they had subjugated all the Hephthalites and taken their cities. The Book of Zhou credits the victory to the khagan Muqan, the Byzantine and Arabic sources to Istämi.

Ghatfar fled into Sasanian territory, and Faghanish, the ruler of Chaghaniyan, became king of the Hephthalites — chosen by their nobles according to some accounts, installed by Istämi according to others. Khosrow marched to the Turkish frontier at Gurgan and made the Turks accept that Faghanish should seek his approval, and the Oxus became the boundary between the Turkic and Sasanian spheres. Hephthalite principalities survived in Tokharistan and the Hindu Kush into the Arab period, while the Sogdian merchants of the lands north of the Oxus became Turkic subjects and soon sought new markets for their silk. The alliance of the victors did not last: within a few years the Turks were seeking an alliance with Byzantium against Persia.