The Turks take Bosporus

In the second year of Tiberius as Caesar (575/576), the imperial swordbearer Valentinus, who had twice been sent to the Turks before, set out on a new embassy with 106 Turks who had come to Constantinople on earlier missions. He sailed past Sinope and Cherson, crossed the Crimea and the marshy, reed-grown plains beyond, and passed through the land of Akkagas, a woman who ruled the local nomads on behalf of Anagai, lord of the Utigurs, until he reached the camp of Turxanthus. Menander calls him one of the Turkic princes, the first a traveller from the west would meet; the Turks, he says, had divided their realm into eight parts under a senior ruler named Arsila, and Turxanthus — a Greek rendering of the title Türk Shad — was a son of the ruler whom the Byzantines called Dizabul, that is Istämi.

Valentinus announced Tiberius’s elevation, invoked the treaty made between Justin II and Dizabul when Zemarchus had come, and urged the Turks to attack Persia. Turxanthus answered with a tirade: thrusting his ten fingers into his mouth, he called the Romans people of ten tongues and one deceit, who spoke of friendship to him while making a treaty with the “Varchonites” — the Avars, his runaway slaves — and boasted that he knew where the Dnieper, the Danube and the Hebrus flowed and by what roads his slaves had entered Roman land; the Alans and the Utigurs, he added, had dared to resist the Turks and were now their subjects. His father had just died, and the envoys had to gash their cheeks with their daggers in Turkic mourning; four captive Huns were sacrificed at the funeral. Valentinus was then sent on to Turxanthus’s brother Tardu at Mount Ektel, the “Golden” mountain, while Turxanthus dispatched Bochan with a large army to take Bosporus, where Anagai was already waiting with another Turkic force.

Bosporus, ancient Panticapaeum, under direct Byzantine rule since the reign of Justinian, fell while the envoys were still among the Turks; Menander saw in this the proof that the Turks were now at war with the Romans. Valentinus and his companions were held, insulted and finally released. A few years later, during the Avar siege of Sirmium, Tiberius II claimed that Turks were encamped near Cherson — a ruse, as Menander says the Avar envoy understood (so also Pohl). Valentinus set out in 575/576, and the fall of the city is usually dated to 576; Pohl places the embassy and the capture in 576–577, hence the interval.