page_title: Manisa
section_title: Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods
hierarchical_section_title: Manisa / History / Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods
caption_attribution_description: Archaeological Museum of Manisa, Turkey
context_page_description: Manisa, historically known as Magnesia, Greek: Μαγνγησια, is a large city in Turkey's Aegean Region and the administrative seat of Manisa Province.
  Modern Manisa is a booming center of industry and services, advantaged by its closeness to the international port city and the regional metropolitan center of İzmir and by its fertile hinterland rich in quantity and variety of agricultural production. In fact, İzmir's proximity also adds a particular dimension to all aspects of life's pace in Manisa in the form of a dense traffic of daily commuters between the two cities, separated as they are by a half-hour drive served by a fine six-lane highway nevertheless requiring attention at all times due to its curves and the rapid ascent across Mount Sipylus's mythic scenery.
  The historic part of Manisa spreads out from a forested valley in the immediate slopes of Sipylus mountainside, along Çaybaşı Stream which flows next to Niobe's "Weeping Rock", an ancient bridge called the "Red Bridge" as well as to several tombs-shrines in the Turkish style dating back to the Saruhan period.
context_section_description: In classical antiquity, Romans knew the city as Magnesia ad Sipylum. There, in 190 BC, forces of the Roman Republic defeated the Seleucid king Antiochus the Great in the Battle of Magnesia. Magnesia ad Sipylum became a city of importance under Roman rule, and though nearly destroyed by an earthquake in the reign of Tiberius (Roman Emperor from 14 AD to 37 AD), was restored by that emperor and flourished through the period of the Roman empire.
  In 1076 the Byzantine Empire lost the city to the Seljuks in the aftermath of the 1071 Battle of Manzikert.The subsequent Crusader victory at the Battle of Dorylaeum (1097) allowed the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I to recover Magnesia. It was an important regional centre under Byzantine rule, and during the 13th-century interlude of the Empire of Nicea of 1204 to 1261. Magnesia housed the Imperial mint, the Imperial treasury, and served as the functional capital of the Empire of Nicea until the recovery of Constantinople in 1261. Ruins of the Nicean-era fortifications attest to the city's importance in the Late Byzantine period, a fact also noted by the Byzantine historian George Akropolites, writing in the 13th century.
caption: Roman artifacts in Archaeological Museum of Manisa
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