page_title: Military of the Sasanian Empire
section_title: Foreign and mercenary soldiers
hierarchical_section_title: Military of the Sasanian Empire / Foreign and mercenary soldiers
caption_attribution_description: English: Rare golden coin of Khosrau II.
context_page_description: The Sasanian army was the primary military body of the Sasanian armed forces, serving alongside the Sasanian navy. The birth of the army dates back to the rise of Ardashir I, the founder of the Sasanian Empire, to the throne. Ardashir aimed at the revival of the Persian Empire, and to further this aim, he reformed the military by forming a standing army which was under his personal command and whose officers were separate from satraps, local princes and nobility. He restored the Achaemenid military organizations, retained the Parthian cavalry model, and employed new types of armour and siege warfare techniques. This was the beginning for a military system which served him and his successors for over 400 years, during which the Sasanian Empire was, along with the Roman Empire and later the East Roman Empire, one of the two superpowers of Late Antiquity in Western Eurasia. The Sasanian army protected Eranshahr from the East against the incursions of central Asiatic nomads like the Hephthalites and Turks, while in the west it was engaged in a recurrent struggle against the Roman Empire.
context_section_description: The Sasanian army, especially during the late Sasanian period, employed foreign mercenary troops from many different regions. The most frequently used types of mercenaries were Kurdish mercenaries from the northern boundary of the Zagros, who begin to appear in 6th-century sources, tribal people from Gilan and Daylam, Caucasian Albanians (regarded as elite soldiers equal to Huns in the 4th-century), and Sakastanis.
  The Sasanians also often recruited foreign auxiliaries, such as Sabir Huns from the North Caucasus - or resettled on Sasanian territory - The Turks who had been divided in 568/9 - and the abundant Arab tribes in the south who were integrated into a "nexus of alliances managed by the Sasanians' Lakhmid client-kingdom from its capital at al-Hira" (James-Howard Johnston).
caption: Coin of emperor Khosrow II, founder of the notorious Gond-i Shahanshah.
exif: {}