Macrones
by Abraham Ortelius, 1624
The Macrones were an ancient Colchian tribe in the east of Pontus, about the Moschici Mountains.
The Macrones are first mentioned by Herodotus, who relates that they, along with Moschi, Tabal, Mossynoeci, and Marres, formed the nineteenth satrapy within the Achaemenid Persian Empire and fought under Xerxes I. There are many other subsequent references to them in the Classical accounts. Xenophon places them east of Trapezus. They are described as a powerful and wild people wearing garments made of hair, and as using in war wooden helmets, small shields of wicker-work, and short lances with long points. Strabo remarks, in passing, that the people formerly called Macrones bore in his day the name of Sanni, a claim supported also by Stephanus of Byzantium, though Pliny speaks of the Sanni and Macrones as two distinct peoples. By the 6th century they were known as the Tzanni. According to Procopius, the Byzantine emperor Justinian I subdued them in the 520s and converted them to Christianity. They participated in the Lazic War fighting under the Byzantine command.
The Macrones are identified by modern scholars as one of the proto-Georgian tribes whose presence in Northeastern Anatolia might have preceded the Hittite period, and who survived the demise of Urartu. They are frequently regarded as the possible ancestors of the Mingrelians and Laz people.
The Macrones lived along the border with the Machelonoi, another "Sannic" tribe evidently closely related to the Macrones.
