Zemarchus was a Byzantine official, diplomat and traveller in the reign of Justin II.
Biography
In the middle of the 6th century, the Göktürks conquered the Sogdiana and thus gained control of the silk trade, which then passed through Central Asia into Sassanid Persia. The Persian king, Chosroes I, dreading the intrusion of Turkish influence, refused to allow the old commerce to continue. The Turks, after many rebuffs, consented to a suggestion made by their mercantile subjects of the Soghd, and in 568 sent an embassy to Constantinople to form an alliance with the Byzantines and commence the silk trade directly with them, bypassing the Persian middlemen. The offer was accepted by Justin II, and in August 569, Zemarchus the Cilician left Byzantium for Sogdiana. The embassy, whose description is preserved by Menander Protector, was under the guidance of Maniakh, "chief of the people of Sogdiana", who had first, according to Menander, suggested to Dizabul Istämi, the great khan of the Turks, this "Roman" alliance, and had himself come to Byzantium to negotiate it. On reaching the Sogdian territories the travellers were offered ironfor sale, and solemnly exorcised; Zemarchus was made to "pass through the fire", and ceremonies were performed over the baggage of the expedition, a bell being rung and a drum beaten over it, while flaming incense-leaves were carried round it, and incantations muttered in "Scythian". After these precautions the envoys proceeded to the camp of Dizabul in a "hollow encompassed by the Golden Mountain", which was apparently in some locality of the Altay Mountains or Tian Shan. They found the khan surrounded by astonishing barbaric pomp: gilded thrones, golden peacocks, gold and silver plate and silver animals, hangings and clothing of figured silk. They accompanied him some way on his march against Persia, passing through Talas or Hazrat-e Turkestan in the Syr Daria valley, where Xuanzang, on his way from China to India sixty years later, met with another of Dizabul's successors. Zemarchus was present at a banquet in Talas where the Turkish kagan and the Persian envoy exchanged abuse; but does not seem to have witnessed actual fighting. Near the river Oēkh he was sent back to Constantinople with a Turkish embassy and with envoys from various tribes subject to the Turks. Halting by the "vast, wide lagoon", Zemarchus sent off an express messenger, one George, to announce his return to the emperor. George hurried on by the shortest route, "desert and waterless", apparently the steppes north of the Black Sea, while his superior, moving more slowly, marched twelve days by the sandy shores of the lagoon. He crossed the Emba, Ural, Volga, and Kuban, and passing round the western end of the Caucasus, arrived safely at Trebizond and Constantinople. For several years this Turkish alliance subsisted, while close trade was maintained between Central Asia and Byzantium but from 579 this friendship rapidly began to cool. It is curious that all this travel between the Bosporus and Transoxiana seems not to have done anything to correct, at least in literature, the widespread misapprehension of the Caspian Sea as a gulf of the Arctic Ocean.
