Battle of Marj Ardabil

Battle of Marj Ardabil
Part of the Second Khazar-Arab War
Khazar warrior with captive, based on reconstruction by Norman Finkelshteyn
Date 9 December 730 CE Location Ardabil Result Khazar victory
Belligerents
Khazar Khaganate	Umayyad Caliphate
Commanders and leaders
Barjik	al-Djarrah ibn Abdullah †
Strength
?	ca. 25,000
Casualties and losses
?	very high

The Battle of Marj Ardabil or the Battle of Ardabil was a battle fought on the plains surrounding the city of Ardabil in northwestern Iran in 730 CE. An Khazar army led by Barjik, the son of the Khazar khagan, invaded the Umayyad provinces of Jibal and Adharybaydjian in retaliation for Caliphate attacks on Khazaria during the course of the decades-long Khazar-Arab War of the early 700s.

Barjik's expedition into northern Iran (and later into Kurdistan and northern Mesopotamia) may have been an attempt to establish Khazar rule south of the Caucasus Mountains.

An outnumbered force led by the Umayyad general al-Djarrah al-Hakami engaged the Khazars for three days. Ultimately, abandoned by many of their mawali auxiliaries, the Caliph's forces were overwhelmed and defeated. During the course of the battle, al-Djarrah was killed. The victorious Barjik mounted his head on top of the throne from which he commanded the battles of his Middle Eastern campaign. According to the historian Agapius, the Arabs suffered 20,000 dead and twice that number captured, a figure which probably includes the population of Ardabil and the surrounding territories.

Following their victory, the Khazars occupied Ardabil. The next year, however, Barjik led an army to Mosul and was defeated. According to Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari and other Arab historians, the Muslims were so enraged by Barjik's desecration of their commander's head that they fought with extra vigor. The Khazar army at Mosul was defeated and withdrew north of the Caucasus Mountains.

References

• Blankinship, Khalid Yahya (1994), The end of the jihâd state: the reign of Hishām ibn ʻAbd al-Malik and the collapse of the Umayyads, State University of New York Press, pp. 149–150, ISBN 978-0-791418277, http://books.google.com/books?id=Jz0Yy053WS4C 
• Kevin Alan Brook. The Jews of Khazaria. 2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2006.
• Douglas M. Dunlop. The History of the Jewish Khazars, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954.
• Peter B. Golden. Khazar Studies: An Historio-Philological Inquiry into the Origins of the Khazars. Budapest: Akademia Kiado, 1980.
• Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982.