The world in AD 450

Africa

Alexandria’s bishop spent the autumn of 451 refusing to answer a church council. Dioscorus had held the see since 444, by Jona Lendering’s Livius chronology, and at the council that met at Chalcedon in Bithynia two Alexandrian deacons, a former priest of the diocese and an Alexandrian layman all brought petitions against him; one complainant, Ischyrion, said Dioscorus had misspent money a charitable woman left for strangers and the poor in Egypt and had shut Ischyrion himself in a hospital for lepers. The council’s letter to the bishop, in H. R. Percival’s translation on Fordham’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook, told him that “on the thirteenth day of the month of October you were deposed from the episcopate,” and gave as one ground that he had not come when called three times.

• Which African kingdom minted gold coins and raised 23-meter stelae?AD 350

West Asia

Yazdegerd II (r. 439-457) issued a decree in 449, in Robert H. Hewsen’s account for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, ordering the Armenians, most of whose country had been an Iranian vassal since the partition of 387, to give up Christianity for Zoroastrianism. Touraj Daryaee, in the same encyclopedia, credits the edict to the grand vizier Mehr-Narseh and sets it beside measures of 445-446 that expelled Christians from the Sasanian army. The Armenians refused, and on June 2, 451, on the plain of Avarayr southeast of the modern Iranian town of Maku, a Persian army defeated the nobles led by Vardan Mamikonean. Hewsen gives the armies as 60,000 Armenians and 200,000 Persians only “according to the story” told by Ełišē, an account he calls probably somewhat fictionalized, and he judges the battle not decisive, since the king, pressed elsewhere, let the Armenians worship as they chose for the time being.

Europe

Lendering’s Livius entries record that Theodosius II fell from his horse and died, and that his sister Pulcheria then married Marcian, born in 392, who ruled the East until January 27, 457. In the West, Valentinian III held his seventh consulship in 450. His mother Galla Placidia, who had been the real power at the western court after 425, died on November 27, 450; the mausoleum in Ravenna that carries her name, Lendering notes, is not where she was buried. The next year the Huns crossed the Rhine into Gaul and sacked Metz, and the general Aetius defeated them near Troyes.

• Fragment 8 of Priscus: wooden cups at Attila's court, 448 or 449AD 449
• Procopius's Buildings, Hagia Sophia and the dome that fell in 558AD 537

East Asia

South of the Yangtze the Liu-Song emperor Wen ruled from Jiankang, modern Nanjing, in the Yuanjia reign period (424-453), years that historians, as Ulrich Theobald writes on Chinaknowledge.de, call peaceful and booming despite the court’s quarrels over the succession. In 450 the Northern Wei conquered the Huai River region and threatened Jiankang itself. On the Korean peninsula that same year, according to the National Institute of Korean History’s New History of Korea, the lord of Silla’s Haseulla fortress killed a Goguryeo border commander who was hunting on the Siljik plain; King Jangsu of Goguryeo sent troops against Silla’s western border, and Silla apologized in humble terms. The institute’s history reads the apology as a stopgap, and when Goguryeo attacked Baekje in 455, Silla sent soldiers to help Baekje.

South Asia

An archer-king, Kumaragupta of the Gupta dynasty, appears on a gold coin 1.9 centimeters across that the Metropolitan Museum of Art dates to between 415 and 455. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds a silver plate 18.7 centimeters across, made in the 400s in northwestern India, possibly at Tanesara Mahadeva, from silver alloyed with tin and lead and with traces of gilding. The museum calls it a rare Gupta-period example and reads its crowded, two-tiered ring of figures as the celebration of a spring festival.

• Thirty copies of Ajanta and the Crystal Palace fire of 1866AD 470
• Sihagiri in the Culavamsa: Kassapa I's rock palace at SigiriyaAD 477

Central Asia

Khorasan was Persia’s eastern front. Daryaee writes that Yazdegerd II made Nishapur his headquarters and appears to have spent several years, as late as 453, at war with the Hephthalites, and a Middle Persian geography, the Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr, says he fortified Qumes, the later Damghan, as a border post against a Hunnic tribe called the Čōl. His coins introduced a new legend, “The Mazda-worshipping majesty, the Kayanid,” and the mints of Gorgan and Merv were the busiest in the east. Farther on, Frantz Grenet notes that Sogdian embassies to China stopped between 441 and 457, a gap he connects, as a hypothesis, with a capture of Samarkand by a possibly Kidarite dynasty; in 457 the ruler of Samarkand negotiated the release of Sogdian merchants who had been taken prisoner in China in 439.

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The Americas

At Copán, in western Honduras, the founder K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ and his son had held ceremonies in 435 to close the eighth bak’tun, a major cycle of the Maya calendar, events recorded on a carved stone called the Motmot Marker and on the later Stela 63. Robert Sharer, who directed the Penn Museum’s Early Copan Acropolis Program, wrote in 2012 that a second tomb beside the founder’s, with a text dated 437, probably holds the founder’s queen, the mother of Copán’s second king. At Tikal the 16th king, Siyaj Chan K’awiil II, dedicated Stela 31 to the same bak’tun ending, with his portrait on the front and the history of his royal predecessors on the back.

Oceania

Sand dunes 20 to 60 meters high run east from the mouth of the Sigatoka River on the southwest coast of Viti Levu, Fiji, and since 1944 they have yielded potsherds, earth ovens and graves under stone cairns. A 2024 study in PLOS One led by Estelle Herrscher obtained 10 radiocarbon dates on human bone from Burial Ground 1, excavated by Simon Best in 1987 and 1988, which place the cemetery in a span of about 600 years in the middle of the first millennium AD, and found from bone and tooth chemistry that its people leaned toward marine food, with differences between women and men. Potters in Tonga had given up their craft long before; David Burley and two colleagues put the end of Tonga’s Polynesian Plainware no later than 2,350 calibrated years before the present.

Sources

• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Theodosius II"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Marcian"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Galla Placidia"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Valentinian III"
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: "Council of Chalcedon, 451" (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 14, edited by H. R. Percival)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Robert H. Hewsen: "Avarayr" (1987, updated 2016)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Touraj Daryaee: "Yazdegerd II" (2000, updated 2013)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Frantz Grenet: "Kidarites" (2022)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Liu-Song Dynasty 劉宋 (420-479)" (2011)
• National Institute of Korean History (국사편찬위원회), 우리역사넷, 신편 한국사 7: "고구려의 남하와 나제동맹의 성립"
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, open access collection data: "Gold Coin Showing King Kumaragupta as an Archer" (1990.319.1)
• Cleveland Museum of Art, open access collection: "Plate with a Scene of Revelry" (1972.71)
• Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine 54(1), Robert Sharer: "Time of Kings and Queens" (2012)
• PLOS One 19(5) via PubMed Central, Herrscher, Valentin, Zinger, Pradier and others: "Life histories in Fiji as reconstructed from first millennium CE Sigatoka Sand Dune burials using isotopes" (2024)
• PLOS One 13(2) via PubMed Central, Burley, Connaughton and Clark: "Early cessation of ceramic production for ancestral Polynesian society in Tonga" (2018)