How Shapur II Skinned and Raped 300 Christian Virgins Alive in Ctesiphon Was Sadistic Horror

#history #medievalhistory #medievalviolence
State paranoia transformed faith into treason across an empire. In 309 AD, Shapur II became Sasanian Persia's king before birth—nobles crowned his pregnant mother's belly after his father's death. Ruling until 379, he inherited an empire stretching from the Euphrates to the Indus, but faced constant Roman pressure. When Constantine championed Christianity and wrote letters urging protection for Persian Christians, Shapur saw a fifth column. After humiliating military stalemates in the 320s, he concluded Christianity was Rome's tool to undermine him. In 337, following Constantine's death, Shapur doubled taxes on Christians, demanding their leaders collect it as a loyalty test. When Bishop Simeon of Seleucia-Ctesiphon—a forty-something scholar who led secret gatherings along the Tigris—refused, declaring "We serve a higher king," the machinery of persecution activated.
The confrontation escalated systematically. Simeon was arrested, chained with fellow priests and deacons. On a Christian holy day in 341, over a hundred were publicly executed outside the capital walls, Simeon going last while speaking forgiveness. But this was just the beginning. The system spread across provinces: informers noted who skipped Zoroastrian rites, priests compiled lists rewarding betrayers with tax relief, governors competed in zeal. Women in riverside convents became targets for alleged disloyalty. Tharba, Simeon's sister in her thirties who had vowed her life to faith after losing family young, was accused with her companions of cursing the queen's illness. Dragged before Shapur's enforcers demanding they "worship sun and fire," she refused: "We bow only to the creator." Tied to stakes, they endured execution as chronicled witnesses turned away.
Early 400s Bishop Maruthas compiled survivor accounts preserving martyrs' names. Twentieth-century excavations near ancient Ctesiphon unearthed crosses in ruins, pottery with Christian symbols, and mass graves with bones bearing violence marks—confirming chronicles documenting estimates from tens of thousands to over 100,000 killed across four decades.
Ideology fused with power systematizes horror, but memory outlasts empires.
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#SasanianEmpire #ShapurII #EarlyChristianity #AncientPersia #ReligiousPersecution #ChristianMartyrs #ForgottenHistories
⚠️ Educational content documenting events through Syriac chronicles, Bishop Maruthas's accounts, and 20th-century archaeological evidence.