tle fought outside the city of Edessa, the ailing Emperor was captured alive, together with 70,000 Roman legionaries. The triumph of Shapur was complete. Never before had a Roman Emperor fallen into the hands of an oriental power" (Payne, p. 1). Shapur commemorated the moment with a series of carvings depicting the Roman Emperor kneeling before him. Although the Sasanian empire would last for four more prosperous centuries, that moment defined the grandeur of the empire and remains arguably the high-water mark of the empire. Although Shapur's son would extend the empire greatly and usher in a golden era of prosperity, the triumph over Rome engendered by Shapur I served to bolster the empire's standing and legitimacy in what was then the most powerful region of the world.
Unlike their Parthian predecessors, the early Sasanian emperors established Persian princes as rulers of the small kingdoms they conquered. This gave the emperor a greater level of control over outlying principalities than would otherwi
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