ZEMARCHUS (fl. 568), Byzantine general and traveller. The Turks, by their conquest of Sogdiana in the middle of the 6th century, gained control of the silk trade which then passed through Central Asia into Persia. But the Persian king, Chosroes Nushirvan refused to allow the old commerce to continue, and the Turks in 568 sent an embassy to Constantinople to form an alliance with the Byzantines and "transfer the sale of silk to them." The offer was accepted by Justin II., and in Aug. 568, Zemarchus the Cilician, "General of the cities of the East," left Byzantium for Sogdiana. The embassy was under the guidance of Maniakh, "chief of the people of Sogdiana," who had himself come to Byzantium to negotiate the "Roman alliance." On reaching the Sogdian territories the travellers were offered iron for sale, and solemnly exorcised; Zemarchus was made to "pass through the fire" (i.e., between two fires), and strange cere monies were performed over the baggage of the expedition. The envoys then proceeded to the camp of Dizabul (or rather of Dizabul's successor, he having just died) "in a hollow encom passed by the Golden Mountain," apparently in some locality of the Altai. They found the khan surrounded by astonishing bar baric 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 Turkistan in the Syr Darya valley.
Near the river Oekh (Syr Darya?) he was sent back to Con stantinople with a Turkish embassy and with envoys from various tribes subject to the Turks. Halting by the "vast, wide lagoon"
(of the Aral sea?), 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 12 days by the sandy shores of "the lagoon"; crossed the Emba, Ural, Volga and Kuban (where 4,00o Persians vainly lay in ambush to stop him) ; and passing round the western end of the Caucasus, arrived safely at Trebizond and Constanti nople. For several years this Turkish alliance subsisted, while close intercourse was maintained between Central Asia and Byzantium; but from 579 the friendship rapidly began to cool. All this travel does not seem to have corrected the misappre hension that the Caspian was a gulf of the Arctic ocean.
See Menander Protector, Hept. IlpeaNcov th.,,uaiwv irpds 'EOvn (De Legationibus Romanorum ad Gentes), pp. 295-302, 380-385, Bonn edition (xix.), 1828 (=pp. 806-81I, 883-887, 899-907, in Migne, Patrolog. Graec., vol. cxiii., Paris, 1864) ; H. Yule, Cathay, clx.-clxvi. (Hakluyt Society, i866) ; L. Cahun, Introduction a l'histoire de PAsie, pp. 108-118 (1896) ; C. R. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, i.
186-189 (1897). (C. R. B.)