The history of the Kingdom of Pontus is told through the names of two cities. The first is Amaseia, set in the deep valley cut by the Yeşilırmak at the foot of a great rock; the second is Sinope, on the neck of a narrow peninsula reaching out into the Black Sea. The dynasty set out from a rocky fortress-town in the inland highlands and, some two centuries later, was waging its war against Rome from a harbour city. The passage between the two does not appear in the ancient sources as a single "decision to move"; it reads instead as a conquest followed by a slow shift of weight. The life of Pharnakes I and the royal rock tombs are the subjects of other articles; what follows deals only with how, and for what reasons, the burden of being the capital passed from Amaseia to Sinope.

Amaseia: The Centre Inside the Rock

The founder of the dynasty, Mithridates Ktistes, fled from Antigonos and made his way first to Kimiata in Paphlagonia and then to the area around Amaseia in northern Cappadocia. Strabo describes Kimiata as a strong fortress at the foot of Mount Olgassys and writes that Ktistes set out from it when he proclaimed himself master of Pontus, and that his descendants held power down to Eupator. The kingdom was proclaimed around 281 BC; Ktistes' son Ariobarzanes took Amastris, the first important port on the Black Sea coast, in 279 BC. Even so, the political and ceremonial centre of the dynasty remained in the interior for a long time. Modern summaries describe Amaseia as the early capital of Pontus, an inland city that held the royal palace and the royal tombs.

Strabo, writing of his own native city, describes Amaseia as a remarkable natural fortress. The city lies in a wide, deep valley through which the Iris (the Yeşilırmak) flows, and it rises on a rock that drops sheer to the river. On one side of the rock a wall encloses the settlement along the riverbank; on the other, walls climb up to the summits. The two peaks, joined to each other by nature, are crowned with magnificent towers, and Strabo takes care to note that the palaces and monuments of the kings lay inside this circuit. The neck joining the two summits is narrow; on either side the slope is five or six stadia high as one climbs from the riverbank and the suburb, and from the neck to the peaks there remains a further ascent of one stadium, so steep that no force could master it. Two tube-like channels were cut into the rock, one towards the river and one towards the neck, so that the city could not be deprived of water even under siege. Two bridges cross the river: one from the city to the suburb, the other from the suburb to the territory beyond.

This description explains why Amaseia remained the dynasty's secure centre for so long. What a highland kingdom needed first, before it needed access to the trade routes, was a strong refuge between plain and mountain. According to Strabo the valley opens onto the plain called Chiliocomum, then onto the districts of Diacopene and Pimolisene, and joins fertile land stretching as far as the Halys. The Amaseians' country runs from north to south as far as Zelitis and Greater Cappadocia, and in Ximene there are deposits of rock salt from which the river is thought to have taken its name. The Pontic interior also held other royal residences; Strabo mentions Gaziura as "an ancient royal residence, now deserted." Amaseia was the strongest of them and the one used for longest. The position of the royal tombs in the rock face, and the question of whom they belong to, is a separate debate.

The Obstacle on the Coast: Independent Sinope

Pontus's wish to reach the Black Sea was as old as the kingdom itself. The coastal strip was in the hands of Greek cities, and the most important of them was Sinope. Founded by settlers from Miletus, the city goes back to the seventh century BC, perhaps the eighth; it minted its own coinage, founded colonies of its own, and gave its name to sinopia, the red earth pigment mined in Cappadocia and used throughout the ancient world. Strabo, who calls it the most noteworthy city of that region, writes that Sinope built a naval station, ruled the sea inside the Cyanean Rocks, and took part in many Greek struggles beyond them. The city sat on the neck of a peninsula with harbours and anchorages on both sides of the isthmus, which made it easy to defend and well suited to trade. Its shores were rocky and pitted with hollows, which made approach from the sea difficult; the locals called these rock cavities, filled with water when the sea rose, "choenicides." The ground above the city was fertile and dotted with gardens, and the city itself was equipped with walls, a gymnasium, an agora and colonnades. Strabo counts Diogenes the Cynic among the distinguished men Sinope produced.

The city had also formed ties with the interior early on. Until the fourth century BC Sinope remained relatively isolated from the inland communities, but afterwards economic exchange between the coast and the interior grew. The ambition of the Pontic kings towards Sinope appears very early. According to Polybius, the king of Pontus besieged the city around 220 BC; the Sinopeans repelled the attack with help from Rhodes. Some accounts name this king as Mithridates II. Sinope thus withstood the first move from the highlands, and as a city able to turn to naval powers such as Rhodes it kept its autonomy a while longer. The failure of the siege showed that a land army from the highlands would not be enough to take the coast; the city could be taken only at a favourable political moment and by a sudden stroke.

The Conquest of About 183 BC

In the first half of the second century BC the situation changed. Pharnakes I joined King Prusias I of Bithynia in the war against Eumenes II of Pergamon; peace was made in 183 BC. The date at which Pharnakes took Sinope is not certain in the sources: some accounts say the city fell before 183 BC, others give 182. The principal witness is Strabo. He writes that Sinope was captured twice; the first time Pharnakes attacked it suddenly and unexpectedly, the second time Lucullus besieged it from within and without. In the same passage he says that the city was enslaved first by Pharnakes and then by his successors, down to Eupator and the Romans who overthrew Eupator. The phrase also conveys how heavily Pontic rule weighed on the coastal city.

When the Rhodians learned of the conquest they sent an embassy to Rome to complain, but the Senate did nothing about it. Polybius records both the embassy and Rome's silence. Pharnakes did not content himself with Sinope in those years. He also took Kotyora, Pharnakeia (named after himself) and, in the east, Trapezus, and so gained control of most of the northern coast of Anatolia. The war that began in 181 BC against Eumenes and King Ariarathes IV of Cappadocia ended around 179 BC, when Pharnakes gave back his gains in Galatia and Paphlagonia, Tium included. Only Sinope remained in his hands. This is what matters most for the question of the capital: while the other coastal gains were returned, Sinope stayed with the kingdom and could grow into a permanent maritime centre.

The Shifting of the Capital

There is no single sentence in the ancient sources saying that "the capital was moved from Amaseia to Sinope," and no formal decision. What we have is the picture that emerged afterwards. Strabo writes that Mithridates Eupator was born and raised at Sinope, that he paid the city special honour and treated it as the metropolis of his kingdom. Modern accounts of the Kingdom of Pontus likewise state that Sinope became the Pontic capital after its capture; Amaseia and Sinope are named together as the kingdom's capital. The interval between Pharnakes' conquest and Eupator's treating the city as his principal seat suggests that the transition took place not in a single year but over several generations.

In the same vein, Mithridates V Euergetes is reported to have been assassinated at Sinope around 121-120 BC. The details of the event are unclear, but the king's presence in the coastal city at that moment points to the dynasty conducting its daily business there by then. None of this means that Amaseia was abandoned. In Strabo's description Amaseia is a city that holds the palaces and monuments of the kings within its walls. Steep fortresses such as Kainon Chorion, where Mithridates kept his most valuable treasures, show that the kings maintained their presence in the interior. The interior continued to serve as the dynasty's treasury and refuge.

Why the Sea?

The sources do not give the reasons for the move in a declaration, but they can be read from the ancient accounts. The first was trade. Strabo writes that the Sinopeans took the second catch of pelamydes, and that the city had harbours and anchorages on both sides; a city on the sea route between the northern and southern shores meant an income and a web of connections that an inland fortress-town could never provide. The coastal part of Pontus was rich in timber, fish and olives; iron and silver were mined near Pharnakeia, and steel from the Chalybian mountains was famous in Greece. A capital on the coast stood much closer to the flow of this wealth than a palace in the interior.

The second was the fleet: Sinope had earlier built a naval station and ruled the sea inside the Cyanean Rocks. For a king this meant a ready shipyard and naval strength. The third was the relationship with the Greek world. A gift made by Pharnakes to Athens, together with the gold crown and bronze statues that the Athenians on Delos set up for him and his wife Nysa, show the dynasty turning towards the Aegean in this period. The Delos inscription dates to 160 or 159 BC, and the exact nature of the gift is unknown. Hellenization continued under later kings: Mithridates V recruited Greek mercenaries on a large scale in the Aegean, was honoured at Delos, and had himself shown as Apollo on his coins. A coastal capital was far better placed than the highlands to build and maintain such ties.

In terms of defence, too, Sinope offered the dynasty no unfamiliar setting. The city stood on the neck of a peninsula, ringed by rocks and enclosed by walls; Strabo calls those walls "beautiful." According to some accounts the fortress and walls were repaired and brought to their present extent under Mithridates IV, after the Cimmerian destruction of the seventh century; this is disputed and the dating is not certain. After the rock fortress of Amaseia the dynasty was again within a natural defence; the difference was that the sea now lay in front of it. But the coastal city was not as safe as the inner fortress. Strabo relates that during Lucullus' siege Bacchides, the garrison commander appointed by the king, suspected treason within and committed constant outrages and murders, which left the people with no heart either to defend the city or to come to terms.

A Two-Centred Order

The Kingdom of Pontus did not work like a state squeezed into a single capital. In the Pontus that Strabo travelled there are many royal seats or fortress-palaces: Amaseia, Sinope, Amisos, Kabeira, Gaziura. Near Kabeira, in the village of Ameria, stood the temple of Mên associated with Pharnakes, and the kings so revered it that they swore their official oaths "by the Fortune of the King and by the Mên of Pharnakes." The detail suggests that Pharnakes also took an interest in the religious structure of the interior, and that the new maritime centre was not cut off from it. Strabo also writes that Arsakes, one of Pharnakes' sons, was captured at the fortress of Sagylion, around the time of Pompey, because he ran short of food; the fortress's water reservoir had been put out of use on Pompey's orders. The account shows that the fortresses of the interior were still being used in dynastic struggles in later years.

The change of capital was therefore less one city replacing another than a shift in the centre of gravity. Sinope was the centre of the dynasty's daily politics, of its relations with the sea and of its commercial power; Amaseia kept its importance as a fortress, as the centre where the royal palaces and monuments stood, and as the lock on the interior. Sinope's weight reached its peak after Eupator came to the throne in 120 BC. Eupator treated the city where he was born and raised as the metropolis of his kingdom and conducted most of his struggle against Rome from this seaside centre.

On the Burial Tradition

According to a widespread account, the first five kings were buried in the rock tombs of Amaseia, and the kings after Pharnakes began to be buried at Sinope. The whole of this account has not been confirmed from ancient sources. Strabo says only that the palaces and monuments of the kings lay within the walls of Amaseia. Modern summaries write that Eupator was born and buried at Sinope. It thus appears that the burial place of the dynasty's last great ruler was the seaside city, while the monuments of the older kings remained at Amaseia. Whom the rock tombs belong to is a separate matter and is not taken up here.

Afterwards

Lucullus entered Sinope in 70 BC. Strabo writes that he left the city's ornaments untouched and took away only the globe of Billarus and the statue of Autolycus by Sthenis, whom the citizens regarded as their founder and honoured as a god; the city also had an oracle of Autolycus. After Eupator's defeat, under Pompey's settlement, the western half of Pontus and the Greek cities of the coast, Sinope among them, were annexed to the province of Bithynia et Pontus, while the interior and the eastern coast remained for some time longer as a dependent kingdom. Caesar founded a Roman colony at Sinope in 47 BC, Colonia Iulia Felix; Strabo too says that the city housed Roman settlers and that part of its land belonged to them. Amaseia, in Strabo's words, was still a very well preserved city. He names it as his own homeland and records in the same place the ruined strongholds and emptied lands that the Mithridatic wars left in the interior; in his account Amaseia had first been given to kings and was now a province.

The passage of the capital from Amaseia to Sinope is thus the most visible sign of Pontus becoming a state that expanded from the inland highlands towards the Black Sea coast. The event that started the process was Pharnakes' conquest of Sinope around 183 BC; what followed was the product not of a single decision but of a balance that unfolded over several generations.

Chronology

c. 281 BC: Mithridates Ktistes proclaims his kingdom; its centre lies around Amaseia.

279 BC: Ariobarzanes takes Amastris, the first important port on the coast.

220 BC: The king of Pontus besieges Sinope but cannot take it.

183 BC (182 in some accounts): Pharnakes I takes Sinope; Rhodes complains to Rome without result.

181-179 BC: War with Eumenes and Ariarathes; in return for peace Pharnakes gives up his gains in Galatia and Paphlagonia but keeps Sinope.

160 or 159 BC: The Athenians on Delos honour Pharnakes and Nysa with a gold crown and statues.

121-120 BC: Mithridates V is assassinated at Sinope.

120-63 BC: The reign of Mithridates VI Eupator; Sinope is regarded as the principal city of the kingdom.

70 BC: Lucullus takes Sinope.

47 BC: Caesar founds a Roman colony at Sinope.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Strabo, Geography (Geographika), Book XII, chapter 3 (Sinope, Amaseia, the inland districts of Pontus).

Other sources

Online sources