Ionia (satrapy)

Ionia, known in Old Persian as Yauna, was a region within the satrapy of Sardis within the First Persian Empire. The first mention of the Yauna is at the Behistun inscription. The Ionians were conquered by Cyrus the Great and according to Herodotus, they were placed in the same tax district (the first) as the Pamphylians, Lycians, Magnesians, Aeolians, Milyans, and Carians. It is unclear to what extent the Yauna were advantaged or disadvantaged by Persian rule, and what caused the Ionian Revolt which broke out in c.499 BC and lasted until 494 BC. The main source, Herodotus, puts it down to the personal ambitions of two men of Miletus, Histiaeus and Aristagoras; modern scholars debate what the underlying reasons may have been; arguments for economic and political causes are variously put forward, but there are no clear sources which can give a definitive answer.

After the revolt was put down, the Ionian cities were subdued by some pragmatic and enlightened measures by the Persian satrap of Sardis, Artaphrenes. The Ionians are reported to have served with the Persian forces which were defeated at Marathon by the Athenians and Plataeans in 490, while they also fought on the Persian side during Xerxes' great invasion of 480-479. It was only after the Persians were defeated at Plataea in 479 that the Ionian cities had the confidence to revolt again, defeating the Persian forces at Cape Mycale in the same year. Soon afterwards, they signed up to a common defence league led by Athens, known today as the Delian League. However, these cities soon came under the domination of Athens. After the Peloponnesian War and the destruction of Athenian power, Sparta ceded them back to Persia in the peace of Antalcidas. Ionia remained under Persian rule until the campaigns of Alexander the Great.

Ionia

Ionia (Ancient Greek: Ἰωνία or Ἰωνίη; Turkish: İyonya) is an ancient region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey, the region nearest İzmir, which was historically Smyrna. It consisted of the northernmost territories of the Ionian League of Greek settlements. Never a unified state, it was named after the Ionian tribe who, in the Archaic Period (600–480 BC), settled mainly the shores and islands of the Aegean Sea. Ionian states were identified by tradition and by their use of Eastern Greek.

Ionia proper comprised a narrow coastal strip from Phocaea in the north near the mouth of the river Hermus (now the Gediz), to Miletus in the south near the mouth of the river Maeander, and included the islands of Chios and Samos. It was bounded by Aeolia to the north, Lydia to the east and Caria to the south. The cities within the region figured large in the strife between the Persian Empire and the Greeks.

According to Greek tradition, the cities of Ionia were founded by colonists from the other side of the Aegean. Their settlement was connected with the legendary history of the Ionic people in Attica, which asserts that the colonists were led by Neleus and Androclus, sons of Codrus, the last king of Athens. In accordance with this view the "Ionic migration", as it was called by later chronologers, was dated by them one hundred and forty years after the Trojan War, or sixty years after the return of the Heracleidae into the Peloponnese.