In 540 Khosrow I broke what Procopius calls the 'endless peace', invaded Roman Syria and took Antioch, the capital of the diocese of the East, after the Roman garrison fled. Procopius (Wars II.8–10) describes Persian troops killing indiscriminately in the streets, Khosrow ordering the survivors captured and enslaved, the treasures of the churches removed and the whole city burned except the main church, which Roman envoys begged him to spare. Khosrow then built a new city a day's journey from Ctesiphon, known in Middle Persian as Weh Antiok Khosrow ('Khosrow's better Antioch') and later as Rumagan or al-Rumiya, settled the Antiochene captives there with a bath and hippodrome, provisioned them at royal expense and placed them directly under the king (Wars II.14). Geoffrey Greatrex, reviewing Henning Börm's study of Procopius, notes that eastern sources confirm Procopius' account of the deportation. The episode continues the Sasanian practice of productive resettlement of Roman captives; the third- and fourth-century deportations under Shapur I and Shapur II are covered separately in 'Sasanian Deportation of Roman Populations to Iran', and this entry counts only the deportations of Khosrow I's 540 campaign and the later arrivals at the same city.
The Sasanian king Khosrow I stormed and burned Antioch during his invasion of Roman Syria and carried its surviving inhabitants, with captives from other Syrian and Osrhoene towns, to a new city he built near Ctesiphon
No figure exists. Procopius says the Persians spared no one they met, old or young, and that many were killed at the gates as the population fled, but he gives no count and wrote as a hostile witness; no other source quantifies the dead. The deportation itself was designed to preserve the captives as subjects and labour, and no source reports deaths on the march to Mesopotamia.
Procopius (Wars II.8–10) describes the indiscriminate killing of Antioch's inhabitants and Khosrow's order to burn the whole city except its main church; he is a hostile and the only detailed source.
Turkey, Iraq