Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

  With these reforms well in train by the 520s,36 Kavad decided that Mazdak had outlived his usefulness. It seems a debate was organised in order to discredit his doctrines, at which not just the Zoroastrian clergy but also the Christians and Jews spoke out against Mazdak. According to the story told much later by by Ferdowsi, Kavad then turned Mazdak and his followers over to Khosraw, who had the charismatic communist’s people buried alive, planted head down in a walled orchard, with their feet only showing above the ground. Khosraw then invited Mazdak to view his garden, telling him:

  You will find trees there that no-one has ever seen and no-one ever heard of even from the mouth of the ancient sages…

  Mazdak went to the garden and opened the gate, but when he saw the kind of trees that were planted in Khosraw’s garden he gave a loud cry, and fainted. Khosraw had him hung by the feet from a gallows, and had him killed with volleys of arrows. Ferdowsi concluded:

  If you are wise, do not follow the path of Mazdak. And so the nobles became secure in their possessions, and women, and children, and their rich treasures.37

  This story may record some aspect of a contemporary memory, and we know that Ferdowsi worked from much earlier accounts of events. We cannot be sure how Mazdak died, but the revolution associated with him was an important episode. Another religious revolution—this time a failed one, or at least partially a failed one. It did not bring in a new order of shared property (let alone free love) but it did weaken the power of the great nobles and bring at least some benefits for the lower classes (though the main beneficiaries were the dehqans, and that may simply have meant that the peasants were delivered into the hands of people with the local focus to exploit them more efficiently). But if we look at it another way, it tells us some important things about the interplay of social and political interests, and the insurrection itself may appear in a different light. Mazdak and his adherents seem, at least initially, to have depended heavily on the authority of the king to get their revolution going. Even if he misjudged the forces that would be released, Kavad handled events cleverly. He was too important to the clergy and the nobles, by the time of his imprisonment, for them to simply kill him. He was the last thing standing between them and utter destruction. The revolution was an overdue reminder to them of the basis of their privileges and the importance of the monarchy in holding society together. Justice, even if not perfect (let alone egalitarian) had to be more than lip-service; and the principle of justice at least, in principle, gave everyone a legitimate expectation from the system, if not necessarily a right to be heard. The effect of the revolution, like most revolutions, was a broadening of the social bases of political power, releasing new reserves of human energy; and a reaffirmation and enhancement of the prestige and power of the monarchy, which now entered what later was regarded as its golden age.

  Khosraw Anushirvan

  After his succession in 531 Khosraw continued with his father’s reforms, and completed the destruction of the Mazdakites.38 His court became a centre for learning, attracting in particular some of the Greek neo-Platonists whose school of philosophy had been closed down in Athens by the emperor Justinian. But as Gibbon commented, these were Platonists ‘whom Plato himself would have blushed to acknowledge’:

  The disappointment of the philosophers provoked them to overlook the real virtues of the Persians; and they were scandalized, more deeply perhaps than became their profession, with the plurality of wives and concubines, the incestuous marriages, and the custom of exposing dead bodies to the dogs and vultures, instead of hiding them in the earth, or consuming them with fire. Their repentance was expressed by a precipitate return, and they loudly declared that they had rather die on the border of the empire, than enjoy the wealth and favour of the Barbarian. From this journey, however, they derived a benefit which reflects the purest lustre on the character of Chosroes [Khos-raw]. He required, that the seven sages who had visited the court of Persia, should be exempted from the penal laws which Justinian enacted against his pagan subjects; and this privilege, expressly stipulated in a treaty of peace, was guarded by the vigilance of a powerful mediator.39

  Khosraw encouraged the translation of texts from the Greek, Indian and Syriac languages, and it was apparently in his reign that the game of chess was introduced from India (and probably somewhat amended). He instigated the compilation of a history of Persia, and an astronomical almanac. He upheld the position of Zoroastrianism in the country, but himself took a more rationalist approach, based on his reading of philosophy and of writings from other religions, and through his reputation for wisdom and justice Khosraw later acquired the title Anushirvan (Khosraw of the Immortal Soul). In the west (partly through his contact with the neo-Platonists) he was known by some as the philosopher-king. The Arabs, as they recorded later, knew him as ‘The Just’. He established a magnificent court, and built the palace at Ctesiphon, the great iwan arch of which can still be seen today, along with spreading gardens and precincts that have since disappeared. The reign of Khusraw, for its intellectual achievements, for its exemplification of the Sassanid idea of kingship, was the pinnacle of Sassanid rule, and in later centuries became almost the Platonic form of what monarchy should be, even after the Sassanids themselves had long since disappeared.

  Khosraw was also successful in war, defeating the Hephtalites, and the Turks, who had been instrumental in weakening the Hephtalites at an earlier stage and were now pressing on the Empire’s northern and north-eastern borders. Khosraw also fought a series of wars with the East Romans (hereafter usually called the Byzantines) in which he was generally successful (following up the successes of his father and his father’s spahbod Azarethes in defeating the great Byzantine general Belisarius at Nisibis and Callinicum in 530 and 531). The Byzantines renewed treaties according to which the Persians, in return for large cash sums, would prevent enemies invading Asia Minor through the Caucasus. Finally, Khosraw retook the strategic town of Dara in 572 and was able again to send his troops raiding into Syria as far as Antioch. The Byzantines made further truces, buying the Persians off with large sums of gold.40

  On Khosraw’s death in 579, his son Hormuzd IV took the throne. Hormuzd seems to have done his best to maintain the balance established by his father, supporting the dehqans against the nobility and defending the rights of the lower classes; and to have resisted attempts by the clergy to reassert themselves. But he resorted to executions to do so, and was remembered accordingly by the Zoroastrians as a cruel and unjust king. In this situation one of the generals, Bahram Chubin, who had achieved successes in war in the east, marched on Ctesiphon after being criticised by Hormuzd for a less than brilliant performance in war in the west. Bahram Chubin was a descendant of the old Parthian Arsacid line, through the great family of the Mehran. With the help of other nobles, he deposed, blinded and later killed Hormuzd, putting Hormuzd’s son, Khosraw II in power (in about 589/590). But then Bahram declared himself king, restoring the Arsacid dynasty. This was too much for the majority of the political class, who held strongly to the dynastic principle and supported the right of Khosraw II to rule. After a reverse that forced him to flee to the west, Khosraw II returned with the support of the Byzantine emperor, Maurice, and ejected Bahram, who fled to the territory of the Turks (Turan) and was murdered there.

  Khosraw Parvez

  Surviving various further disputes and rebellions among the nobility with Armenian and Byzantine help, Khosraw was able to establish his supremacy again by 600, and took the title Khosraw Parvez—The Victorious. The title was to prove apposite, but Khosraw II did not have the vision or the moral greatness of his namesake, his grandfather. He may have been implicated in the murder of his father, and his life was studded with incidents of cruelty and vindictiveness, intensifying as he grew older (though his pro-Christian position and the unfortunate outcome of his reign may have prejudiced later Zoroastrian writers against him). He did everything to excess. He burdened his subjects with increasingly heavy taxation, accumulating enorm
ous wealth. Although he was remembered afterwards for the great story of his love for Shirin, he had an enormous harem of wives, concubines, dancers, musicians and other entertainers. When he went hunting he did so in a huge park stuffed with game of all kinds. At court he sat on a splendid throne, under a dome across which celestial spheres moved by a hidden mechanism, as in a planetarium.

  Fig. 6. Khosraw II, depicted hunting on a dish of gilded silver. He achieved unprecedented military successes but they proved ephemeral, exhausted the Sassanid realm and prepared the way for the Arab conquest.

  But his greatest excess was in war. In 602 Khosraw’s benefactor, the Byzantine emperor Maurice, was murdered and supplanted by a usurper, Phocas (one account says that Maurice was forced to watch the execution of his five sons before he himself was killed), and the Byzantine territories fell into disorder and civil war, made worse by divisions between Christian sects. Phocas sent an army against dissenting Christians in Antioch, which perpetrated a massacre there. At Edessa, a local Byzantine general was resisting Phocas’s forces. Khosraw used the pretext of Maurice’s murder to make war against Phocas in revenge, and relieved Edessa. He was able from there to extend his control over the other Byzantine frontier posts and then, after some preparation, to unleash his armies on the eastern Byzantine empire. The Byzantines had been concentrating their efforts on their Danube frontier against the Avars, and were relatively weak in the east. By this time (610) Phocas had been deposed by Heraclius, who was to prove one of the most capable of all Byzantine emperors (he was of Armenian descent). Heraclius tried to make peace with the Persians, but Khosraw ignored him. The able Persian generals Shahrvaraz and Shahin led the Sassanid armies through Mesopotamia, Armenia and Syria into Palestine and Asia Minor. They took Antioch in 611, Damascus in 613, and then Jerusalem in 614 (sending a shock through the whole of the Christian world). At Jerusalem the Christian defenders refused to give up the city, and it was taken by assault after three weeks, and given over to sack. According to Byzantine Christian sources, the Jews of the city and the surrounding region (who had been persecuted and excluded from the city for centuries) joined in a massacre in which sixty thousand Christians died.41 The Persians carried off the relic of the True Cross to Ctesiphon. Within another four years they had conquered Egypt, and were in control of most of Asia Minor, as far as Chalcedon, opposite Constantinople on the shores of the Bosphorus. No Shah of Persia since Cyrus had achieved such military successes.

  But then Fortune switched her allegiance. Heraclius made careful preparations and crystallised the religious dimension of the conflict into a holy war, devoting himself and his army to God. Later Christian chroniclers included his expedition with the descriptions of the Crusades. In a bold move, in 622 (the same year as the Prophet Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina) he took a small band of élite troops by water to the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea, bypassing all the Sassanid forces in Asia Minor, and from there burst into Armenia, deliberately devastating the countryside everywhere he went. Heraclius managed to keep Shahrvaraz inactive by sending him letters that suggested Khosraw intended to kill him. With the support of the Turkish Khazars from north of the Caucasus, the Byzantines marched on into Azerbaijan and destroyed one of the most sacred Persian fire temples, at what is today called Takht-e Soleiman (The Throne of Solomon).

  The Persians withdrew from Asia Minor, and suffered a crushing defeat at Nineveh in 627. Early the following year, with Heraclius threatening Ctesiphon, Khosraw was deposed and his son Kavad II became Shah. Kavad sued for peace, offering the restitution of all the previous Persian conquests, and this was agreed in 629. Khosraw was put on trial, and convicted of a lengthy series of crimes including patricide (his complicity in the murder of Hormuzd IV), cruelty towards his subjects (especially soldiers and women), ingratitude toward the Romans, ruinous avarice, and mistreatment of his own children.42 But Kavad showed himself scarcely more of a just ruler, murdering all his brothers to eliminate rivals. These killings (which repeated some of the worst cruelties of the Arsacid period) meant a shortage of candidates with obvious legitimacy in the years that followed.

  The destruction of the wars had ruined some of the richest provinces of both empires, and the taxation to pay for them had impoverished the rest. Turks were on the loose throughout the eastern provinces of Persia, the Khazars were dominant in the north-west, and the Arabs, with a new determination and cohesion derived from the message of Mohammad, were raiding and beginning to establish themselves in Mesopotamia. Civil wars broke out between rival great nobles, and floods broke the irrigation works in Mesopotamia, turning productive land into swamps. Plague appeared, killing many in the western provinces, and carrying off Kavad himself. The internal chaos and infighting brought a succession of short-lived monarchs to the throne (ten in two years), including the former general Shahrvaraz and two queens, Purandokht and Azarmedokht (Purandokht, who was a daughter of Khosrow II, attempted some sensible measures to restore order in the empire, but was removed by another general before she could make much headway). Finally Yazdegerd III (a grandson of Khosraw II) was crowned at the age of eight in 632.

  3

  ISLAM AND INVASIONS: THE ARABS, TURKS AND

  MONGOLS: THE IRANIAN RECONQUEST OF

  ISLAM, THE SUFIS, AND THE POETS

  Dusham gozar oftad be viraneh-e Tus

  Didam joghdi neshaste jaye tavus

  Goftam che khabar dari az in viraneh

  Gofta khabar inast ke afsus afsus

  Last night I passed by the ruins of Tus

  And saw that an owl had taken the place of the peacock.

  I asked, ‘What news from these ruins?’

  It answered, ‘The news is—Alas, Alas.’∗

  Attributed to Shahid Balkhi (d. 937). The owl is a symbol of death

  One of the recurring questions in the history of Iran is the problem of continuity from pre-Islamic Iran to the Islamic period, and to modern times. The great institutions of Persia as the period of Sassanid rule reached its climax were the monarchy and the Zoroastrian religion. Both of these were swept away by the Islamic conquest, and within three centuries there was little apparent remnant of them.

  But there are some indisputable facts that point the other way. The first and most important is the language. The Persian language survived, while many other languages in the lands the Arabs conquered went under, to be replaced by Arabic. Persian changed from the Middle Persian or Pahlavi of the Parthian and Sassanid periods, acquired a large number of loan-words from Arabic, and re-emerged after two obscure centuries as the elegantly simple tongue spoken by Iranians today.1 Some would say that it became a new language, much as English was transformed in the Middle Ages after the Norman conquest. Modern Persian is remarkably unchanged since the eleventh century. The poetry in particular that has come down from that time is readily understandable by modern Iranians, is studied in school and often quoted from memory. People continued to speak Persian, and Persian came to be written in Arabic script.

  There is another monument to continuity; itself a nexus of language, history, folk-memory and poetry—the Shahnameh (Book of Kings) of Ferdowsi. This is the greatest single body of poetry from the period of transition, containing passages and stories familiar to most Iranians even today. Ferdowsi reworked a traditional canon of stories of the kings and heroes of Iran that is known in fragments from other sources. He wrote deliberately to preserve, as if in a time-capsule, as much as he could of the culture of pre-Islamic Iran, for future generations of Iranians. The language of the stories itself avoids all but a very few of the Arabic loan-words that by Ferdowsi’s time had become almost indispensable in everyday usage, especially written usage. Such is the quality of the poetry that it influenced almost all subsequent Iranian poets; and the characters of the stories, Kay Kavus, Rostam, Sohrab, Siavosh, Khosraw, Shirin, are as familiar to Iranians today as in Ferdowsi’s time.

  But in discussing Ferdowsi we anticipate events, and to understand him it is necessary t
o appreciate the significance of Islam and the history of the first three centuries of Muslim rule.

  Mohammad

  The Arabs of Mohammad’s time were not just simple Bedouin. Mohammad himself was the son of a merchant (born in Mecca some time around the year 570) and later he served a rich widow as a guard and leader of her trading caravans. Eventually he married her and ran the business himself. This was a period of change, both social and economic. Towns like Medina and Mecca had become an important part of life in the Arabian peninsula, and there was tension between austere nomad values and the more sophisticated urban way of life; between the traditional polytheism of tribes and the monotheism of urban Jews (there were significant Jewish communities in the Arabian peninsula—notably at Medina but also elsewhere). As in Persia, religious ideas travelled through the peninsula and beyond with the merchants’ trade goods. Christian hermits rubbed shoulders with Jews as well as polytheistic Arabs in the Arabian towns. Arabs had served both the Sassanids and the Romans as mercenaries, and the Ghassanid and Lakhmid Arab kingdoms had served as buffer-states between the two empires in the south (as Armenia had in the north). Arabs had settled in the western part of what is now Iraq, and as far north as Syria.

  Muslims believe that Mohammad received his first revelations from the Angel Gabriel, which appear in the opening five lines of Sura 96 of the Qor’an, in the hills around Mecca around the year 610. The early revelations gave the pronouncements of a just God, who at the day of judgement would decide on the basis of men’s actions in life whether they should go to paradise or to hell. They condemned false pride, neglect of the poor, and cruelty to the weak. They emphasised the duty of prayer. Around 613 Mohammad began preaching the revelation he had received in Mecca, and his reception there reflected social divisions and tensions. His early converts were mainly among the poor, among members of weak clans and the younger sons of richer families. But his preaching threatened the proprietors of the existing order in Mecca, by creating an alternative pole of social authority, and by condemning the polytheism that among other things gave the ruling families an income from religious visitors.