In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

by Tom Holland

  As to how precisely the Shahanshah had met his end, various accounts were given. Some said that as he crashed into the Hephthalite trench, he had torn off his own ear, and kept it clenched in his palm: for he had not wanted some savage nomad to lay claim to his famous pearl. Others said that he was left trapped in a cleft in the ground, where he died of hunger; and others yet that he had crawled away from the killing field, “only to be devoured by wild animals.”26

  Two things were certain, though. First, neither Peroz’s body nor his great pearl was ever found; second, his farr had abandoned him for good.

  Fire Starter

  Only a few weary and grime-streaked Persian survivors managed to stumble back from the killing fields of Gurgan. The news that they brought with them could hardly have had more menacing implications. The gore that had filled the Hephthalite trenches might as well have been the lifeblood of Iranshahr itself. No realm in the world could endure for long without treasure or men—and the slaughter had left the Sasanian Empire drained of both. Only a massive effort on the part of the imperial tax-collectors had enabled the expedition to ride out in the first place; now, with the flower of the empire’s cavalry destroyed, there was nothing left to blunt the scythings of the Hephthalites’ own horsemen. The frontier stood wide open. All the bulwarks that Peroz had laboured so hard to construct lay abandoned and tenantless. Whisperings of terror, thickening into ever more certain rumour, were soon darkening the eastern dominions of Iranshahr: of whole regions, where once the Kayanids had ruled, turned by the Hephthalites to shambles of blood and ash.27

  Here, in the picking to the bone of the ancient heartlands of the Aryan people, was a fearsome challenge to the practical functioning of the entire Sasanian realm. Both its prestige and its tax base were under mortal threat. But this was not the worst. The Hephthalite flames were scorching more than fields and cities. The conflagration was also consuming structures regarded by those who had raised them as sources of a truly awesome holiness. Just as fire, in the hands of the wicked, might be used to destroy, so also, in the hands of the virtuous, might it be consecrated to the service of the heavens. This was why, studded across Iranshahr, there were temples that contained no statues but rather, in each one, “an altar in the middle of an enclosure, holding a large quantity of ashes, where priests keep a fire eternally burning.”28 Desecrate such an altar, so it was believed, and the order of the cosmos itself would start to totter. In the aftermath of Peroz’s “overpowering and crushing defeat,”29 as fire temples across the northern reaches of Parthia were sent crashing into ruin by the Hephthalites, there were many in Iranshahr who saw in the annihilation of the royal army something far more troubling, and portentous, than a mere military debacle: a darkening of the universe itself.

  Yet, hope remained. The three holiest fire temples—the most luminescent and charged with power—remained inviolate. One, the “Fire of the Stallion,” was enclosed within rings of towering fortifications on the summit of a hill in Media, the mountainous region that lay to the north of Persia; the second, the “Fire of the Farr,” stood secure within Persia itself. Only the third, the Adur Burzen-Mihr—“Fire of Mihr is Great”—seemed at potential risk from the Hephthalites: for it lay close to the front line, in Parthia, on the ancient highway that led directly to the steppelands of the north.30 To the devout of Iranshahr, however, the notion that one of their three most sacred fire temples might be despoiled, its ashes scattered, its flame extinguished, appeared almost sacrilegious in itself. To imagine such a thing was to contemplate a cosmos terminally sick.

  No mortal hand had brought the three great fires into being. Rather, the Good God, Ohrmazd—the Eternal, the All-Radiant, the Supremely Wise—had lit them, “like three lights, for the watching of the world.”31 And the world had urgently needed watching. Ohrmazd, the fountainhead of all that was good and pure and right, was not the only creator god. “Truly,” ran an ancient verse, “there are two primal Spirits, twins, renowned for being in conflict. In thought and word and deed, they are two: the best and the worst.”32 While Ohrmazd had brought Asha—“Truth and Order”—to the universe, his shadow, Ahriman, snake-haired and darkness-vomiting, had spawned their opposite: Drug—“the Lie.” The cohorts of evil were everywhere. They ranged from nomads, such as the Hephthalites, to that most fiendish and wicked of all Ahriman’s creations, the frog. In the ongoing struggle against such adversaries, mortals choosing the path of righteousness and light had long cherished the assistance that Ohrmazd sent them. Back in primordial times, the great fires had swept across the face of the earth, going wherever they were needed: one had helped in the overthrow of Dahag, the serpent-shouldered necromancer; another had assisted a Kayanid king in a particularly arduous bout of idol-smashing. Stationary though the fires had since become, they had lost not a spark of their heavenly potency. They remained what they had always been: the surest guardians of the proper ordering of the world.

  Humanity too, however, had a part to play. Mortal men and women everywhere needed to commit themselves to the cause of light: to live in such a way as to render themselves branches of living flame. Fortunately, they were not without guidance from the Lord of the Universe on how best to achieve this. Many centuries earlier, a man named Zoroaster had seen a vision. Emerging from a ritual immersion in a river, into the luminous purity of a spring dawn, he found himself suddenly bathed by the infinitely purer light of Ohrmazd. Words sounded in his head: the teachings of the divine. For the first time, the Supreme Creator had revealed Himself to a mortal as He truly was: the fountainhead of all that was good. Over the succeeding years, Zoroaster witnessed many more visions. The nature of the cosmos was revealed to him, and the rituals by which he and all mortals should lead their lives. Forced into exile by the refusal of his own people to listen to his teachings, he succeeded in winning converts in a strange land. These new followers, despite all the efforts of neighbouring tribes to crush them, eventually triumphed in war; their infant religion endured and thrived. Zoroaster himself, through whom the revelations of Ohrmazd had been perfectly refracted, would be commemorated ever afterwards as the human equivalent of a sacred fire: as a divinely forged link between heaven and earth. This, in the opinion of his followers, was what it meant to be a mathran, a “possessor of the words of God”—a prophet.

  “For Zoroaster alone has heard Our commands.” So Ohrmazd Himself had pronounced. “He alone has made known Our thoughts.”33 A ringing commendation—and one that ensured that the priests who followed Zoroaster’s teachings displayed a steely and unblinking concern for propriety. As they tended the sacred fires, they adhered to the regular performance of ferociously complicated rituals, knowing that each one completed would see the order of the cosmos buttressed. Yet the priests could not hope to take the fight to Ahriman unaided. Others too had to be steeled to the cosmic fight. Even the lowest slave might have a part to play. If he only performed the five daily prayers that Zoroaster had demanded of the faithful, and kept his teeth shiny clean to boot, he too could help to purge the Lie. Understandably, then, the priests of Iranshahr sought to keep a tight leash on the beliefs and behaviour of their countrymen. As one foreign commentator observed, “Nothing is held to be lawful or right among the Persians unless it is first ratified by a priest.”34 Without such discipline, there could be no prospect of winning the great battle for the universe.

  Yet, ultimately, in the spiritual dimension as well as the earthly, one protagonist mattered more than any other: the Shahanshah himself. He alone could claim to have been touched by the divine. Asha—that supreme virtue of Ohrmazd—could not possibly be maintained without him. Nor, indeed, could the privileges and pretensions of the priesthood. Ahriman, in the malignancy of his cunning, had always been assiduous in his attempts to cultivate heresy and demon-worship. Not every corner of Iranshahr had been illumined by the light of Zoroaster’s teachings. While some of the Iranians’ ancient gods—the Lady Anahita pre-eminent among them—had come to be ranked by the Zoroastrian priesth
ood as loyal lieutenants of Ohrmazd, others, so Zoroaster himself had warned, were not gods at all, but demons. Their cults, idols and adherents all needed smashing. Only the Shahanshah, in the final reckoning, was up to the job. If the religion of Zoroaster, instituted of Ohrmazd Himself, self-evidently existed to serve as the protector of humanity, then it was the function of kingship, in the opinion of the priesthood, to serve as “the protector of religion.”35

  A role to which the House of Sasan, over the years, had only fitfully measured up. Although many kings had certainly been piously Zoroastrian, many had not. The royal understanding of what Asha should be was not necessarily that of the priesthood. Religion, in the opinion of the Persian monarchy, existed to buttress the power of the throne—not the other way round. Any notion that the Zoroastrian establishment might be permitted to obtain an identity that was independent of royal control, let alone political leverage, had long been anathema to the Sasanians. Accordingly, for all that priests were often employed by the monarchy as attack-dogs, they were never let off the leash. Any hint that they might be slipping their collars had always seen them thrust firmly back into their kennels. Petted and spoiled though they might be, they were never allowed to forget who held the whip hand.

  But now, amid the calamities and convulsions of the times, that was starting to change. As the Persian monarchy, battered by the onslaughts of the Hephthalites, scrabbled desperately to shore up its position, the Zoroastrian establishment seized its chance. The priests who had provided Peroz with his Kayanid ancestry were in a position to exact a considerable price for their collaboration. Not all their energies had been devoted to serving the royal interest. In their redrafted history of Persia, the priests had given themselves the role they had always dreamed of playing: that of partner, indeed twin, of the Shahanshah. “Born of the one womb—joined together and never to be sundered.”36 Earlier Sasanian kings would have scorned—and punished—such presumption. But Peroz did not, because he could not: his situation had grown too desperate. Rather than dismiss the pretensions of the priesthood as mere conceit, to be slapped down with disdain, he had little choice but to indulge the clergy, and then take advantage of what could be screwed out of them in return. Better a marriage of convenience than no marriage at all.

  And certainly, despite the many tensions that remained between them, the monarchy and the priesthood shared similar goals. Just as it had been the ambition of Peroz to bring the antique order of the Kayanids to his tottering realm, the priests wished to enshrine the even more transcendent order of Ohrmazd within Iranshahr. It was only with an unwearying effort, of course, that such a campaign could ever hope to be won. Laws, long disregarded or only fitfully applied, had to be given added teeth. The guardians of light and truth had to be prepared “to smite, to smash and to overthrow the idol-temples and the disobedience that comes from the Adversary and the demons.”37 Naturally, the greatest responsibility of all still lay with the Shahanshah; but the Zoroastrian priesthood too, as it increasingly began to slip royal control, had set to carve out its own, independent role. Across the empire, the power of the provincial governors was being matched, and sometimes even eclipsed, by that of the mowbeds—the chief priests. Officially, of course, these men remained answerable to the Shahanshah; but already, back in the reign of Peroz’s father, there had been the unmistakable glimmerings of an alternative chain of command. For the first time, there had been mention made of a modaban mowbed—a “chief of chief priests.” Here, putting down deeper roots with each decade that passed, was an institution that could claim to embody Asha indeed. The word that best described it, however, was not Persian at all, but Greek. What the priests were creating, in effect, was an ecclesia—a “church.”

  And it was the ambition of this Zoroastrian Church, a prodigious and a dazzling one, to institute an order that might be truly universal: reaching backwards as well as forwards through time. It was not chaos, after all, but deception that most menaced the universe—which meant in turn that it was vital, fearsomely and urgently vital, to establish the precise truth about the life and times of Zoroaster. Yet this presented a problem. The age of the great prophet was dizzyingly remote. So remote, in fact, that the long dead language in which he had made known his revelations, although lovingly preserved upon the tongues of the learned, had descended down the ages without so much as a script. This, to the fretful leaders of the Zoroastrian Church, had become a cause of mounting anxiety. Could memory truly provide a sufficient bulwark against the corrosive effects of time? If not, then the faithful, and the whole world, were surely damned. A script was duly devised.38 Zoroaster’s revelations were entrusted, for the first time ever, to a book.

  But the priests were not done with their labours yet. The process of transcribing the mathra—the word of God—had begged a couple of obvious questions: where and when had Zoroaster received it? Here were riddles not easily solved. There was barely a region in Iranshahr that had not, at some point, laid claim to the honour of having been the birthplace of the Prophet. Embarrassingly, the most ancient reports of all—dating from a time when the Persians’ ancestors had themselves been nomads, living on the steppes—placed it fair and square in what was now the realm of the Hephthalites. It is impossible to know if the leaders of the Zoroastrian Church were aware of this tradition; either way, it was literally beyond the pale. Instead, with a gathering confidence and assertiveness, the mowbeds promoted a very different biography of their prophet. Zoroaster, they taught, had actually been born in Media around a thousand years previously, in the age of the Kayanids.a In fact, it was a Kayanid king, “mighty-speared and lordly,” who had offered him asylum in the wake of his exile and had served his nascent religion as its “arm and support.”39 A veritable model of royal behaviour, in other words. Peroz, desperate for his own good reasons to identify himself with the Kayanids, had duly taken the bait. Riding to war, he had done so not merely as the heir of the dynasty as a whole, but also, and more specifically, as the heir of the Prophet’s first patron. Church and state: twins indeed. Priest and king: both, it had seemed, were winners.

  Except, unfortunately, that Peroz had ended up dead. A calamity, his subjects fretted, that had reflected more than simple bad luck. “No one was the cause of such losses and destruction save the divine lord of the Aryans himself.”40 This verdict, whispered increasingly across the entire span of Iranshahr, threatened to cripple the future of the House of Sasan. Critics condemned more than merely the royal battle tactics. Advancing towards the Gurgan Plain, the Shahanshah had passed the snow-capped Alburz Mountains: seat of a god named Mihr, whom it had always been peculiarly foolish to anger. The Zoroastrian priesthood ranked him—alongside Anahita—as one of the two foremost lieutenants of Ohrmazd: “sleepless and ever awake, the warrior of the white horse, he who maintains and looks over all this moving world.”41 And in particular, what Mihr kept watch for was oath-breakers: those who presumed to tell lies. Possessed as he was of “a thousand ears,”42 he was well equipped for the task. The god would certainly have tracked Peroz’s original expedition against the Hephthalites, when the Shahanshah, ambushed and taken captive, had been obliged to bow before the boots of the khan: for Peroz had craftily timed his obeisance to coincide with the sunrise, a moment when it was required of the faithful to offer up their prayers. Even more underhand, however, had been his scorning of the treaty forced upon him by the Hephthalites; for by its terms, he had sworn with great solemnity never again to cross the frontier. An oath which, of course, he had indisputably broken. What had the destruction of Peroz and his army been, then, if not the judgement of the wrathful heavens? “For you bring down terror upon those who lie, O Mihr. You take away the strength of their arms. You take away the swiftness of their feet.”43

  The King of Kings was either the defender of Truth, or he was nothing. The miseries that had overwhelmed Iranshahr in the wake of Peroz’s death certainly appeared to confirm the whispered notion that the House of Sasan had become agents of the Lie. Impover
ishment and brutalisation were not the only spectres to haunt the realm: renewed drought compounded the miseries inflicted by the Hephthalites. As the grip of famine tightened, and the starving scrabbled after roots and withered grass amid the dust of their barren fields, ever more people started to believe that the heavenly judge was delivering his verdict on Peroz: “The villain who breaks his promise to Mihr brings death upon all the land.”44 With “the Persian treasury empty and the land ravaged by the Huns,”45 the farr of Peroz’s heirs was barely glimmering. Over the course of the four years that followed the disaster of Gurgan, one of his brothers was executed as a pretender to the throne, and another was deposed and blinded. Peroz’s eldest son Kavad, who acceded to the throne on the back of this coup, was only just fifteen—the age at which, according to elite Persian custom, a boy was awarded a studded belt and became a man.46 His rule could scarcely have begun in less propitious circumstances.

  As to the full scale of the challenges confronting him, that could best be gauged, perhaps, by staring into the sightless eyes of his uncle. Menace was building at home as well as abroad. Not everyone in Iranshahr had been left impoverished by Peroz’s defeat. To the great lords of Parthia, in particular, the calamities overwhelming the Persian monarchy had presented opportunity as well as peril. By the time that Kavad acceded to the throne, one of them had already moved with such boldness and swagger as to establish himself as king in all but name. Even by the standards of his forefathers, Sukhra, the head of the Karin, was quite fabulously domineering. He had also, uniquely, enjoyed an excellent war. It was under his command that the few demoralised remnants of the imperial army had managed to escape from the Gurgan front: an achievement so assiduously trumpeted that Sukhra had even presumed to cast himself as “the avenger of Peroz.”47 Amid the otherwise all-prevailing gloom, he possessed an undeniable aura of success—and exploited it to the hilt. He diverted taxes from the royal coffers into his own; he kept the warriors he had led back from Gurgan firmly under his own command. Kavad, “Lord of the Aryans” though he might be, appeared left with little save for impotence.