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

by Tom Holland

  Between the Persian monarchy and the lords of Parthia, between the House of Sasan and the dynasties of the Karin and the Mihran, ghosts had always intruded. When Sukhra, in the pomp and glory of his magnificence, rode out beneath the great horseshoe arches of his palace, he did so at the head of warriors who seemed more like phantoms than men, conjured up from an age remoter by far than that of Ardashir, remoter even than that of Zoroaster himself. Their cloaks, their pennants, the livery of their chargers: all were green.48 The colour was that of Mihr—the god whose anger with Peroz had turned the fields of Iranshahr brown. The god, if he could only be appeased, had the power to make the soil fertile and giving again. Sukhra, by invoking this conviction with such flamboyance, was not only thumbing his nose at the House of Sasan but laying claim to the most ancient and enduring of the traditions cherished by the Parthians. Not for nothing was their sacred fire named the “Fire of Mihr is Great”: for in the easternmost regions of Iranshahr, Mihr was worshipped as he had once been by all the Aryan people, with a peculiarly single-hearted devotion. So much so, in fact, that the fervour with which the god’s cult was practised across the plains and mountains of Parthia tended to leave little time for Ohrmazd Himself.49 Just as Sukhra’s green-clad private army evoked a time before the Sasanians, so, even more scandalously, did the sacred fire of Mihr serve as a reminder of beliefs that pre-dated Zoroaster. Unsurprisingly, then, the mowbeds had done all they could to dim its renown. Too venerable to be extinguished entirely, it had nevertheless been demoted. Mihr’s fire, so the mowbeds had declared, was fit only for the masses: herdsmen, ploughmen, peasants. A doubly neat manoeuvre: for with it, the priests had served to cast the two remaining sacred fires—both of which lay securely within the Church’s own heartlands—as the only two with authentic pedigree. That the truth was far different—that the fire temple in Persia dated back only to the time of Ardashir, and the fire in Media even later, only to the reign of Peroz himself—had ceased so much as to register.50 It was the mowbeds, after all, who enjoyed the ear of the king, who commanded the resources of a spreading Church, who wrote the books. Yet still, wherever the Karin rode, their green-clad horsemen were sure to follow: serving notice that there were beliefs older than the Prophet, and still very far from dead.

  Not that everyone in Parthia was necessarily convinced by Sukhra’s posing as the agent of Mihr. While the Parthian dynasts had long resented Persian rule, they were far more suspicious of each other than they were of the Sasanians. Kavad, in this fractiousness, was able to distinguish a glimmering of hope. It was not only the Shahanshah who was affronted by the suffocating greatness of the Karin. So too was the Parthian dynasty which, decades earlier, had helped Peroz to the throne, and still regarded it as their god-given right to throw their weight around much as they pleased: the Mihran. They too, as their name suggested, regarded themselves as the favourites of Mihr; they too raised their own taxes; they too had private armies. Kavad, growing up into a full recognition of his weakness, decided that he had no choice but to turn to them for assistance. A desperate throw, and one that did little for the royal prestige, of course—but the “Lord of the Aryans” was beyond caring. To all the other miseries afflicting his people Kavad now added, as the consequence of his manoeuvre, civil war. The Mihran, wooed into making an open assault on their bitterest rivals, duly advanced against the power of Sukhra. Reaches of Iranshahr left untorched by the Hephthalites were now trampled down by the empire’s two foremost noble families. Finally, in a climactic confrontation, it was the Karin who were overthrown. Sukhra was taken captive, and all his treasure with him. Delivered into royal hands, the great warlord was put to death.

  None of which, as it turned out, improved the position of Kavad one jot. “Sukhra’s wind has died away, and a wind belonging to Mihran has now started to blow”:51 centuries later, and the phrase was still proverbial. Bitterly as the gusts must have sounded in the king’s ear, however, they did not sound so cruelly as they did across the blackened fields, the weed-choked roads, and the abandoned villages of his unhappy realm. War and famine were emptying the countryside. Even in the best of times, those who worked on the land had laboured under crushing burdens. All the wealth of the Shahanshah in his many fabulous palaces, of the dynasts in their own strongholds, and of the mowbeds on their fine horses, all the splendour of the aristocracy’s shimmering silks, their jewels and their groaning tables, all their dancing girls, their musicians and their performing monkeys, almost everything enjoyed by the rich, in short, had been wrung from the exertions of the poor. Unsurprisingly, then, the flight of peasants from the fields had long been a cause of anxiety to the elite; and vagrants, if they were caught, could expect to be branded on their faces as rebels against Ohrmazd Himself. Increasingly, though, as misery was piled upon misery, the sheer number of people on the move started to overwhelm the authorities. Many rootless peasants headed for the cities, but many more, ganging together and brandishing cudgels and bill-hooks, took to the road and turned predator themselves. At first, they plundered their neighbours’ villages and attacked travellers on the highways. Then, as they grew in number and confidence, they started to aim higher. Barely believable news began to intrude upon the councils of the great. Gangs of the despised peasantry, “like demons set at large,”52 were moving against the nobility’s granaries and estates. They had stormed palaces and divided entire treasuries among “the poor, the base and the weak.”53 Most shockingly of all, “the ignoble plebeians” were said to have passed around women captured during these assaults, handing even the perfumed wives of nobles from peasant to peasant.54 A high-born lady streaked with the filth and the sweat of the landless: here was the ultimate image of order turned to chaos.

  What did this turning of the world upon its head portend? Surely nothing less than the end of time itself. The Zoroastrian faithful had long believed that things were not eternal, and that the great struggle between Ohrmazd and Ahriman was destined to resolve itself in one final and climactic confrontation. No one, prior to Zoroaster, had ever contemplated such a notion: that mankind, rather than reproducing itself for ever, generation after endless generation, might instead be heading towards a fixed and definite end; that a terminal clash between good and evil might be approaching; that the whole universe might be weighed in the balance and judged. Such notions, doubtless, sat readily with troubled times; but the collapse of Iranshahr into near anarchy was not the only reason why anxiety and anticipation had risen, by the time of Kavad’s reign, to an unprecedented fever pitch. No less influential, perhaps, was the date that scholars had recently assigned to Zoroaster’s birth: a thousand years before the present. People had come to feel themselves living in the shadow of something truly portentous—a millennium. For decades, this had served to foster eerie whisperings: that a new prophet was destined to appear, one who would serve as the seal of all who had gone before him and would usher in, for his followers, a golden age of equality, justice and peace.55The Zoroastrian establishment had found it increasingly difficult, amid the miseries of the age, to ring-fence such talk. The rumours spread; and, as they spread, they mutated and evolved. To the poor, especially, they seemed to offer a route map to a juster and happier future. The ragged armies of the dispossessed, when they seized the property of the rich, were motivated by more than mere hatred, or even hunger. Just as the mowbeds passionately believed themselves entrusted by Ohrmazd with the maintenance of the traditional order of things, so had the poor, no less passionately, come to believe themselves entrusted with a divine mission to bring it crashing down around their heads. Men, they declared, were created equal. It followed, then, that all good things, from food to land to women, should be held in common. The privileges of the nobility, the pretensions of the priesthood: both had to be dissolved. Such were the demands of the self-proclaimed “Adherents of Justice”: the world’s first communist manifesto.

  How was it, in the bowels of the world’s most intimidating monarchy, that such a startling movement had come in
to existence? Clearly, the evils and injustices of the preceding decades had done much to inspire the spirit of revolution, as too had all the many varied currents of belief abroad in Iranshahr, the cults and shadowy heresies that had always plagued the Zoroastrian Church. Subsequent tradition, however, would attribute the unprecedented eruption of the Adherents of Justice to the teachings of a single prophet, the messenger from Ohrmazd long foretold: a one-time priest by the name of Mazdak. Four hundred years on, and historians would still commemorate how he had ringingly “proclaimed that what God had given to man should be distributed equally, and that men had abused this in their injustice to one another.”56 Unfortunately, however, the murk that veils the lives of so many prophets from our gaze has, by and large, served to swallow up Mazdak as well. Although, in histories written a century and more after his lifetime, he is portrayed as a towering figure, no contemporary makes reference to him. Consequently, when attempting to make sense of his career, we are left with more questions than answers. Were his teachings original to him, or did he merely articulate doctrines that had been decades, even centuries, in the making? How much faith can we have in the traditional details of his biography? Did he even exist?57

  Amid all the uncertainty, though, two facts are clear. The first is that Iranshahr, by the time of Kavad’s reign, was teetering on the brink of a full-scale social revolution. The second is that Kavad himself, ever the opportunist, had helped to push it over the edge. Monarchs are rarely in the habit of promoting class warfare; but Kavad, “a man who for cunning and energy had no rivals,”58 was desperately negotiating uncharted waters. His support for the revolutionaries had two aims: to ensure that his own estates were left untouched; and to foster assaults on those of the great Parthian dynasts. Yet, it is possible—even likely—that there was more to this strategy than mere cold calculation: perhaps he did genuinely look with sympathy upon the miseries and the demands of the poor. Tradition would recall that Mazdak, brought into the royal presence, had converted the Shahanshah to his infant faith; and tradition might conceivably be correct. Certainly, the sheer audacity of Kavad’s attempt to neutralise the nobility is the best evidence we have that Mazdak did after all exist. It is hard to believe that a Sasanian would ever have identified himself with peasant insurrectionists had he not possessed an inner assurance that he was truly fulfilling the divine purpose. Cynicism fused with religiosity: such was the combination, surely, that made of Kavad a Mazdakite.

  Inevitably, though, his conversion stirred up a hornets’ nest. Events now began to move very fast. In 496, an alliance of nobles and mowbeds forced Kavad’s abdication. His brother, a young boy by the name of Zamasp, was proclaimed Shahanshah in his place. Kavad himself was immured in the empire’s most fearsome prison, the aptly named “Castle of Oblivion”—“for the name of anyone cast into its dungeons is forbidden to be mentioned ever again, with death as the penalty for anyone who speaks it.”59 Yet, to Kavad—a king so enterprising that he had toyed with communism—this was never likely to prove a terminal roadblock. Sure enough, he soon procured a complete outfit of women’s clothes, gave his gaolers the slip while disguised as his own wife, and fled to the court of the Hephthalites. There, just as his father had done nearly four decades before, he secured the khan’s backing and returned to Iranshahr at the head of a Hephthalite army. The Parthian dynasts, struggling desperately to keep their heads above the Mazdakite floodtide, found themselves powerless to help their royal cipher; Zamasp was duly toppled without a battle; blinded with burning olive oil, or else with an iron needle, he was banished into oblivion himself.

  So it was, by 498, that Kavad was once again the Shahanshah. Nevertheless, the desperate circumstances of his realm still threatened to give the lie to that title. The empire remained racked by religious controversy, social upheaval and dynastic feuding. It was also effectively bankrupt. How, then, was Kavad to pay his Hephthalite backers for their support? A challenge, it might have been thought, fit to defeat even his ingenuity.

  But Kavad was, as ever, nothing daunted. Instead, with his entire empire seemingly on the verge of implosion, he opted to go on the attack: to fix his gaze towards the setting of the sun, to cross his western border, and to take the gold he needed from there.

  He would go to war with the only empire in the world that could rival his own.

  The Twin Eyes of the World

  Once, the predecessors of the Sasanians had ruled a dominion so vast that it had reached the shores of the Mediterranean. Egypt, Syria and even a chunk of Europe had been theirs. Memories of this golden age had grown faint, yet there were still monuments to it in Persia itself: enigmatic tombs and reliefs on cliffs of bearded kings. Most haunting of all was a great wilderness of columns, some five miles south of Istakhr: the “Place of a Hundred Pillars.” Here, amid the ruins, priests would carve inscriptions—and noblemen offer sacrifices—to the spirits of the ancient kings who had built it, back in the fabulous reaches of time.

  Most Persians had no doubt that these mysterious ancestors were the Kayanids. The sustained rewriting of history that occurred under Peroz had merely cemented the identification. Yet there were other traditions, very different, which endured as well. Far to the west of Iranshahr, the Greeks—a people to whom the Kayanids meant nothing—preserved the memory of a Persian king named Cyrus. He had been, according to their historians, “the best of all rulers,”60 the first man ever to attempt the conquest of the world. A full half a millennium before Christ he had died—but still, among the Greeks, he was commemorated as the very model of a universal monarch. He and his successors had wielded a power more dazzling than that of any dynasty before them. One king had even sought to chain Europe to Asia by means of a bridge of boats, and to conquer Greece itself. He had failed—but only just. As a display of global reach, it had certainly proved a memorable one. Better than the Persians themselves, the Greeks knew precisely who the founders of the first world empire had been. It was not the Kayanids who had inhabited “the Place of a Hundred Pillars,” but the heirs of Cyrus. Indeed, Greek historians even had their own name for the ruin: “the City of the Persians,” or Persepolis.

  It is hard to believe that the Persians themselves were wholly ignorant of this alternative history.b Anything that touched on the glory of their ancestors was bound to tickle their fancy. Sure enough, distorted echoes of what the Greeks had recorded about Cyrus and his descendants could sometimes be discerned in the fables of the Kayanids: the majesty of their rule, the vastness of their empire, even, on occasion, their names. Yet ultimately, to the Zoroastrian priests who were responsible for chronicling the past of Iranshahr, history such as the Greeks understood it was of only incidental significance. Far greater issues, and far greater forces, were at play. The rise and fall of earthly empires were the mere shadow-play of something infinitely more cosmic: the clash between Truth and the Lie. Nowhere, in the opinion of the Persians, better illustrated just how violently this battle had reverberated throughout the ages than the Place of a Hundred Pillars. By the time of Kavad’s reign, there was a hardening consensus as to who its architect had been. Jamshid, according to fabulously ancient tradition, had been the greatest monarch of all time: ruler of the entire world, possessed of a farr so potent that it had kept the whole of humanity from death, the chosen one of Ohrmazd, the owner of a flying throne.c Finally, though, after a reign of a thousand years, he had aspired to become a god—and at once his farr had abandoned him. Cornered by Dahag, the demonic necromancer, Jamshid had been hacked to death. Darkness and evil had prevailed. Of the fallen king, and all the manifold glories of his reign, nothing had been preserved, save only the great pillared city of stone.

  Takht-e Jamshid, people had begun to call the ruin—“Jamshid’s Throne.”d Yet, even with responsibility for its destruction firmly pinned on a brain-eating demon, the name of the true, the authentic culprit remained one fit to chill the blood of any devout Zoroastrian. Although the priests of Ohrmazd had long since forgotten what every Greek hist
orian took for granted, that it was in fact no demon who had burned Persepolis, but rather an earthly warlord, their amnesia was far from total. In Persia, the name of the conqueror whose drunken arson had left the palace a smoking ruin had most certainly not been forgotten. Eight hundred years on, and the fame of Alexander the Great still blazed undiminished. To many, and not only in the West, he remained a figure of incomparable glamour: king of a once-backward Greek kingdom by the time he was twenty; master of the empire founded by Cyrus five years later; dead, having marched to the limits of the world, at the age of thirty-three. Even the Persians, whose dominion he had overthrown, were not wholly immune to the allure of his glory. At the royal court a craze was brewing for romances in which the great man, somewhat improbably, featured as the son of a Persian king. There were plenty in Iranshahr, however, less than thrilled by this innovation. To the Zoroastrian priesthood, in particular, any notion that the conqueror of their country might have been a hero was not merely anathema but heresy. The memories preserved by the mowbeds of Alexander were terrible ones: of a criminal, a vandal, accursed. “For he entered Iranshahr with terrible violence, war and torture, and killed the King, and destroyed and razed to the ground the court and all the kingdom.”61 Not exactly a demon, perhaps—but demonic, certainly. Even the non-existence of ancient books of Zoroastrian lore was attributed by the priests, not to the fact that they had only just come up with a script capable of recording their holy scriptures, but to Alexander’s imagined taste for burning libraries. There was just a single mercy, in short: that the fiend had ended up “plunged into hell.”62