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

by Tom Holland

  Meanwhile, inside Iranshahr itself, Kavad set about neutering other threats. Although it was his heresy that had seen him toppled in the first place, he seems not, on his return to power, to have tempered his loyalty to the teachings of Mazdak. Just the opposite, in fact. Whether prompted by conviction, or by cynicism, or by a mixture of the two, Kavad remained an enthusiastic partisan of the communist prophet. That the mighty should be humbled; that the great estates of the nobility and the clergy should be dismantled; that privilege should yield to justice: here, in these demands, was scope for reform indeed. The genius of Kavad—or perhaps his wilful blindness—was that for a long while he saw not the slightest contradiction between the two defining policies of his reign: the ring-fencing of royal power and the sponsorship of social revolution. Nothing, perhaps, better exemplified the successes that he was thereby able to obtain than the fate of the family that had threatened, at the start of his reign, to put the whole of Iranshahr in its shade: the Karin. Such was the scale of the onslaught launched by the Mazdakites against the power base of that haughty dynasty that it ended up shattered into pieces. The destruction of their strongholds in Media left them impotent to resist when Kavad, pressing home his advantage, forced them east, into what remained of their fiefdoms, far from the heartbeat of royal power. Revenge was sweet.

  Nevertheless, the display of royal weight-throwing did still have its limits. The Karin, although certainly brought low, had been scotched, not killed. Meanwhile, their old rivals, the Mihran, continued to supply the House of Sasan with ministers and generals, just as they had ever done. Other Parthian dynasts too had positively flourished under the rule of Kavad. One prominent warlord—known to the Romans as Aspebedes—had played a leading role during the siege of Amida, and, even more lucratively, had succeeded in slipping his sister into Kavad’s bed.69 The marriage was a spectacular love-match. Although Kavad had already fathered two sons to other wives, it was his third, Khusrow, “born to him by the sister of Aspebedes, whom the father loved most of all.”70 Able, ruthless and bold: Khusrow was to prove all these things. Doubtless, then, when Kavad looked at his youngest son, it was the image of his own princely self that he saw reflected there. Nevertheless, as the years slipped by, and Khusrow grew to a strutting maturity, this naked favouritism came to threaten a major constitutional crisis. Blatantly ignoring the convention that dictated the eldest son should succeed to the throne, the Shahanshah began to pull all the strings he could in favour of Khusrow—even to the degree of offering bribes to Anastasius, the Roman emperor, to support his candidacy. This manoeuvring, however, rather than proving offensive to those conservative elements of the establishment that had resisted all of Kavad’s attempts to undermine them, instead received their wholehearted backing: for Khusrow—unlike Kavus, his Mazdakite elder brother—was a fiercely orthodox Zoroastrian. No wonder, then, that the mowbeds, long put in the shade by Kavad’s devotion to Mazdak, should have rallied to the younger prince’s cause. No wonder, either, that the Mazdakites, contrary to all the wishes of their royal patron, should have begun to swing behind Kavus, the legal heir.

  So was set the scene for the climactic crisis of Kavad’s reign. By 528, the aged Shahanshah was backed agonisingly into a corner: forced to choose between his faith and his hopes for the future of the crown. To nominate Kavus as his successor would be to entrench Mazdakism in Iranshahr for good; to nominate Khusrow would be to entrust the throne to the man best qualified to consolidate royal power. In the event, Kavad opted to give free rein to his favourite son. Given the nod, Khusrow sprang into action. A formal debate was staged at Ctesiphon, at which Mazdak himself, according to the reports of the gloating mowbeds, was comprehensively trounced. Khusrow, in the wake of this show-trial, had the teachings of the upstart prophet formally condemned. A wave of persecutions followed, right across the empire. Massacres and confiscations rapidly drove the wretched Mazdakites underground. In Ctesiphon’s royal park, so it was reported, Khusrow ordered holes to be dug and then buried his Mazdakite prisoners in them head first, so that only their legs stuck out. He then invited Mazdak himself to walk along the flower beds, inspect what had been planted there, and admire the fruit. When he did so, the prophet cried out in horror and slumped to the ground. He was then revived, hung from a tree, and used for target practice by Khusrow’s archers.

  Whatever the truth of this gruesome anecdote, it is certain that Kavad’s willingness to abandon his faith marked a key turning point in the history of the Near East. The scope for change offered by Mazdakism had certainly not been exhausted. Potentially, as the turbulent and convulsive course of Kavad’s own reign had served so potently to demonstrate, there was almost no limit to what might not be achieved by an alliance between an imperial monarchy and the revelations, if truly believed to be heaven-sent, of a prophet. As it was, however, the future of Iranshahr was not to be Mazdakite. In 531, Kavad died. Although Kavus, from his powerbase in the north of the empire, did attempt to seize the throne, he was speedily defeated by his younger brother, captured, and put to death. Sternly, Khusrow proclaimed the definitive end of “new customs and new ways”:71 of what had been, so he declared, a rebellion against “religion, reason, and the state.”72

  Yet, in truth, the new Shahanshah was set on having his cake and eating it. His enthusiasm for tradition notwithstanding, he had no intention of letting all of his father’s achievements go to waste. Ancient hierarchies were to be affirmed; and yet, simultaneously, hundreds of inspectors dispatched across Iranshahr with licence to poke their noses into the business of anyone, including even the dynasts. The Zoroastrian priests were to be confirmed in all their rights and privileges; and yet, in a patent attempt to counter the appeal of Mazdakism, new offices created from among their ranks, focused on meeting the needs of the poor and the desperate. Four of the greatest Parthian dynasts—including a Karinid—were to be appointed to the defence of the four corners of the empire; and yet, for the first time, a standing army, beholden solely to the crown, was to be recruited and maintained. To perform such a balancing act, even for an operator as cool and iron-fisted as Khusrow, was likely to prove no easy matter. Not only the future prospects of the House of Sasan, but of Iranshahr itself, were likely to hang upon how he did.

  Few who enjoyed the supreme privilege of being ushered into the royal presence would have doubted that Khusrow had what it took for success. “May you be immortal!” sounded the response to his every utterance; and certainly, to look upon a Shahanshah enthroned in all his glory was still, as it had ever been, to behold a man as close as any mortal could be to a god. His robes gleamed with jewels; his beard was dusted with gold; his face was painted like some ancient idol. Most dazzling of all was his diadem: the symbol of his farr. By the time of Khusrow, however, it was no longer possible for a king to wear one unsupported. Instead, as he sat on his throne, the crown had to be suspended by a chain hung from the ceiling above his head. So massive had it become, and so stupefyingly heavy the gold and jewels that adorned it, that it would otherwise have snapped his neck.

  Menace, it seemed, lurked in even the most splendid show of power.

  By the Rivers of Babylon

  Flower-beds and fountains might have seemed an incongruous setting for mass slaughter. Nevertheless, if the stories told of the execution of Mazdak and his followers were true, they had met with their fate in a peculiarly fitting venue for an assertion of royal power. In a land such as Mesopotamia—where sand was often borne on howling winds, and where only relentless toil kept the desert from smothering the fields—there was no more precious perk of majesty than a walled and well-tended park. The ancient kings of Persia had termed such a garden a paradaida—a “paradise.” When Khusrow dallied in arbours “fresh with the beauty of fruit trees, vines and green cypresses,”73 or wandered past paddocks boasting “boundless numbers of ostriches, antelopes, wild asses, peacocks and pheasants,”74 or rode with the lords and ladies of his court through his hunting grounds in pursuit of “lions and tigers o
f huge size,”75 he was the heir to traditions more ancient than he knew.

  Indeed, there were some among his subjects who claimed that the horticultural traditions of the region stretched all the way back to the beginning of time itself. Beyond the wall that encircled the blossom-scented air of the royal gardens, amid the immense agglomeration of settlements that sprawled for miles along the banks of the Tigris, there lived people who believed that once, shortly after the making of the heavens and the earth, all of Ctesiphon, and far beyond it, had been a paradise. “And the Lord God,” it was recorded in their scriptures, “planted a garden in Eden, in the east.”76 Prior to that, under cover of a mist such as still often rose up from the Tigris, He had taken mud, and fashioned out of it, not bricks, not a city, but a man. The first man who had ever lived, in fact: “Adam,” which meant, in the language of the people who told the story, “Earth.”

  The Jews, however, were not natives of Mesopotamia. Rather, they traced both their name and their origins back to a vanished kingdom—Judah—that had lain just inland from the Mediterranean Sea, some five hundred miles to the west. A fair distance, it might be thought—and all the more so because the directest route cut across burning and near-impassable sand. However, by taking a slightly longer course, along the arc of a well-watered crescent—northwards from Mesopotamia and then curving back south—it was possible to travel from the banks of the Tigris via a succession of cities, rather than across the open desert, and arrive in Judah within a matter of months. Eleven hundred years before the time of Khusrow, this had proved sufficient to doom the tiny kingdom’s independence. In 586 BC, a vast Mesopotamian army had descended upon its capital, a temple-topped city named Jerusalem, and put it to the torch. The wretched kingdom’s elite had been carted off into exile. Their god—who was believed by the Jews not only to have chosen them as the objects of his especial favour, but also to have been the creator of the entire universe—seemed to have abandoned them for good.

  A thousand years on, however, and it was not the Jews who had vanished from Mesopotamia, but the very memory of the conquerors who had first hauled them there in chains. Preserved in the Jewish scriptures were the visions of a man named Daniel, said to have been one of the original exiles from Jerusalem. In a dream, he had seen a tempestuous sea, out of which had emerged “four great beasts.”77 These monsters, according to an angel who interpreted the dream for the prophet, were four great kingdoms that were destined to inherit the earth, until, at the end of time, “the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, for ever and ever.”78 That Daniel’s vision had been a true one, and that the course of history was indeed to be interpreted as a succession of mighty empires, each one consigning its predecessor to oblivion, was more manifest in Mesopotamia, perhaps, than anywhere else on earth: for the land was an entire graveyard of abandoned capitals. Its two great rivers, rather than flowing obediently within their banks, were like restless serpents, shaking their coils with such sporadic violence that entire cities were left high and dry, or else submerged and returned to mud. The Jews of Ctesiphon, when they wandered along the banks of the Tigris, could see the shells of abandoned buildings, partly dissolved by the turbid waters: remnants of Veh-Ardashir, the first capital raised by the House of Sasan and built according to a perfectly circular plan, but which, upon an abrupt and calamitous shifting of the river’s course, had been sliced in two. In turn, of course, beyond Veh-Ardashir, there loomed the sand-throttled ruins of Seleucia, its harbour choked by silt and reeds; and beyond them, some forty miles across the mud steppes, an even more battered monument to human vanity, a place that was now “nothing more than mounds and stones and decay” but once, long before, had been the greatest city in the world.79 Abandoned by the Euphrates, emptied of its population and despoiled of its brickwork, the name of the ruin was barely to be heard now on people’s lips. The Jews, however, did speak it. They had not forgotten the vanished city, nor the glamour and the terror of its reputation. They still remembered Babylon.

  As well they might have done—for it was a king of Babylon who had burned their capital, enslaved their ancestors, and first embodied for the Jews that peculiar and terrifying intoxication which was the lust to rule all of mankind: “The nations drank of her wine; therefore the nations are mad.”80 Conversely, in the ruin of such a city, there had been offered to the Jews a precious reassurance: that there existed no earthly empire so great or overweening that it might not one day be dashed to pieces by their divine protector. All the convulsive rhythms of history, which over time had served to offer now one nation, and now another, the sceptre of the world, bore witness to nothing, in the final reckoning, save the purposes of the One God of the Jews. That was why, in the heartlands of Mesopotamia, it was the Jews themselves who still maintained the sacred habits of their worship, while all the temples of Babylon had “become a heap of ruins, the haunt of jackals, a horror and a hissing, without inhabitant.”81

  Only in a single city—one that lay right on the margins of the one-time Babylonian world, at the uppermost point of the Fertile Crescent’s arc, just beyond the frontier with Rome—did “the ancient faith”82 of Mesopotamia continue to flicker: for in Harran, they still worshipped the ancient gods. The landscape beyond its walls was filled with idols: strangely preserved, withered corpses, both animal and human, were wedged into fissures above mountain roads; eerie figures framed by peacock feathers and crescent moons stood guard over desert lakes. The mightiest idol of all, however, and the glory of Harran itself, was a colossal statue of the city’s patron, Sin—the “Lord of the Moon.” Annually, the god’s worshippers would hoist him on their shoulders, carry him from his temple, parade him all around town, and then return him in triumph to his sanctuary on a barge. The rituals of this festival—the akitu—were of a quite staggering antiquity, and had once been practised across Mesopotamia; nor did the priests of Sin, who conducted them with a grave and sombre sense of reverence, ever forget it.83 Yet, in truth, the same obduracy with which the people of Harran clung to their ancient cult served only to emphasise their freakishness. In Mesopotamia, the balance of power had long since swung against any notion that the moon, the sun and the stars might conceivably be deities. The Harranian idols—demonic though they often seemed to nervous visitors—were the merest flotsam, left beached by a retreating tide. The Jews, whose prophets had long foretold the doom of all gods save their own, found a particular vindication in this: “By the purple and linen that rot upon them, you will know that they are not gods; and they will finally be consumed, and be a reproach in the land.”84

  Nevertheless, for all the mingled scorn and dread with which they cast their backward stare upon the primordial traditions of Mesopotamia, the Jews had never ceased to be fascinated by them. The land that had served the first man and woman as an earthly paradise had also provided humanity with the wellsprings of its learning—a precious legacy from an otherwise vanished world. Just as the Tigris had turned all the grandeur of Veh-Ardashir to mud, a great flood had submerged the whole earth and dissolved all traces of Eden. Had a man named Noah not been given forewarning of the calamity, and built a massive ark, then life itself would have been obliterated. However, not every trace of the world before the Flood had been lost: for Noah’s descendants, digging amid the mud of Mesopotamia, had stumbled across a buried cache of books.85 These, when they were deciphered, had been found to contain the wisdom of the earliest generations of men—necromancers who had lived before the Flood. The consequence had been the reputation that had served to grace Mesopotamia ever since—not only among the Jews, but among peoples everywhere—as the land “where the true art of divination first made its appearance.”86

  Such stories reflected not only the faint aura of the sinister that had always clung to Babylonian learning, but also an ambition on the part of Jewish scholars to lay claim to its inheritance. For a thousand years and more, ever since the first deportation of the people of Judah, they had been in the hab
it of regarding Mesopotamia as a home away from home. Naturally, they had never entirely conquered their sense of homesickness: Jerusalem, the capital of their God-given homeland, would always represent for them the most sacred place on earth. Nevertheless, it had also long been their conviction that their ultimate origins lay not in the Holy Land but on the banks of the Euphrates. The proof of this could hardly have been a weightier one: for it was to be found in the very first book of the Tanakh, the great compendium of the holiest Jewish scriptures. There, after the stories of Adam, and of Noah, it was recorded how God, ten generations after the Flood, had spoken to a man named Abram: a native of a place called Ur. As to where precisely this mysterious city might have been, there was much dispute; but what all scholars could agree on was that it had stood somewhere in the Land of the Two Rivers.87

  Abram had not remained in the land of his birth, though. Out of the blue, shortly after his seventy-fifth birthday, he had received a revelation from God. “Go from your country and your kindred, and your father’s house, to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”88 A tempting offer, to be sure—and one that had seen Abram duly commit to emigration. His reward had quickly followed. No sooner had Abram arrived in a land named Canaan than he had found himself being graced with a further divine revelation: an assurance that his descendants would inherit Canaan as “an everlasting possession.”89 Hence the new sobriquet that the Almighty bestowed on him: “Your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.”90 And so, sure enough, it had come to pass: for Abraham had indeed ended up fathering many peoples, with the most prominent of all being the Jews. A glorious pedigree, to be sure. Much had derived from it. Abraham it was, after all, who had handed down to the Jews their sense of themselves as God’s Chosen People. But he had also bequeathed them something more: the title deeds to what had once been Canaan, and now ranked as their Promised Land.