Ardashir was not initially successful in his wars against the Romans, but after some years he was able to retake Nisibis and Carrhae. In his last years he ruled jointly with his son Shapur, who succeeded him after his death in 241. And it was Shapur who achieved some of the most dramatic successes of the long wars with Rome. These began with his defeat of the Romans at Misikoe in 243, during which the Roman Emperor Gordian was killed. In 244, Shapur accepted the submission of Emperor Philip the Arab and the cession of Armenia. In 259/260 the Emperor Valerian led an army against Shapur—but the Persians defeated Valerian west of Edessa and took him prisoner. These events are commemorated by another mural sculpture at Naqsh-e Rostam, which shows Shapur on horseback receiving the submission of both Roman emperors. The inscription claims that Philip paid five hundred thousand denarii in ransom, and that Shapur captured Valerian in battle “Ourselves with Our own hands.”14 There are different accounts of what happened to Valerian thereafter. The more sensational one (from Roman sources) is that after some years of humiliation the former emperor was eventually flayed alive; his skin was then stuffed with straw and exhibited as a reminder of the superiority of Persian arms. Anthony Hecht wrote a poem based on this story, from which the following is an excerpt:
. . . A hideous life-sized doll, filled out with straw,
In the skin of the Roman Emperor, Valerian . . .
Swung in the wind on a rope from the palace flag-pole
And young girls were brought there by their mothers
To be told about the male anatomy. . . .15
But the inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam says the Roman captives were settled in various places around the empire, and there is evidence of this at Bishapur and Shushtar, where the Romans showed their engineering expertise by building a combined bridge and dam, the remains of which can still be seen (along with other Roman-built bridges elsewhere). It may be that Valerian, rather than surviving only as a stuffed skin to be giggled at, lived out his days as pontifex maximus of a Persian city. Given the other evidence of Shapur’s generally humane conduct (and the spirit of the Naqsh-e Rostam relief itself, which seems to show magnanimity rather than brutal humiliation of the enemy), it may be that the former story is just a rather gruesome fable, reported by uncritical Roman historians who had no idea what really had become of Valerian after his capture, but were ready to believe the worst of the Persians. Large numbers of ordinary people, including many Christians from Antioch and elsewhere, were brought back and settled in Persia by Shapur after his campaigns. In addition to the wars with Rome, both Ardashir and Shapur campaigned in the east against the Kushans, eventually establishing Sassanid rule over large parts of what are now Central Asia, Afghanistan, and northern India.
Ardashir and Shapur made changes in government that may have paralleled the beginnings of some deeper changes in society. Government became more centralized, the bureaucracy expanded, and from the devolved system of the Parthians (sometimes, probably misleadingly, described as a kind of feudalism) a new pattern evolved.16 New offices and titles appeared in inscriptions, including dibir (scribe), ganzwar (treasurer), and dadwar (judge). The old Parthian families continued, but were given court offices and may thereby, one may say, have been domesticated (a change reminiscent of the way in which Louis XIV of France tamed the French nobility after the Fronde civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century). This change in role for the great nobles may in time have helped initiate another phenomenon of social, cultural, and military significance: the emergence of a class of gentry, the dehqans, who in later centuries controlled the countryside, its villages, and its peasantry on the shah’s behalf, and provided the armored cavalry that were the central battle-winning weapon of the Sassanid armies. (Though in the interim the great noble families retained much of their power in the provinces, and the cavalry were provided in large part by their retainers—as in the time of the Parthians.)
In several other ways the long reign of Shapur continued and fulfilled the policies set in motion by Ardashir. Following the precedent of his father at Ferozabad and elsewhere, Shapur was also a great founder of cities—Bishapur and Nishapur, among others. The establishment of these cities17 and the growth of old ones, abetted by the expansion of trade within and beyond the large empire (especially along the silk routes as well as, increasingly, by sea to India and China), brought about changes in the Persian economy. Bazaars of the kind familiar later, in the Islamic period, grew up in the cities—a home to merchants and artisans, who formed trade guilds. Agriculture expanded to meet the demand for food from the towns, and nomadic pastoralism receded in significance. The spread of land under cultivation was facilitated by the use of qanat—underground irrigation canals that carried water as far as several kilometers, from highland areas to villages. There it could be distributed to fields. Agriculture was also expanded in Mesopotamia, where, if properly irrigated, the rich soils of the great river valley were potentially very productive, capable of yielding several crops a year.
Culturally, the resettlement of Greeks, Syrians, and others from the Roman Empire brought in a renewed burst of interest in Greek learning, and new translations into Pahlavi were carried out (Pahlavi was the Middle Persian language spoken in the Sassanid period, simplified from the more grammatically complex Old Persian spoken in Achaemenid times). Eventually, recognized schools of learning, including those for medicine and other sciences, flourished in cities like Gondeshapur and Nisibis. Inscriptions also record Shapur’s pious establishment of fire altars named for various members of his family. Each altar would have involved an endowment to support the priests and their families. These endowments, along with similar ones established by the great nobles, enhanced the economic and political power of the priests (mobad).
DARK PROPHET
Another phenomenon that emerged in the reign of Shapur was a new religion—Manichaeism, named after its originator, the prophet Mani. Aside from a more or less vague idea of a dualistic division between good and evil, Mani and his doctrines are obscure to most people today. But on closer examination Mani’s ideas and his movement turn out to have been enormously influential, especially in medieval Europe.
Mani was born in April 216 in Parthian Mesopotamia, of Iranian parents descended from a branch of the Arsacid royal family, who had moved there from Hamadan/Ecbatana. There is a story that he was born lame, and some have suggested that his pessimism and his disgust at the human body had something to do with that. As with other founders of world religions, Mani was born into a troubled time and place. His parents seem to have been Christians,18 and he was strongly influenced by gnostic ideas in his formative years. (The gnostics were an important sect of early Christianity, though some believe their ideas pre-date Christianity, incorporating Platonic ideas. Similar movements in Judaism and even, later, Islam have been identified and labelled gnostic. Broadly, they believed in a secret knowledge—gnosis— that derived from a personal, direct experience with the divine.) At some point before about 240, Mani claimed to have received a revelation that told him not to eat meat or drink wine or to sleep with women. The doctrine of Mani incorporated Christian elements, but depended heavily on a creation myth (if it can be called that) derived from Mazdaean concepts, particularly the pessimistically and deterministically inclined forms of the branch of Mazdaism called Zurvanism. This had been particularly important in Mesopotamia for several centuries, drawing on indigenous traditions like that of astrology.
Put simply, Manichaeism was based on the idea of a queasy, dystopic creation in which the good—the light—had been overwhelmed and dominated by evil—the demonic—which was itself identified with matter. Through copulation and reproduction (inherently sinful), evil had imprisoned light in matter and had established the dominance of evil on earth. Jesus was able to liberate man from this miserable condition, but only briefly, and the only real hope was the eventual liberation of the spirit in death. This dismal and ugly vision of existence was presented as a religion of liberation from material existence
and evil. Mani wrote down a series of religious texts and liturgies, many of which were quite beautiful. After a meeting with Shapur in 243 at which Mani impressed the shah favorably,19 Mani was allowed to preach the new religion all over the Sassanid Empire. Presumably the king failed to question him too closely—Shapur was distinguished by a tolerant attitude to all religions, including Judaism and Christianity. It is tempting to wish that he had made an exception in Mani’s case. Mani accompanied Shapur in some of the campaigning that year against the Romans, which is coincidental because the great Neoplatonist, Plotinus, was apparently accompanying the Roman emperor through the same campaign, on the other side.
The teachings of Mani spread rapidly and widely—beyond Persia into India, Europe, and Central Asia. They survived longest in Central Asia, as an open rather than a persecuted, underground movement, and there yielded most of the authoritative texts from which Manichaeism is understood by academics today. Mani organized teams of scribes to translate and copy his writings into different languages.20 His followers formed a hierarchy of believers, with an exclusive elect of pharisaic priests at their head. These were the people who followed the purity rules and the rules of abstinence and chastity and other life-hating mumbo jumbo to their fullest extent. But the sect was generally despised and declared heretical—especially by the Mazdaean Magi, but also by the Jews, the Christians, and even by gnostics like the Mandaeans. Eventually, Mani returned from his travels (after Shapur’s death) to a less tolerant atmosphere, and the Magi—who hated Mani more than anyone else because of his subversion and distortion of their own beliefs—were able to have him imprisoned. In February 277 Mani was killed by being crushed over a period of twenty-six days by some very heavy chains.
By the time of Mani’s death, though, the damage was done. It would be foolish to attribute all the evils of religion to Mani, but he does seem to have done a remarkably good job of infecting a range of belief systems with the most damaging and depressing ideas about impurity, the corruption of material existence, and the sinfulness of sexual pleasure. Of course, some of his notions were useful also to those wishing to elaborate metaphysically upon misogynistic impulses, and to those with a deterministic bent. His thinking was a kind of Pandora’s box of malignity, the particles from which went fluttering off in all directions on their misshapen wings. As the scholar of Persian religion Alessandro Bausani said, Mani seems to have constructed myths out of a sense of the “monstrosity of existence”:
. . . myths that have the particularly unpleasant characteristic of not being natural and rising from below . . . not based on a wide-ranging religious sociality like the Zoroastrian ones, for they are almost the personal dreams of an exhausted and maniacal intellectual.21
But his ideas were complex, varied, and innovative, and not all bad. They may later have had some influence on Islam—Mani, like Mohammad in the seventh century, declared himself to be the “seal of the prophets,” and there are other parallels.22 But the central tenets of Islam were intrinsically anti-Manichaean in spirit, and the Prophet Mohammad, speaking of various sects and faiths, was clear that “All will be saved except one: that of the Manichaeans.”23 Despite the condemnation heaped upon Mani’s teachings, they seem to have persisted among an underground sect. But the most startling story is that of Mani’s influence in the West.
Of all the fathers of the Christian church, probably the most influential was St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine wrote wonderful books that explained the Christian religion to the uneducated—explained the downfall of the Roman Empire in Christian terms, absolving the Christians of blame (some, like Gibbon, have remained unconvinced); Augustine also explained in touching and humane terms his own life, his own sense of sin, and his own (late) conversion to Christianity (“O Lord, Make me chaste—but not yet”). Augustine’s presence in the thought of the church in later centuries was dominant. He also explained the reasons Manichaeism was heretical in a Christian context. But the remarkable fact is, before he converted to Christianity, Augustine himself had been an avowed Manichaean, had converted others to the sect, and may have served as a Manichaean priest. It has been disputed, but the imprint of Manichaeism on Augustine’s thinking is obvious and heavy.
Many of the ideas that Augustine’s teaching successfully fixed in Catholic Christian doctrine—notably that of original sin (strongly associated by him with sexuality), predestination, the idea of an elect of the saved, and (notoriously) the damnation of unbaptized infants—originated at least partly in debates that had been going on earlier within the Christian church, though those discussions had been influenced by similar gnostic ideas to those which had inspired Mani. But many of these key concepts—especially the central one, original sin—also show a striking congruence with Manichaean doctrine. Surely Augustine could not successfully have foisted upon the Christian church Manichaean ideas that the church had already declared heretical? Yet that seems to have been what happened, and Augustine was accused of doing precisely this by contemporaries—notably by the apostle of free will, Pelagius, who in the early years of the fifth century fought long and hard with Augustine over precisely these theological problems. Pelagius lost, and was himself declared a heretic. It was perhaps the most damaging decision ever made by the Christian church.24
As pursued later by the Western Christian church in medieval Europe, the full grim panoply of Manichaean/Augustinian formulae emerged to blight millions of lives, and they are still exerting their sad effect today—the distaste for the human body, the disgust for and guilt about sexuality, the misogyny, the determinism (and the tendency toward irresponsibility that emerges from it), the obsessive idealization of the spirit, the disdain for the material—all distant indeed from the original teachings of Jesus. One could argue that the extreme Manichaean duality of evil materiality versus good spirituality emerged most strongly in heresies like those of the Cathars and the Bogomils that the church pursued most energetically (the same Bogomils from whom the English language acquired the term “bugger”). The great scholar and Persianist Bausani (from whom I have taken much of my account of Manichaean beliefs) doubted the connection with these Western heresies,25 but many of their beliefs and practices showed a close identity with those of Manichaeism, which is not easily discounted. The ferocity of the medieval church’s persecution of the Cathars and others derived really from the dangerous similarity between the heretics’ doctrines and the orthodox ones—they had merely carried orthodox doctrine to its logical extreme. The church was trying to destroy its own ugly shadow. The Eastern Orthodox Church, sensibly, never embraced Augustinian theology to the same extent.
The real opponent to Augustinian orthodoxy was Pelagianism—a simple, natural golden thread, sometimes concealed, running through medieval thought, to emerge again in Renaissance humanism. If ever a Christian thinker deserved to be made a saint, then surely Pelagius did. If ever a pair of thinkers deserved Nietzsche’s title Weltverleumder26 (world-slanderers), then they were Mani and Augustine.
To return to Persia from this excursion, we should remember that Manichaeism was condemned by the Mazdaean Magi as a heresy at an early stage, and that it is more correct to see it as a distortion of Iranian thinking—or indeed as an outgrowth of Christian gnosticism dressed in Mazdaean trappings—than as representative of anything enduring in Iranian thought.
RENEWED WAR
Shapur’s defeats of the Romans had contributed to the near-collapse of the Roman Empire in the third century. For a while after the capture of Valerian in 260 the Romans were in no fit state to strike back, and it seemed as if the whole East was open to Persian conquest. But a new power arose in the vacuum, based on the Syrian city of Palmyra. It was led by Septimius Odenathus, a Romanized Arab, and his wife Zenobia (Zeinab).
Odenathus swept through the Roman provinces of the East, and some Western sources have suggested that he campaigned successfully in the western part of the Sassanid Empire as well, though this has been disputed. Odenathus was assassinated in about 267 a
nd was succeeded by Zenobia, who conquered Egypt in 269 but was defeated by the emperor Aurelian in 273. Aurelian restored the fortunes of Rome in the region. By that time Shapur was dead; he probably died of illness in Bishapur in May 270, though some have put his death in AD 272.27 In any case, his reign had boosted the prestige of the Sassanid dynasty enormously, and had established the Persian Empire as the equal of Rome in the East.
After Shapur’s death several of his sons reigned for short periods in succession, and a Mazdaean priest named Kerdir gradually strengthened his position at court. Kerdir used this position to begin asserting Mazdaean orthodoxy more aggressively, achieving not just the death of Mani and the persecution of his followers, but also the persecution of Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and others. Not for the last time the over-involvement of religious leaders in Iranian politics led to the persecution of minorities (and perhaps too, at length, to the discrediting of the persecutors).
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