Sasanian Empire

A vassal takes the crown

Drafted from Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2009)formation

The Sasanians began as hereditary custodians of a fire temple at Istakhr in Fars, vassals of the Parthian Arsacids. Ardashir, son of Papak, spent the 210s absorbing his neighbours in Fars, was declared a rebel, and in 224 killed the Parthian king Artabanus IV in battle on the plain of Hormizdgan.

What he built afterwards was not a restored Parthia. The Arsacid state had been a confederation in which the king was first among great houses and the great houses kept their armies. Ardashir and his son Shapur I built something more centralised: royal cities founded by decree, a standing administration, and a title — šāhān šāh ērān ud anērān, king of kings of Iran and non-Iran — that claimed universal authority rather than primacy among peers.

The other innovation was religious. The Sasanians attached themselves to a Zoroastrian priesthood and gave it institutional form, a hierarchy and endowed fire temples, in a way no previous Iranian dynasty had. This is what makes the empire legible as a confessional state four centuries before it faced one, and it is why its fall is remembered as the fall of a religion's political home and not merely of a dynasty.

The emperor on his knees

Drafted from Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2009)expansion

Shapur I, Ardashir's son, ruled for about thirty years from the 240s and fought three Roman emperors. He defeated Gordian III, who died on campaign; he took a large payment from Philip the Arab; and in 260, near Edessa, he defeated and captured Valerian alive.

No Roman emperor had ever been taken by a foreign power and none was again.

What Shapur did with it is the part that mattered afterwards. He had the victories carved into the cliff at Naqsh-e Rustam, below the tombs of the Achaemenid kings, in a series of reliefs showing a mounted Sasanian king and a Roman emperor kneeling or held by the wrist. And he had an inscription cut on the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht there in three languages — Middle Persian, Parthian and Greek — listing his titles, his provinces, his campaigns and his victories, and the fire temples he founded for the souls of his family.

That inscription, the Res Gestae Divi Saporis, is the single most important Sasanian document, and the contrast with what went before is total. The Parthians ruled Iran for four and a half centuries and left almost nothing written about themselves. The Sasanians, in their first generation, were cutting monumental self-description in three languages into a cliff chosen for its Achaemenid associations — and they are consequently the best documented Iranian dynasty before Islam by a wide margin, because they decided in advance to be.

The provinces the inscription lists reach from Syria to the Indus, and the title it claims is the one the dynasty kept: king of kings of Eran and Aneran — of Iran and of not-Iran — whose lineage is from the gods.

Shapur also deported the populations of the cities he took, which was the standard practice of the region from the Assyrians to Timur, and settled them in new foundations in Khuzistan and Fars. Among the deportees from Roman Syria were large numbers of Christians, which is how a Christian community that would eventually have its own church, its own patriarch and its own missions to India and China came to be inside the Sasanian empire — a consequence of the deportations that is taken up further on.

Amida

Drafted from Marcellinus, The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus (1902)expansion

In 359 Shapur II besieged the Roman fortress city of Amida on the upper Tigris for seventy-three days and took it. The fullest account of the siege was written by a Roman staff officer who was inside the walls for all of it and got out the night the city fell.

Ammianus Marcellinus almost never says I. He says we, and the pronoun is the reason this is the best description of a Sasanian army at work that survives from anywhere.

The morning they arrived

At daybreak, everything, as far as we could see, glittered with shining arms; and an iron cavalry filled the plains and the hills.

And at the head of it, the king himself: mounted, taller than the men around him, leading the whole army — and wearing, instead of a crown, a golden figure of a ram's head inlaid with jewels. Behind him came a retinue of high-ranking men of several different nations.

The detail about the ram's head is the kind of thing only an eyewitness supplies, and it is corroborated by Sasanian coins and reliefs: the king's headgear was the statement of who he was, and Shapur had brought his to a Roman wall to be looked at.

Ammianus is clear that Shapur had not intended a siege at all. He meant to test the garrison with a parley and move on to another objective. What changed his mind was being shot at, and then, in Ammianus's reading, an elation so extravagant that he came to believe the walls would open at the sight of him.

Seventy-three days

What followed was the whole repertoire of ancient siegecraft used at once.

Mines driven underground. Towers and engines brought up to the walls and burned by the defenders. Sorties by the Gallic legions that did the Persians great harm. And, in the end, the method that worked: enormous mounds raised against the walls until the attackers could cross on the level and enter the city.

Inside, the thing that decided it was not the engines. Too many bodies lay unburied with nobody to perform the rites over them, and plague broke out. Ammianus, who had read his Thucydides and says so, digresses for several pages on the causes of pestilence in general before returning to the fact that his own city was dying of one.

The escape

Amida fell in October. Ammianus got out at night, alone, and made his way to Antioch.

He tells it without any self-dramatisation at all — it is one clause among the military dispositions — and then goes straight on to what happened to the Roman commanders: some executed, others kept as prisoners.

And then the story he clearly thought was the most interesting thing about the whole campaign, which is not about the siege. Craugasius of Nisibis, a notable of that city, had a wife who had been taken prisoner by the Persians. He went out to a country villa eight miles from the city, ostensibly to arrange his own wedding feast with a high-born virgin, mounted a horse, and rode at full speed to a Persian raiding party he had heard was nearby. He gave himself up, was passed to the king, and got his wife back — along with his household and all his property.

She died a few months later.

What the campaign was worth

Shapur took Amida and lost so much of his army doing it that the season ended there. The city had been a strongpoint in a frontier zone that both empires had been contesting for a century, and taking it changed the line not at all.

That is the shape of Roman-Sasanian war for four hundred years, and Amida is the clearest single instance of it: two states that could each hurt the other enormously and neither of which could keep what it took. The fortress was rebuilt. It was besieged again in 502, and again after that.

Five provinces and a city

Drafted from Marcellinus, The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus (1902)expansion

In 363 a Roman emperor invaded Iran with the largest army Rome had sent east in a century, reached Ctesiphon, could not take it, turned back, and was killed in a skirmish during the retreat. His successor bought the army's escape with the eastern frontier.

Ammianus was on that campaign too.

What Shapur asked for

Julian was dead and Jovian, hastily elevated, was in Persian territory with a hungry army and no way home that did not run through Shapur's forces.

Shapur's opening demand was framed historically: the restoration of territories taken from him by Maximian, seventy years earlier. As the negotiation went on, Ammianus says, what he actually wanted as the price of the Romans' redemption was:

five provinces on the other side of the Tigris — Arzanene, Moxoene, Zabdicene, Rehimene and Corduene — with fifteen fortresses, besides Nisibis, and Singara, and the important fortress called the camp of the Moors.

Nisibis was the anchor of the whole Roman east. Shapur had besieged it three times in his life and failed every time.

How it was agreed

Ammianus's verdict is unambiguous — it would have been better to fight ten battles than to give up one of them — and so is his account of why it was not fought over.

A set of flatterers worked on the emperor by repeating the name of Procopius, a relative of Julian's commanding fresh troops elsewhere, and insisting that unless the army recrossed the river quickly he would hear of Julian's death and raise a revolution nobody could resist.

Jovian, worn down by this, gave up everything demanded. He obtained two concessions with difficulty: that the inhabitants of Nisibis and Singara should not be handed over along with the cities, and that Roman garrisons in the surrendered forts could withdraw to Roman ground.

And one further clause was added, which Ammianus calls mischievous and unfair: Rome was not to assist Arsaces of Armenia against Persia, even if he asked — though he had always been a friend and a trusty ally. Shapur wanted him punishable, and Armenia invadable.

What it meant

Shapur had spent forty years failing to take Nisibis by siege. He got it, and four other provinces and fifteen forts, in a treaty signed by an emperor who had been in office a few days and wanted to go home.

The inhabitants were allowed to leave, and they did — Nisibis was emptied of its Roman population and resettled. A frontier that Rome had held since Diocletian moved west in a single document, and stayed moved.

This is the mirror image of Amida. There, Shapur won a siege and gained nothing permanent. Here he lost a war — Julian had burned his way to the walls of Ctesiphon — and gained the most valuable strip of territory the Sasanians ever took from Rome, because the other side's succession had failed at the wrong moment.

Four centuries of this frontier turn on that repeatedly. Battles moved almost nothing. What moved provinces was somebody's dynasty coming apart while an enemy army happened to be standing nearby.

A state religion, and the church it made possible

Drafted from Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2009)aside?What aside means

The Sasanians are the Zoroastrian empire in a way the Achaemenids and Parthians were not. They founded fire temples on a large scale, endowed a priesthood, made the chief priest an officer of state, and produced under royal patronage the written form of the Avesta and its Middle Persian commentary.

The inscriptions of Kartir, the chief priest under four kings in the third century, are the clearest statement of the programme, and they are not comfortable reading. He records establishing fires and priests across the empire and then striking at Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, Nazarenes, Christians, Baptisers and Manichaeans — a list of everything else in the empire — and Mani himself, who had preached with royal permission under Shapur, was imprisoned and died in chains around 274.

So a state church, with the ordinary consequences. What makes the Sasanian case worth a chapter is what happened next, which is the opposite of what a reader would predict.

The Christians of the empire — many of them descended from the Roman deportees of Shapur's campaigns — were persecuted heavily in the fourth century, particularly after Constantine made Christianity Roman, because a Christian in Iran was now a potential partisan of the enemy. And then in 410 the Church of the East held a council at Ctesiphon under royal authorisation, organised itself into a hierarchy under a catholicos, and became a legally recognised community of the Sasanian empire. In 424 it declared itself independent of the Western patriarchates altogether.

The reason is precisely the one that had made it suspect. A church that answered to nobody in Roman territory was safe to have; and when the Roman empire condemned Nestorius and his followers, the Church of the East's adoption of that Christology made it permanently distinct from the church of its enemy, which suited Ctesiphon exactly.

What followed almost never appears on a map. The Church of the East, a legally tolerated minority inside a Zoroastrian empire, sent missions along the roads that empire taxed — to Arabia, to India, to Central Asia, and to China, where a stele put up at Chang'an in 781 records a century and a half of Christian presence under the Tang.

None of that happens without a Persian king deciding that a church cut off from Rome was an asset rather than a threat. The persecution and the expansion have the same cause, which is that Ctesiphon cared where a bishop's loyalty ran and did not much care what he believed.

The survey

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 3: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (1983)peak

The Sasanian empire inherited its structural problem from the empire it replaced: great noble houses with their own land, their own armed followings and a decisive voice in who was king. Ardashir had come from exactly such a house. The dynasty spent four centuries trying to reduce them and the reforms of the sixth century are the serious attempt.

The circumstances were a crisis. Peroz had been killed with his army by the Hephthalites in 484 and the empire paid them tribute for a generation; the Mazdakite movement — a religious and social programme that appears in the sources as an attack on property and on the aristocracy, and which Kavad supported for a time — convulsed the country; Kavad was deposed and restored. What came out of it under his son Khusrau I was a reconstruction of the state.

The fiscal half was a cadastral survey. Land was measured, crops and trees counted, and a fixed assessment in cash imposed in place of a proportional levy on each harvest — which made revenue predictable, made it collectable without an official standing in every field, and made it possible to budget. A poll tax on non-Zoroastrian subjects, graded by wealth and exempting the poor, the old, the young and the clergy, was regularised beside it.

The military half followed from the money. The crown began paying, equipping and mounting cavalry directly instead of depending on magnates to bring their own, and the single army command was divided into four regional ones under spahbeds so that no one commander held the whole force. The result was two armies at once: the dehqan gentry holding land and turning out armoured on it, and a paid professional corps beside them that answered to the treasury.

The reforms worked well enough that Khusrau I is the height of the dynasty, and he is remembered in the later Persian and Arabic tradition as the model of a just king — Anushirvan, of the immortal soul — which is a reputation constructed partly by an Islamic bureaucracy that admired the system it had inherited.

Because that is what happened to it. When the Arabs took Mesopotamia and Iran a century later they took the survey, the assessment, the tax registers and the officials who kept them, and the kharaj and jizya of every Islamic polity on the Islamic world afterwards are the Sasanian kharag and gizyat, under the same names. The caliphates ran Khusrau's system for centuries, and in a good many places they ran it with Khusrau's clerks.

The two eyes of the world

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 3: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (1983)peak

For four centuries the Sasanians and the Romans fought over the same corridor — Armenia, upper Mesopotamia, the Syrian frontier — in wars that neither could win and neither could stop. Counting the Parthian record before this one, it is six hundred years of the same war, and it is the longest sustained rivalry between two states in the ancient world.

The most important thing about it is that it was not a war of extermination and neither side pretended otherwise. Sasanian and Roman diplomacy had a protocol, a correspondence, ambassadors with defined status, and a shared formula — the two eyes of the world, two empires whose brightness lit everything else. A sixth-century Persian letter to Constantinople and a Roman one to Ctesiphon address a brother. When Khusrau I took Antioch in 540, he deported its population and built them a new city outside Ctesiphon laid out on the same plan, with the same amenities, called Weh-Antiok-Khusrau — Khusrau's Better Antioch — and let them keep their own bishop and their own baths.

The wars had a rhythm accordingly. Campaigns for cities and fortresses; a frontier that moved tens of kilometres and returned; enormous payments described by each side as subsidies for the joint defence of the Caucasus passes and by the other as tribute; and periodic Eternal Peaces, one of which lasted eight years.

It is worth registering how unusual that is. Two empires that recognise each other as peers behave differently from empires that do not, and very few states in any period have had a counterpart they regarded that way. The Ottomans and the Safavids fought a confessional war in which each side obtained rulings that the other's subjects could lawfully be killed. The Mamluks and the Ilkhanids fought for sixty years before signing anything at all. Rome and Iran had an argument about a frontier, and a diplomatic vocabulary for conducting it, and they kept both for six hundred years.

It is also why the ending is so abrupt. A rivalry conducted at that pitch by two states that each assumed the other was permanent produced, in 602, a war in which one of them tried to end the other — and the next two chapters are about what that cost them both.

The last war

Drafted from Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2009)contraction

Rome and Iran had fought each other for six hundred years by 602 without either being able to finish the other, in a rhythm both sides had come to treat as permanent: campaigns, sieges, a sacked capital occasionally, and a frontier that moved tens of kilometres and returned. The war that began in 602 was different because one side tried to win it.

Khusrau II had been restored to his throne in 591 by Roman troops. When the emperor who had restored him was murdered by a usurper, he invaded — with a better pretext than usual — and then did not stop.

Sasanian armies took Mesopotamia, then Syria, then Antioch. In 614 they took Jerusalem and carried the relic of the True Cross to Ctesiphon. By 619 they held Egypt, which had been Roman for six and a half centuries and supplied Constantinople's grain. Asia Minor was overrun to the Bosphorus. In 626 a Sasanian army stood on the Asian shore while an Avar host assaulted the walls of Constantinople from Europe, and the city held because the Persians had no fleet and could not cross.

That is the furthest an Iranian empire ever reached west, the Achaemenids included, and it lasted about two years.

Heraclius had already done the thing that reversed it. Rather than defend, he took an army by sea to the Black Sea coast, campaigned through Armenia and the Caucasus with Turkic allies, and struck at the Iranian heartland from behind the Persian armies in the west. In 627 he beat a Sasanian force at Nineveh and moved towards Ctesiphon.

Khusrau II was deposed by his own nobles and generals in early 628 and executed. The conquests were returned; the True Cross went back to Jerusalem; the frontier went back to where it had been in 602.

Both empires had spent twenty-six years and everything they had. The next chapter is about what arrived eight years later.

Twenty-six years, then eight

Drafted from Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2009)end

Khusrau II invaded the Roman empire in 602 and very nearly finished it. Sasanian armies took Syria, Palestine and Egypt, carried the True Cross out of Jerusalem in 614, and stood on the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople in 626. It was the furthest west an Iranian empire had reached since the Achaemenids.

Heraclius answered by striking at the Iranian heartland rather than defending the provinces, campaigning through Armenia and into Mesopotamia and destroying a Sasanian army at Nineveh in 627. Khusrau II was deposed and killed by his own nobility in 628. What followed was four years of civil war and roughly ten claimants, in an empire whose treasury was empty, whose army had been in the field for a quarter of a century, and whose Mesopotamian irrigation had been wrecked by flooding nobody had the resources to repair.

Yazdegerd III was a child when he was raised to the throne in 632, the year Muhammad died. The Arab armies broke the Sasanian field army at al-Qadisiyya in 636 and took Ctesiphon; the empire was not defeated again so much as unwound, province by province, over fifteen years, as garrisons surrendered and the dehqan gentry made terms locally with the conquerors. Yazdegerd was murdered by a miller at Merv in 651, having spent his reign retreating east.

There is a temptation to read this as decadence meeting vigour. The Sasanian state that faced the Arabs was not decadent — it had almost destroyed Rome six years earlier. It was bankrupt, leaderless and exhausted, which is a different thing, and it had spent everything winning a war it then lost.

Nobody restored the line. But three centuries later the Buyids, ruling Baghdad and holding the caliph in their hands, revived the title shahanshah — which was an assertion that the Iranian monarchy the Sasanians had embodied was still a thing a man could claim to be. It is the only such claim anybody made.

The fire that left

Drafted from Karaka, History of the Parsis, including their manners, customs, religion and present position (1884)afterlife

A state religion does not end when the state does. It becomes a minority religion, which is a much harder thing to be, and the best-documented part of what happened to Zoroastrianism afterwards is the story of a group who decided not to stay and find out.

The account of it comes from one text, and its limitations have to be set out first. The Qissa-i Sanjan was composed in 1600 by a Zoroastrian priest, Bahman Kaikobad Sanjana, living at Navsari in Gujarat — which is to say between eight and nine hundred years after the events it describes. Karaka, writing in 1884, prints it as the only substantial source there is and then spends a footnote demonstrating that its own chronology does not work: the Hindu and Parsi dates given for the landing do not coincide in 716, where tradition puts it, but in 936, and he canvasses the argument that the day and month have been transposed. His conclusion is that the accounts of the first and later emigrations have been confused with one another.

So: a community memory, written down nine centuries late, whose dates are demonstrably tangled. It is also all we have, and the shape of it is corroborated by the fact that the people are there.

Diu, and then a storm

The refugees came by sea from the Gulf and made land first at Diu, an island off the Kathiawar coast, where the text says they stayed nineteen years — long enough, Karaka notes, to learn the language, religion and customs of the Hindus, which turned out to matter.

Then an aged dastur, reading the tablets of the stars, made an augury that they should go, and they sailed for Gujarat and ran into a storm. In it they made a vow: bring us to shore and we will kindle a fire in your honour.

They landed at Sanjan, twenty-five miles south of Daman, in a territory ruled by a chief the text calls Jadi Rana, who saw a boatload of hard-looking armed men and asked, reasonably, what they were. The high priest answered with sixteen verses summarising the religion — we worship Ahura Mazda and the sun and the five elements; we keep silence while bathing, praying, making offerings to fire, and eating; we use incense, perfumes and flowers in our ceremonies — and the nineteen years at Diu are what made that answer legible to a Hindu prince.

They were allowed to stay. They asked permission to build a fire temple, and got it easily, because the people they were asking also revered fire. The temple was finished around 721 and the fire was consecrated in it.

The itinerary of a flame

Three hundred years of peace, the text says, and the community spread — Cambay, Ankleshwar, Variav, Vankaner and Surat to the north, Thana and Chaul to the south. A Pahlavi inscription in the Kanheri caves records that a party of Parsis visited them on 2 December 999.

Then Sanjan was taken. The Parsis fought for their Hindu ruler and lost; their general was killed by a dart; the Hindu prince fell in the same battle. What follows is the part worth having, and it is an itinerary.

They took the fire eight miles east into the mountains of Bahrot and kept it in a cave there for twelve years. Then to Bansda, north-east of Navsari, for fourteen. Then to Navsari itself. In 1733, with Pindari raiders about, it was moved to Surat; three years later back to Navsari; in 1741, after a quarrel among the priests, to Balsar; and on 28 October 1742 to Udvada.

It is still burning at Udvada.

Sanjan has nothing. When a Bombay missionary visited in 1839 he found one or two Parsi families; by Karaka's time there were none, and the only monument to the settlement was the ruin of a tower of silence.

The other direction

Some went east instead, and the traces are scattered through the Arabic geographers rather than through any single narrative. A son of Yazdegerd is reported to have gone to China in the seventh century. In 758 the Persians and Arabs at Canton were numerous enough to raise a riot and plunder the city. In 845 there is a notice of mobeds at Canton, and half a century later Mas'udi records that there were many fire temples in China.

What this is an afterlife of

Ardashir's dynasty made Zoroastrianism the religion of a state for the first and only time in its history: a chief priest who was an officer of government, an endowed priesthood, fires founded by kings, and Kartir's inscription boasting of striking at everybody else.

Four hundred years of that ended in 651. What the religion had afterwards was a tolerated status inside somebody else's empire, a community that got smaller every century, and a group of people who put a fire on a boat.

The empire is the reason anybody remembers the religion. The boat is the reason the religion is still going.