Heyday and Fall of Ērānšahr

[Semper Victor]

4.13. THE IBERIAN WAR (IV). THE BATTLE OF SATALA AND RENEWED PEACE TALKS.


In the summer of 530 CE, at the same time that his armies were invading Roman Mesopotamia, Kawād I also sent a second invasion army against Roman Armenia, thus launching a coordinated offensive in both parts of the common border. As with the battle of Dara, Procopius offers a detailed account of the events (and in this case, he is the only source too):

Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XV:

And Cabades sent another army into the part of Armenia which is subject to the Romans. This army was composed of Persarmenians and Sunitae, whose land adjoins that of the Alani. There were also Huns with them, of the stock called Sabiri, to the number of three thousand, a most warlike race. And Mermeroes, a Persian, had been made general of the whole force. When this army was three days’ march from Theodosiopolis, they established their camp and, remaining in the land of the Persarmenians, made their preparations for the invasion. Now the general of Armenia was, as it happened, Dorotheus, a man of discretion and experienced in many wars. And Sittas held the office of general in Byzantium and had authority over the whole army in Armenia. These two, then, upon learning that an army was being assembled in Persarmenia, straightway sent two bodyguards with instructions to spy out the whole force of the enemy and report to them. And both of these men got into the barbarian camp, and after noting everything accurately, they departed. And they were travelling toward some place in that region when they happened unexpectedly upon hostile Huns. By them one of the two, Dagaris by name, was made captive and bound, while the other succeeded in escaping and reported everything to the generals. They then armed their whole force and made an unexpected assault upon the camp of their enemy; and the barbarians, panic-stricken by the unexpected attack, never thought of resistance, but fled as best each one could. Thereupon the Romans, after killing a large number and plundering the camp, immediately marched back.

This opening passage of chapter XV of Procopius’ History of the Wars (entirely dedicated to this campaign), offers a lot of information, and is worth a detailed commentary. First, about the commanding officers. Modern scholars consider Procopius’ Mermeroes (Μερμερόης) to be a Greek corruption of the Middle Persian name Mihr-Mihrōē. Procopius also informs us that by this time Sittas had risen in rank to Magister Militum Præsentalis, i.e. commander of one of the two præsentalis armies based around Constantinople, and that he had been replaced as Magister Militum per Armeniam by Dorotheus. His presence in this theater implies that the Romans were not surprised in Armenia like they were in Mesopotamia by the Sasanian invasion, or that maybe they were preparing an attack of their own. Procopius also makes it clear that Sittas outranked Dorotheus, and so there was no split command issues, as the former commanded all the Roman forced in the theater, that he must have known well, as he had been Magister Militum per Armeniam until recently.

Another important information provided by Procopius is that the alliance of the Sabirs with the Romans had been short-lived, as 3,000 of their warriors had joined the army led by Mihr-Mihrōē. Obviously, Kawād I had managed to counteract Justinian I’s trans Caucasian diplomacy and had outbid him, thus convincing the Sabirs to join his cause. Obviously, as the Sasanians controlled the main Caucasian passes, there were no physical or logistic obstacles for the displacement of this body of Sabir troops to Sasanian-controlled Armenia. Other than the Sabirs, Procopius also informs us that Mihr-Mihrōē’s army also included another contingent of trans Caucasian allies, the “Sunitae”, who some modern scholars consider to be a Hunnic people. This is also interesting, for since the immediate aftermath of the Anastasian War, the Caucasian Huns had been generally favorable to the Roman cause and had kept up the raiding and pressure against the Sasanian border on the Caucasus, but now this array of peoples in the Sasanian army of Armenia seems to paint a different picture. After the excavations of the last twenty years, archaeologists have determined that the Darband Wall was rebuilt in stone during the VI c. CE, and that most probably Kawād I was responsible for this project. As we have seen in a previous post, he also reinforced and rebuilt the fortresses of the Darial Pass further to the west, so this shift in alliances among the steppe nomads of the Caucasus and beyond might be the result of this strengthening of the border, that dissuaded these peoples from their traditional raiding activities into Sasanian territory south of the Caucasus Mountains. Now, if they wanted to obtain riches from their southern neighbor, the only way left was to join its armies as “allies” (i.e. mercenaries or vassals entitled to subsidies).

From his actions at the start of the war, it is clear that Sittas was a proactive and daring commander, willing to take risks, and so he decided to attack first by means of a surprise raid against the enemy camp, although in Procopius’ text it is not made clear if this camp was the main Sasanian camp, or the camp of their Sabir and Hunnic allies. As we have seen in the previous thread “Ērān against Tūrān”, Sasanian camps in the V c. CE were formidable compounds, and scholars believe that this practice continued during the VI c. CE; a surprise attack against one of such camps would not have achieved much. And indeed, Procopius imply so in the next passage, as Mihr-Mihrōē’s army invaded Roman territory soon afterwards, unopposed by Sittas’ army:

Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XV:

Not long after this Mermeroes, having collected the whole army, invaded the Roman territory, and they came upon their enemy near the city of Satala. There they established themselves in camp and remained at rest in a place called Octava, which is fifty-six stadia distant from the city. Sittas therefore led out a thousand men and concealed them behind one of the many hills which surround the plain in which the city of Satala lies. Dorotheus with the rest of the army he ordered to stay inside the fortifications, because they thought that they were by no means able to withstand the enemy on level ground, since their number was not fewer than thirty thousand, while their own forces scarcely amounted to half that number. On the following day, the barbarians came up close to the fortifications and busily set about closing in the town. But suddenly, seeing the forces of Sittas who by now were coming down upon them from the high ground, and having no means of estimating their number, since owing to the summer season a great cloud of dust hung over them, they thought they were much more numerous than they were, and, hurriedly abandoning their plan of closing in the town, they hastened to mass their force into a small space. But the Romans anticipated the movement and, separating their own force into two detachments, they set upon them as they were retiring from the fortifications; and when this was seen by the whole Roman army, they took courage, and with a great rush they poured out from the fortifications and advanced against their opponents. They thus put the Persians between their own troops and turned them to flight. However, since the barbarians were greatly superior to their enemy in numbers, as has been said, they still offered resistance, and the battle had become a fierce fight at close quarters. And both sides kept making advances upon their opponents and retiring quickly, for they were all cavalry. Thereupon Florentius, a Thracian, commanding a detachment of horse, charged into the enemy’s centre, and seizing the general’s standard, forced it to the ground, and started to ride back. And though he himself was overtaken and fell there, hacked to pieces, he proved to be the chief cause of the victory for the Romans. For when the barbarians no longer saw the standard, they were thrown into great confusion and terror, and retreating, got inside their camp, and remained quiet, having lost many men in the battle; and on the following day they all returned homeward with no one following them up, for it seemed to the Romans a great and very noteworthy thing that such a great multitude of barbarians in their own country had suffered those things which have just been narrated above, and that, after making an invasion into hostile territory, they should retire thus without accomplishing anything and defeated by a smaller force.

Procopius carefully leaves some things out of his account here. Satala (modern Sadak, in Turkey) had been during the Principate the base of Legio XV Apollinaris. It was then located at the border between the Roman province of Cappadocia and the independent Kingdom of Armenia. But after the partition of Armenian between the Roman and Sasanian empires in the late IV c. CE, the Roman border moved considerably to the East. The new main Roman fortified border city became Theodosiopolis (modern Erzurum, in Turkey), located 143 km to the east in a straight line.

Location of Theodosiopolis and Satala. You can also see the location of the fortresses of Bolum and Pharangium.

This means that the Sasanian army must have enjoyed a considerable numerical superiority, as the Romans retreated quite far into their own territory without fighting it. Procopius also does not mention what happened with Theodosiopolis, but we can infer from the lack of mentions to it that the city was bypassed by the invaders. It is quite unconceivable that the Sasanians, who were usually careful about such things, would have left such an important fortified city (with an accordingly large garrison within its walls) unguarded behind their lines, so Mihr-Mihrōē must have left part of his army blocking the city. If despite this Sittas still decided not to fight him and to retreat, this means that Sasanian numerical advantage must have been quite substantial; indeed, both magistri left all of Roman Armenia to the Sasanians before putting up a fight at Satala. According to Procopius, at the time of the final encounter the Sasanian forces amounted to 30,000 men against 15,000 Romans, which seems to me quite a low number for two joined field armies, even if Sittas had decided to leave most of the Field Army of Armenia ensconced within the walls of Theodosiopolis.

Given that Theodosiopolis’ fortifications had been reinforced by Anastasius I and Justinian I and that in Armenia the invaders did not enjoy the advantage of surprise, the decision by Mihr-Mihrōē to bypass it is not surprising; clearly his objective was not to conquer territory, but to either plunder the Roman provinces or to engage and defeat the Roman field army in open battle.

Practically nothing remains today of ancient Satala above ground, and the site is still largely unexcavated. View of the remains of the eastern wall.

Satala is located in broken country, in a plain surrounded by mountains, a bit north of the upper Euphrates Valley, on the crossroads of two Roman roads: one that led from Samosata in the southwest to Trabzon to the north, and another that led from Amaseia and Bithynia in the West to Theodosiopolis and Armenia. Probably, the Sasanian invaders followed this road on an east-west direction. Upon reaching the environs of Satala, the army of Mihr-Mihrōē built a camp according to Sasanian custom, for apparently the retiring Roman army had taken refuge within the walls of Satala. They probably used for this the old camp of Legio XV Apollinaris, that this unit (according to archaeologists) had occupied until the V c. CE, and which was probably large enough to accommodate Sittas’ 15,000 soldiers. According to Procopius, the Sasanians pitched their camp in a place called Octava, located fifty-six stadia from Satala, that is, about eight to nine km.

The only visible remains of Satala today above ground is this fragment of the aqueduct that once brought water to the settlement from the surrounding mountains.

Sittas, who had demonstrated before that he was a dynamic and proactive leader, refused to simply wait for his force to be besieged at Satala, and instead he decided to lead a small part of his force (about 1,000 men according to Procopius) and take advantage of the hills and mountains that surrounded the plain of Satala to surprise his enemy. From Procopius’ account it seems that Sittas attacked with the Sasanians with this small force when they were already closing upon the walls of Satala, and that in that very moment the remaining Roman forces carried out a sally from the walls, thus taking the Sasanians between two fires and creating much confusion. Interestingly, Procopius also states clearly that both armies were formed entirely by cavalry, which is not surprising in the case of the Sasanians, but is more uncommon for the Romans; this could explain why Sittas and Dorotheus only had 15,000 men with them (i.e. they only took the field with the combined cavalry of both the Field Army of Armenia and Sittas’ Præsentalis Army). Still, the Romans were unable to prevail in the fight until in a lucky coup the Romans were able to cut down the standard bearer of Mihr-Mihrōē, which caused the Sasanian army to retreat.

But still, and like it happened in Dara, the Sasanians were able to retreat in good order and undisturbed all the 143 km to the Roman-Sasanian border, and Sittas and Dorotheus decided not to pursue them. In this way, Justinian I’s commanders managed to beat the double invasion planned by Kawād I for the season campaign of 530 CE. The Roman victory in the north though had more consequences than in the south, especially among the always problematic nobility of Sasanian Armenia:

Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XV:

At that time, the Romans also acquired certain Persian strongholds in Persarmenia, both the fortress of Bolum and the fortress called Pharangium, which is the place where the Persians mine gold, which they take to the king. It happened also that a short time before this they had reduced to subjection the Tzanic nation, who had been settled from of old in Roman territory as an autonomous people; and as to these things, the manner in which they were accomplished will be related here and now.

The significance of the fall of these two Armenian fortresses in Roman hands is bigger than what it may seem, for as Procopius wrote, there were gold mines in the vicinity of Pharangium, and these were important enough to have been one of the causes in one of the two Roman-Sasanian wars of the V c. CE. We will see this in more detail when we address the issue of the territorial administration of the Sasanian Empire, but there were gold mines in the trans-Caucasian territories of Armenia, Iberia and Albania, enough so that the Sasanian court created the post of zarrbed (lit. “master of the gold” in Middle Persian) to oversee the mines in these territories, a post that is unattested elsewhere in the Empire. Procopius goes into more detail about this event:

Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XV:

Beyond the borders of this people (i.e. the Tzanni) there is a canyon whose walls are both high and exceedingly steep, extending as far as the Caucasus mountains. In it are populous towns, and grapes and other fruits grow plentifully. And this canon for about the space of a three days’ journey is tributary to the Romans, but from there begins the territory of Persarmenia; and here is the gold-mine which, with the permission of Cabades, was worked by one of the natives, Symeon by name. When this Symeon saw that both nations were actively engaged in the war, he decided to deprive Cabades of the revenue. Therefore, he gave over both himself and Pharangium to the Romans but refused to deliver over to either one the gold of the mine. And as for the Romans, they did nothing, thinking it sufficient for them that the enemy had lost the income from there, and the Persians were not able against the will of the Romans to force the inhabitants of the place to terms, because they were baffled by the difficult country.

The Roman successes also caused some defections among the Armenian nobility:

Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XV:

At about the same time Narses and Aratius who at the beginning of this war, as I have stated above, had an encounter with Sittas and Belisarius in the land of the Persarmenians, came together with their mother as deserters to the Romans; and the emperor’s steward, Narses, received them (for he too happened to be a Persarmenian by birth), and he presented them with a large sum of money. When this came to the knowledge of Isaac, their youngest brother, he secretly opened negotiations with the Romans, and delivered over to them the fortress of Bolum, which lies very near the limits of Theodosiopolis. For he directed that soldiers should be concealed somewhere in the vicinity, and he received them into the fort by night, opening stealthily one small gate for them. Thus, he too came to Byzantium.

So, Pharangium was handed over to the Romans by Symeon, a member of the Tzanni people, and Bolum by an Armenian noble called Isaac, who two elder brothers Narses and Aratius had already deserted to the Romans soon after their victory at Satala.

Seeing that the military situation had taken a turn in his favor, Justinian I decided to resume peace talks in the fall of 530 CE, and sent his ambassadors Rufinus and Hermogenes to the court of the Šāhān-šāh:

Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVI:

Thus matters stood with the Romans. But the Persians, though defeated by Belisarius in the battle at Daras, refused even so to retire from there, until Rufinus, coming into the presence of Cabades, spoke as follows: “O King, I have been sent by thy brother, who reproaches thee with a just reproach, because the Persians for no righteous cause have come in arms into his land. But it would be more seemly for a king who is not only mighty, but also wise as thou art, to secure a peaceful conclusion of war, rather than, when affairs have been satisfactorily settled, to inflict upon himself and his people unnecessary confusion. Wherefore also I myself have come here with good hopes, in order that from now on both peoples may enjoy the blessings which come from peace.” So spoke Rufinus. And Cabades replied as follows: “O son of Silvanus, by no means try to reverse the causes, understanding as you do best of all men that you Romans have been the chief cause of the whole confusion. For we have taken the Caspian Gates to the advantage of both Persians and Romans, after forcing out the barbarians there, since Anastasius, the Emperor of the Romans, as you yourself doubtless know, when the opportunity was offered him to buy them with money, was not willing to do so, in order that he might not be compelled to squander great sums of money in behalf of both nations by keeping an army there perpetually. And since that time we have stationed that great army there, and have supported it up to the present time, thereby giving you the privilege of inhabiting the land unplundered as far as concerns the barbarians on that side, and of holding your own possessions with complete freedom from trouble. But as if this were not sufficient for you, you have also made a great city, Daras, as a stronghold against the Persians, although this was explicitly forbidden in the treaty which Anatolius arranged with the Persians; and as a result of this it is necessary for the Persian state to be afflicted with the difficulties and the expense of two armies, the one in order that the Massagetae may not be able fearlessly to plunder the land of both of us, and the other in order that we may check your inroads. When lately we made a protest regarding these matters and demanded that one of two things should be done by you, either that the army sent to the Caspian Gates should be sent by both of us, or that the city of Daras should be dismantled, you refused to understand what was said, but saw fit to strengthen your plot against the Persians by a greater injury, if we remember correctly the building of the fort in Mindouos. And even now the Romans may choose peace, or they may elect war, by either doing justice to us or going against our rights. For never will the Persians lay down their arms, until the Romans either help them in guarding the gates, as is just and right, or dismantle the city of Daras.” With these words Cabades dismissed the ambassador, dropping the hint that he was willing to take money from the Romans and have done with the causes of the war. This was reported to the emperor by Rufinus when he came to Byzantium. [531 A.D.] Hermogenes also came thither not long afterwards, and the winter came to a close; thus ended the fourth year of the reign of the Emperor Justinian.

In his response to the Roman ambassador as reported by Procopius, Kawād I kept insisting about the need that the Romans involved themselves in the defense of the Caucasian passes, i.e. that they contributed with money to the upkeep of the fortifications and the garrisons there. This is the same response that Kawād I had given to the Roman ambassadors during the previous attempts at peace talks and by now it was a standard Sasanian demand (also demanded by Pērōz, and by Kawād I during the Anastasian War). But now the Šāhān-šāh offered another possibility: he would agree to a peace between both empires if the Romans either contributed to the maintenance of the Caucasian fortresses, or if the Romans dismantled the fortifications of Daras, that he considered a Roman aggressive move against Ērānšahr.

John Malalas also mentions these peace talks in his work, and he included in it details absent from Procopius’ account:

John Malalas, Chronographia, XVIII, 53-:

At the end of the month of September the Roman ambassadors who had been sent to Persian territory returned, having made a treaty. The emperor Justinian, on learning that he had won peace for the Romans, was filled with joy. When he received the letter accompanying the treaty and read it, he found that it was as follows:

“Our ambassadors who had been sent to your Clemency have now returned and have announced to us the good intention of your paternal disposition. we have rendered thanks for all things to the Lord God in that an event befitting his goodness has taken place and that peace has been made with the help of God to the benefit of the two states and the credit of us both. It is clear that great glory and credit is due in all the earth before God and men to the fact that peace has been established between the two worlds under the reign of your Clemency and of us who truly love you. The enemies of both our states will be destroyed when with God’s help this peace is established. Our ambassadors then will arrive with all speed, for they must complete what is necessary to secure the peace. We pray indeed that your paternal disposition be preserved for many years.”

Rufinus was sent once more by the Romans, whence a second letter was dispatched to Persian territory; he found the Persian emperor had withdrawn from the peace agreement they had made between them. For news had come that the Samaritans in Roman territory, incurring the anger of the emperor Justinian, as was described above, had fled and gone over to Koades, the Persian emperor, from their own territory in Palestine, and had promised to fight for him. They numbered 50,000. They promised to hand over to the Persian emperor their own land, all Palestine and the Holy Places, a city which possessed donations from various emperors, both a large sum of gold and an untold quantity of precious stones. When the Persian emperor heard this and had been convinced by their statements, he withdrew from the agreement to make the treaty. He made his excuse the question of the gold-bearing area that had been discovered formerly in the time of the emperor Anastasios and was under Roman jurisdiction; these mountains had formerly been part of the Persian state. the gold-bearing mountains lie on the border between Roman Armenia and Persarmenia, as the experts say. These mountains produce much gold, for when rain and storms occur the soil of these mountains is washed away and pours out flakes of gold. Previously certain people leased these mountains from the Romans and Persians for 200 “litrai” of gold, but from the time the mountains were taken over by the most sacred Anastasios only the Romans were in receipt of the revenue that had been decreed. This was what upset negotiations over the treaty.
The Romans learnt of the Samaritan betrayal when certain of their men of substance were captured on their return from Persian territory, and were recognized after their journey to Koades, the emperor of the Persians, and after their agreement with him to betray their land as was mentioned above. There were five Samaritans who were recognized. On being captured, these were taken before the Magister Militum per Orientem and were examined in his presence. They confessed to the treachery which they were planning. the report on them was read to the emperor Justinian.
(…)
At this time, an ambassador was sent by the Persian emperor to the Roman emperor and, having handed over the letter he was carrying, he was sent away bearing gifts.
When the Roman emperor heard from the ambassador Rufinus about the transgression of the emperor of the Persians, Koades, he composed and despatched sacred commands to the emperor of the Axoumitai.

Malalas continues this passage by stating that Justinian I’s ambassadors convinced the Negus of Axum to invade and conquer Ḥimyar, but this seems to be a chronological mistake by Malalas, as the Axumite invasion of Ḥimyar had taken place the preceding decade, against the Jewish king Dhū Nuwās. What seems more interesting from the end of Malalas’ account is that allegedly the Axumite monarch sent “his Saracens” (i.e. the south Arabian tribes under his control) against the “Persian Saracens”, that is, against the Laḵmids and the tribes controlled and to or controlled by them in eastern and central Arabia.

Practically nothing is known about Sasanian heraldry and vexillology. This is a fragment of a late Sasanian wool and linen textile preserved at the National Museum in Athens, where a standard bearer can be seen carrying a standard behind a king or general. The scholar Matteo Compareti believes that the sixteen-rays rosette might have been a symbol linked to the goddess Anāhīd, while other scholars link it to Mihr/Mithra, the Sun God.

But the rest of Malalas’ account is really interesting, as the reasons mentioned in it for the failure of the peace talks are completely different from those described by Procopius. I am not versed enough in the study of these Greek sources to be able to guess the reason for such huge differences, but they are quite puzzling. Procopius was a strict contemporary of the facts, and a member of the imperial bureaucracy; he clearly knew people in the imperial administration and was generally well informed; this is why the absence of the story about the Samaritans and Justinian I’s appeal to the Axumites from his account is so puzzling, as well as the very different account about the Armenian gold mines: according to Procopius, they were in the Persian side of the border, and according to Malalas, they were in Roman territory.

Malalas wrote his account in the second half of the VI c. CE, so he was not a strict contemporary of the events, and he was a lawyer of Syrian origin (probably from Antioch) who moved to Constantinople and developed his legal career in the capital, and wrote his Chronographia in Greek. In this respect, he was not an “insider” of the imperial administration as Procopius had been, and these two points would have been enough to discard his account in favor of Procopius’ one, if it were not by two facts: first, that it makes evident sense in itself, and second, that it is quoted almost exactly by an even later source, Theophanes the Confessor (IX c. CE), but with some details and sentences absent from Malalas; this strongly suggests that both Malalas and Theophanes resorted to another, now lost source, that may have been contemporary to the events, and independent from Procopius. What this source may have been, I do not know, for as I have said above I am not versed enough in the Greek sources of the VI c. CE.

The fantastic creature that can be seen in this Sasanian silver dish (kept in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg) is often described as a “sēnmurw”. The sēnmurw, evolved into New Persian as “simorgh”, appears in Ferdowsī’s Šāh-nāma as a magical bird associated to the hero Rostām. But the scholars Matteo Compareti and Touraj Daryaee believe that the griffin-like creature depicted in this plate and in many other examples of late Sasanian art was not a sēnmurw (it doesn’t fit at all with Ferdowsī’s description), but merely a symbol or embodiment of the old Iranian concept of “xwarrah” (“fārr” in New Persian) the kingly glory that symbolized the right to rule bestowed by the gods into kings or nobles. As such, some historians associate it closely with the House of Sāsān itself, but that is far from clear, as the only direct link appears in a late rock relief of Xusrō II at Taq-ē Bostān in western Iran.

That the rebel Samaritans were in contact with Kawād I evidently makes sense. Even if they were motivated by Messianic hopes, the promise (or even the expectation) of military help by the Sasanian superpower must have seemed to them as a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity; this would also explain why after the uprising was crushed in Samaria the Samaritans moved across the Jordan River into the Roman province of Arabia; in this place they probably would have hoped that Sasanian help would have been better able to reach them, probably in the form of the Laḵmids of al-Munḏir III. What seems more surprising to me is that 50,000 Samaritans might have been able to reach the safety of Sasanian territory; it seems quite improbable that they could have reached it crossing across Roman held territory, as this would have implied crossing across several heavily militarized provinces, so the only open way would have been the wastes of the Syrian desert, probably with the help of the Laḵmids. But evacuating 50,000 refugees (Malalas seems to imply they were all men capable to bear arms, but this seems quite impossible to me, they would have been 50,000 in total, including women, children, and the elderly) across such a large extension of desert would have been a real logistic achievement, so I have my doubts about the total numbers. As for offering them asylum within Ērānšahr, that would not have been a problem, as the Sasanians had a long history of resettlements, deportations and taking in persecuted minorities within their Empire. What is also surprising is that Justinian I and the court of Constantinople took so long to realize this and reveals that (once more) the Sasanians seemed to be more capable at deception, espionage, and cover operations than their Roman foes.

Both accounts may be complementary to some point, although the reasons for the disagreements are so wildly different in them, that I have some difficulty putting them together. Personally, I would put more credibility on Procopius’ account in this case, if only because they fall more in line with the usual bones of contention between the Roman and Sasanian empire since the start of the VI c. CE, the influence of the Samaritan refugees and the issue of the gold mines may have been secondary or even “tactical” considerations that pushed Kawād I towards trying to keep the military pression up against the Roman Empire in the hopes of extracting more favorable peace terms from the court of Constantinople.

 

[Pzt_Kami]

asanian forces amounted to 30,000 men against 15,000 Romans

I personally do not believe Romano-Greek accounts especially when it comes to numbers. Many of them proved to be false and for propaganda purpose.

Still another swesome read from you @Semper Victor

 

[Semper Victor]

I personally do not believe Romano-Greek accounts especially when it comes to numbers. Many of them proved to be false and for propaganda purpose.

Still another swesome read from you @Semper Victor

First of all, thank you for the appreciation.

As for the sources, I try to engage in some criticism within my very limited qualifications and abilities; the proper study of these ancient texts and the provenance of the informations they offer is a highly specialized and demanding task for which high levels of skill in ancient languages and scripts (and having read a lot of primary and secondary literature) are a must, and I lack all of this.

But Procopius is quite a clear and uncomplicated case, compared to many other ancient sources. The bulk of what he wrote happened in his lifetime and he was a contemporary, and in some cases a direct witness, so his data in these cases are usually reliable. Another matter is when he writes sbout events that happened before his lifetime or in places far removed from his location; a good example is his account of Peroz's final defeat and death. It is evident that he based his account on an older source, but which one? Ancient historians rarely mentioned where they took their information from, and this is a serious problem for modern historians when they find contradictory accounts of a same event in different ancient texts.

Generally speaking, Procopius is a reliable source when he offers data about the Roman army of his time, like the numbers of men that took part in a certain campaign or battle, and even more so if he was present. As Belisarius' secretary, he would have had access to all (hell, he probably redacted them himself) the official dispatches and reports that Belisarius sent to the imperial court of to other fellow generals or officials. That doesn't mean he wasn't manipulative or tendentious when it suited him, all the contrary. He is probably the ancient historian from whom a larger part of his work has survived to our times and that has allowed us to get a very good perspective of his many philies and phobies, but as far as I am aware he is a reliable authority when dealing with numbers related to the military. Not so when dealing with the personal life of Justinian and Theodora.

 

[Pzt_Kami]

As I said dear @Semper Victor I'm not criticizing you as you should logically be loyal to the sources you chosen for your analysis (and apparently you have a good reason because Procopius is much more reliable than other historians according to you)

I just wanted to remind others to generally be wary of numbers in history books. Herodotus is a prime and maybe among the earliest example of a western historian who tries to manipulate facts/Numbers for the Propaganda purposes. Let's assume Procopius to be a very honest guy still Mistakes can happen. I've heard somewhere that even nowadays there can be misyakes when it comes to numbers in historical accounts/records of battles ,Like WWII that is less than a centuary away from us.

The reason I'm stongly disagree here and especially on the numbers in your last post is it totally seem illogical to me is that a Force twice the number of opposing side (30000 to 15000) easily beaten while both even have using nearly the same type of units (both are Cavalry armies and probably mostly heavy Cavalry) !!! I'm neither historian nor military expert but we both have massive interest in military history and persoanally read alot of books and other materials about it ,so to know that while it is not impossible but extremely difficult to achieve victory against a foe twice stronger

 

[Semper Victor]

As I said dear @Semper Victor I'm not criticizing you as you should logically be loyal to the sources you chosen for your analysis (and apparently you have a good reason because Procopius is much more reliable than other historians according to you)

I just wanted to remind others to generally be wary of numbers in history books. Herodotus is a prime and maybe among the earliest example of a western historian who tries to manipulate facts/Numbers for the Propaganda purposes. Let's assume Procopius to be a very honest guy still Mistakes can happen. I've heard somewhere that even nowadays there can be misyakes when it comes to numbers in historical accounts/records of battles ,Like WWII that is less than a centuary away from us.

The reason I'm stongly disagree here and especially on the numbers in your last post is it totally seem illogical to me is that a Force twice the number of opposing side (30000 to 15000) easily beaten while both even have using nearly the same type of units (both are Cavalry armies and probably mostly heavy Cavalry) !!! I'm neither historian nor military expert but we both have massive interest in military history and persoanally read alot of books and other materials about it ,so to know that while it is not impossible but extremely difficult to achieve victory against a foe twice stronger

Satala was not a frontal battle; the Sasanian army fell into a trap and was attacked unexpectedly from the front and rear, and the Romans were lucky and struck down the standard-bearer of the enemy general; in most ancient armies, such a situation would have caused the dissolution of the army into a panicked mass of men and animals trying to retreat, which clearly did not happen here, or at Dara. Procopius does not say it explicitly but it is quite clear from the context; otherwise Sittas (or Belisarius) would have pursued their foes. That the Sasanian army was able to react in such a professional and disciplined manner and did not lose its cohesion anytime is testimony to its high military standards. Indeed, Procopius makes it clear in his account of the battle of Dara that a Roman victory in open field against the Sasanians was a rare feat.

As for superiority in numbers, the next post will deal with the battle of Callinicum in 531 CE, in which the numbers were reversed: 15,000 Sasanians and Lakhmids against a Roman army of +30,000 men (including their own Arab foederati), and Procopius' account does not hide what happened: it was a complete Sasanian victory, and the Romans were saved from a disaster because of the terrain and because the Roman infantry stood firm at the end with their backs to the Euphrates. There is little or no manipulation of numbers in Procopius, although he of course tries to manipulate some things; in his account of Callinicum he tried to shift the blame for the Roman defeat against a much smaller enemy onto the Arab foederati, in order to protect the reputation of his patron Belisarius. But emperor Justinian was not fooled and had Belisarius cashiered; he only recovered the augustus' favor because he led his private army against the Nika rioteers in the Hippodrome of Constantinople a few years later and organized an obscene bloodbath among the populace of the capital. This saved Justinian's throne, and the grateful emperor appointed him to lead the expedition against the Vandals, which turned him into the most prestigious Roman general of his generation, thus restoring his military career.

 

[Pzt_Kami]

Satala was not a frontal battle; the Sasanian army fell into a trap and was attacked unexpectedly from the front and rear, and the Romans were lucky and struck down the standard-bearer of the enemy general ...

That kind of makes more sense now ,although I'm still hesitate on numbers at least your explination makes it more reasonable. Undoubtedly the quality of your work is unparalleled and I'm personally very grateful of you.
Thanks for thorough reply

 

[Semper Victor]

4.14. THE IBERIAN WAR (V). THE BATTLE OF CALLINICUM.


For this post, I will follow mainly the account by Procopius of Cæsarea in his History of the Wars, while I will also resort to the (much shorter) account by the Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene and the Chronicle of John Malalas, whose account differs substantially from Procopius. As a secondary source, I will also use the paper by the British historian Ian Hughes about the battle of Callinicum (published in Ancient Warfare Vol. 5, Issue 3). But there is a problem in all this: Hughes and other historians usually follow Procopius’ account closely, although it clashes considerably with Malalas. Again, this happens because Procopius was not only a strict contemporary of the events, but that as Belisarius’ secretary, he may have even been present in the battle. For the sake of legibility, I will follow first Procopius’ account and Hughes’ reconstruction of the events, and at the end I will quote the two other accounts in full and try to address on the differences between them.

After the failure of the peace talks during the previous fall and winter seasons, Kawād I renewed the attacks against Oriens in the spring of 531 CE, as described by Procopius:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVII:

At the opening of spring a Persian army under the leadership of Azarethes invaded the Roman territory. They were fifteen thousand strong, all horsemen. With them was Alamoundaras, son of Saccice, with a very large body of Saracens. But this invasion was not made by the Persians in the customary manner; for they did not invade Mesopotamia, as formerly, but the country called Commagene of old, but now Euphratesia, a point from which, as far as we know, the Persians never before conducted a campaign against the Romans.

The Sasanians attacked this time along the Euphrates route, instead of more to the north in the north Mesopotamian plain; the same route that had been used by Julian in his 363 CE invasion or by Šābuhr I in his second campaign that culminated in his victory at Barbalissos and the first Sasanian sack of Antioch. Once they crossed the border into Roman territory, the Romans would have indeed entered the Roman province of Euphratesia, which had been not targeted by attacks of the Sasanian army in this war, but which had been attacked several times by their Laḵmid allies. So, Procopius statement that until that point in the war Euphratesia had not been attacked by the Sasanians is right, but only if we ignore the raids by al-Munḏir III. And indeed Procopius offers an elaborate explanation about why this route was chosen this time, and he attributes it directly to the advice given by the Laḵmid king to the Šāhān-šāh:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVII:

When the mirranes, defeated in battle and with the greater part of his men lost, came back to the Persian land with the remainder of his army, he received bitter punishment at the hands of King Cabades. For he took away from him a decoration which he was accustomed to bind upon the hair of his head, an ornament wrought of gold and pearls. Now this is a great dignity among the Persians, second only to the kingly honour. For there it is unlawful to wear a gold ring or girdle or brooch or anything else whatsoever, except a man be counted worthy to do so by the king.
Thereafter Cabades began to consider in what manner he himself should make an expedition against the Romans. For after the mirranes had failed in the manner I have told, he felt confidence in no one else. While he was completely at a loss as to what he should do, Alamoundaras, the king of the Saracens, came before him and said: “Not everything, O Master, should be entrusted to fortune, nor should one believe that all wars ought to be successful. For this is not likely and besides, it is not in keeping with the course of human events, but this idea is most unfortunate for those who are possessed by it. For when men who expect that all the good things will come to them fail at any time, if it so happens, they are distressed more than is seemly by the very hope which wrongly led them on. Therefore, since men have not always confidence in fortune, they do not enter into the danger of war in a straightforward way, even if they boast that they surpass the enemy in every respect, but by deception and diverse devices they exert themselves to circumvent their opponents. For those who assume the risk of an even struggle have no assurance of victory. Now, therefore, O King of Kings, neither be thus distressed by the misfortune which has befallen Mirranes, nor desire again to make trial of fortune. For in Mesopotamia and the land of Oshroene, as it is called, since it is very close to thy boundaries, the cities are very strong above all others, and now they contain a multitude of soldiers such as never before, so that if we go there the contest will not prove a safe one; but in the land which lies outside the River Euphrates, and in Syria which adjoins it, there is neither a fortified city nor an army of any importance. For this I have often heard from the Saracens sent as spies to these parts. There too, they say, is the city of Antioch, in wealth and size and population the first of all the cities of the Eastern Roman Empire; and this city is unguarded and destitute of soldiers. For the people of this city care for nothing else than fêtes and luxurious living, and their constant rivalries with each other in the theatres. Accordingly, if we go against them unexpectedly, it is not at all unlikely that we shall capture the city by a sudden attack, and that we shall return to the land of the Persians without having met any hostile army, and before the troops in Mesopotamia have learned what has happened. As for lack of water or of any kind of provisions, let no such thought occur to thee; for I myself shall lead the army wherever it shall seem best.”
When Cabades heard this he could neither oppose nor distrust the plan (…).

Pērōz Mihrān, the defeated commander at Dara, was a member of the wuzurgān, the upper crust of the Iranian nobility, so any punishment that Kawād I may have wished to inflict on him would have been more symbolic than physical. Procopius’ account that he retired from him the right to wear an ornament that he displayed on his hair fits with what is known about displays of elite status in Sasanian Iranian: as I have commented in previous posts, numismatist Rika Gyselen thinks that the kolāh displayed by certain high officials in Sasanian seals might have been a bejeweled hat (other scholars think that it might have actually been not a hat, but a helmet, maybe made of precious metals) reserved exclusively to the upper nobility and members of the House of Sāsān. Moreover, in almost all cases these kolāhs also displayed a sort of emblem on the sides that can be seen clearly in seals and in the great rock reliefs of the III c. CE that depicted the kings and their courts. So, maybe Kawād I withheld the right to wear the kolāh from the unfortunate Pērōz Mihrān, or maybe the right to display an emblem on it.

Two personal Sasanian seals depicting high-ranking dignitaries (the one on the right is a mowbed) wearing the kolāh with personal emblems on it. In some cases, scholars have been possible to establish that these emblems are actually example of Pahlavi text with abbreviations of their names or posts, but in other cases their meaning remains obscure.

The gold cap above was found in Korea and is dated to the V c. CE, to the Kingdom of Silla. It is remarkably similar to a Sasanian kolāh, and it even displays the “feather motive” known from Sasanian swords and helmets. Objects like this one, highly influenced by the steppe cultures, have been found in abundance in archaeological sites that belong to the Kingdom of Silla.

What the Laḵmid king al-Munḏir III proposed to the Šāhān-šāh was the sort of deep incursion into the Roman rearguard that he had undertaken several times in past years, and according to Procopius it aimed at outflanking the heavy Roman defensive deployment that existed in Mesopotamia to the north and in Syria to the south (the Limes Arabicus, now guarded by the Arab fœderati under the command of the Ghassānid king Ḥārith ibn Jabala). The Euphrates Valley, located in between both border sectors, was lightly guarded in comparison, and offered a direct venue of approach to the rich Roman provinces in northern Syria and to Antioch itself. Of course, it was a risky operation, and everything would depend on speed and surprise, for if Belisarius’ army at Dara and the Ghassānids to the south were given time to react, regroup their forces and maneuver, they could easily close the Sasanian force’s path of retreat, and even trap it between superior forces. The invasion would be a major raid aimed at forcing Justinian I to accept Kawād I’s peace terms, and to make it potent enough to achieve this diplomatic goal, it would be mainly formed by Sasanian regular forces with the Laḵmids, led by their king, as auxiliaries. But the overall commander would be an Iranian general:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVIII:

This man’s suggestion at that time therefore pleased Cabades, and he chose out fifteen thousand men, putting in command of them Azarethes, a Persian, who was an exceptionally able warrior, and he bade Alamoundaras lead the expedition.

So, the army would be guided by al-Munḏir III in its path of invasion, but the overall commander would be Azarethes, whom Procopius calls “an exceptionally able warrior”. As usual, scholars are fairly sure that Azarethes was not his name, and that once more Procopius is rendering here, in a Hellenized form, a title or rank rather than a personal name. The Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene calls him “the Asthebid”, which could be a corruption (through Syriac) of Middle Persian Aspbed, i.e. “Master of the Horse” (“Commander of the Cavalry”), an ancient military rank that existed already under the Arsacids, while the British scholar Geoffrey Greatrex thought it could be a Greek corruption of the Middle Persian office Hazāraft (also rendered as Hazāruft and which was perhaps the same office as Hazārbed). This title means in Middle Persian “Commander of the Thousand”, and some scholars believe that it may have designated the commander of the “royal guard”, i.e. the elite troops of the royal household (what western historians anachronistically called “the 10,000 Immortals” following the lead of Herodotus and Thucydides). Any one of those two hypothesis imply that he was a man of extremely high rank, and that he belonged to the highest circles of the Sasanian court immediately below the Šāhān-šāh. He reappears in western texts only once more, during the account of the siege of Edessa in 544 CE by Procopius (then serving under Xusrō I, Kawād I’s son and successor). In Procopius account, it seems that this Sasanian invasion came as a complete surprise for the Romans:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVIII:

So they crossed the River Euphrates in Assyria, and, after passing over some uninhabited country, they suddenly and unexpectedly threw their forces into the land of the so-called Commagene. This was the first invasion made by the Persians from this point into Roman soil, as far as we know from tradition or by any other means, and it paralyzed all the Romans with fear by its unexpectedness. And when this news came to the knowledge of Belisarius, at first, he was at a loss, but afterwards he decided to go to the rescue with all speed. So he established a sufficient garrison in each city in order that Cabades with another hostile army might not come there and find the towns of Mesopotamia utterly unguarded, and himself with the rest of the army went to meet the invasion; and crossing the River Euphrates they moved forward in great haste. Now the Roman army amounted to about twenty thousand foot and horse, and among them not less than two thousand were Isaurians. The commanders of cavalry were all the same ones who had previously fought the battle at Daras with Mirranes and the Persians, while the infantry were commanded by one of the bodyguards of the Emperor Justinian, Peter by name. The Isaurians, however, were under the command of Longinus and Stephanacius. Arethas also came there to join them with the Saracen army. When they reached the city of Chalcis, they encamped and remained there, since they learned that the enemy were in a place called Gabboulon, one hundred and ten stadia away from Chalcis. When this became known to Alamoundaras and Azarethes, they were terrified at the danger, and no longer continued their advance, but decided to retire homeward instantly. Accordingly they began to march back, with the River Euphrates on the left, while the Roman army was following in the rear. And in the spot where the Persians bivouacked each night the Romans always tarried on the following night. For Belisarius purposely refused to allow the army to make any longer march because he did not wish to come to an engagement with the enemy, but he considered that it was sufficient for them that the Persians and Alamoundaras, after invading the land of the Romans, should retire from it in such a fashion, betaking themselves to their own land without accomplishing anything. And because of this all secretly mocked him, both officers and soldiers, but not a man reproached him to his face.

The first sentence in this passage informs us that the invaders advanced along the right bank of the Euphrates, probably in order to avoid the dangerous operation of having to cross a major river within Roman territory. It was the same route used by Šābuhr I in the disastrous (for the Romans) campaign that led to the battle of Barbalissos and the fall of Antioch in 252-253 CE, so Procopius was wrong when he stated that the Sasanians had never used this route. Belisarius (who was presumably based at Dara) was taken by surprise, and he had to split his forces: part of them were left to garrison the cities of Mesopotamia in case this was just a Sasanian feint, and he moved with the rest against Azarethes and Al-Munḏir III. Procopius states that he crossed the Euphrates “in great haste”; presumably, he did so to the north of the Sasanians’ line of advance, in the vicinity of Edessa/Zeugma, and from there they reached Chalcis in Syria (modern Qinnasrin), where they encamped. In Chalcis, Belisarius’ army was joined by the Ghassānid king Ḥārith ibn Jabala. We do not know how large this contingent of Arab fœderati was; Ian Hughes assumed that it amounted to 5,000 men, probably all of them cavalry, based on the account by John Malalas (that we will address later) thus raising the overall numbers of the Roman army under Belisarius to about 25,000 men.

At this point, Belisarius’ army was located (according to Procopius) at about 120 km of the invading force, presumably blocking its path of advance towards Antioch. Upon learning this, the invaders decided to retreat along the same path they had followed in their approach (“with the Euphrates to their left” according to Procopius), and Belisarius pursued them. The army that Belisarius took with him to Chalcis amounted to twenty thousand men, including infantry and cavalry, and it also included the forces of the Ghassānid king Ḥārith ibn Jabala.

Map of the Roman provinces of the northern part of the Levant. The Euphrates divided Euphratesia to the south from Osrhoene to the north; notice also how at Callinicum (modern Raqqa in Syria) the Euphrates flows practically on an eastward direction.

According to Procopius, Belisarius was satisfied only with having cut the advance of the invaders and forced them to retreat, and he did not intend to fight a battle with them, despite the fact that he enjoyed numerical superiority, and his men were aware of it. But the course of events would soon take a turn against Belisarius’ intentions:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVIII:

Finally the Persians made their bivouac on the bank of the Euphrates just opposite the city of Callinicus (i.e. Callinicum). From there they were about to march through a country absolutely uninhabited by man, and thus to quit the land of the Romans; for they purposed no longer to proceed as before, keeping to the bank of the river. The Romans had passed the night in the city of Sura, and, removing from there, they came upon the enemy just in the act of preparing for the departure. Now the feast of Easter was near and would take place on the following day; this feast is reverenced by the Christians above all others, and on the day before it they are accustomed to refrain from food and drink not only throughout the day, but for a large part of the night also they continue the fast. Then, therefore, Belisarius, seeing that all his men were passionately eager to go against the enemy, wished to persuade them to give up this idea (for this course had been counselled by Hermogenes also, who had come recently on an embassy from the emperor); he accordingly called together all who were present and spoke as follows: “O Romans, whither are you rushing? and what has happened to you that you are purposing to choose for yourselves a danger which is not necessary? Men believe that there is only one victory which is unalloyed, namely, to suffer no harm at the hands of the enemy, and this very thing has been given us in the present instance by fortune and by the fear of us that overpowers our foes. Therefore it is better to enjoy the benefit of our present blessings than to seek them when they have passed. For the Persians, led on by many hopes, undertook an expedition against the Romans, and now, with everything lost, they have beaten a hasty retreat. So that if we compel them against their will to abandon their purpose of withdrawing and to come to battle with us, we shall win no advantage whatsoever if we are victorious, — for why should one rout a fugitive? — while if we are unfortunate, as may happen, we shall both be deprived of the victory which we now have, not robbed of it by the enemy, but flinging it away ourselves, and also we shall abandon the land of the emperor to lie open hereafter to the attacks of the enemy without defenders. Moreover this also is worth your consideration, that God is always accustomed to succour men in dangers which are necessary, not in those which they choose for themselves. And apart from this it will come about that those who have nowhere to turn will play the part of brave men even against their will, while the obstacles which are to be met by us in entering the engagement are many; for a large number of you have come on foot and all of us are fasting. I refrain from mentioning that some even now have not arrived.” So spoke Belisarius.
But the army began to insult him, not in silence nor with any concealment, but they came shouting into his presence, and called him weak and a destroyer of their zeal; and even some of the officers joined with the soldiers in this offence, thus displaying the extent of their daring. And Belisarius, in astonishment at their shamelessness, changed his exhortation and now seemed to be urging them on against the enemy and drawing them up for battle, saying that he had not known before their eagerness to fight, but that now he was of good courage and would go against the enemy with a better hope.

This is a long passage, and in here Procopius’ defends Belisarius, trying to relieve him of any responsibility in the defeat: he did not want to fight the battle, but his men forced it upon him, even disrespectful to God Himself because they disrespected Easter (Procopius knew very well that this argument would go down well with the pious Emperor). According to Malalas, the battle happened on Easter Saturday, 19th April 531 CE, and at the time it was customary for Christians for fast during Holy Week before Easter Sunday. Both sources agree on this, but it seems strange to me that Belisarius would risk a major battle this way (which could happen if he approached the Sasanian army) if his men were so weakened by a week of fasting. Also, according to Malalas’ account, Belisarius and his generals sought the battle and did not shrink from it.

The Sasanian army was formed entirely by cavalry and so it should have been able to flee without trouble from Belisarius’ mixed infantry-cavalry army. If the latter was able to catch his foes, the most probable explanation for it is that the forces of Azarethes and al-Munḏir III were loaded with loot and prisoners captured in Syria (and indeed, Malalas’ account is explicit in this respect). It would have been exceedingly difficult for Belisarius to explain to Justinian I why he had allowed an inferior enemy to escape from his reach when it was loaded with Roman plunder and prisoners. The only reason that could make this reluctance believable is that Belisarius had secret instructions from Constantinople not to engage in field battle if it could be avoided, otherwise it would have been a decision impossible to justify, but Procopius says nothing of the sort (and if this were the case, he would just have said so, as it would have saved him the effort of having to resort to the “religious” justification). The interception had also happened relatively far from the border, which was located at Circesium, 161 km downstream the Euphrates from Callinicum.

Belisarius’ speech to his troops is nothing more than the usual rhetorical device so beloved by ancient historians, especially those of the classicizing variety like Procopius. Callinicum was located on the left bank of the Euphrates, so the Romans would not have the benefit of a walled city to their rearguard where they could have taken refuge in case of defeat, so both armies deployed for battle:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVIII:

He then formed the phalanx with a single front, disposing his men as follows: on the left wing by the river he stationed all the infantry, while on the right where the ground rose sharply, he placed Arethas and all his Saracens; he himself with the cavalry took his position in the centre. Thus the Romans arrayed themselves. And when Azarethes saw the enemy gathering in battle line, he exhorted his men with the following words: “Persians as you are, no one would deny that you would not give up your valour in exchange for life, if a choice of the two should be offered. But I say that not even if you should wish, is it within your power to make the choice between the two. For as for men who have the opportunity to escape from danger and live in dishonour it is not at all unnatural that they should, if they wish, choose what is most pleasant instead of what is best; but for men who are bound to die, either gloriously at the hands of the enemy or shamefully led to punishment by your Master, it is extreme folly not to choose what is better instead of what is most shameful. Now, therefore, when things stand thus, I consider that it befits you all to bear in mind not only the enemy but also your own Lord and so enter this battle.”
After Azarethes also had uttered these words of exhortation, he stationed the phalanx opposite his opponents, assigning the Persians the right wing and the Saracens the left.

It is difficult, or even impossible, to overcome a mistake in an initial deployment for battle, and according to Ian Hughes Belisarius made several of them in this occasion. According to Procopius, the Roman right wing (i.e. the Sasanian left one) was located on a series of low hills that rose sharply from the river valley, while the Roman left wing and center were indeed on relatively flat ground that rose towards the hills to their right. So, this seems to imply (and Hughes stated so) that the opposing armies positioned themselves in a perpendicular direction to the Euphrates. The problem is that this “reconstruction” by Hughes as based in Procopius’ account, goes explicitly against the initial deployment of the Roman army as stated by Malalas, who wrote that the Roman army was deployed “with their backs to the river”, that is, parallel to the Euphrates, and that Belisarius had ordered a large number of boats to be assembled on the river to his rearguard, to keep communications open with Callinicum and so that the army would be able to retreat if necessary. I will return to this point later.

Belisarius stationed himself in the center, and thus (according to Hughes) he lost the opportunity of having a clear view over the entirety of the battlefield. This was to be a serious mistake. He also put the Roman infantry (led by Peter, a member of Justinian I’s guard, another example of how these units acted as a recruiting pool for Roman officers) to his left, anchored on the riverbank. The regular Roman infantry led by Peter was to avoid a complete disaster in the end (in Procopius’ version). Procopius does not mention them here, but with the information he furnished in the passages that follow this one, we can reconstruct the rest of the Roman line of battle. In the center of the Roman line, to the right of Peter’s infantry, there was the Roman cavalry commanded by Belisarius himself, and to his right a group of Huns (high-quality troops that had won single-handedly the battle at Daras) commanded by Simmas and Sunicas. To their right was a further force of Roman cavalry under Ascan, and to the right of this latter force there was a force of 2,000 Isaurian infantrymen under the command of Longinus and Stephanacius. And finally, the Arab fœderati, commanded by Ḥārith ibn Jabala, were located at the extreme right of the Roman line. From Malalas’ text, we know that there were other “Saracen phylarchs” in that wing, and so that most probably not all of these 5,000 men were Ghassānids.

View of the Euphrates near Raqqa in the 1920s. In recent times the landscape of this part of the Euphrates Valley has been considerably altered by the building of the Tabqa Dam between 1968 and 1973.

It was quite clear that the Sasanians would not be able to try to outflank the Roman left flank, especially as, being spring, the Euphrates probably carried even more water than usual, so the decisive fight had to happen either in the center or the Roman right flank. But for the Sasanians, who were inferior in overall numbers but probably superior in cavalry, attacking in the center when the Romans had an open right flank would have been quite a bad choice. The logical course of action (and what the Sasanians followed in Procopius’ account) would be to try to concentrate their forces (using their superior tactical mobility) against the Roman right flank to try to envelop the Roman center and left wing, and this is exactly what Azarethes did. Until now, Belisarius had only fought static frontal battles at Thannuris and Dara against the Sasanians; he was unused to the danger posed by their superior cavalry, and so he had to learn it the hard way. Also, as we will see in the passages that follow, Belisarius made another mistake: he put the recently recruited and inexperienced body of 2,000 Isaurian infantrymen in a key position, linking the Roman troops with the Arab fœderati, and these untested troops collapsed quickly when they were attacked by the Sasanians in their flank and rear.

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVIII:

After Azarethes also had uttered these words of exhortation, he stationed the phalanx opposite his opponents, assigning the Persians the right wing and the Saracens the left. Straightway both sides began the fight, and the battle was exceedingly fierce. For the arrows, shot from either side in very great numbers, caused great loss of life in both armies, while some placed themselves in the interval between the armies and made a display of valorous deeds against each other, and especially among the Persians they were falling by the arrows in great numbers. For while their missiles were incomparably more frequent, since the Persians are almost all bowmen and they learn to make their shots much more rapidly than any other men, still the bows which sent the arrows were weak and not very tightly strung, so that their missiles, hitting a corselet, perhaps, or helmet or shield of a Roman warrior, were broken off and had no power to hurt the man who was hit. The Roman bowmen are always slower indeed, but inasmuch as their bows are extremely stiff and very tightly strung, and one might add that they are handled by stronger men, they easily slay much greater numbers of those they hit than do the Persians, for no armour proves an obstacle to the force of their arrows. Now already two-thirds of the day had passed, and the battle was still even.

From this passage, historians have assumed that 2/3 of the Sasanian army was formed by Iranian savārān, and 1/3 by their Laḵmid allies, assuming that the three parts in which Azarethes divided his army were of equal strength. That would mean 5,000 savārān in each of the Sasanian right wing (anchored on the Euphrates’ riverside) and center, and 5,000 Laḵmid horsemen in the Sasanian left wing, which would prove to be the decisive sector of the battlefield, presumably under the command of al-Munḏir III. Hughes guessed that the Sasanian force was deployed in a single line, due to the fact that they had to cover the same front the Romans did with less men, but this would go against customary Iranian battle deployments, as described in later Islamic treatises. In my opinion, given Sasanian custom and how the battle developed, it is more probable that (like at Daras) the three bodies of the Sasanian army (including the Laḵmids) deployed in two lines. This would have allowed them to keep a constant rotation of men in the front shooting arrows constantly and following the traditional Arsacid and Sasanian “wave tactics” while providing a reserve able to exploit any weakness in the enemy line or to perform maneuvers behind the front line, which would be harder to see by the enemy in the middle of the dust and confusion of the battle.

The battle began with the usual mixture of individual duels and the interchange of arrows. According to Procopius, Roman archery was more effective than the Sasanian one, which seems quite unlikely. Based on this single passage by Procopius, some modern scholars have hypothesized that by this time the Romans had fully adopted the larger Hunnic composite bow while the Sasanians still used the older and smaller Parthian bow (a variant of the Scythian bow). The problem is that this is not only unattested by archaeological or iconographic findings, but that it is quite unlikely. Out of the two empires, it was the Sasanians who not only had always given more importance to archery (as Procopius admits) but they also had to fight far longer and bitter wars against the Huns and other Inner Asian nomadic peoples, and so it seems quite likely that (if the Hunnic bow was superior) they would not have hesitated to adopt it. The Sasanian employ of bows in battle was based on mass archery tactics, by deploying rapid concentrated fire against dense enemy formations, and for this tactic, Hunnic bows would have been as suitable as smaller Parthian ones. Hughes accepted Procopius’ account and considered that maybe Belisarius hoped to break the morale of the numerically inferior Sasanian army through attrition; if so, he was sorely mistaken.

Aerial view of the remains of the wall of Raqqa as it was before the Syrian civil war. This wall was built in Abbasid time during the 780s CE, when the city underwent a period of great splendor, and cover an area probably much larger than that of the previous Roman city, of which nothing remains above ground (and as far as I am aware of, no excavations have been undertaken either).

As Procopius admits, after a long exchange of arrows between the Romans and the numerically weaker Sasanian force, the battle was still undecided, so Azarethes decided to launch his attack:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVIII:

Then by mutual agreement all the best of the Persian army advanced to attack the Roman right wing, where Arethas and the Saracens had been stationed. But they broke their formation and moved apart, so that they got the reputation of having betrayed the Romans to the Persians. For without awaiting the oncoming enemy they all straightway beat a hasty retreat. So the Persians in this way broke through the enemy’s line and immediately got in the rear of the Roman cavalry.

This was the decisive moment of the battle, and if Procopius account is true to the events, this was a true stroke of military genius by Azarethes, at the level of Frederick the Great or Napoleon. What happened? According to Hughes, the rear lines of the Sasanian right and center moved to the left and together with the Laḵmids, launched a concentrated assault against the Arab fœderati. Personally, I think more probable that the Sasanian general ordered the second lines of his right and center to carry out this maneuver. The Sasanians probably took advantage of the lack of visibility in the battlefield caused by more than 20,000 horses running and galloping across it; the Sasanian front lines in the right and center kept launching their “wave” attacks against the Romans and showering them with arrows, fixing them in place, and the second line could carry on this displacement towards the left undetected. In this way, Azarethes concentrated his numerically inferior forces against the Roman right wing, thus achieving local numerical superiority. Most probably, if Belisarius had stationed himself in his right flank on higher ground, he could have detected the enemy maneuver, but as he was in the center, he was unable to see it.

Initial deployment of both armies at the battle of Callinicum, movement of part of the Sasanian cavalry towards the left wing of the Iranian army and collapse of the Roman right wing (according to Procopius). Source: Wikipedia.

Procopius blamed the Ghassānids for fleeing the Sasanian onslaught without opposing resistance, and Hughes believed his account and excused Ḥārith for it stating that unlike Belisarius the Ghassānid king would have seen what was happening and that his men were greatly outnumbered and decided to preserve his forces. The problem is again that Malalas wrote that despite the fact that “some Saracen phylarchs” fled, Ḥārith kept on fighting. As I have written in previous posts, Procopius’ dislike against Ḥārith ibn Jabala is obvious in his works and he did not disguise it, so Malalas account seems more credible. Perhaps the other Arab phylarchs resented having been put recently under the suzerainty of the Ghassānid basileus by the Roman augustus. It is quite revealing in my opinion that, according to Malalas, after the battle Justinian I ordered an official investigation to be carried on, and Belisarius was replaced as Magister Militum per Orientem, but Ḥārith did not suffer any reprisals or punishments.

Having destroyed the Roman right wing, now the Sasanian and Laḵmid cavalry turned to their right and began to systematically roll the Roman line up, attacking it from the flank and rear, and with the added benefit that they were attacking from the higher ground, which would have greatly helped their visibility, archery, and charges. Now, the other mistake by Belisarius (placing his untrained Isaurian infantry in this flank) would become painfully obvious:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVIII:

Thus the Romans, who were already exhausted both by the march and the labour of the battle, — and besides this they were all fasting so far on in the day, — now that they were assailed by the enemy on both sides, held out no longer, but the most of them in full flight made their way to the islands in the river which were close by, while some also remained there and performed deeds both amazing and remarkable against the enemy. Among these was Ascan who, after killing many of the notables among the Persians, was gradually hacked to pieces and finally fell, leaving to the enemy abundant reason to remember him. And with him eight hundred others perished after shewing themselves brave men in this struggle, and almost all the Isaurians fell with their leaders, without even daring to lift their weapons against the enemy. For they were thoroughly inexperienced in this business, since they had recently left off farming and entered into the perils of warfare, which before that time were unknown to them. And yet just before these very men had been most furious of all for battle because of their ignorance of warfare and were then reproaching Belisarius with cowardice. They were not in fact all Isaurians but the majority of them were Lycaones.

Procopius displays here the issue of the battle taking place on Easter Day and the Romans being weakened by fasting (which makes me wonder why the men bullied their general into battle in the first place, according to Procopius, and what had happened to the energy with which they had been peppering the enemy with arrows until a few moments earlier). Ascan was the commander of the Roman cavalry stationed on the right of the Roman line, and apparently he put up an energic resistance, until he fell in battle, and then his cavalry collapsed. The name “Ascan” suggests he was not a native Roman (perhaps a Goth or an Alan) and that his cavalry was perhaps a “barbarian” unit in Roman service; in these cases, the death of their tribal chief/commander almost always led to the rout of the unit. Although in Malalas’ account, he talks of “Phrygians” fighting in this wing together with Ḥārith’s Arabs, so they could have been Roman cavalry after all. As for the Isaurian infantry, it broke down completely and was massacred by the enemy; Procopius explains it by informing us they were in fact green recruits and by the rather surprising news that the majority of them were not Isaurians but Lycaonians (as if that explained their lack of martial spirit, I guess).

The Sasanian and Laḵmid cavalry rolls up the Roman line; collapse of the Roman center and last stand of the Roman infantry and the survivors by the riverbank (according to Procopius). Source: Wikipedia.

After the utter collapse of what remained of the Roman right, the Sasanians kept rolling the Roman line up, and fell upon the Roman center (where Belisarius had located himself) on its front, back and flank:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVIII:

Belisarius with some few men remained there, and as long as he saw Ascan and his men holding out, he also in company with those who were with him held back the enemy; but when some of Ascan’s troops had fallen, and the others had turned to flee wherever they could, then at length he too fled with his men and came to the phalanx of infantry, who with Peter were still fighting, although not many in number now, since the most of them too had fled. There he himself gave up his horse and commanded all his men to do the same thing and on foot with the others to fight off the oncoming enemy.

The Roman cavalry in the center collapsed swiftly under the onslaught, and Belisarius fled to the security offered by what remained of the Roman infantry led by Peter in the Roman left flank (according to Procopius, many of the infantrymen had fled too), which was probably formed in close order (in a “phalanx”). There, Belisarius dismounted, and his cavalrymen followed his example, to join the infantry in fending off the enemy. It was their last opportunity. If what remained of the Roman army also collapsed and routed, the Sasanian cavalry would butcher them, and the defeat would become a complete disaster. Procopius does not mention the two Hun commanders in Roman service Sunicas and Simmas at all, and in my opinion this can be quite telling if we look at Malalas’ account, which we will do at the end of this post.

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVIII:

And those of the Persians who were following the fugitives, after pursuing for only a short distance, straightway returned, and rushed upon the infantry and Belisarius with all the others. Then the Romans turned their backs to the river so that no movement to surround them might be executed by the enemy, and as best they could under the circumstances were defending themselves against their assailants. And again the battle became fierce, although the two sides were not evenly matched in strength; for foot-soldiers, and a very few of them, were fighting against the whole Persian cavalry. Nevertheless the enemy were not able either to rout them or in any other way to overpower them. For standing shoulder to shoulder they kept themselves constantly massed in a small space, and they formed with their shields a rigid, unyielding barricade, so that they shot at the Persians more conveniently than they were shot at by them. Many a time after giving up, the Persians would advance against them determined to break up and destroy their line, but they always retired again from the assault unsuccessful. For their horses, annoyed by the clashing of the shields, reared up and made confusion for themselves and their riders. Thus both sides continued the struggle until it had become late in the day. And when night had already come on, the Persians withdrew to their camp, and Belisarius accompanied by some few men found a freight-boat and crossed over to the island in the river, while the other Romans reached the same place by swimming. On the following day many freight-boats were brought to the Romans from the city of Callinicus and they were conveyed thither in them, and the Persians, after despoiling the dead, all departed homeward. However they did not find their own dead less numerous than the enemy’s.

The Roman infantry and the dismounted cavalry formed some sort of closed formation with their backs to the river and managed to withstand the Sasanian attack. It is noticeable the discipline of the Sasanian force, for Procopius states that the cavalrymen who were pursuing the feeling Romans returned to take part in the attack against the last resisting group of Romans. This gives some credibility to the claims by some historians that for this campaign Azarethes had been entrusted by Kawād I with elite forces, perhaps some gunds of the “royal guard”. The exceptional performance of the Sasanian savārān during the battle also seems to support this assumption. Hughes hypothesized that the Romans may have deployed in the Late Roman formation known as fulcum, forming a triangle with one of the sides unoccupied (the one that aligned with the riverside), spearmen in the other two sides and bowmen in the center, allowing them to fight in a very compact formation impossible to outflank, and offering maximum protection to their archers.

If the Roman foot soldiers stood firm, this formation would have been impossible to break for the enemy cavalry, and although the Sasanians kept trying to do so until nightfall, finally they had to retreat without having achieved so, and the Romans also abandoned the battlefield under cover of darkness. Procopius also offers an account of the outcome after the battle:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XVIII:

When Azarethes reached Persia with his army, although he had prospered in the battle, he found Cabades exceedingly ungrateful, for the following reason. It is a custom among the Persians that, when they are about to march against any of their foes, the king sits on the royal throne, and many baskets are set there before him; and the general also is present who is expected to lead the army against the enemy; then the army passes along before the king, one man at a time, and each of them throws one weapon into the baskets; after this they are sealed with the king’s seal and preserved; and when this army returns to Persia, each one of the soldiers takes one weapon out of the baskets. A count is then made by those whose office it is to do so of all the weapons which have not been taken by the men, and they report to the king the number of the soldiers who have not returned, and in this way, it becomes evident how many have perished in the war. Thus the law has stood from of old among the Persians. Now when Azarethes came into the presence of the king, Cabades enquired of him whether he came back with any Roman fortress won over to their side, for he had marched forth with Alamoundaras against the Romans, with the purpose of subduing Antioch. And Azarethes said that he had captured no fortress, but that he had conquered the Romans and Belisarius in battle. So Cabades bade the army of Azarethes pass by, and from the baskets each man took out a weapon just as was customary. But since many weapons were left, Cabades rebuked Azarethes for the victory and thereafter ranked him among the most unworthy. So the victory had this conclusion for Azarethes.

Procopius does not mention Belisarius’ fate in his coda to the battle of Callinicum, and only mentions it, in passing, at the start of chapter XXI of this same book:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XXI:

Hermogenes, as soon as the battle on the Euphrates had taken place, came before Cabades to negotiate with him, but he accomplished nothing regarding the peace on account of which he had come, since he found him still swelling with rage against the Romans; for this reason he returned unsuccessful. And Belisarius came to Byzantium at the summons of the emperor, having been removed from the office which he held, in order that he might march against the Vandals; but Sittas, as had been decreed by the Emperor Justinian, went to the East in order to guard that portion of the empire.

The reason alleged by Procopius for Belisarius’ removal from his post as Magister Militum per Orientem is quite unconvincing, as the expedition against the Vandals was not launched until late June 533 CE, two years later. Let us now see the short account of the battle by the Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene:

The Syriac Chronicle of the Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene, Book IX, Chapter IV:

The Persians, having learned wisdom by experience through the great injury which they had suffered from the attacks of the Romans whenever they approached the city and went out against them, went up into the desert portion of the Roman territory and encamped on the Euphrates; and according to their usual practice they made a trench. And Belisarius at the head of a Roman force and tribunes came up against them to battle; and they arrived in the last week of the fast. And the Persians were found to be as a little flock, and so they appeared in their eyes: and Asthebid their commander was afraid of them, and those who were with him; and he sent to the Romans, asking them to respect the feast, “for the sake of the Nazarenes and Jews who are in the army that is with me, and for the sake of yourselves, who are Christians". And, when Belisarius the general had considered this, he was willing to agree; but the commanders murmured greatly and would not consent to wait and respect the day. And, when they went out to battle on the eve of the first day of the week, the day of unleavened bread, it was a cold day, with the wind in the face of the Romans; and they showed themselves feeble, and turned and fled before the Persian attack; and many fell into the Euphrates and were drowned, and others were killed; but Belisarius escaped, while the nephew of Butzes was taken prisoner (for he himself was ill at Amida, and did not go to the battle, but sent his army to Abgersatum under Domitziolus), and went down to Persia, but eventually returned (…)

And finally, the longer account by John Malalas. After it, I will make a comparison between the three accounts:

John Malalas, Chronographia, XVIII, 60-61:

In that year, the magister Hermogenes was sent into the eastern regions because of the Persian war, for the Roman emperor had learnt that a Persian general named Exarath, with a Persian force and in possession of a royal standard, had set out against Roman territory. Alamoundaros, the Saracen prince, with a great armed force, appeared at Kalllinikon, a city in Osrhoene, having come by way of Kirkesion. When the magister militum Belisarios learnt this, he came to support the duces with 8,000 men; among them was the phylarch Arethas with 5,000 men. The Persians advanced with their Saracens and encamped at night near the fortress of Gabboula beside which flowed a small river. After they had dug a ditch there, they scattered iron caltrops over a great distance around the ditch, leaving one entrance for themselves. Coming behind them with 4,000 men, the dux Sounikas found some of the Persians and Saracens plundering the villages round about and hunted them down. He killed a few of them and captured some others whom he interrogated and learnt about their plans.
The Roman magister came to Hierapolis and learnt that the Persians had encamped on Roman territory. He went off to Belisarios who was near the Persians at the city of Barbalissos, together with Stephanos and Apakal, the exarchs and the dux Simmas, with 4,000 men. Belisarios was angry with Sounikas because he had attacked the Persian army on his own initiative. When the magister arrived, he reconciled them, urging them to advance on the Persians. The Persians and their Saracens were intercepted at the village known as Beselathon and at Batnai and at the cities round about. The Persians made wooden engines, breached, and destroyed the walls of Gabboula and, when they entered it, they killed everyone they found and also took captives. They captured other places as well in sudden raids.
When the Antiochenes heard what had happened, they fled to the coast of Syria. The Roman generals sent messages to one another to be ready to fight with them, for it had been made clear on the Persian side that they would join battle. They collected all their booty and withdrew by night. When Belisarios and the Roman exarchs learnt this, they pursued and overtook them. The Persians turned and stopped, drawing themselves up, they encamped on the limes across the Euphrates and made plans. Likewise the Roman exarchs drew up their army and took a position opposite the Persians. They were arranged with the Euphrates at their back, while Belisarios ordered that boats be stationed along the riverbanks. Arethas was encamped on the southern section with Dorotheos and Mamantios, the Isaurian exarchs, while Sounikas and Simmas, with their army, were on the north. It was on 19th April, on Holy Saturday, at Easter, that the battle took place. The Persians attacked Sounikas and Simmas and, as the Romans resisted, the Persians as a trick turned their backs and retreated to their own men. When the Persians had come together, they realized that the Romans had the Euphrates at their back, so they attacked with their Saracens and joined battle; many fell on both sides. Among those who fell on the Persian side were Andrazes the tribune and Naaman, son of Alamoundaros; on the side of the Roman Saracens the dux named Abros was captured, while Stephanakios was wounded and fell. In the general mêlée Apakal charged into the middle of the Persians and was killed there when his horse trampled on a corpse. When the Phrygians saw their exarch fall and his standard captured by the Persians, they turned in flight and the Roman Saracens fled with them, but others continued with Arethas fighting. Some supposed that a number of the Saracens fled because of the treachery of the phylarchs. When the Isaurians who were stationed nearby saw the Saracens fleeing, they threw themselves into the Euphrates thinking they could get across. When Belisarios saw what was happening, he took his standard with him and got into a boat; he crossed the Euphrates and came to Kallinikon. His army followed him. Some used boats, others tried to swim with their horses, and they filled the river with corpses. Sounikas and Simmas continued fighting the Persians and these two exarchs, persevering with their surviving army, dismounted and valiantly fought a battle on foot. By skilful deployment they destroyed many of the Persians. They did not allow them to pursue the fugitives but intercepted three of their exarchs. They killed two of them and captured alive one named Amerdach, a warlike man whose right arm had been cut down at the elbow by Sounikas. They continued fighting with their army.
When evening fell the Roman exarchs and their army came to the city of Kallinikon, after the Persians had been pursued for two miles. At sunrise, the next day they left the city of Kallinikon, crossed the Euphrates with their army and the citizens and despoiled the Persian corpses. When the magister (Hermogenes) learnt all that had happened in the battle, he informed the Roman emperor. Having read the letter, the emperor Justinian ordered by letter the magister militum praesentalis Sittas, resident in Armenia, to journey to the East to give military help. Sittas also captured Persian lands. He came to Samosata by traversing the Armenian mountains. Constantiolus was also ordered to go to the East to find out the truth about the battle. After reaching Antioch he set out in the direction of the Roman exarchs, to learn the complete truth.
(…)
When Constantiolus learned of the events from the magister and the rest of the exarchs, he set out for Byzantion and reported the events to the emperor. When he heard a report on the battle from Constantiolus, he relieved Belisarios of his command and appointed Moundos to the position of magister militum per Orientem.

The three accounts have some points of agreement and many points of disagreement. As the longest and most detailed account and written by someone who may have even been present at the battle is the one by Procopius, I will treat it as the “main” or “canonical” account, and I will compare the other two to it.

I will also remind the readers here that Procopius wrote as Belisarius “advisor” and personal secretary and so he was strictly contemporary to the events and personally involved in them. The so-called Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene was an anonymous Miaphysite cleric (probably from Amida) who was also a contemporary of the events and who wrote in Syriac. And that John Malalas was a lawyer native from Antioch who moved later in life to Constantinople to carry on his trade and where he wrote his Chronicle in Greek, during the second half of the VI c. CE, that is, three or four decades after the events. Thus, while Procopius and the Pseudo-Zacharias wrote either as eyewitnesses, from what they had learnt from people who were present in the battle, or from news that spread soon after it, Malalas must have resorted to some written source now lost to us, but one that lacked the personal involvement of Procopius and his biases (i.e. his attempt to protect Belisarius’ reputation, his antipathy towards Ḥārith ibn Jabala, etc.) so although he is the most removed in time and space from the events, he was probably more impartial than Procopius, or at least as impartial as his source was. The great amount of disagreements between his account and the one by Procopius makes it clear that he did not use the latter as source.

The three accounts are in agreement about the date when the battle happened: towards the end of the Easter fast, and Malalas precises it happened on Easter Saturday, April 19th 531 CE. The three accounts also agree that it took place by the Euphrates, although the Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene does not detail the precise location, but the other two accounts agree that it happened on the right riverbank, opposite to the walled Roman city of Callinicum. Other than this, they are in disagreement about everything else.

Belisarius’ reluctance about fighting during the Easter fast is omitted altogether from Malalas’ account, while in the text of the Pseudo-Zacharias, it is the Sasanian commander who invokes it in order to avoid battle with the superior Roman force, and after some deliberation Belisarius inclines to agree with his proposal, but his officers (not the men at large, as in Procopius’ account) oppose it strongly, and he has to fight the battle.

Malalas’ disagreements with Procopius begin with very start of the campaign. According to Procopius, this was a marauding expedition that was aimed at taking Antioch itself in a coup de main, while in Malalas’ account as soon as it crossed the border the Sasanian force built a fortified encampment and began looting the province of Euphratesia (that Malalas calls anachronistically “Osrhoene”). The description of the thorough fortification work done by the Sasanian army agrees strongly with what (as we saw in the previous thread) the Sasanian army did in Gorgān, the southeastern Caucasus and northern Iran during the V c. CE and so is in itself perfectly credible. The problem is that such behavior is completely absurd in case of a surprise raid, so both versions are incompatible with each other. Malalas adds that they had encamped in front of the fortress of Gabboula (Gabula in Latin, presumed to correspond to the modern village of al-Jabbūl in Syria, near the salt marsh of the same name). Furthermore, Malalas states that the Sasanian army formally besieged the fortress with war machines and managed to take it, sacking it, and enslaving its dwellers. This further contradicts Procopius’ description of the campaign as a surprise raid and seems to imply that the Sasanian army might have also included infantry in order to carry out the siege works.

Possible portrait of Belisarius standing to the right of Emperor Justinian I in the mosaics of the main apse of the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy.

There is also disagreement about the number of men in the Roman army and their concentration place. According to Procopius, Belisarius marched to Chalcis with an army of 20,000 from Dara, and in Chalcis (modern Qinnasrin, in Syria) he was joined by the Arab fœderati led by Ḥārith ibn Jabala, who probably would have journeyed there from the south. According to Malalas, Belisarius came to this menaced part of Oriens with 8,000 men, and it is unclear if the 5,000 led by Ḥārith were included in this total or not; when he reached Euphratesia he reinforced the local duces (probably the duces of this province and the neighboring provinces). This again makes sense in itself; the Romans did not need to move the whole Field Army of the East to meet a limited thread like this one, as they had already the provincial armies lead by their respective duces. Belisarius would have moved directly towards Hierapolis Bambyce (modern Manbij in Syria), with his men (either 8,000 or 5,000 men, depending if the Arab fœderati are included in the initial total or not). But the first one to react according to Malalas had been the dux Sunicas, who with 4,000 men had harassed the Sasanian marauders. The fact that he is called a dux and that he was the first to react probably means that Sunicas (who was present at Dara, was a Hun by birth and had performed brilliantly there) wa probably the dux of the province of Euphratesia (according to Malalas report). Belisarius, as overall commander of the Roman forces in Oriens, clearly resented this show of independence by Sunicas, and it was necessary for a higher official to arrive to settle this issue.

This is another disagreement between Malalas and Procopius. In the latter’s account, Hermogenes is completely absent, while according to Malalas, he reinforced Belisarius at Hierapolis with 4,000 further men, including the commanders Stephanos and Apakal and the dux Simmas (the other Hun commander who had played such a brilliant role at Dara, and who also appears here also elevated to the dignity of dux). As an ex-Magister Officiorum and the Emperor’s personal envoy, Hermogenes outranked Belisarios and forced a reconciliation between him and Sunicas. Malalas’ prose is quite unclear, and so it is difficult to get an idea of the total numbers of the Roman army. If we take a “maximalist” approach, when Hermogenes reached Hierapolis the total numbers of the Roman army must have reached 21,000 men, quite close to Procopius’ numbers, but divided quite differently: 8,000 men had come with Belisarius from Dara, 5,000 were Arab fœderati, 4,000 were the provincial army of Euphratesia under Sunicas and another 4,000 were the reinforcements arrived with Hermogenes that included the other Hunnic dux, Simmas.

This methodic concentration of forces must have taken its time and so it would have furnished the Sasanians with plenty of time to besiege and take Gabboula, and then to start their retreat back to Ērānšahr, and it was while they were already on their way back that the Romans overcame them. In Malalas’ account, it is stated clearly that they were laden with loot and captives, so this must have slowed their march enough to allow the Romans to reach them.

The battle deployment according to Malalas seems at first view different to the one by Procopius, but a detailed look at it shows that is not the case. According to the former, the Romans deployed “with the river to their backs”, and with some sort of provisional bridge or ferry service made with boats covering the width of the Euphrates and linking their rearguard to Callinicum. According to him, Ḥārith and the Isaurians were deployed to the south while the two Hunnic duces Sunicas and Simmas were deployed to the north. As in this part of its valley the Euphrates flows in an eastward direction, this would imply that the Roman army was deployed perpendicularly to the river (otherwise, the distinctions between “south” and “north” would be absurd) and that Belisarius was located in the center, with the Arab fœderati and the Isaurians to his right (i.e. to the south) and the forces of Sunicas and Simmas to his left (i.e. to the north); that is, a deployment quite similar to the one described by Procopius, except that according to the latter Sunicas and Simmas were posted in the center an the Roman left wing was led by Peter.

There is no fancy maneuvering in Malalas’ account of the battle, just a frontal assault by the Sasanians against the Roman line. Initially the fight was undecided, with many casualties on both sides (according to Malalas, one of them was al-Nu’man, son of the Laḵmid king al-Munḏir III). According to this version, Apakal, one of the Roman commanders, charged into the middle of the Sasanians and was killed, which led to the flight of the “Phrygians” (Apakal is described as their “exarch”). This figure is quite similar to Procopius’ Ascan, and in both cases his death causes the flight of his troops, that according to Malalas were Phrygians. It is noticeable also that in Malalas’ account it is the death of this character that leads to the collapse of the Roman right wing (the Phrygians rout and this in turn causes part of the “Saracens” to flee) while in Procopius’ account the succession of events is reversed: the Arab fœderati rout first and then Ascan’s troops resist until he is killed. And here we arrive to another of the obvious disagreements between Procopius and Malalas: according to the former Ḥārith ibn Jabala fled, while according to the latter, he carried on fighting even after other Arab phylarchs had fled; as we will see, Malala’s version is quite more credible in this respect. As in Procopius’ version, in Malalas text the Isaurians also rout and try to cross the Euphrates swimming. I should precise here that in the Euphrates riverbed just opposite Callinicum (modern Raqqa in Syria) there are several islands, so the crossing of the river is less difficult in this point that could be thought otherwise.

And then we reach the main point of disagreement between both sources: the role played by Belisarius himself. While in Procopius’ detailed account Belisarius can only be found guilty of committing deployment mistakes (i.e. of bad generalship) in Malalas account he is guilty of fleeing the battlefield with his men after the right wing crumbled, crossing the Euphrates to the safety of the left bank and the walls of Callinicum. And obviously, this behavior would have been unacceptable in a general. Again, both accounts are incompatible, and given Procopius’ obvious interest in upholding the reputation of his patron Belisarius, there is reason to suspect that he might have embellished his account, although it is impossible for us to prove it beyond doubt.

Two members of the reenactment group Numerus Invictorum in the garb of Roman infantry soldiers of the late VI – early VII centuries CE.

The role played by the Roman infantry of the left wing, its commander Peter, and Belisarius in Procopius’ account as the focus of the heroic last resistance against the Sasanians in Procopius’ account is attributed to the troops of the Roman right wing under Sunicas and Simmas. According to Malalas, these two Hun commanders dismounted and them and his troops fought as infantry fending off the Sasanian attacks, and remained in the battlefield after the Sasanians retreated, to the point that in this account it is the Romans who appear as the victors, having been left in possession of the battlefield. Of course, this part of Malalas’ account is also incompatible with Procopius. But there is something that makes me suspicious that again Malalas might have been right here: Sunicas and Simmas appear in the initial battle deployment by Procopius, but later they disappear completely from his narration, and given their excellent performance at Dara it is clear that they were good field commanders.

The outcome after the battle also makes more sense in Malalas’ version. Both sources agree that Belisarius was summoned to Constantinople, but Procopius’ statement that this was so that Belisarius could prepare the campaign against the Vandals is quite hard to believe. The invasion fleet towards North Africa would not leave the Golden Horn until late June 533 CE, more than two years later, and if Belisarius were a successful general Justinian I would have never taken him out from the East while there was still a war against the Sasanians going on. Malalas’ account that Justinian I sent Constantiolus to carry out an official enquiry makes more sense and is completely in line with Justinian’s way of acting, and that the conclusions of this enquiry were not favorable to Belisarius seems a more plausible reason for his being recalled to the capital and his replacement for Mundus as Magister Militum per Orientem. Notice also that Justinian I did not punish Ḥārith ibn Jabala either and this seems to imply again that Malalas’ account is correct; i.e. that he was not guilty of fleeing the battlefield. If Procopius’ account were true, he would have been most probably dismissed as overall commander of all the Arab fœderati of Rome in the East, especially considering that at this point in time his appointment was still quite recent.

Still, both sides paint the outcome of the battle as either a Pyrrhic victory for the Sasanians with many casualties or as a Roman semi-victory as the Roman infantry remained in the battlefield. But the fact that Justinian I was forced to dispatch to Oriens Sittas with his præsentalis army (which had been in Armenia until then) as attested by both Procopius and Malalas, seems to suggest otherwise.

 

[Semper Victor]

4.14. THE IBERIAN WAR (VI). THE DEATH OF KAWĀD I.


As we have seen in the previous post, according to Procopius after the battle of Callinicum the emperor Justinian I sent the ex-magister officiorum Hermogenes to try to renew the peace talks with Kawād I, but without result. The Šāhān-šāh wanted to exploit his military advantage and renewed the offensive against the Roman Empire. There are some disagreements in the sources about what parts of the Roman East were targeted in this Sasanian invasion:

John Malalas, Chronographia, XVIII, 61:

(…) The Romans learned that the Persian exarchs with a Persian force and Saracens had moved against Osrhoene, and had encircled the fort known as Abgersaton, which had been built by Abgaros, the toparch of the city of Osrhoene. It had an old brick wall. The garrison inside killed 1,000 of the Persians by shooting down with their arrows; and when they ran out of arrows, they used slings and killed many of them. As a result the Persians were hard-pressed, and by use of a variety of engines they dug through the brick wall of the fortress and started to make their way in. But those of the wall became aware of the breach that had been made by the barbarians and came down from the wall; they began to cut down with their swords the Persians who were entering. The Persians realized this and, while the Roman soldiers were occupied at the breach, they took ladders and made their way up to the wall at night. They forced their way in, captured the fortress and killed everyone, except for a few who were able to escape and brought news of what had happened. The Persians set out from there and returned to Persian territory.

Malalas follows this passage with the notice about the replacement of Belisarius by Moundos, thus implying that Abgersaton fell while the former was still the magister militum per Orientem. A brief notice in the Chronicle of the Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene also mentions the fortress of Abgersaton, but only in passing, while Procopius does not mention it at all. I have been unable to identify the exact location of Abgersaton; if we assume that with “Oshroene” Malalas (who was quite sloppy with the usage of geographical terms and titles) was referring to the late Roman province of the same name (east of the Euphrates, and west of the province Mesopotamia) then it must have located in the western part of the upper Mesopotamian plain under Roman control, probably in the vicinity of Edessa; the reference to “Abgaros” is to one of the several kings of that name (“Abgar”) that ruled the Kingdom of Osrhoene from their capital in Edessa before its gradual annexation by the Roman Empire in the second half of the II c. CE and the early III c. CE. The location of this attack suggests that once more the Sasanians had managed to slip part the screen of Roman fortresses in Mesopotamia, either by bypassing it to the south (crossing the desert) or marching again along the Euphrates Valley, managing thus to attack a fortress located to the rearguard of the main location of the Field Army of the East at Dara.

The Nymphius River (modern Batman Su, in Turkey) that acted as border between the Roman region Sophanene and Sasanian-held Arzanene.

According to Malalas, after the fall of this fortress and the recalling of Belisarius to Constantinople, there were renewed attempts at reopening diplomatic talks from both sides:

John Malalas, Chronographia, XVIII, 61-63:

In the month of June, while the Roman magistri militum were making preparations against the Persians, Alamoundaros, the prince of the Saracens, wrote to the Romans for a deacon called Sergius to be sent to him so that he could convey peace terms through him to the Roman emperor. Sergius was sent back to the Roman emperor with the letter sent by Alamoundaros. The emperor, having read the letter, did not stop his campaign against the Persians. He sent Rufinus as an ambassador to Persia with a letter for the king recommending that he accept friendship; “for it is honourable and glorious to make the two states to live in peace. If you do not do this, I shall seize the Persian land for myself”.
At the same time Sergius the deacon was sent to king Alamoundaros with imperial gifts.
In that year gifts were sent from the emperor of the Romans to the emperor of the Persians. Likewise the Augusta sent gifts to the Persian empress, who was his sister. When Rufinus and Strategios reached the city of Edessa they sent a message to Koades, the emperor of the Persians. He put off receiving them, since he had sent a force secretly against the Romans.
In that year Demosthenes was sent to the East, conveying a considerable sum of money to prepare granaries in each city because of the war with Persia. When he reached Antioch, he then went on to Osrhoene.

It is clear that both rulers wanted peace, but both wanted to achieve it in terms favorable to them, from a position of force, and as the war remained mostly undecided, neither was willing to concede. But it was more pressing for Kawād I, who was now more than seventy years old, and with a disputed succession ahead, this is probably why he showed himself more aggressive, in hopes of forcing the Romans to concede defeat before his death (notice the threatening response that the Roman augustus sent back to the šāhān-šāh). Greatrex and Lieu noted that it is interesting how Kawād I chose al-Munḏir III to initiate this round of peace talks and suggested that Justinian I may have seized the opportunity to try to establish diplomatic links with the Laḵmid king. Irfan Shahīd thought improbable that such an important diplomatic mission would have been entrusted to a simple deacon and suggested that “Sergius the deacon” must have been Sergius, the bishop of Sergiopolis (modern al-Ruṣāfa or Reṣafa in Syria) who had already taken part in the talks at Ramla to arrange the release of several Roman officers held captive by the Laḵmids.

These tentative talks failed again, and the Sasanians invaded Roman territory once more. This invasion, which was to be the last one of this war, is reported in all the three main sources:

John Malalas, Chronographia, XVIII, 65-66:

In that year, a report was sent from Hermogenes concerning a battle which had taken place between Romans and Persians. The Persian generals had made a raid with a force of 6,000 men, to capture Martyropolis, for they had camped in the area of Amida by the river known as Nymphios. The Romans made a stand against the Persians but could not drive them back. When a second battle took place, the Romans, using the tactic of flight, appeared to be in retreat. The Persians made a charge and, thinking their opponents were in flight, broke their own ranks. The Romans turned and cut down 2,000 of the Persians, taking some of their exarchs as prisoners and capturing some standards from them. When the rest escaped and expected to cross the river Nymphios, they perished in its currents as they were pursued. The Romans returned victorious to Martyropolis. The Roman dux went out with the landowners and stripped the Persian corpses, having put their exarchs under guard.
In that year Dorotheos, the magister militum per Armeniam, also set out against the Persians with a Roman force. He won a victory, and killed Persarmenians and Persians, whom he treated cruelly. He also captured many Persian fortresses. One of those he captured was a strong fortress on top of a mountain, approached by a single narrow pathway, by which the inhabitants came down to draw their water from the river which flowed past. The Persian traders used to store up there all the goods they carried with them for their business, since the place was safe. When news of this was brought to Dorotheos, he encircled the fortress and put a guard on the path to it. The Persians inside were starved out and surrendered, persuaded by sworn promises. When a report was sent by Dorotheos to the emperor Justinian about what had been found in the fortress, he sent out Narses the cubicularius to take over what was stored there. When Narses arrived, they handed everything over to him.
The Persian exarchs reported the events to their emperor. A large Persian army was sent out, and came close to Martyropolis, for they had received a message from their emperor not to return to Persia until they had recaptured the fortress. They appeared before the place and besieged it, making attacks. They undermined the wall and made scaling-ladders, setting them up against the wall. Later they constructed a tall wooden tower but won no advantage, for among those besieged there was a clever man who worked out counterstrategies to oppose the Persian schemes. He made a taller tower inside the walls and, with the Persians fighting from the tower outside and the Romans fighting back from the tower inside, the Romans used a machine to drop a column which smashed everything to the ground and killed many Persians at the same time. When the rest of the Persians saw what had happened, since they were suffering losses and had also heard that Sittas, the Roman magister militum (præsentalis) was approaching to help those in the fortress, they withdrew, frightened that they would be surrounded. When the emperor Justinian heard this, he instructed his ambassadors not to enter Persia until he sent them a second letter, and so they remained on Roman territory with the gifts.

So, according to Malalas, this last round of fighting was clearly favorable to the Romans. The Sasanian incursion against Martyropolis was soundly defeated by the Romans (as the invading force was formed only by 6,000 men, it was probably defeated by the local forces of the provincial dux, who is the only Roman official named by Malalas). Next came a Roman incursion into Sasanian Armenia, led by Dorotheus, the magister militum per Armeniam, and that led to the capture of an important (but unnamed) Sasanian fortress were the Romans captured such a rich booty that emperor Justinian sent one of his main court officials, the praepositus sacri cubiculi (shortened as cubicularius) to seize it and bring it to the capital. The Sasanian counterattack to retake the fortress failed, and the Sasanian army had to retreat due to the approach of the magister militum præsentalis Sittas and his army. Notice also how Malalas informs us that upon hearing of these Roman successes, emperor Justinian ordered his ambassadors Rufinus and Strategius, who were at Edessa waiting for permission from the Sasanian court to enter Ērānšahr, to wait there with the gifts (for Kawād I and his wife) that they were carrying until they received new written instructions from him. Rather than open war, this was a sort of diplomatic game carried out by way of arms.

Above: location of Martyropolis in the eastern Roman border.

Above: location of Martyropolis in the Upper Tigris Valley northeast of Amida. Nisibis and there were located south of the Tigris and the Tur Abdin Mountains.

Let now us see the version of the events as told by the Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene:

The Syriac Chronicle of the Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene, Book IX, Chapter VI:

The villages in the country of Arzanene are the property of the Persian crown, and no small sum is collected as poll-tax from their inhabitants for the king's treasury and for the office of the Ptehasha (i.e. the bidaxš, which was presumably the title of the Sasanian governor of Arzanene), who is stationed there (he is the king's prefect). To this country, as related above, Bessa the dux did much injury, who took the nephew of the Ptehasha captive, and also kept him prisoner in Martyropolis. And King Kawād was much distressed when he heard from the Ptehasha about the devastation of the country: which same Hormizd left no stone unturned, using force and cunning (?) against Martyropolis, in order to get possession of it, for it acts as an ambush and a place of refuge for a Roman army, enabling it to ravage Arzanene. And an army was, so to speak, equipped by the Persian army: Mihr Girowi was sent to hire a large number of Huns and bring them to their assistance. And they came and were gathered together against Martyropolis at the beginning of the year ten; and they made a trench against it, and a "mule" and many mines; and they made assaults upon it and pressed it hard. And in it was Butzes and a Roman force of no small size, and they drove large numbers of Persians back in battle. But Nonnus also, the bishop of the city, had died.
Now Belisarius, being held culpable by the king on account of the rout which had been inflicted on the Roman army by the Persians at Thannuris and on the Euphrates, had been dismissed from his command, and went up to the king; and he was succeeded at Dara by Constantine.
And a large Roman army was mustered, and Sittas was general; and Bar Gabala (i.e. Ḥārith ibn Jabala), the Saracen king, was with them. And they reached Amida in November (?) of the year ten; and John, the hermit of Anastasia, a man of honourable character, who had been elected to the bishopric, accompanied them. And, when they had gone to Martyropolis and the winter came on (and the country is northerly and cold), the Persians were impeded by rain and mud, and underwent hardships, while they were also afraid of the numbers of the Roman army; and Kawād their king also had died while they were there; and they made a compact with the Romans to withdraw from the city.
And soon after they had withdrawn and Martyropolis had been freed from blockade, and the Roman army had returned, the Huns, who had been hired by the Persians, arrived. This great people suddenly attacked the territory of the Romans and massacred and slew many of the tillers of the soil and burned villages and their churches; and they crossed the Euphrates and advanced as far as Antioch; and no one stood before them or did them any harm except only the same Bessa, the duke of Martyropolis, who fell upon a detachment of them during their retreat and killed them and captured about five hundred horses and much spoil; and the man became rich. And at the fortress of Citharizon the duke there repulsed a party of them, consisting of about four hundred men, and captured their baggage-animals.

This account is quite different from the one by Malalas, but it describes military operations in roughly the same areas as the latter; i.e. the area of Amida/Martyropolis, in the upper Tigris Valley, in the old Armenian region of Sophanene, that bordered the region of Arzanene in Sasanian Armenia, across the Nymphius River (today the Batman River). Martyropolis (the modern Turkish town of Silvan), founded, or rather, re-founded over the previous Armenian city of Tigranakert/Tigranocerta by the augusti Arcadius and Theodosius II after the partition of the independent Kingdom of Armenia between Romans and Sasanians in 387 CE, was the main Roman military base between Theodosiopolis to the north and the heavily fortified Mesopotamian border to the south, and guarded the approaches to Samosata and Melitene in the upper Euphrates Valley (and from there to central Anatolia) along the upper Tigris Valley. Due to its importance, its fortifications were repaired and improved by Anastasius I and Justinian I.

According to the Pseudo-Zacharias (who, let us remember it, was most probably a Miaphysite churchman from Amida, and though most probably he was not only a contemporary of the facts, but he also lived extremely near to where they happened) the dux Bessa, based at Martyropolis (which had been made the capital of the province Armenia IV by Justinian I) devastated the territory of Arzanene, just across the border, and he even managed to take captive the nephew of the local bidaxš. The Sasanian response was an invasion that surrounded and besieged Martyropolis, which was defended by the Roman commander Butzes and his men. The Pseudo-Zacharias’ account makes clear that the Sasanians deployed their usual mastery in siege warfare: the city was surrounded by siege works and mines and siege towers were used against the defenders, but to no avail.

This translation of the Pseudo-Zacharias’ Chronicle is quite an old one (it is the one translated by F. J. Hamilton & E. W. Brooks, published in London in 1899), as this one was available for free in the Book Depository; there are two more recent translations but S. Gertz and G. Greatrex, but I have been unable to find them. In this translation, it is not clear who commanded the Sasanian force; from what I have been able to understand, it was commanded by a certain Hormizd, while a certain Mihr Girowi hired “Huns” for the Sasanian cause (presumably north of the Caucasus).

Sasanian helmet made of iron and bronze with silver decorations and dated to the VI-VII c. CE. Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins.

In the meantime, according to the Pseudo-Zacharias (and roughly agreeing in his timeline with Malalas) Belisarius was recalled to the capital due to his defeats at Thannuris and Callinicum (a bit of information we find nowhere else; Malalas only implies it was due to Callinicum), but he says that he was “succeeded at Dara” (presumably as magister militum per Orientem) by a certain Constantine, while both Procopius and Malalas give the name of the new commander as Mundus.

In this account, the siege of Martyropolis is lifted by the approach of Sittas’ præsentalis army, which had been joined by the Arab fœderati of Ḥārith the Ghassānid (yet another hint that he had not fallen in disgrace after Callinicum) from the south (Amida is located south of Martyropolis), which implies that Sittas had moved from Armenia to Mesopotamia to stabilize the situation after Callinicum, and then he had to go back north to relieve Martyropolis. The Pseudo-Zacharias precises that Sittas’ army reached Amida, relatively near to Martyropolis, in November.

Upon hearing about the approach of Sittas’ army, the Sasanians retreated, and as the season was quite advanced, the Romans also went into winter quarters; the chronicler informs us that at this point in time, between Sittas’ arrival to Amida and the Sasanian retreat from Martyropolis, Kawād I died (Malalas also dates his death to this frame of time, as we will see), but then he also tells us that this was not the end of the campaign, for the “Huns” that the Sasanians had hired fell then upon the Roman eastern provinces and looted them, reaching as far as the environs of Antioch. This must have happened either in late November or early December, when the Roman armies had already gone into winter quarters, and so the invading “Huns” must have encountered no resistance by the Roman field forces; only the dux Bessa was able to intercept and defeat a group of them (500 men according to the Pseudo-Zacharias) during their retreat back to Sasanian territory.

I will address the issue of Kawād I’s death as told by the other sources later. Now, let us see Procopius’ version of this last campaign of the war:

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XXI:

And the Persians once more invaded Mesopotamia with a great army under command of Chanaranges and Aspebedes and Mermeroes. Since no one dared to engage with them, they made camp and began the siege of Martyropolis, where Bouzes and Bessas had been stationed in command of the garrison. This city lies in the land called Sophanene, two hundred and forty stadia distant from the city of Amida toward the north; it is just on the River Nymphius which divides the land of the Romans and the Persians. So the Persians began to assail the fortifications, and, while the besieged at first withstood them manfully, it did not seem likely that they would hold out long. For the circuit-wall was quite easily assailable in most parts and could be captured very easily by a Persian siege, and besides, they did not have a sufficient supply of provisions, nor indeed had they engines of war nor anything else that was of any value for defending themselves. Meanwhile Sittas and the Roman army came to a place called Attachas, one hundred stadia distant from Martyropolis, but they did not dare to advance further, but established their camp and remained there. Hermogenes also was with them, coming again as ambassador from Byzantium. At this point the following event took place.
It has been customary from ancient times both among the Romans and the Persians to maintain spies at public expense; these men are accustomed to go secretly among the enemy, in order that they may investigate accurately what is going on and may then return and report to the rulers. Many of these men, as is natural, exert themselves to act in a spirit of loyalty to their nation, while some also betray their secrets to the enemy. At that time, a certain spy who had been sent from the Persians to the Romans came into the presence of the Emperor Justinian and revealed many things which were taking place among the barbarians, and, in particular, that the nation of the Massagetae, in order to injure the Romans, were on the very point of going out into the land of Persia, and that from there they were prepared to march into the territory of the Romans and unite with the Persian army. When the emperor heard this, having already a proof of the man’s truthfulness to him, he presented him with a handsome sum of money and persuaded him to go to the Persian army which was besieging the Martyropolitans, and announce to the barbarians there that these Massagetae had been won over with money by the Roman emperor, and were about to come against them that very moment. The spy carried out these instructions and coming to the army of the barbarians he announced to Chanaranges and the others that an army of Huns hostile to them would at no distant time come to the Romans. And when they heard this, they were seized with terror, and were at a loss how to deal with the situation.

Procopius agrees in general lines with the Pseudo-Zacharias, but with many differences. He gives the names of the generals who commanded the Sasanian invasion army that besieged Martyropolis. Mermeroes was of course Mihr-Mihrōē, the commander that was defeated at Satala the previous year by Sittas. The other two names are once more titles mistaken for personal names. Aspebedes refers to the Middle Persian military rank of Aspbed (“i.e. “Master of the Horse”) or maybe spāhbed (i.e. “general”), and the other name is the most interesting of the lot, because Chanaranges is clearly the Hellenized version of the Middle Persian title Kanārang, i.e. the nobleman based in Tūs in Khurāsān who acted as the military commander of the exposed northeastern border of the Iranian Empire. The title of Kanārang was hereditary in the Kanārangiyān family/clan, one of the great nobiliary clans of the Sasanian Empire. This is the first time the presence of a Kanārang is attested in the western border of Ērānšahr, and this must imply that at the time there was peace with the Hephthalites in Central Asia, otherwise this official would not have been deployed to southwestern Armenia to fight against the Romans; and if he had been deployed here, it is quite possible that his “feudal retinue” (sorry for the gross anachronism) would also have come with him.

Procopius does not state the size of this army, but quite clearly it was a large one, which can be deduced from several details in his account:

• It was led by three very high-ranking commanders; such a concentration of top brass would have been unjustified if the army had been of “normal” size or of this were just a raid.
• The army attacked directly Martyropolis, one of the main Roman fortified cities in the eastern border, and one that (as I have explained above) performed a key role. If it fell, the Sasanians would have been able to advance directly towards Melitene in the northwest, to the rearguard of the Field Army of Armenia, and menace the land routes that led from Armenia to Constantinople, as well as all the central Anatolian Plateau. Or they could have advanced directly in a westward direction towards Samosata, bypassing the dense Roman defensive deployment in Mesopotamia and Osrhoene to the south, menacing Syria to the southwest and Cilicia to the west.
• Procopius explains that two Roman commanders, Bessas and Bouzes, commanded the garrison. From his own account elsewhere and also thanks to Malalas and the Pseudo-Zacharias, we know that these two men were gifted commanders and that Bessas held the title of dux of the province of Armenia IV. We may safely assume because of this that these commanders must have had with them around 4,000 - 6,000 men (which seems to have been a common size for provincial armies in this time, see previous posts for examples), and that is not a small garrison. Martyropolis was well garrisoned, but according to Procopius the walls were unsuited to the danger posed by the Sasanian army and the defenders lacked resources to carry out a successful defense.

In my opinion, this last campaign was the most dangerous offensive that the Romans had met thus far during this war, because the attacking army was large and menaced a part of the Roman defensive line (the city of Martyropolis) that, if it fell, compromised potentially all the remaining parts of the system, both to the north and south. Behind it, the only important fortified obstacles the Sasanians would have found were the cities of Melitene and Samosata, and then they would be in the Roman strategic rearguard. And also in my opinion, Kawād I resorted to such a large-scale invasion when until now he had been satisfied with raids and relatively minor attacks because he was running out of time. As we will see, he was already 82 years old, and he would die shortly, leaving behind him a contested succession. Justinian I had refused all his overtures for a peace in terms favorable to the šāhān-šāh (and according to Malalas, in quite an offensive way in the augustus’ last letter). This was to be the last attempt to force the Roman emperor to accept a peace dictated by Kawād I, because after his death it was very possible that a war a succession broke out in the Sasanian Empire, and whoever succeeded him would have to accept peace on Justinian I’s terms.

Silvan/Martyropolis has not been excavated since the 1930s, and so our knowledge of the late antique city is quite deficient. It has a roughly square shape, and it was surrounded by a double wall; we do not know if both walls were in place in 531 CE. According to Procopius, the original wall was about 6 m high and Justinian rebuilt it doubling its height to 12.3 m and trebling its width. It was also surrounded by a moat fed by two permanent rivers. The city wall was dotted with 50 towers, set 25 m apart. This is a strong fortification despite Procopius’ assertions to the contrary, but the lack of archaeological digs means that we cannot be sure if the towers were added (or increased in number) by Justinian after 531 CE. The city also had a citadel (number 5 on the map). The greatest defensive disadvantage of the city was that it was located in a plain surrounded by hills and mountains, from which the city could be easily spotted and attacked with projectiles.

The “Massagetae” (i.e. some steppe people from north of the Caucasus Mountains) of Procopius are the same as the Pseudo-Zacharias’ “Huns”, but as you might have noticed already, both accounts differ dramatically about their role. According to Procopius, the emperor Justinian used the approach of the Huns to trick the Sasanian commanders. In my opinion, for whatever it is worth, this part of Procopius’ account makes little sense and is probably just a flattery directed at the emperor, and the soberer account of the Pseudo-Zacharias should be preferred. The Sasanian army was strong enough that even the menacing closeness of Sittas’ army (which at this point in time was encamped 100 stadia, i.e. about 16 km from Martyropolis) did not compel them to lift the siege.

It would be only the death of Kawād I that forced them to do so, and when the “Massagetae/Huns” arrived, they went on a rampage against the Roman provinces because there was nothing else left for them to do (as Procopius himself admits in the passage that follows this one, see below). The Sasanian king had run out of time. We have already seen the brief account of his death by the Pseudo-Zacharias, let us see it by Malalas and Procopius of Cæsarea:

John Malalas, Chronographia, XVIII, 68:

On 8th September (of 531 CE) Koades, the emperor of the Persians, hearing of the losses sustained by the Persians at the hands of the Romans, suffered a sudden paralysis on the right side of his body. He summoned his second son Chosroes and proclaimed him as emperor, placing a crown on his head. After an illness of five days, Koades, the emperor of the Persians, died at the age of 82 years and three months. He had reigned for 43 years and two months.

Procopius of Cæsarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XXI:

At this juncture it came about that Cabades became seriously ill, and he called to him one of the Persians who were in closest intimacy with him, Mebodes by name, and conversed with him concerning Chosroes and the kingdom, and said he feared the Persians would make a serious attempt to disregard some of the things which had been decided upon by him. But Mebodes asked him to leave the declaration of his purpose in writing and bade him be confident that the Persians would never dare to disregard it. So Cabades set it down plainly that Chosroes should become king over the Persians. The document was written by Mebodes himself, and Cabades immediately passed from among men. And when everything had been performed as prescribed by law in the burial of the king, then Caoses, confident by reason of the law, tried to lay claim to the office, but Mebodes stood in his way, asserting that no one ought to assume the royal power by his own initiative but by vote of the Persian notables. So Caoses committed the decision in the matter to the magistrates, supposing that there would be no opposition to him from there. But when all the Persian notables had been gathered together for this purpose and were in session, Mebodes read the document and stated the purpose of Cabades regarding Chosroes, and all, calling to mind the virtue of Cabades, straightway declared Chosroes King of the Persians.
Thus then Chosroes secured the power. But at Martyropolis, Sittas and Hermogenes were in fear concerning the city, since they were utterly unable to defend it in its peril, and they sent certain men to the enemy, who came before the generals and spoke as follows: “It has escaped your own notice that you are becoming wrongfully an obstacle to the king of the Persians and to the blessings of peace and to each state. For ambassadors sent from the emperor are even now present in order that they may go to the king of the Persians and there settle the differences and establish a treaty with him; but do you as quickly as possible remove from the land of the Romans and permit the ambassadors to act in the manner which will be of advantage to both peoples. For we are ready also to give as hostages men of repute concerning these very things, to prove that they will be actually accomplished at no distant date.” Such were the words of the ambassadors of the Romans. It happened also that a messenger came to them from the palace, who brought them word that Cabades had died and that Chosroes, son of Cabades, had become king over the Persians, and that in this way the situation had become unsettled. And as a result of this the generals heard the words of the Romans gladly, since they also feared the attack of the Huns. The Romans therefore straightway gave as hostages Martinus and one of the body-guards of Sittas, Senecius by name; so the Persians broke up the siege and made their departure promptly. And the Huns not long afterward invaded the land of the Romans, but since they did not find the Persian army there, they made their raid a short one, and then all departed homeward.

Neither Procopius nor the Pseudo-Zacharias offer a date for Kawād I’s death, bus as usual there are obvious chronological disagreements. According to Malalas, Kawād I suffered a stroke on September 8th and died five days later on September 13th, while his army was still besieging Martyropolis, and the news cannot have taken more than one week, two in the worst case, to reach it (supposing the šāhān-šāh had died in Ctesiphon or somewhere in Mesopotamia). But that is difficult to reconcile with the dates given by the Pseudo-Zacharias. According to him, Sittas’ army reached Amida in November, and given that this author lived there and was a contemporary of the events, the date must be correct unless the original manuscript has been corrupted in the copies made across the centuries. He also describes the Sasanian besieging Amida in the hardships of winter, but early September is hardly wintertime in this part of the world.

Procopius does not help at all because he omits any dates and even any references to the weather. If we must trust his lack of remarks about winter conditions, then perhaps he would support Malalas’ dates, but although he was also a contemporary of the events, by this time he would have accompanied his patron Belisarius back to Constantinople, and so he might have written about the events on hearsay.

I will address the issue of Kawād I’s disputed succession in the next post, but as you have seen above, Malalas and Procopius give a falsely uncomplicated account of Xusrō I’s rise to the throne that probably differs considerably from what really happened. Malalas just assumes that Kawād I crowned his son Xusrō as šahān-šāh on his deathbed, and that all his subjects accepted it. Procopius offers as usual a more complicated account (he loved courtly intrigues), but mostly agrees with Malalas: at the urging of his general Mahbodh (whom we have met before, in the failed peace talks that led to the start of the Iberian war) he wrote down his will and it was presented to the court, that accepted it without complain, and so Xusrō became king instead of his older brother Caoses (Middle Persian Kāvūs).

Accordingly to Procopius’ account, it was the news about Kawād I’s death that prompted the Sasanian commanders to finally lift the siege, and this makes sense, for despite Procopius and Malalas’ accounts, the succession was anything but straightforward, and the Sasanian generals would have been perfectly aware of this fact.

An exceedingly rare gold dinar of Kawād I, minted at Ērān-Xwarrah-Šābuhr in Xūzestān (ancient Susa) during his second reign.

Kawād I had reigned for 43 years (488-531 CE, not 47 as Malalas wrote), in two reigns (488-496 CE and 498/9-531 CE) and his reign had been a resounding success. He had received an empire humiliated and submitted to tributary status after the defeat and death of his father Pērōz at the hands of the Hephthalites, of whom he had been a hostage once or even twice, depending on the accounts. He had risen to the throne as a teenager and had managed to survive and rule for more than 40 years, a feat in itself (his was the longer reign of any Sasanian king since the reign of Šābuhr II), and in this time he had rid himself of the nobleman that had acted as his “tutor” at the start of his reign (Soḵrā) by playing another great aristocrat against him, had fostered a “heretical” religious sect (the Zarāduštis) survived a dethronement, had fled a jail deemed to be the most secure in the empire, had allied himself with his father’s killers and probably married a Hephthalite wife who happened to be his niece, had recovered the throne, broken a century-long peace with Rome with success in the Anastasian war, and finally he had managed to recover most of the eastern territories lost by his father to the Hephthalites by turning against them (despite the fact they had helped him against the Romans) when they were busy in Inner Asia and India. And on top of it all, he had either enacted completely (or started to enact) a reform in depth of the territorial administration of the Iranian Empire that paved the way for the tax reforms of his son Xusrō I. It is even probably fair to wonder if the planning of these reforms should be attributed to the father or the son; I am personally inclined to think that they had been planned by Kawād I, and that he chose Xusrō to succeed him precisely because he saw in him someone capable to follow his policies. The reign of his son Xusrō I would be the second “Golden Age” of the Empire of the Aryans.

 

[Semper Victor]

5.1. THE RISE TO THE THRONE OF XUSRŌ I.

The long reign of Xusrō I (r. 531-579 CE) was in several fields the apogee of the Sasanian Empire, and was together with the reign of Šābuhr II (r. 309-379 CE) a “golden era” for Ērānšahr. Due to the abundance of sources and events, I have decided to divide his reign in two “chapters”, although they will not be of equal length. Just cutting his reign at mid length would have been quite absurd because it would not have coincided with any clear break in it, so I have decided to take 562 CE as the year for the cut. This year marked the end of Xusrō I’s first war against the Romans and the high point of his reign politically; as shortly before he had also managed to destroy the Hephthalite Empire in alliance with the Türks and recover practically all the lost territory in the East south of the Āmu Daryā, lands that had been out of Sasanian political control since the late reign of Šābuhr II. From 562 CE until the end of his reign though, international politics would take a turn against Xusrō I, as relations with the powerful Türk Khaganate worsened and the Türks sought an alliance with the Romans, an alliance that posed a mortal danger to the Sasanian Empire. So, we can say that from 531 to 562 CE Xusrō I’s reign witnessed a long string of political and military successes, and that 562 CE signals a break in this tendence.

Testimony of the overall positive vision of his reign retained in popular memory and in written tradition (especially in Zoroastrian texts) is the fact that he is remembered both in Zoroastrian and non-Zoroastrian texts and popular histories by the honorific Anōšīrvān (“of the immortal soul”), which is often transliterated into western languages in a confusing array of variants: Anushirvan, Anūshirvan, Anushirwan, Anuširwān, etc. By the way, the same happens with the personal name of the king, which can be found as Ḵosrow (used in his biographical entry in the Encyclopædia Iranica), Husrō (the form chosen by Rika Gyselen), Chosroes (from the Hellenized version of his name employed by ancient Greek authors), Khusro, Khusrau, Khosrow, Husraw, etc. Xusrō is a Kayanian name taken from Avestan legend, same as Kawād or Kāvūs and Jam/Zāmāsp, the names of Xusrō I’s two elder brothers according to Procopius of Caesarea.

For four centuries, the Sasanian drahm kept a silver content of 95% or higher even in times of difficulties for Ērānšahr, and Xusrō I’s reign was not an exception. But curiously, this king’s coins are the ones with a poorer artistic quality from among all the Sasanian kings. Silver drahm of Xusrō I, minted in 534 CE in Mēšān (mint mark MY).

Unlike with Šābuhr II and his reign though, we have plenty of sources to reconstruct Xusrō I’s reign, both western and eastern ones. The plenty of western sources is nothing new, but the availability of eastern sources is more uncommon; this is due to the fact that Xusrō I’s court presided over (or rather, orchestrated) a large output of historiographic and propagandistic works in Middle Persian. In turn, these works (most of which are lost) were used as sources by early Islamic historians and part their information has come down to us in medieval Arabic and New Persian texts. These were short texts, and practically none of them have survived, except for the brief story Xusrō ī Kawadān ud rēdag-ē (i.e. Xusrō son of Kawâd and the page) in which this king and a page of his court discuss the education of a young aristocrat in Sasanian Iran. Judging by the amount of anecdotes that have survived about this king in later Islamic works, this must have been a prolific genre; it is a specifically Sasanian genre known as andarz (“wisdom”) literature, that aimed at offering useful counsel and advice to the members of the upper classes. According to modern researchers, Sasanian history works (like the Xwadāy-nāmag) were short, dry chronological works similar to western annals, so later Islamic writers, which lived in a much different literary world, where written culture had expanded and their public asked for longer narratives, resorted to all sort of sources (like andarz literature, legendary material, popular Iranian and Arabic lore, etc.) to flesh out the stories they told about the pre-Islamic kings of Iran. Unfortunately, this has an unwanted consequence, and that is the wide amount of differences that can be found among the Perso-Arabic sources.

The impact of Xusrō I Anōšīrvān in folk memory can be deduced because in the medieval Islamic era both Iranians and Arabs living in the former territories of Ērānšahr attributed to this king all the pre-Islamic Sasanian structures and all sort of legends and acts of wisdom. Among Arabs in Iraq, “Kisrā” became synonymous with “Sasanian king”. This of course also poses a problem, because the tendency among later Islamic authors and popular lore to attribute so many different works, reforms and sayings to this king has shrouded him in legend and has made difficult to distinguish between truth and myth. This is particularly evident in the issue of the many administrative reforms conducted by the Sasanian kings during the VI c. CE. Modern scholars suspect that many administrative, fiscal, and military reforms attributed to Xusrō I may have been actually enacted, or at least devised, by his father Kawād I, who suffered from a PR problem compared to his son and successor, while the exaggerate amounts of praise and admiration heaped by these later sources upon Xusrō I reach at times sycophantic levels.

There is also quite a significant amount of surviving Syriac Christian literature from this reign, although it mostly deals with ecclesiastic affairs. But Canadian scholar Michael R. Jackson Bonner, in his detailed study Three Neglected Sources of Sasanian History in the Reign of Khusraw Anushirvan hypothesizes that Dīnawarī, Ferdowsī and Agathias may have resorted to material that in turn might have been derived from Syriac works. This Canadian scholar has expanded considerably the study of eastern sources for the reign of Xusrō I by pointing out that modern historians have relied too much on Ṭabarī, neglecting other sources that can offer equally reliable (and in some cases, even more reliable) information.

He underlines the importance of Dīnawarī’s Kitāb al-akhbār al-tiwāl (that Jackson Bonner translates as “The book of long histories” but is also translated as “The book on general history”) as a source, according him, Dīnawarī has been downplayed by historians when his work is actually the first example of “universal history” in Arabic, and it precedes chronologically Ṭabarī’s work by at least a full century. It is also an uncommon example of early Arabic history because in it Dīnawarī downplays the important of prophecy in human history (which bordered on heresy for many of his contemporary Muslims) and adopted a “secular” approach to his narrative. Dīnawarī (815 896 CE) was a native of the city of Dīnawar in western Iran, and his book has a noticeably “Iranian” bias: despite being written in Arabic, all its dates are written/calculated according to the regnal years of Iranian kings, instead of using the Islamic calendar; which is something unheard of in any of his contemporaries. According to Jackson Bonner, there are also considerable chances that he was able to access original pre-Islamic material for his work. He was a second-generation Muslim, and probably he was unable to read Pahlavi texts, but he may have been probably able to contact Zoroastrians in his hometown who were still able to read them. Dīnawar was also home to a sizeable Christian population, and it is extremely probable that Dīnawarī consulted some sort of East Syriac Christian historical work through this community, for as we will see in a later post he is one of the few eastern sources dealing with the rebellion of Xusrō I’s Christian son Anōšāzād against his father. This rebellion is absent from most eastern sources, but it appears also in Procopius’ History of the Wars, a contemporary account.

Jackson Bonner also insists in the historicity and reliability of the part of the Šāh-nāma that deals with Xusrō I’s reign, and he also underlines that Ferdowsī must have drawn his material from multiple sources: he also presents a distorted version of Xusrō I’s son rebellion (called Nūš Zād in this New Persian text), an episode that would have been in all likeliness suppressed from any official Middle Persian historical text. Ferdowsī’s references to the political arrangements (like royal marriages) in Central Asia in the VI c. CE between Sasanians, Türks and Chinese are also solidly grounded on historical reality.

But perhaps the most interesting of the sources that Jackson Bonner wants to bring forth for consideration is included within the Kitāb tajārib al-umam wa ta'āqib al-hemam (Book of the Experiences of Nations and their Consequences and Ambitions) by Ibn Miskawayh (932 - 1030 CE). Within this large work, this Iranian-born author included the Sīrat Ānūširwān, which according to Miskawayh is an extract of the autobiography of Xusrō I Anōšīrvān (translated into Arabic). This document, for several reasons elaborated by Jackson Bonner, might very well be authentic and dating back originally to the VI c. CE, and so we could be dealing here (in an abridged and translated form) with what the Sasanian court of Xusrō I wanted to pass as this king official autobiography.

Front page of a medieval copy of Ibn al-Nadīm’s Kitāb al-Fihrist.

Actually, as Jackson Bonner notes, the Kitāb al-Fihrist (The Book Catalogue) by Ibn al-Nadīm (? – 995/998 CE), an encyclopedic/biographical compendium of the knowledge and literature of X c. CE Islam referencing approx. 10,000 books and 2,000 authors, lists three biographies of Xusrō I, all of which have been lost (and any one of which may have perhaps been Ibn Miskawayh’s Sīrat Ānūširwān):

• The Kitāb al-Tāj fī sīrat Ānūširwān (Book of the Crown, which treats of the Life of Anōšīrvān) which according to the Fihrist was translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa’ in the VIII c. CE.
• The Kitāb Ānūširwān (Book of the Life of Anōšīrvān) which according to the Fihrist was translated into Arabic by Aban al-Lāḥiqī (VIII-IX c. CE).
• The Kitāb al-Kārnāmaj fī sīrat Ānūširwān (Book of Kisrā to the Leaders of the People in Gratitude) which according to the Fihrist was translated into Arabic by an anonymous writer.

The existence of these titles in the Fihrist adds to the credibility of the Sīrat Ānūširwān because they imply that there existed a genre of royal biography in the Sasanian Empire in the VI c. CE. Jackson Bonner’s study is of particular help due to the poor state of research on Islamic sources in the West. Ibn Miskawayh’s book has never been translated into a western language, nor is there a good critical edition in Arabic available. It has only been published in facsimile version (reproduced from one of the extant medieval manuscripts) by the Italian scholar Leone Caetani in 1909, in a version full of scribal mistakes and letters and words of difficult reading. And the same happens with Dīnawarī’s work, which has never been translated into a European language, although there are several reliable Arabic editions (the most recent one from 2001), although Jackson Bonner has translated the parts of the work dealing with pre-Islamic Iranian history.

Western sources for Xusrō I’s relations with Rome are plentiful: Procopius of Caesarea, John Malalas, Marcellinus Comes, Agathias of Myrina, Theophanes the Confessor, Theophanes of Byzantium and Menander Protector are the main Greek and Latin sources. Sebeos is the main Armenian source for the VI c. CE. And the main Syriac sources for political events involving Rome and Ērānšahr during Xusrō I’s reign are the Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene, John of Ephesus, Michael the Syrian and Gregory Bar Hebraeus (these last two are quite late sources, but they drew upon earlier sources now lost).

After this long historiographical excursus, let us return now to the matter at hand: the succession of Kawâd I and the rise of Xusrō I to the throne of Ērānšahr. In the previous post, I have already posted Procopius’ version of the events, in which the chronicler reported that Xusrō I’s accession to the throne was untroubled. But this does not agree with other sources:

John Malalas, Chronographia, XVIII, 68-69:

When Chosroes was proclaimed emperor of the Persians, he sent a message to the Roman ambassador by a Persian “magistrianus” that they should enter Persian territory and make a peace treaty between Romans and Persians. The Roman ambassadors refused to enter Persia without imperial command, explaining, “We do not dare to come to visit you”. When the emperor of the Persians learned of this, he wrote a letter and sent it to the emperor Justinian, asking that permission be given to the Roman ambassadors to enter Persia and to make a treaty. The emperor of the Persians wrote a friendly letter and sent it by the magister Hermogenes. When the Roman emperor received this message, he wrote in reply, “We do not give permission for our ambassadors to come to you, nor do we recognize you as emperor of the Persians”.
In that year, the emperor of the Persians told the Manicheans who were subject to his state that they could practice their religion as they wished. The Persian “magoi”, distressed by this event, plotted with the senators, and decided to depose him from the throne and to put his brother in his place. When the emperor of the Persians heard of this, he beheaded his brother and executed the senators and the “magoi”. He wrote a letter to the Roman emperor containing a proposal for a three months’ truce. The Roman emperor wrote back to the magister to accept the three months’ truce and to exchange hostages with the Persians. He ordered Strategius and Rufinus, his ambassadors, to return to Byzantion.

This account by Malalas does not portray such a quiet and uneventful succession as the one by Procopius. It depicts Xusrō I as being anxious to sign a peace with the Romans, while emperor Justinian I expressly forbade his ambassadors (let us remember that they were at that moment in Edessa waiting for permission from both courts to journey into Sasanian territory). According to Malalas, Justinian I went even further by writing back to Xusrō I that he did not acknowledge him as the legitimate Sasanian king. If we assume that this this detail is true, then this would only have made sense if Xusrō I’s succession were being contested within the Sasanian Empire. This is confirmed by the paragraph that follows Justinian’s reply, in which Malalas displays confusedly the events within Ērānšahr. The “Manicheans” of Malalas are probably the Zarāduštis, and the chronicler makes probably a mess with what really happened; the sources of the Perso-Arabic tradition shed more light on this matter.

Ṭabarī, History of the Prophets and Kings (Tāriḵ al-Rusul wa al-Mulūk) – The Kings of the Persians:

Then there assumed the royal power Kisrā Anūsharwān, son of Qubādh, son of Fayrūz, son of Yazdajird (II), son of Bahrām (V) Jūr. When he became king, he wrote letters to the four Fādhūsbāns, each of whom was governor over a region of the land of Persia, and to their subordinate officials The text of his letter to the Fādhūsbān of Azerbaijan is as follows:
“In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, from the King Kisrā, son of Qubādh, to Wārī, son of the Nakhīrjān, Fādhūsbān of Azerbaijan and Armenia and their territories, and Dumbāwand and Ṭabaristān and their adjacent territories, and his subordinate officials, greetings! The thing that most strikes fear into the hearts of people is the feeling of deprivation felt by those who fear the ending of their state of comfortable living, the eruption of civil disorders, and the advent of unpleasant things to the best of individuals, one after the other of such individuals, in regard to their own persons, their retainers, their personal wealth, or what is dearest to them. We know of no cause for fear or absence of a thing that brings more crushing ill-fortune for the generality of people, nor one likely to bring about universal disaster, than the absence of a righteous king.”
When Kisrā had gained firm control of power, he took measures to extirpate the religious beliefs of a hypocritical person from the people of Fasā, called Zarādhusht, son of Khurrakān, a new faith which he had brought into existence within the Mazdaean religion. A considerable number of people followed him in that heretical innovation, and his movement became prominent on account of this. Among those who carried out missionary work for him among the masses was a certain man from M.dh.riyyah (?) called Mazdaq, son of Bamdādh. Among the things he ordained for people, made attractive to them, and urged them to adopt, was holding their possessions and their families in common. He proclaimed that all this was part of the piety that is pleasing to God, and that He will reward with the most handsome of recompenses, and that, if that religious faith he commanded them to observe and urged them to adopt were not to exist, the truly good way of behavior, the one which is pleasing to God, would lie in the common sharing of property. With those doctrines, he incited the lower classes against the upper classes. Through him, all sorts of vile persons became mixed up with the best elements of society, criminals seeking to despoil them of their possessions found easy ways to do this, tyrannical persons had their paths to tyranny facilitated, and fornicators were able to indulge their lusts and get their hands upon high-born women to whom they would never have been able to aspire. Universal calamity overwhelmed the people to an extent they had never before experienced.
Hence Kisrā forbade the people to act in accordance with any of the heretical innovations of Zarādhusht, son of Khurrakān, and Mazdaq, son of Bamdādh. He extirpated all their heresy, and he killed a great number of their fervid adherents and did not allow himself to be deflected from any of what he had forbidden the people. [He further killed] a group of the Manichaeans and made firm for the Magians the religion they had always held.

Ṭabarī’s account makes far more sense than Malalas’ one, although it also has its inconsistencies. Like all the Perso-Arabic sources, Ṭabarī’s account ignores completely the fact that the Sasanians were currently at war against the Romans in that moment, but that is common to all the Perso-Arabic sources; this probably happens because the Middle Persian and East Syriac texts that are the ultimate sources of these authors ignored it altogether. It is worth to be remembered that while the western sources almost only deal with the Sasanians when they were at war with Rome (and so we are used to see these conflicts as the main driving theme of Sasanian history) that was most probably not the case for those authors, either Christians or Zoroastrians, who wrote within the Sasanian Empire. With some exceptions, the wars against Rome were usually disregarded by Sasanian chronicles, which tells a lot about the degree of importance that the Šāhān-šāh and his subjects attached to them.

This fragment by Ṭabarī is not only filled with useful information, but the foot notes of its translator, the British scholar Clifford E. Bosworth, are extremely interesting, so I will include them in here too.

According to Bosworth, the letter quoted by Ṭabarī as having been sent by Xusrō I after becoming king to the Fādhūsbān of Azerbaijan may very well be veridic. It is constructed very much as official Sasanian documents were, as far as we know according to the documents that have survived. Obviously, the Sasanian chancery would not have headed the message with the Islamic basmalah (the starting sentence of the first surah of the Qur’an) but many extant Middle Persian texts often begin with the formula pad nām ī yazadān "by the name of the gods", or words to the same effect. The title fādhūsbān is also interesting. It is not documented in seals or epigraphy of any sort, so I will not cover it in the oncoming posts about the territorial administration of the Sasanian Empire. According to Bosworth, it is the Arabization of the Middle Persian title pādhūspān, from Middle Persian pāygōs (meaning “land, region”). They would have been the civilian equivalents of the four territorial spāhbeds that controlled the Sasanian military after the disappearance of the title of Ērān-spāhbed. This is interesting, because after the passages that I have quoted above Ṭabarī explains how Xusrō I divided the empire into four great “military regions” and entrusted every one of them to a spāhbed, which actually contradicts the quoted passage with which he opens his account of Xusrō I’s reign: it would be quite surprising if the civilian administrative divisions were already in place but the military divisions were not; the only explanation for it would be that the administrative division was implemented by Kawād I but that the war against Rome and his death prevented him from implementing their military counterparts. Some modern scholars attribute the elimination of the post of Ērān-spāhbed to Kawād I (and link it with the execution of Syāwaxš the artēštārān-sālār at the start of the Iberian war). Either that, or it was Kawād I who installed the system of the four spāhbeds and Ṭabarī was wrong, but he is not alone in attributing their creation to Xusrō I.

The four pādhūspāns are not attested anywhere outside of later Arabic and New Persian texts, but the four spāhbeds are well attested in the sigillographic record. In the early 2000s, Rika Gyselen found bullae for the four spāhbeds in Ahmad Saeedi’s collection, and they agree completely with Ṭabarī’s account. Each spāhbed (and so, each pādhūspān) ruled over one “quarter” or “direction” (kust) of Ērānšahr, according to the four cardinal points:

• The “Quarter of the West” (Kust-ī-xwarofrān).
• The “Quarter of the South” (Kust-ī-nēmrōz).
• The “Quarter of the East” (Kust-ī-xwarāsān).
• The “Quarter of the North” did not exist as such, because in the Zoroastrian tradition the North was the abode of Ahreman and the demons, so it was named instead Kust-ī-Ādurbādagān, after one of its regions. As Ādurbādagān means “the land of the eternal fire” this would have been much more pleasing to Zoroastrian believers. From it derives the modern name Azerbaijan.

So, that there was a pādhūspān of Ādurbādagān at the start of Xusrō I’s reign makes sense, and the letter in itself is credible and follows known Sasanian redaction patterns and ideology (the insistence on the importance of order as the equivalent of justice, and of the monarchical institution as its main guarantee.

A XIV c. copy of the Šāh-nāma with Xusrō I enthroned.

What seems more dubious though is that the problems with the Zarāduštis (not Manicheans like in Malalas’ account) took place after Xusrō I’s accession to the throne. As we will see later, this is probably false, and would be expected if the original source that Ṭabarī followed (after one or several translations and further elaboration across three centuries) was an official Middle Persian text issued by the royal chancery; such an official account would have suppressed anything that might have shed any doubts upon the legitimacy of Xusrō I’s rule, and a contested succession would have done just that. Notice also how Ṭabarī introduces here the character of Mazdak, and attributes the bloody repression of his followers firmly to Xusrō I. Instead of having troubles with the Zoroastrian priesthood, in this account Xusrō I is a “restorer of the true faith”. Let us now see the account of Xusrō I’s rise to the throne in the Šāh-nāma:

Ferdowsī, Šāh-nāma:

Now when Kubád had reigned for forty years
The grief of death's day came upon his heart.
He had a writing fairly drawn on silk
In that befitting and engaging script,
And first he offered praise to that just Judge,
"Who gave us Faith, accomplishment, and wisdom,
Whose word is certain, whatsoe'er He saith,
Alike in secret things and manifest.
None hath beheld His height of sovereignty,
And His elect ne'er are contemptible.
All ye that see the writing of Kubád!
Give heed but to the counsel of the wise,
I have bestowed the honourable throne
Upon Kisrá. Fair fortune will be his
When I am dead. May God accept my son,
And may his foes' hearts be fulfilled with smoke.
By this our signet-ring we do require
Of archimages, chiefs, and other subjects
That ye in no wise shall transgress his bidding,
But joy in him and fill your treasuries."
He set his golden signet on that writing,
And placed it with the archmage Rám Barzín.
Kubád had come to four-score years and yet,
Old as he was, he did not wish for death.
Is any in the world content to die
Since no man knoweth what will come thereby?
He died and left the world as his bequest;
His travail, ease, and pleasures passed away.
Who profiteth by what he hath amast
Since empty-handed go he must at last?
They draped the body with brocade and called
For rose and musk, for camphor and for wine.
They made for him a royal charnel-house,
A golden throne and crown of majesty.
They set the Sháh upon the throne of gold,
Barred up the way thereto for evermore,
And thenceforth looked not on him. Thus he passed
O'er this world, as thou mightst have said, like wind!
How canst thou trust then in this ancient sky
Since it will end thee irremediably?
The mourning being o'er, the high priest spread
The royal document upon the throne,
The magnates and archmages of tan,
And all the famous sages, met in conclave,
The document was read before them all,
And with rejoicing they enthroned the heir.
Now when Kisrá ascended his new throne
The people hailed him as their new-made Sháh,
Called praises down on him as sovereign,
And time and earth submitted to his sway.
His throne revived the world, and at the stream
The sheep drank water with the wolf. Folk said:
"May this Sháh live for ever. May his Grace
Surpass Jamshíd's."
His goodness and his justice,
His institutions, Faith, and far-famed knowledge
Were such that people called him Núshírwan,
For love and signet were both young with him.
The story of Kubád is at an end,
And henceforth to Kisrá my thoughts I bend.

As you can see, Ferdowsī also offers the account of a smooth and uncomplicated transfer of power between Kawād I and Xusrō I. Let us now see Dīnawarī’s account:

Dīnawarī, The Book of Lengthy Histories (Kitāb al-akhbār al-tiwāl):

When king Qubāḏ reached his forty-third [regnal] year, death was upon him, and he gave power to his son Kisrā, namely Anūšarwān. He was king after his father, and he ordered a search for Mazdak son of Māzayyār, who had made men believe in doing forbidden things, and by such baseness provoked the commission of sin, and facilitated the height of rapine and of injustice. And he was sought until found, and Anūšarwān ordered his murder and impaling, and the killing of whoever else had joined the sect.

So, Dīnawarī also reported a smooth transfer or power. It is quite clear that the western sources (contemporary to the events) report some sort of disturbance or dispute between Xusrō I and his brother, while the Perso-Arabic sources, written 300 years after the events or later, talk about a smooth transition. As I wrote above, this unanimity of the eastern sources is probably due to the fact that their ultimate source (or source) were official Middle Persian reports issued by Xusrō I’s chancery that would have purged any references to a succession conflict from it.

Miniature of a Mughal Šāh-nāma depicting Xusrō I in battle against the Mazdakites.

In the early 1990s, the British scholar Patricia Crone studied this issue in her paper Kavad’s heresy and Mazdak’s revolt, which I used in the last thread when I dealt with the appearance of the Zarādušti heresy during Kawād I’s first reign. In it, Crone deals not only with the evolution of the Zarādušti “heresy” but also with Kawād I’s succession, as she believed both to be closely related. Historically there has been a lot of confusion with the so-called Zarādušti movement, and in this article Crone clarified this issue and attempted to reconstruct the sequence of events.

As Crone stated, the Islamic sources (as we can see in the quotes above state that Mazdak appeared under Xusrō I and that he (and/or his followers) were killed by this Šāhān-šāh. Ṭabarī’s account is particularly clear, and it aligns with what Syriac and other Arabic sources tell us about this “heresy”: its founder was Zarādušt of Fasā, who had lived in the III c. CE, and Mazdak led a violent insurrection of its followers under Xusrō I. Ṭabarī, Ferdowsī and Dīnawarī all tell the story of Mazdak’s rebellion immediately after reporting Xusrō I’s rise to the throne, so it seems logical to assume that this revolt happened either immediately after or maybe even during the succession itself. Malalas also writes about religious troubles immediately after recounting Xusrō I’s accession to the throne, but it is actually him the one responsible for much of the confusion, for he included a passage about a bloody repression against “the Manicheans” who were led by “their bishop Indarazar” under an unnamed Sasanian king and put it after the Antioch earthquake in late 528 CE and al-Munḏir III’s incursion in Syria in the spring of 529 CE. As Malalas usually follows a chronological order in his Chronographia, some historians have assumed this was Mazdak’s revolt and that it might have broken out under Kawād I and not under Xusrō I. Indarazar must have been a corruption of Middle Persian andarzgar, meaning “adviser” or “teacher” and which so could very well be a reference to Mazdak himself. Malalas also adds that the “Manicheans” were massacred in a meeting to which they had been summoned by the king, a detail that is also present in later Islamic sources.

Malalas’ chronology is supported only by another western source: Theophanes the Confessor. In his Chronography, this author tells much the same story as Malalas, but he adds that Kawād I’s third son, whom he names as Phthasouarsan, had been brought up by the “Manicheans” and that he made a bid for the throne with their help: the “Manicheans” undertook to make Kawād I to abdicate in Phthasouarsan’s favor, and he undertook to uphold their faith in return. This is why Kawād I (who is explicitly named in Theophanes’ account) killed “thousands upon thousands of Manicheans in a single day”, along with their bishop Indazaros. Theophanes dated this event to 523-524 CE in his Chronography. As we have already seen in previous posts, the chronicles of John Malalas and Theophanes the Confessor tend to show agreement between them in many details in which they disagree in turn with other authors, which suggests that they share a same source, now lost. It is worth adding that as Theophanes dated the death of Kawād I to 526 CE, the lapse of time between this episode and Kawād I’s death is the same as in Malalas’ account: three years.

The problem is that all the eastern sources attribute this bloody repression to Xusrō I; not only the ones quoted above, but also the Christian East Syriac Chronicle of Arbela and Chronicle of Karkā ḏe Bēṯ Selōḵ, the Christian Arabic Chronicle of Se’ert and the Zoroastrian Pahlavi Books.

If Kāvus was really the Parišwārgar-šāh, then the rugged terrain could explain why it took Xusrō I years to finish with his revolt. View of the Ālborz Mountains.

Crone accepted the proposal by Arthur Christiansen that Theophanes’ Phthasouarsan was a corruption of Middle Persian Parišwārgar-šāh (that is, “king of Parišwārgar”, the latter being the denomination for a “sub-kingdom” within the Sasanian Empire that encompassed the Ālborz Mountains along the southern Caspian shoreline), and that the son in question was not Kawād I’s youngest son, but Kāvūs, the eldest, according to Procopius of Caesarea’s account. I have already quoted the relevant passage by Procopius in a previous post in this thread, so I will not repeat it here, but to summarize, according to him Kawād I had three sons, which in a descending degree of seniority were Kāvūs, Jam (or Zāmāsp) and Xusrō. As we have seen in previous threads, there were was not an established right of primogeniture for royal succession in Ērānšahr, and what really mattered was in the first place the assent of the nobility and the Zoroastrian clergy to the succession, and then the will of the previous king. Procopius stated that Jam was the most able military leader of the three and the option preferred by the magnates, but that he had lost an eye in battle, and due to this the country’s custom forbid him from becoming king (this is nothing unusual, similar laws and customs existed also in the West; for example men who were mutilated or “deformed” could not be ordained as Christian priests). Procopius added that the youngest one Xusrō was Kawād I’s favorite, as this king disliked his eldest son Kāvūs.

As we have seen, all the western accounts tell of some sort of succession trouble, but this is uniformly absent from Islamic accounts, a perfect example of how successful Xusrō I’s royal propaganda was. Procopius is the only source that gives us credible names for Kawād I’s sons, and he states that the dispute took place between Kāvūs and Xusrō, but that Xusrō’s ascent to the throne was settled by their father’s written will. But Malalas and Theophanes wrote that there was some sort of armed conflict. Crone, following Christensen, combines all these sources to produce a credible account. The results are quite interesting, although far from assured. Parišwārgar was a “great region” (šahr) in the III c. CE as it appears named in the ŠKZ, but actually we know of no kings ever for this territory (unlike for Kermān, Makurān, Hindestān, etc.) so we cannot be sure if the title Parišwārgar-šāh was ever used by anybody except the ruling Šāhān-šāh, Actually, after the IV c. CE Sasanian sub-kings disappear completely from the historical record and many scholars (like Rika Gyselen) believe that the practice of appointing sub-kings was discontinued after the reign of Šābuhr II.

What gives more substance to Crone’s hypothesis those (in my opinion) is what follows: if one of Kawād I’s sons had been brought up in the Zarādušti doctrine, it is logical to assume that it would have been the eldest one, possibly born during Kawād I’s first reign, when he had openly embraced and fostered Zarāduštism. Perso-Islamic sources are almost unanimous in not mentioning any brothers for Xusrō I, and they mostly assert (like we have already seen in the previous thread) that Xusrō I had been born during Kawād I’s flight to the Hephthalite court. Again, if we assume that their ultimate source is one or several historical reports issued by Xusrō I’s royal chancery, it fits perfectly that this king would have had any brothers of his erased from the historical record if they had been his rivals in a disputed succession, and even more if they had supported a “heresy”. Also, having Xusrō I be conceived and born during Kawād I’s flight and exile in the Hephthalite court pushed Xusrō I’s birth back as far as possible in time without having him “tainted” by having been born during his father’s “heretical” period.

Execution of Mazdak, in a miniature of a medieval Šāh-nāma.

So, assuming that Kāvūs was born during his father’s first reign, it is possible that he was tutored in the Zarādušti religion for a while but given that Kawād I was only in his twenties when he was deposed, the instruction must have ceased when Kāvūs was still a child and it certainly it could not have continued until the time of his bid for the throne, as it appears in the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian (who mostly followed Theophanes in this part of his work).

Crone continued her reasoning by stating that given the oncoming succession conflict Kawād I tried to shore Xusrō’s position up by asking Justin I to adopt him (and thus committing himself to support him militarily) but as we have seen the augustus refused. So, the only thing that Kawād I could do was to either write a will in his deathbed (as Procopius wrote) or to crown Xusrō himself (according to Malalas). According to Procopius, Kāvūs lay claim to the throne immediately after his father’s death, but according to Ibn Isfandīyār’s Tāriḵ (one of the very few Islamic sources that report a succession conflict) he staged a revolt a short time after his brother became king.

Crone concluded that either Malalas or his source made a mistake placing the “Manichean” revolt under Kawād I, and that Theophanes made the same mistake either because he followed Malalas or because they shared the same source. She followed by proposing that the Mazdakite uprising broke up immediately after Xusrō I’s accession, and that this revolt was what forced him to stop the ongoing war against the Romans and to ask Justinian I’s for peace terms. In Crone’s opinion, the most likely cause for the Mazdakite uprising might have been precisely a succession dispute: either Kāvūs rose up against his brother or there was a courtly intrigue against Xusrō I as reported by Malalas, or both. Crone speculated that maybe the revolt was led by Kāvūs and that the palace intrigue could have been aimed at installing a son of the other brother Jam/Zāmāsp on the throne who was also named (confusingly) Kawād, according to Procopius:

Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XXIII:

Straightway it came about that plots were formed against both rulers by their subjects; and I shall now explain how this happened. Chosroes, the son of Cabades, was a man of an unruly turn of mind and strangely fond of innovations. For this reason he himself was always full of excitement and alarms, and he was an unfailing cause of similar feelings in all others. All, therefore, who were men of action among the Persians, in vexation at his administration, were purposing to establish over themselves another king from the house of Cabades. And since they longed earnestly for the rule of Zames, which was made impossible by the law by reason of the disfigurement of his eye, as has been stated, they found upon consideration that the best course for them was to establish in power his child Cabades, who bore the same name as his grandfather, while Zames, as guardian of the child, should administer the affairs of the Persians as he wished. So they went to Zames and disclosed their plan, and, urging him on with great enthusiasm, they endeavoured to persuade him to undertake the thing. And since the plan pleased him, they were purposing to assail Chosroes at the fitting moment. But the plan was discovered and came to the knowledge of the king, and thus their proceedings were stopped. For Chosroes slew Zames himself and all his own brothers and those of Zames together with all their male offspring, and also all the Persian notables who had either begun or taken part in any way in the plot against him. Among these was Aspebedes, the brother of Chosroes’ mother.
Cabades, however, the son of Zames, he was quite unable to kill; for he was still being reared under the chanaranges, Adergoudounbades. But he sent a message to the chanaranges, bidding him himself kill the boy he had reared; for he neither thought it well to shew mistrust, nor yet had he power to compel him. The chanaranges, therefore, upon hearing the commands of Chosroes, was exceedingly grieved and, lamenting the misfortune, he communicated to his wife and Cabades’ nurse all that the king had commanded. Then the woman, bursting into tears and seizing the knees of her husband, entreated him by no means to kill Cabades. They therefore consulted together and planned to bring up the child in the most secure concealment, and to send word in haste to Chosroes that Cabades had been put out of the world for him. And they sent word to the king to this effect, and concealed Cabades in such a way that the affair did not come to the notice of anyone, except Varrames, their own child, and one of the servants who seemed to them to be in every way most trustworthy. But when, as time went on, Cabades came of age, the chanaranges began to fear lest what had been done should be brought to light; he therefore gave Cabades money and bade him depart and save himself by flight wherever he could. At that time, then, Chosroes and all the others were in ignorance of the fact that the chanaranges had carried this thing through.
At a later time Chosroes was making an invasion into the land of Colchis with a great army, as will be told in the following narrative. And he was followed by the son of this same chanaranges, Varrames, who took with him a number of his servants, and among them the one who shared with him the knowledge of what had happened to Cabades; while there Varrames told the king everything regarding Cabades, and he brought forward the servant agreeing with him in every particular. When Chosroes learned this he was forthwith exceedingly angry, and he counted it a dreadful thing that he had suffered such things at the hand of a man who was his slave; and since he had no other means of getting the man under his hand, he devised the following plan. When he was about to return homeward from the land of Colchis, he wrote to this chanaranges that he had decided to invade the land of the Romans with his whole army, not, however, by a single inroad into the country, but making two divisions of the Persian army, in order that the attack might be made upon the enemy on both sides of the River Euphrates. Now one division of the army he himself, as was natural, would lead into the hostile land, while to no one else of his subjects would he grant the privilege of holding equal honour with the king in this matter, except to the chanaranges himself on account of his valour. It was necessary, therefore, that the chanaranges should come speedily to meet him as he returned, in order that he might confer with him and give him all the directions which would be of advantage to the army, and that he should bid his attendants travel behind him on the road. When the chanaranges received this message, he was overjoyed at the honour shown him by the king, and in complete ignorance of his own evil plight, he immediately carried out the instructions. But in the course of this journey, since he was quite unable to sustain the toil of it (for he was a very old man), he relaxed his hold on the reins and fell off his horse, breaking the bone in his leg. It was therefore necessary for him to remain there quietly and be cared for, and the king came to that place and saw him. And Chosroes said to him that with his leg in such a plight it was not possible that he make the expedition with them, but that he must go to one of the fortresses in that region and receive treatment there from the physicians. Thus then Chosroes sent the man away on the road to death, and behind him followed the very men who were to destroy him in the fortress, — a man who was in fact as well as in name an invincible general among the Persians, who had marched against twelve nations of barbarians and subjected them all to King Cabades. After Adergoudounbades had been removed from the world, Varrames, his son, received the office of chanaranges. Not long after this either Cabades himself, the son of Zames, or someone else who was assuming the name of Cabades came to Byzantium; certainly, he resembled very closely in appearance Cabades, the king. And the Emperor Justinian, though in doubt concerning him, received him with great friendliness and honoured him as the grandson of Cabades. So then fared the Persians who rose against Chosroes.

This is a long passage, and it displays a large amount of names and information. Zames was Jam/Zāmāsp, the middle one amongst the three sons of Kawād I. According to Procopius, a faction among the aristocracy plotted to depose Xusrō I to install Kawād, son of Jam/Zāmāsp, on the throne, so that the latter could act as a reagent and rule the empire despite his loss of an eye. But Xusrō I discovered the plot and he ruthlessly had everyone involved executed, included his own uncle Aspebedes (i.e. Ispahbudhan or Aspahbadh, the head of this noble house, one of the main great aristocratic families of Ērānšahr) and all his brothers and their male relatives.

Here, Procopius’ account takes a novelesque twist that is possibly untrue, as the story he reports about the child Kawād being hid and raised in secrecy is a copy of the life of Cyrus as told by Herodotus, although the details and names given are historical. The chanaranges is of course the Kanārang, and this time Procopius gives his name: Adergoudounbades (a Hellenization of the Middle Persian name Ādurgundbād, short for Ādurgušnaspbad) which is a character we had already met in the previous thread; he had been installed as Kanārang by Kawād I at the start of his reign, so if ne was still the Kanārang forty years later he must have been already an old man as Procopius states (notice also that he must have been one of the three commanders who had lay siege to Martyropolis shortly before). Also notice the precautions that according to Procopius Xusrō I had to take in order to get rid of Ādurgundbād, and how he was succeeded in the title of Kanārang of Tūs by his son Varrames (Middle Persian: Warahrān).

In Procopius’ account, the man who secured the throne for Xusrō I was Mahbodh (or Mehbod) who was also responsible for signing the peace treaty with Justinian I in 532 CE. It is possible that he was the head of a faction of the nobility, for at the start of the Iberian war he had been responsible for the disgrace and execution of the artēštārān sālār Syāwaxš, who had been Kawād I’s main support since he had recovered the throne in 498/499 CE. Procopius also explains how in turn a few years later Mahbodh would also fall in disgrace and be replaced by another aristocrat as Xusrō I’s main diplomat, which probably would have signaled a replacement of the main nobiliary faction in the imperial court:

Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XXIII:

Later on Chosroes destroyed also Mebodes for the following reason. While the king was arranging a certain important matter, he directed Zaberganes who was present to call Mebodes. Now it happened that Zaberganes was on hostile terms with Mebodes. When he came to him, he found him marshalling the soldiers under his command, and he said that the king summoned him to come as quickly as possible. And Mebodes promised that he would follow directly as soon as he should have arranged the matter in hand; but Zaberganes, moved by his hostility to him, reported to Chosroes that Mebodes did not wish to come at present, claiming to have some business or other. Chosroes, therefore, moved with anger, sent one of his attendants commanding Mebodes to go to the tripod. Now as to what this is I shall explain forthwith. An iron tripod stands always before the palace; and whenever anyone of the Persians learns that the king is angry with him, it is not right for such a man to flee for refuge to a sanctuary nor to go elsewhere, but he must seat himself by this tripod and await the verdict of the king, while no one at all dares protect him. There Mebodes sat in pitiable plight for many days, until he was seized and put to death at the command of Chosroes. Such was the final outcome of his good deeds to Chosroes.

We do not know when this event happened. Still in 532 CE Mahbodh was firmly in power as it was him who negotiated the Eternal Peace with the Romans, but in 540 CE when the next Roman-Sasanian war broke up, he had been already replaced by Zaberganes (Middle Persian: Zabregān or Zabrigān; already in the ŠKZ appears a certain Zik Zabregān listed as a member of Ardaxšīr I’s court) as Xusrō I’s main diplomat. Procopius is unclear in this respect because he includes this episode immediately after the execution of Ādurgundbād, and a few years must have been passed between both events; if Mahbodh and his faction were Xusrō I rose to the throne and his succession was contested, it would have been foolish to eliminate his main (and perhaps only) support among the nobility.

Taking all this into account, the reconstructed sequence of events according to Crone is as follows:

• Death of Kawād I (dated by Malalas to early September 531 CE).
• Accession of Xusrō I to the throne, supported by his father’s will and by the nobiliary faction led by Mahbodh.
• Uprising of his brother Kāvūs, who may have been the Parišwārgar-šāh in northern Iran.
• Uprising of the Zarāduštis led by Mazdak, their spiritual leader (“bishop” in Malalas’ words).
• Xusrō I arranged urgently a peace with the Romans through Mahbodh in 532 CE; he was helped in this respect because the Nika riots broke out in Constantinople in January 532 CE, endangering Justinian I’s throne and signing a peace treaty would now also have become an urgent matter for the augustus.
• An amnesty or an edict of tolerance is issued by Xusrō I to appease the Zarāduštis. It succeeds, and this is the kernel for Malalas’ account of Xusrō I issue of a tolerance edict to the “Manicheans”.
• The hasty peace and the concessions to the Zarāduštis engendered discontentment in some circles of the nobility and the clergy, who launched a plot to depose Xusrō I and replace him with his nephew Kawād. Xusrō I discovered the plot and purged bloodily the ranks of the wuzurgān and the Zoroastrian clergy, as well as his male relatives, including his brother Jam/Zāmāsp.
• Defeat and execution of his brother Kāvūs.
• Once his brothers and the nobility were firmly under his control, Xusrō I turned against the Zarāduštis and massacred them and their leader Mazdak, as told by the Perso-Arabic sources. This is supported by Ṭabarī’s assertion that Xusrō I only repressed the Zarāduštis once he was firmly ensconced on the throne (see above).
• Once the internal situation in Ērānšahr was completely secured, Xusrō I restarted in 540 CE the war against the Romans invading the Roman eastern provinces. In the meantime, Mahbodh has also been disgraced and executed and replaced by Zabregān as the main diplomat of the Šāhān-šāh.

Crone’s reconstruction of events makes sense and also integrates almost all the seemingly contradictory reports from disparate sources into a coherent narration. It also makes sense chronologically, for it must have taken years for Xusrō I to be able to clear such a mess. It also vindicates Kawād I’s fears with respect to his succession (he probably feared that exactly this would happen) and also provides a reason for the Roman obstinacy in not signing a peace in 531 CE; possibly it was only the Nika riots that forced Justinian I to make a sudden change of policy in this respect as well as a convincing reason why Xusrō I restarted the war against the Romans in 540 CE (it might have been an “unfinished business” postponed due to the internal conflicts in the Sasanian Empire).

Xusrō I holds a banquet in honor of his vizier Wuzurgmihr; miniature of a medieval Šāh-nāma.

Crone also added that the Chronicle of Se’ert provides further support for her argument. According a passage of to this East Syriac document, written in the town of Se’ert in northern Mesopotamia during the VI c. CE, Zarāduštism was still rampant in the period between the return of Mar Abba after his stay in Constantinople sometime between 526 and 533 CE, and his election as Catholicos of the East in either 536-537 or 540 CE. During this period Mar Abba, who was living in Nisibis, preached to the people of the city against the Zarādušti doctrines, which taught that “all physical pleasures are licit”.

A further point addressed by Crone was if the Zarāduštis were in league with Kāvūs, at is seems to be alleged by Theophanes the Confessor. She thought that such an alliance would not have been impossible, but that it is impossible to ascertain if it happened thus from the extant evidence.

As for where did the Mazdakite uprising break out, the Dēnkard implies that it affected all of Ērānšahr, although the passage is unclear and ambiguous. As Crone wrote, most evidence we have from the revolt points to Iraq. Mazdak may have come from Mādharāyā in lower Iraq (according to Ṭabarī); it was in the Nisibis area where Mar Abba encountered Zarāduštis and it was in Iraq (between al-Jāzir and al-Nahrawān) that thousands of Mazdak’s followers were slaughtered in a single day (according to Mas’ūdī, Ṭabarī, Maqdīsī, Tha’ālibī, and Ibn al-Balḵī). Crone though conceded that the revolt may have extended also to Iran proper, as the later Khurramīs were concentrated in the Zagros Mountains and according of al-Iskāfī Mazdak also “corrupted” the population of Fārs. But Crone insisted that Iraq was probably the center of Mazdak’s revolt.

Another further issue is what was the deeper reason for the revolt. Crone stated that the political situation of civil war in Ērānšahr might have provided the immediate cause, but that there must have been a deeper reason, especially as all the Perso-Arabic sources insist that it was a revolt of the masses, and that Xusrō I was forced to kill (allegedly in a single day) between 60,000 and 100,000 of Mazdak’s followers. To Crone, the availability of a heterodox religious message in the form of Zarāduštism must have also facilitated the revolt, but according to her the ultimate reason must have been the administrative and fiscal reforms of Kawād I and Xusrō I; this is a contentious issue in which many historians disagree with her (i.e. they think that religion played a primary part in the uprising), but I tend to agree with her hypothesis. The primary source for these reforms is Ṭabarī:

Ṭabarī, History of the Prophets and Kings (Tāriḵ al-Rusul wa al-Mulūk) – The Kings of the Persians:

The rulers of Persia before Kisrā Anūsharwān used to levy land tax (ḵarāj) on the administrative divisions (kuwar), a third or quarter or fifth or sixth [of their produce], according to the water supply and the degree of cultivation; and poll tax (jizyat al-jamājim) according to a fixed sum. King Qubādh, son of Fayrūz ordered, toward the end of his reign, a cadastral survey, comprising plains and mountains alike, so that the correct amount of land tax could be levied on the lands. This was carried out, except that Qubādh’s death supervened before that survey could be completed. Hence when his son Kisrā succeeded to power, he gave orders for it to be carried through to its end and for an enumeration to be made of date palms, olive trees, and heads (i.e., of those liable to the poll tax). He then ordered his secretaries to calculate the grand total of that, and he issued a general summons to the people. He commanded the secretary responsible for the land tax to read out to them the total tax liabilities from the land and the numbers of date palms, olive trees, and heads. The secretary read all this out to them, after which Kisrā said to them, "We have judged it advisable to establish the rates of taxation on the basis of what has been enumerated of the various jarībs of this cadastral survey – date palms, olive trees, and heads - and we ordain that the taxation should be paid in installments spread over the year, in three installments. In this way, sums of money will be stored in our treasuries so that, should any emergency arise along one of our vulnerable frontiers or on any one of our distant boundaries, a breach of the borders or anything else untoward, and we have a need to deal with it and to nip it in the bud, involving the expenditure of money on this, we shall have money stored up here, ready and to hand, since we do not wish to have to levy a fresh installment of taxation for that emergency. So what do you think about the procedure we have envisaged and agreed upon?"

In short, the fiscal reforms that followed this survey involved a change from paying a fraction of the harvest in kind to paying a fixed amount in cash. This is presented as the epitome of justice in the Perso-Arabic sources (no surprise here because it had been taken over by the Arab Muslim conquerors as their standard fiscal system and was widespread in the medieval Islamic world). But as Crone stated, the peasants in Ērānšahr at the time of the revolt would have seen it otherwise. Having a fixed, predictable stream of income in cash was highly desirable for any ruler, but it would have been a very unwelcome change for the peasantry. Paying a fixed fraction of the harvest guaranteed the peasants that something was left for them even after a bad crop, but if they had to pay a fixed amount of cash for planted area depending on what was planted was a blow to their livelihoods because of two reasons:

• First, because they had to pay a fixed amount independently of the result of the crop. And in a bad year that could spell ruin to them.
• And second, because having to pay the tax in cash at a certain time of the year meant that all the peasants needed to sell at the same time of the year, driving down prices and further damaging their already precarious economies.

In fact, the above account by Ṭabarī is followed by a somewhat strange passage that does not leave Xusrō I in a great light, something extremely rare in Perso-Arabic accounts of the reign of this king:

Ṭabarī, History of the Prophets and Kings (Tāriḵ al-Rusul wa al-Mulūk) – The Kings of the Persians:

None of those present offered him any further advice or uttered a single word. Kisrā repeated these words to them three times. Then a man stood up from out of the expanse of persons present and said to Kisrā, "O king - may God grant you long life! - are you establishing a perpetual basis for this land tax on transient foundations: a vine that may die, land sown with corn that may wither, a water channel that may dry up, and a spring or qanāt whose water supply may be cut off?" Kisrā replied, "O troublesome, ill-omened fellow, what class of people do you come from?" The man said, "I am one of the secretaries." Kisrā gave orders, "Have him beaten with ink holders until he dies." Hence the secretaries in particular beat him with their ink holders, seeking to disassociate themselves, in Kisrā's eyes, from the man's views and utterance, until they killed him. The people said, "O king, we are in full agreement with the land tax which you are imposing on us."

In another fragment of Ṭabarī’s chronicle, a X c. CE landowner from Nehāvand states that the Iranians were horrified by the Sasanian shift from proportional to fixed taxes (that this individual attributed to the founder of the dynasty Ardaxšīr I). The XIV c. Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab also adds that the Iraqis found Xusrō I’s tax regime so hard to bear and protested so much against it that proportional taxation was eventually restored.

The main argument against Crone’s thesis is that the sources, like Ṭabarī’s chronicle, describe Xusrō I’s fiscal reform after the suppression of the Mazdakite revolt, so it is usually assumed that the two events were completely unrelated. The problem is that Ṭabarī also states clearly that the land survey was initiated by Kawād I, and no government would have initiated such a complex operation as a cadastral survey of the entire Sasanian Empire if it had not in mind a tax reform of some sort. Crone guessed that the reform must have proceeded gradually and that it must have been implemented first in the “central” part of the empire (that is, Iraq, nearer to the court) while other scholars thinks that the implementation must have happened all at once across the empire once the cadastral survey was finished.

Crone quoted some sources in support for her thesis:

• Ibn Rusta, Mas’ūdī, Yāqūt and Qummī stated that it was Kawād I who instituted the new tax system in Iraq, or more precisely in the Sawād (i.e. southern Iraq, the “black land”). Ibn Ḵordāḏbeh, Qummī and Ibn Rusta added that this king collected 150 million miṭqāls of silver through this tax (1 miṭqāl = 4.25 g), although Mas’ūdī wrote that it was Xusrō I who collected the tax after Kawād I’s death.
• Ibn Ḥawqal credited Kawād I with the shift from proportional to fixed taxes in Fārs.
• According to Qummī, Kawād I set up his tax office in Ḥulwān (an ancient town on the Zagros Mountains in western Iran, located on the entrance of the Paytak Pass, nowadays identified with the town of Sarpol-ē Z̄ahāb), which is supported by Ya’qūbī (quoting the local lore) who also added that the tax registers were kept there until the Umayyad period.

If the fiscal reform was initiated by Kawād I himself in Iraq and Pārs (or in western Iran at large), then Crone found that it would not be surprising that the peasants of these regions rebelled under the leadership of a dissident priest as soon as an opportune moment presented itself in the form of a disputed succession. Xusrō I crushed the revolt and then proceeded to complete the reform, be it in a modified way or otherwise.

In the midst of all these troubles in Ērānšahr, signing the peace with the Romans became a priority. But still, the negotiations were not easy:

Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars – Book I: The Persian War, XXII:

Straightway Rufinus and Alexander and Thomas came to act as ambassadors with Hermogenes, and they all came before the Persian king at the River Tigris. And when Chosroes saw them, he released the hostages. Then the ambassadors coaxed Chosroes and spoke many beguiling words most unbecoming to Roman ambassadors. By this treatment Chosroes became tractable, and agreed to establish a peace with them that should be without end for the price of one hundred and ten “centenaria,” on condition that the commander of troops in Mesopotamia should be no longer at Daras, but should spend all his time in Constantina, as was customary in former times; but the fortresses in Lazica he refused to give back, although he himself demanded that he should receive back from the Romans both Pharangium and the fortress of Bolum. (Now the “centenarium” weighs one hundred pounds, for which reason it is so called; for the Romans call one hundred “centum”). He demanded that this gold be given him, in order that the Romans might not be compelled either to tear down the city of Daras or to share the garrison at the Caspian Gates with the Persians. However the ambassadors, while approving the rest, said that they were not able to concede the fortresses, unless they should first make enquiry of the emperor concerning them. It was decided, accordingly, that Rufinus should be sent concerning them to Byzantium, and that the others should wait until he should return. And it was arranged with Rufinus that seventy days’ time be allowed until he should arrive. When Rufinus reached Byzantium and reported to the emperor what Chosroes’ decision was concerning the peace, the emperor commanded that the peace be concluded by them on these terms.
(…)
At a time not long after this Rufinus himself and Hermogenes were again sent to the court of Chosroes, and they immediately came to agreement with each other concerning the treaty, subject to the condition that both sides should give back all the places which each nation had wrested from the other in that war, and that there should no longer be any military post in Daras; as for the Iberians, it was agreed that the decision rested with them whether they should remain there in Byzantium or return to their own fatherland. And there were many who remained, and many also who returned to their ancestral homes. [532 A.D.] Thus, then, they concluded the so-called “endless peace,” when the Emperor Justinian was already in the sixth year of his reign. And the Romans gave the Persians Pharangium and the fortress of Bolum together with the money, and the Persians gave the Romans the strongholds of Lazica.

This peace was grandiosely baptized as the “Perpetual Peace” between both empires, but it would be notoriously short lived as Xusrō I broke it in the summer of 540 CE. It is difficult to state when exactly it was signed. In January 532 CE, Constantinople was shaken by the Nika revolt that almost toppled Justinian I, and the fleet that carried Belisarius’ army to North Africa did not sail from the Golden Horn until June 533 CE. Xusrō I was probably the one most hard pressed for peace among the two emperors, and so he agreed to quite lenient conditions. The Romans returned Bolum and Pharangium to the Sasanians, and the later returned the fortresses they had occupied in the border between Iberia and Lazica, while the Iberian refugees in the Roman Empire were allowed to return to their homeland if they so whished. The Romans also conceded the largely symbolic gesture of transferring the command post of the magister militum per Orientem from Dara to Constantia (further to the west) but they did not dismantle the fortress and kept it garrisoned. And Justinian I agreed to pay 110 centenaria of gold (11,000 Roman pounds of gold, about 792,000 gold solidi) which was a huge amount, but crucially, Xusrō I conceded that the Romans would pay no regular tribute or “contribution”, a condition upon which Kawād I had been insisting in all his negotiations with the Romans since the start of his second reign.

But what Justinian I got from this peace was the freedom to start his project of restauratio imperii in the West. The 8 years between 532 and 540 CE were to witness the zenith of Justinian I’s reign: the Vandal Kingdom was annexed in a lightning campaign led by Belisarius in 533-534 CE, and the same general began soon after the conquest of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy, which was initially met with overwhelming success. Justinian I’s jurists would also end the huge task of compiling and systematizing Roman law (the emperor’s most enduring legacy), and on 27 December 537 CE (after a marathon-like building period of 5 years and 10 months) emperor Justinian I and patriarch Menas inaugurated with great pomp the spectacular new basilica of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, while in front of it the emperor also rebuilt the square of the Augustaion, in which he erected a colossal column topped with an equestrian bronze statue of himself. All these successes though were possible because of the peace in the East, a peace that was most probably not due to the Perpetual Peace or to Xusrō I’s goodwill, but to the internal difficulties of the Šahān-šāh. Once they were over, Xusrō I would come back to solve his unfinished business with the Romans.

Virtual reconstruction of the church of Saint Polyeuktos in Constantinople. The church was commissioned by the noblewoman Anicia Iuliana, descendant of several West Roman emperors, and was constructed between 524 and 527 CE. It was a dynastic statement against the family of Justin I and Justinian I, so the latter seized the chance offered by the destruction of the old Theodosian cathedral of Hagia Sophia to build a church more grandiose, innovative, and elaborate than Saint Polyeuktos. Today, nothing remains of this church above ground level, but the remains of its inner marble decoration are of an exceptional quality, superior even to those from Hagia Sophia. According to contemporary sources, this interior decoration of elaborately carved marble reliefs was inspired in the rich stucco decorations that covered the interior surfaces of “Persian” palaces.

 

[Semper Victor]

5.2. INTRODUCTION TO THE TERRITORIAL ADMINISTRATION OF ĒRĀNŠAHR.


As I wrote time ago, I will be retaking now the issue of the territorial administration of the Sasanian Empire. My first attempt at tackling this subject was based in Rika Gyselen’s 1989 book, La geographie administrative de l'empire Sassanide. Les témoignages sigillographiques. Gyselen is a Belgian scholar who has specialized in the study of Sasanian seals (both the prints left by the seals -seals, or bullae- and the sealings themselves) and who began her career collaborating with the French historian Philippe Gignoux, who was one of the first scholars to study Sasanian seals.

The 1989 study (based on her doctoral dissertation) was a near-exhaustive summary of the state of the question back in 1989, but as I began writing my posts I did further research and I soon realized that not only had she published some short papers that modified the conclusions of her 1989 book, but that in 2019, on the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of her first study, she had published another book (La geographie administrative de l'empire Sassanide. Les témoignages épigraphiques en moyen-perse) that superseded all her previous publications and which had become an actualized summary of the state of the question in 2019. So I decided to stop what I was doing until I managed to acquire a copy of the new book and read it.

Why have I decided, of all things, to follow the work of a numismatist specialized on seals to address the issue of the territorial administration of Ērānšahr? Because seals are the only contemporary document that allows us to reconstruct the territorial administration of the Sasanian Empire. As I have written repeatedly during these threads, there are very few extant surviving texts written inside the Sasanian Empire before its fall. Most written sources were written in Islamic times (IX-XI c.) in Arabic or New Persian or were written by foreigners in Greek or Latin. Foreign sources show little or no interest in this subject, and the later Islamic sources present quite incomplete and distorted images due to the time lapse. There are some surviving sources written inside the empire, but they are Armenian or Christian Syriac sources. The former are mostly concerned with Armenian issues, and the latter are almost exclusive ecclesiastic accounts. As for the surviving Middle Persian texts, the vast bulk of them were written after the Arab Muslim conquest (some of them, like the Dēnkard and Bundahišn, as late as the IX c. CE). Even the only Middle Persian geographical text known, the Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr (literally "The Provincial Capitals of Ērānšahr") seems to have been completed inly in the late VIII or early IX c. CE.

Compared to this paucity of the written sources, the study of seals offers more possibilities, although it has also its limitations. The study of Sasanian must be always be conducted in relation to the written sources, because in themselves they tell little; but they can confirm or deny their content.

The use of seals in the Middle East is an extremely antique practice, which dates back all the way to Sumerian times. In this respect, Sasanian seals have been found dating back to the very beginnings of the dynasty in the III c. CE, but until the VI c. CE these seals were exclusively “personal” seals; seals in which the owner engraved their name and status, a portrait, or an emblem or perhaps a religious symbol or formula. In the cases of military officers or civilian functionaries, they sometimes (but now always) were engraved too with their titles or offices. Women could also have seals, as did members of the religious minorities of the empire. The texts in these seals could be engraved in Middle Persian using the Pahlavi script, but seals engraved in Hebrew, Syriac or other languages have also been found.

Chalcedony stamp-seal dated to the IV c. CE. Philippe Gignoux read the legend as “Mihrak, descendant of Vivahvant …”. Height: 19 mm; width: 17 mm; thickness: 20 mm. Unusually, the Pahlavi text is written in Parthian and not in Middle Persian; hence why it is dated to the IV c. CE (or earlier). This is a “personal” seal, engraved with the bust of the owner (Mihrak). The two wings represent “Xwarrah” (glory). British Museum.

This is a tricky distinction that Gyselen does in her works, and which is at times difficult to grasp. An office was a post that someone occupied by the will of the Šāhān-šāh, while a title was a rank that someone displayed by their own hereditary right, because they had attained it through a religious hierarchy or because the Šāhān-šāh had awarded it to the bearer as a mark of distinction. Unlike an office, a title was not limited in time, and it was not tied to a specific geographical location. Some cases could be tricky: for example, mowbed was both a title (one could become mowbed by rising through the Zoroastrian hierarchy) or an office, as according to Gyselen’s research every province had a provincial mowbed officially attached to it. So, in a province could co-exist “the” provincial mowbed, and another mowbed who held the title of jadaggōv driyōšān ud dādvar (“defender of the poor and judge”, a provincial office that seems to have been always filled by a mowbed).

Another example of a personal seal, this time dated to the V c. CE. This is a ring bezel (i.e. it was originally mounted on a ring) cut in cornelian. Height: 32 mm; width: 25 mm. Pahlavi Middle Persian legend read by Philippe Gignoux as “Roz-bud, chief of the drinkers”, which has also been translated as “chief wine-purchaser” (of the royal court). British Museum.

Archaeology shows that the situation changed in the VI c. CE, coinciding with the reign of Kawād I. At this time, a new kind of seal appears in the archaeological record, that Gyselen has named “official seal”. These official seals have distinctive traits that set them clearly apart from the personal seals (which continued to exist until the fall of Ērānšahr and into the Islamic era). They are much more homogeneous in design than personal seals and also much more austere: they never show images, portraits, or emblems (except in the very exceptional case of the official seals of the four Spāhbeds of the Empire) and they display only a text in Middle Persian written in Pahlavi script, stating:

• The name of the office (governor, judge, mowbed, etc.).
• The geographical jurisdiction over which their office wielded authority. This territorial jurisdiction could appear written in several ways; either a list of the provinces, or a more general term that could encompass several provinces (for example, “Pārs”). This can pose a problem for modern scholars, because we do not which specific provinces did these generic geographic terms include, and if these larger territories formed some sort of administrative unit of an upper level. As for now, archaeology has not furnished any proofs in this respect.

The name of the office was always written in Middle Persian using the Pahlavi script and employing larger characters in the center of the seal while the territorial jurisdiction of the office was written along the perimeter. If the name of this jurisdiction was too long, part of it was also written in the center of the seal (for example, in the case that an office covered several provinces). These seals were purely functional ones, and sometimes could be engraved quite crudely, even with spelling mistakes. They were not necessarily made to be long-lasting either, as some of these offices were probably only temporary, as we will see in a later post.

Drawing of a Sasanian administrative seal, VI-VII c. CE. The scale under the drawing is in cm. The Pahlavi Middle Persian legend reads “ōstāndār of Virōzān” (i.e. “governor of [Caucasian] Iberia”). The name of the office (ōstāndār) is written in larger characters in the center and the name of the territorial jurisdiction (i.e. “Iberia”) on the perimeter of the seal.

The Arabic and Middle Persian sources confirm that it was Kawād I who introduced the systematic use of seals, although some of the provincial offices that used them were created (according to the same sources) by his son and successor Xusrō I. The sources also state that Kawād I decreed that no official document would have any legal value unless it was sealed by the responsible official. We have already seen that the Sasanians developed an extremely complex bureaucracy, and the example, of the Bactrian Documents (dated to the IV – VII c. CE) clearly show how developed the use of legal documents and seals was. Detailed documents on parchment were written even for minor affairs like the sale of some sheep in remote mountain villages in Ṭoḵārestān, and no document of this sort was valid unless it bore at least five seals: all the parts involved and at least two witnesses. This means that even relatively humble people needed to own seals for ordinary transactions; if this was the case for villagers we can only start to imagine what it must have been like for the official administration of the territory. This has been further confirmed by the discovery in 2018-2019 of the so-called “Ṭabaristān archive”, a collection of Pahlavi documents from the region of the same name in northern Iran dated to the late VII and the VIII c. CE. Although at this time the Sasanian Empire had already fallen to the Arab Muslims, most of Ṭabaristān was still ruled by local Iranian noblemen that ruled as local kings subordinated to the Umayyad or Abbasid Caliphs, and they followed very narrowly the old Sasanian administrative practices.

As I have said before, the material remains of the seals can be either their sealings (usually clay bullae) or the seals themselves, that were normally made of semi-precious stones, usually red ones like carnelian. Official seals were always of a circular shape, usually quite small in size and must have been carried either mounted as signet rings or hung around the neck from a chain, but were quite small, rarely larger than 2-3 cm in diameter, with the exception of the seals of the Four Spāhbeds, which were quite elaborate affairs of a more considerable dimension (5-6 cm). Personal seals show a much greater variety of forms; they were usually oval and could display very varied legends and emblems. Gyselen and Gignoux think that unlike the official seals, in which no clear hierarchy is displayed (unless for the seals of the Four Spāhbeds) personal seals displayed the social status of the owner according to some guidelines:

• The larger the seal, the higher the social status of the owner.
• The more finely and elaborately carved the seal, the higher the social status of the owner.
• Only members of the House of Sāsān or of the higher layers of the aristocracy were allowed to display their portraits in seals; it is also quite possible that the kolāh (a sort of bejeweled tiara) that these dignitaries displayed in the seals were symbols of social status and thus were reserved only to members of the higher aristocratic families. The kolāhs displayed symbols whose significance is not entirely clear. Sometimes they seem to have been monograms in Pahlavi for the names and/or offices of the bearers, but in depictions that does not seem to have been the case. The people depicted are always depicted in civilian attire, including the Šāhān-šāh himself.
• Although only members of the higher echelons of society are depicted in “portraiture seals”, some of them also owned seals without portraits, so it is not clear in which cases a seal with portrait was deemed preferable or not.
• The seals without portrait could belong to all sorts of people. Seals for Christian bishops are known, as well as for Jews or Christian governors. They could display religious symbols (including Christian or Jewish religious imagery), astral symbols, real or fantastic animals (usually those associated with Zoroastrian deities or hypostases: birds with Xwarrah, boars with Verethragna, etc.).

The study of the surviving bullae upon which these seals left their imprints has also brought us important insights into the way in which they were used. It is quite common to find bullae with mora then one sealing, and Gyselen thinks that this may mean that the Sasanian administrative practice demanded that in many cases documents and/or packages were sealed by more than one official, to ensure the cooperation between the different offices and limit the opportunities for malfeasance or corruption. I say “packages” because in many bullae can be observed the holes through which anciently passed two (or more) crossed straps or ropes, which would have been completely unnecessary if they were sealing a document written on parchment; it is quite clear then that these bullae were sealing larger items, be it coffers (perhaps with the product of tax collection), bags or packages of some sort. Archaeological findings in Spain and Portugal have revealed that this practice was continued by the Arab Muslim conquerors in the early VIII c. CE. Bullae have been found carrying seals of the Umayyad authority identifying the loot or tribute from conquered cities, which probably were put there to ensure that this tribute/loot arrived intact to its destiny (where it was to be divided among the conquerors or handed over to the Caliph’s Treasury).

Clay bulla with two “official” and one “personal” seals. National Museum of Iran, Tehran.

Sadly, most seals and sealings have not been found in properly archaeological digs but had surfaced in private collections or through official purchases from the antiquities’ market. Uncoupled from their proper archaeological context, these artifacts then tell us much less than they would have otherwise. Perhaps the best example are the seals of the vast collection seals and sealings of the Saeedi family; in which Rika Gyselen discovered in the early 2000s the seals of the Four Spāhbeds that validated, once and for all, the accounts of the Perso-Arabic historical texts in this respect. But we still do not know where and when they were physically found, and that is a serious inconvenience because it denies historians from valuable additional information.

You might have noticed also that the title of the monography from 2019 displays a small but significant change with respect to the older book: from témoignages sigillographiques to témoignages épigraphiques en moyen-perse. The new monography from 2019 is quite more ambitious in scope (and considerably more extensive) and instead of concentrating exclusive on seals and sealings, it also resorts to other objects and texts, always of an epigraphic nature, especially the Šābuhr I's Ka'ba-ye Zartošt Inscription (shortened as ŠKZ) with the objective of arriving to a reconstruction as comprehensive as possible (within what is possible given the available evidence) of the territorial administration of Ērānšahr. In this sense, this newer monography succeeds in offering something that the older one only hinted at: an attempt at reconstructing the evolution of the territorial administration of the empire along its four centuries of existence.

This expanded scope and ambition has been very welcome, but it has also posed me an unexpected problem. The monograph from 1989 was shorter and had quite a straightforward structure that I could easily translate to the posts in this forum simply by replicating it, shortening it as much as possible and omitting any information that would be of use only for specialists; Gyselen followed a very “pedagogical” narrative structure with an introduction, a review of the general administrative structure, followed by the offices that appeared in the seals, then a comprehensive review of the provinces that appeared in them, and finally a conclusion.

But the structure of her 2019 book is much less “amateur friendly”, because it clearly assumes a familiarity with her previous publications. For example, after a short introduction she jumps directly into a massive geographical catalogue in which she lists alphabetically all the known administrative territorial entities of the Sasanian Empire from the level of province upwards, reaches many conclusions about the nature and evolution of the territorial administration and only towards the end she deals with the offices and what were their tasks. I just cannot translate directly such a narrative into posts if I want this thread to make any sense, so I will need to twist things around and try to replicate her 1989 structure, which was much friendlier to the non-initiated. I hope I can achieve so.

Seal of Pant, patriarch of the Church of Caucasian Albania (VI c. CE). The Pahlavi legend in Middle Persian was read by Philippe Gignoux as “Pant/Pand, the Great Catholicos of Albania and Balāsagān”. National Library of France. Notice the use of the cross, and alongside it, of the half moon and the sun/star, two typically Sasanian astral symbols heavily present in late Sasanian iconography (i.e. in coins and the crowns of Sasanian kings).

 

[Kurfürst]

But the structure of her 2019 book is much less “amateur friendly”, because it clearly assumes a familiarity with her previous publications. For example, after a short introduction she jumps directly into a massive geographical catalogue in which she lists alphabetically all the known administrative territorial entities of the Sasanian Empire from the level of province upwards, reaches many conclusions about the nature and evolution of the territorial administration and only towards the end she deals with the offices and what were their tasks. I just cannot translate directly such a narrative into posts if I want this thread to make any sense, so I will need to twist things around and try to replicate her 1989 structure, which was much friendlier to the non-initiated. I hope I can achieve so.

Sounds like you have your work cut out for you No worries, no pressure, take your time. Your posts are worth waiting for.

 

[Semper Victor]

5.3. THE ADMINISTRATION OF ĒRĀNŠAHR. THE CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION.


The Šāhān-šāh sat on the top of the military, religious and civilian hierarchies of the empire. Although Greek and Latin writers regularly depicted the Sasanian king as the model of an Oriental despot with unlimited power over his subjects, and Sasanian official propaganda liked to portray the king as all-powerful, in real life his power had serious limits.

The most serious of these limits to the king’s power was the very nature of kingship among Iranians, which in turn was linked to the structure of Sasanian society. Although ever since the reign of Ardaxšīr I royal propaganda portrayed the king as the one chosen by the gods to rule, in practice the king ruled through consensus of the nobility. This was so because the Sasanian state was in several ways a continuation of the Arsacid state, and the monarchy founded by Aršak I had been founded on the tradition of steppe nomads, that later became nuanced by Iranian religious traditions. Like in many Inner Asian nomadic societies, kingship was restricted only to the members of a royal clan or family (like it was the case already among the Xiongnu, as documented in Sima Qian’s Shiji), so even if every king claimed to have been invested by the gods with Xwarrah, it actually was something that had been bestowed by them upon all the members of the House of Sāsān. This is also put in evidence by the succession rules: even if kings tried to appoint one of their sons to succeed them while they were still alive, many times the succession was contested by the nobility who installed on the throne another member of the House of Sāsān; the more extreme case is probably the accession of Šābuhr II to the throne according to Ṭabarī’s chronicle.

In turn, this preponderance of the nobility was rooted in nomadic custom. If we look again at the Chinese sources, already under the Xiongnu all the offices of the state were reserved to the members of three families (one of which was the royal family). So, in the same way that kingship was the collective agnatic property of a family, the same happened with all the main public offices in the Arsacid and Sasanian empires. The Soviet/Armenian historian Anahit Perikhanian, after a long study of Sasanian law, actually defined a citizen of Ērānšahr with full citizenship rights as a male member of the nobility who professed the Zoroastrian religion. Such a person was an Ēr (i.e. an Aryan/Iranian) and the Sasanian Empire was Ērānšahr, the Kingdom/Empire of the Ērān/Aryans/Iranians. Other social groups could also enjoy legal rights, but they were always less “enfranchised” than an Ēr. Zoroastrian law was written by the Zoroastrian religious hierarchy and in turn the latter supported this legal and social construct through its reading of the Avestā and the Zoroastrian tradition: the Ērān were the heirs of the Aryan people who were the first to follow the teachings of Zoroaster, and this “sanctity” was transferred by right of inheritance. Only they (again, in a collective way) had been entrusted by the gods with ownership and sovereignty over the whole world, which allowed them to elect a king (the Šāhān-šāh) who in turn should rule over all the other kings on Earth.

The Greek and Latin sources support the evidence provided by Sasanian law and the study of ancient Inner Asian custom. Since the first accounts left by Hellenistic and Latin writers about the Parthians and their state, the authors noted that the higher public offices of the state were owned by a reduced group of families, and this is still duly repeated by the authors of the VI-VII c. CE. This must have been obviously a point of great tension for the Sasanian state.

As the bureaucracy of the empire grew, it must have become impossible to fill all the available posts with the Ērān, even if they resorted not only to the higher but also to the lower aristocracy, and so as time went by we can see an increasing integration of religious minorities into the power structures of the empire; especially Christians. In turn, it is unclear to me, even after reading all of the works by Gyselen and other scholars, how did the Sasanian state resolve the inherent contradiction between a territorial provincial division with governors appointed by the king and the existence of great noble houses that had traditionally ruled over great parts of the Iranian Plateau (and who were in some cases even older than the House of Sāsān itself).

In turn, this was also reflected in the army. As we have seen, the impressive military bases and border walls built by the Sasanian kings in the Caucasus and northern Iran during the V c. CE clearly imply the existence of a large professional army just to garrison them. But the contemporary written sources of the VI c. CE attest still to an army that depended on the contribution of the armies of the nobility (it would have been also impossible to explain some of the nobiliary rebellions of the V and VI c. CE if this were not the case). As for the Islamic sources, according to Ṭabarī it was Xusrō I who first created a professional army paid for by the Treasury, but this again seems to go against the archaeological evidence (i.e. a large standing army must have existed already before him) and the contemporary sources (i.e. the noble class still provided, if not most, then a large part of the military forces of the Sasanian army).

The Middle and New Persian word dīwān can be translated as “register” or “government office” in a broader sense (or “chancery”, to use a more antique-sounding term). According to Islamic chronicles, a central dīwān already existed in Sasanian times, from which subordinated offices depended (a dīwān of the army, a dīwān of finances, etc.) but scholars had long been skeptical about this claim. Until the early 2000s, the earliest attested appearance of this word dated back to the reign of the second Rashidun Caliph Omar, who founded a dīwān in Medina to administer the tribute from the conquered countries and to keep track of the Arab warriors who were entitled to receive a regular salary from it. So, scholars thought for a long time that the term dīwān employed by Ṭabarī and other Islamic authors when writing about the Sasanian administration was just an anachronism, in which they resorted to the use of a term that was contemporary to them to describe an older administrative institution that no longer existed. But even if its foundation could only be traced back to Caliph Omar, the term is clearly a loanword from Middle Persian: dīwān is derived from Old Persian dipi, which means “inscription, document”, From this word also came the Middle Persian word for “scribe” (dībīr) and all its derivatives. So a priori we should not rule out its existence in Sasanian times, as its etymology is of a clear Iranian origin.

The controversy ended when in 2003 Rika Gyselen published the finding of a chalcedony seal of a Sasanian dīwān that she located in Ahmad Saeedi’s collection in London. The legend on the seal does not specify to which dīwān it belonged (the royal chancery, the dīwān of finances, etc.). Gyselen thought that this information was probably provided by the symbol or emblem that is inscribed in the center of the seal and whose meaning remains unknown. The legend reads simply “Seal of the dīwān” (Middle Persian: muhr ī dīwān).

Gyselen published a second seal in the same paper that probably belonged also to the central Sasanian government. This time it was not a seal in itself, but the sealing. The Middle Persian legend around the perimeter reads “Seal of the Treasury which is in good increase” (Middle Persian: muhr ī ganj ī pad abzōn wēh). Like the previous one, it had in its center a large symbol whose meaning is known to specialists: it is commonly known as frawahr and it appears in many fields closely related with the House of Sāsān (rock reliefs, coins, etc.). In Gyselen’s opinion, the presence of this symbol must surely hint towards a royal status for this “Treasury”, i.e. that this was the seal of the Royal Treasury.

Above: drawing of the two seals published in 2003 by Rika Gyselen in her paper “Dīwān et «Trésorerie» sassanides: premières attestations sigillographiques”. To the left, seal of a dīwān. To the right, seal of the Treasury.

If we consider the evidence provided by these two seals as proof of the veracity of the information provided by the Islamic sources, then the late Sasanian government was a remarkably modern and sophisticated structure. A Royal Chancery is already attested in epigraphic and sigillographic sources to have existed under the Arsacids (findings from Old Nisa in modern Turkmenistan, I c. BCE), and to have continued under the first Sasanian kings. One of the secretaries of Xusrō I, called Pābag son of Wēh-Ruwān is said to have been responsible for carrying out the first steps of Xusrō I’s fiscal reforms, and to have become later the head of the Military Office (dīwān al-jund in Arabic).

How many dīwāns existed in the central government? To my knowledge, there is no comprehensive list of them neither in primary nor in secondary sources, but we can see hints in later Islamic works as well as in some Middle Persian and Armenian sources.

There seems to have been a Royal Chancery (i.e. a main dīwān) in charge of the king’s correspondence and the redaction of edicts and laws. We do not know if this institution enjoyed some sort of preferent status over the other branches of the administration, but that could have been the case because the sources hint at some of their members enjoying a really great degree of closeness to some Sasanian kings. I have quoted above already the case of Pābag son of Wēh-Ruwān under Xusrō I, but there are other examples.

We find mentioned in the Parthian version of the ŠKZ, among the members of the court of Šābuhr I, a certain Arštād, the “letter scribe” (Parthian: pad frawardag dībīr) from Ray, who belonged to the Mihrān family. This detail is important, because it shows that a member of the noble estate could also be a dībīr, while later Islamic texts list the scribes as a “third state” separate from the nobles, priests, and commoners.

During the brief period of Sasanian occupation of Dura Europos in the III c. CE, the names of important Iranian visitors were written in the walls of the city’s synagogue in Middle Persian and Parthian. These graffiti include several scribes: Yazdān-Farrōbay, Yazdān-pēs, Rašnag, Mahrspand, Hormazd and Abursām. Ahmad Tafazzoli suggested that these scribes might have been high army secretaries that accompanied the Sasanian army in its campaigns.

A secretary of Šābuhr I, Abasā of Ḥarrān, left an inscription in which he reported having erected a statue of the king, who in turn rewarded him with gold, silver, slaves, gardens, and riches. It is probable that Abasā was a dībīr but also a provincial governor. During the reign of Xusrō I, one provincial governor of Ctesiphon was addressed as dībīrbed, “chief secretary”.

We can find another example in the Paikuli inscription. In the list of grandees, sub-kings and dignitaries who met Narsē when he arrived in Āsūrestān from Armenia we can find listed a “secretary of finances” though his personal name does not appear either in the Middle Persian or Parthian versions of the inscription.

Another clue at the importance of these bureaucrats and how many diwans there were can be found in Ṭabarī’s account of the succession crisis after the death of Yazdegerd I in 421 CE. Instead of supporting any of Yazdegerd I’s sons, the court and the nobility decided to back a certain Sasanian prince named Xusrō as king. Among these nobles were three dībīrs:

• Gōdarz, Secretary of the Army.
• Gušnasp-Ādur, Secretary of Finances.
• Juwānōy, the chief scribe, who was sent to al-Ḥīra to persuade the Laḵmid king al-Munḏir I from supporting Warahrān (the future Warahrān V) as a candidate to the throne.

So according to the Islamic sources there were at least three dīwāns, and each of them would have been headed by its respective secretary (dībīr):

• The Royal Chancery headed by the chief scribe (who may have carried the title of Wuzurg-dībīr), whom we might call “chancellor”. It dealt with the king’s correspondence, drafted edicts, royal commands and probably also laws. It is also probable that this organism was in charge of diplomacy and the exterior politics of the empire.
• The Chancery of the Army headed by the Secretary of the Army.
• The Chancery of Finances (the Dīwān of the Treasury of the sealing mentioned above) headed by the Secretary of Finances.

Scribes formed a privileged class. According to Ṭabarī, they were exempt from taxation, same as the nobility and priesthood and the king’s servants. They were also allowed to ride on high-quality horses “like the king and judges” and according to Ibn al-Balḵī “people of low extraction, common people, or the offspring of servants” were not allowed as a rule to become a dībīr. Ferdowsī also narrates the story of a shoe-maker who asked that his son be educated as a dībīr, in exchange for lending a king a considerable sum of money (he was probably not a “shoe-maker” but a rich merchant), but his request was refused. And according to Ṭa’ālibī, Xusrō I forbid the sons of commoners from receiving a good education because, he said, “when the sons of people of low class are educated, they seek high positions, and when they obtain them, they take the liberty of humiliating the nobles”.

Agate seal (15.3 x 20 x16.5 mm) with the legend “Ābiy dībīr, see the soul”. Published by Rika Gyselen in her book “Sasanian seals and sealings in the A. Saeedi collection”; Acta Iranica 44, 2007.

This exalted social position for scribes could have been due (in my opinion) to the fact that the scribes formed the royal bureaucracy. To put it in other words: I think that ōstāndārs, šahrabs, āmārgars, etc. may have been drawn from the class of the dībīrs.

The school in which dībīrs were trained was called dībīristān. The court secretaries were selected from among the young dībīrs by examination, conducted by the chief secretaries. After the names of the persons accepted had been submitted to the king, they were counted among the royal attendants. According to the Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, they were forbidden from associating with anyone not sanctioned by the king. Those less qualified in handwriting and intelligence were assigned to high officials. According to Jahšiyārī, the estate of dībīrs was subdivided into several groups, the establishment of which was attributed to the mythical king Jamšēd, but Jahšiyārī does not specify which and how many groups there were. Fortunately, the Letter of Tansar does mention these subdivisions: official correspondents, accountants, judicial secretaries, chroniclers, and copyists.

The Middle Persian name for a correspondent was frawardag (or nāmag) dībīr (i.e. “scribe concerned with letters”). The term is already attested in the ŠKZ. They needed to master a special form of cursive Pahlavi scrip used for letters (frawardag-dībīrīh), be intelligent and quick witted and to have notions of various sciences. One of their functions was to act as translators and interpreters; the Parthian and Greek versions of the ŠKZ were written by such bilingual secretaries. Because of this reason, foreigners could also fulfill this role; Ṭabarī mentions an Indian secretary who lived in the court of Xusrō II and an Arab dībīr who served this same king; his father had served his predecessor Hormazd IV in the same post. As attested in the graffiti of the synagogue of Dura Europos, some royal secretaries accompanied the army on the march, and this is also reflected in the Islamic sources: according to Dīnawarī, a certain Yazdak, who accompanied the army, fled at night to inform Hormazd IV of the rebellion of its commander Warahrān Chōbēn, and this same Yazdak is also mentioned by the same author among the attendants of Xusrō I. Again according to Dīnawarī, the same title (Arabic kātib al-jund, “secretary of the army”) had also been borne by one of the grandees during the reign of Yazdegerd I.

As for the accountants, they were further divided into sub-groups. Financial secretaries (Middle Persian: hāmār-dībīr) are already mentioned in the Paikuli inscription (dated to the late III c. CE); they handled tax affairs. The court accountants may have borne the name *kadag-hāmār-dībīr, and there were also accountants of the Treasury who may have been called *ganj-hāmār-dībīr (who according to the Islamic sources had also their own special script known as *ganj-hāmār-dībīrīh). One of the duties of the chief secretary of the Treasury was to make a report of the inventory of the Royal Treasury to the Šāhān-šāh at the beginning of each year. Thus Ferdowsī wrote how at the beginning of the new year the chief secretary of the Treasury of Warahrān V went to the king to let him know that the royal treasury was empty. The chief secretary of taxation (called al-dabīrbad or kātib al-ḵarāj in the Arabic sources) was among the first state officials to congratulate the Šāhān-šāh in the Nowrūz audience (the most important public event of the year for a Sasanian king).

The title of the accountants attached to fire temples was ātaxšān-hāmār-dībīr, and they also employed a special script (*ātaxšān-hāmār-dībīrīh). A personal seal belonging to an accountant attached to the great fire temple of Ādur Gušnasp has been found. Accountants of pious foundations were known as *ruwānagān-hāmār-dībīrs, and again according to the Islamic users they used their own special script (*ruwānagān-hāmār-dībīrīh).

Agate seal (15.3 x 18 x 13.6 mm) with the legend “Čarig, dībīr, true”. Published by Rika Gyselen in her book “Sasanian seals and sealings in the A. Saeedi collection”; Acta Iranica 44, 2007.

Each province of the Sasanian Empire had its own tax accountants, known as šhrdwyr in Syriac and kātib al-kūrah in Arabic (Middle Persian: *šahr-dībīr). In the Syriac Martyrdom of Pethion, it is told how a *šahr-dībīr, together with a judge and the Mowbedān-mowbed of Yazdegerd II were in charge of judging Pethion, while according to the anonymous Kitāb al-Kārnāmaj fī sīrat Ānūširwān (Book of Kisrā to the Leaders of the People in Gratitude) it is told that:

I (i.e. Xusrō I Anōšīrvān) have appointed in each land a man worthy of confidence, next to the governor, to surprise him (…) and I ordered that the judge, the scribe of the province (kātib al-kūrah), the men worthy of confidence of the people of the region and the governor should submit their (particular) accounts to the dīwān.

According to Ahmad Tafazzoli, the secretaries responsible for recording judicial decisions and verdicts were probably called *dad-dībīrs. The special script used by them was called dād-dafirih in Arabic sources (Middle Persian: dad-dībīrīh).

And finally, certain scribes were responsible for recording daily events. According to Movsēs Xorenac’i, one of them, a secretary of Šābuhr II called Xwarrahbūd, was captured by the Romans. In Roman captivity, he learnt Greek and wrote a book about the deeds of Šābuhr II and Julian. The same Armenian source also tells us that later he also translated into Greek a Middle Persian book on the history of primitive times written by one of his Iranian companions in captivity, a certain Rāšt-saxwan. Sergius, an interpret for Xusrō I, allegedly summarized the court archives and translated his summary into Greek; this work was used by the Roman historian Agathias of Myrina.

According to Balāḍurī, in a report pertaining to the late Sasanian period, the king’s orders and decisions were recorded in his presence, and another official copied them into the royal monthly diary; the king put his seal on the diary, which was kept in the Treasury.

The chief secretary of the court bore the title dībīrbed, already attested in the Parthian documents from Old Nysa (I c. BCE). In the ŠKZ, the dībīrbed is also mentioned among the great dignitaries of the court. A certain Mard with this title is named among the retinue of Ardaxšīr I, and a certain Hormazd is mentioned among the dignitaries of Šābuhr I’s court bearing the same title. Interestingly, a Hormazd dībīrbed is also mentioned in a Manichean Parthian text, and it might have been the same person mentioned in the ŠKZ. The same term was borrowed into Sogdian, and also into Armenian as dprapet.

In the Arabic and New Persian sources this title is variously given as dabīrbad, dabīrfad, daβīrfad and daβīrbad. Dīnawarī translated it into Arabic as ra’īs kuttāb al-rasā’il.

Another title for the chief secretary, also attested since Arsacid times, was Parthian dibīrān mahist, as attested in the Parthian epic Ayādgār ī Zarērān. It was translated into New Persian as mihtar-e dabīrān, mihtar dabīr, or bozorg dabīr by Bal’amī and Ferdowsī). The Middle Persian title wuzurg dībīr also can be found in a graffiti in Dura Europos.

The fact that the title dabīrbad was used in the Kitāb al-Tāj fī sīrat Ānūširwān (Book of the Crown, which treats of the Life of Anōšīrvān) for the kātib al-ḵarāj indicates that this official was chief functionary for taxation. This official was the first person, after the king, to deliver a speech in the Nowrūz ceremony. According to Tafazzoli, there must surely have been other categories of chief secretary.

The chief priest (Mowbedān-mowbed), the chief secretary (dībīrbed) and the chief religious teacher (*Hērbedān-hērbed?) were present at public pleadings according to Islamic sources. These same sources also report that on “delicate” occasions the king dined only with three of his attendants: the chief priest, the chief secretary and the chief of cavalry (Arabic: ra’s al-‘asāwira, maybe Parthian/Middle Persian Aspbed).

We do not know what sort of relationship these bureaucratic institutions had with other organs of the civilian and military establishment. For example, we know that during the V c. CE a nobleman called Mihr-Narsē became Hazārbed under Warahrān V and Yazdegerd II, and that he acted as a sort of prime minister for these kings. We do not know if came from the ranks of the Royal Chancery or if he reached this position through other ways. In the same way, during the VI c. CE we know that a certain Wuzurgmihr became the Wuzurg-framādār for Xusrō I, also acting as his head of government. We really do not know about other such figures through the sources, and so we do not know if these two characters were exceptional cases or if the norm was to have in place a Hazārbed or a Wuzurg-framādār to coordinate the several branches of the royal bureaucracy, and the sources just ignore them because they were less colorful figures than the two characters quoted above.

Agate seal (17 x 20.7 x 13.4 mm) with the legend “Šād-Šābuhr, dībīr”. Published by Rika Gyselen in her book “Sasanian seals and sealings in the A. Saeedi collection”; Acta Iranica 44, 2007.

Personally, I think that there is no proof that they were permanent posts. Notice that in the succession crisis after the death of Yazdegerd I quoted above there appears no “prime minister” in Ṭabarī’s account, and the same can be said in other events like the repeated civil wars and dethronements immediately before, during and after the reign of Kawād I. The chronicles of Joshua the Stylite, the Pseudo-Zacharias of Mytilene and Procopius of Caesarea mention quite a confusing array of Sasanian dignitaries during Kawād I’s reign within the frame of his wars and negotiations with the Romans, but none of these dignitaries appears to fulfill the role of a “prime minister”. In the talks with the Romans immediately before the Iberian war, Kawād I sent as negotiators Syāwaxš, who held a military post (Artēštārān-sālār, “head of the warriors”) and Mahbodh, for whom no title or post is mentioned in the sources. He could have hold the title of Hazārbed, or Wuzurg-framādār for all we know, but Procopius does not mention it at all. If Mahbodh did indeed hold this post, then it seems that one his functions was to act like the empire’s diplomat-in-chief, and that he was responsible for the exterior politics of the empire immediately under the king’s command.

Although he could also have been the Chancellor, i.e. the Wuzurg-dībīr in charge of the Royal Chancery, and there are hints in the Islamic sources that this may well have been the case. Ṭabarī wrote that when Xusrō I was considering his campaign against the Hephthalites and the “Khaqan of China”, he consulted with the Mowbedān-mowbed Ardaxšīr and his secretary Yazdegerd. Now, we cannot be sure who this secretary was. He could have been the dībīr in charge of the Chancery of the Army (quite logical for a military campaign), the Wuzurg-dībīr, head of the Royal Chancery and of the empire’s diplomacy, or the king’s personal secretary (if this was a post separated from that of Chancellor) which would have also made sense in the case of starting a war against the empire’s most formidable enemy.

Gyselen also deals with the issue of the several “organs” of the central administration and its relationship with the provincial administrations in her 2019 study. According to her, while the latter can be identified by the name of their territorial circumscription, the former can be perhaps identified by some terms that appear in their names:

• Hamšahr, meaning “all the empire” in Middle Persian.
• Šahr, meaning “empire” (but also “kingdom” or “country” in Middle Persian; this is quite an ambiguous term and I will deal with it in a later post).
• Ērān, meaning “Aryans/Iranians”.

According to Gyselen, the Islamic sources seem to suggest also that the term wuzurg (“great” in Middle Persian) may have been used for offices and officials in the central administration, and she also points that the term dīwān (“chancery”) in itself is neutral enough and that there may well have been provincial dīwāns that helped the provincial authorities to fulfill their duties, perhaps attached to each or any of the provincial offices.

Garnet seal (3.8 x 19.5 x 15.3 mm) with the legend “Narsē, ganjwar” (treasurer). Published by Rika Gyselen in her book “Sasanian seals and sealings in the A. Saeedi collection”; Acta Iranica 44, 2007.

Nevertheless, Gyselen also admits there is the possibility that the names of offices/officials formed with šahr or Ērān did not refer to posts or offices in the central administration, but that they were purely honorific titles: Šahr-hazāruft (“Hazāruft of the empire”) or Šahr-aspbed (“Aspbed of the empire”) without any sort of relationship with the territorial administrations. She admits that this seems to be the case for the Ērān-ambaragbed (the “chief of the provisions of the Aryans”, i.e. the “quartermaster of the Aryans”), as there are no traces of territorial ambaragbeds in the written sources or in the epigraphic evidence.

She is less sure about the case of the Wuzurg-framādār, and she leaves open the question if all the territorial offices that bore the name framādār (meaning “he who issues commands”, “he who has the command” in Middle Persian) depended upon this official (to which I would add “assuming this was a permanent office of the central administration”; see above):

• The framādār.
• The gund-ī-kadag-xwadāyān-framādār.
• The wāspuhragān-framādār.

Gyselen also points out that it seems to be the case in both the central and provincial administrations that an office was usually designated by the title of the official that headed it (dādwar, āmārgar, etc.) and not by an abstract administrative name (dīwān is a clear exception to this rule)

Gyselen also deals with a rather particular title. In one of the inscriptions by the priest Kirdēr (III c. CE), he stated that he was appointed hamšahr-mowbed-ud-dādwar (“chief of the magi and judge of all the empire”) by Warahrān I. This is a title that is found absolutely nowhere else, neither in the written sources nor in epigraphy. According to Gyselen, this title may have given Kirdēr the power to supervise all the provincial administrations of mowbed-ud-dādwar, although other explanations are also possible.

Several offices which included the term šahr appear also in the epigraphic sources:

• In the Paikuli inscription appears a šahr-āmārgar-dībīr, that Prods Oktor Skjærvø translated as “secretary of finances” (see above). Gyselen interprets it as being the secretary to a hypothetical šahr-āmārgar, that is, an official who supervised all the āmārgars of the empire. This interpretation though has his problems as we have seen above; it would have been quite strange if the Paikuli instruction if it noted only the “secretary of finances” and not the “minister of finances”.
• The dīwān-ī-kustagān, the “chancery of the (four) kusts” (the four great territorial divisions of the Sasanian military during the VI-VII c. CE).
• The Ganj (šāhīgān) that is, the Royal Treasury. Gyselen considers that the Treasury may have been headed by a ganjwar (“treasurer”).

So, taking into consideration the epigraphic evidence as well as the written sources, we can hypothesize that the central administration included the following institutions, probably each of them with its attached dīwān:

• The Royal Chancery, either led by the Wuzurg-dībīr or by the Wuzurg-framādār of Hazārbed himself.
• The Chancery for the Army, that may have become later in the VI c. CE the dīwān-ī-kustagān.
• The Royal Treasury (Ganj šāhīgān?) and its attached dīwān, led perhaps by a treasurer (ganjwar). Gyselen does not make clear if the Treasury would have been the same organization as the Chancery of Finances responsible for taxation (i.e. the organization that supervised the provincial āmārgars, perhaps led by a hypothetical šahr-āmārgar).

In her 2019 study, Gyselen also deals briefly with the military organizations that were organized upon a territorial basis (the Four Spāhbeds and the marzbāns) but she does not clarify what was their relationship like towards the central administration; in this case the dīwān-ī-kustagān. And the same question can be made in relation to previous centuries: if a Chancery of the Army existed already under Yazdegerd I, what was its relationship with the marzbāns, but also with the Ērān-spāhbed and/or the artēštārān-sālār? Was it a purely administrative body, or did its authority extend further than that?

The only branch of the government for which we can be moderately sure about its workings was the Zoroastrian “church”. It was headed by the Mowbedān-mowbed, who controlled all the provincial administrations that were compulsory staffed by members of the Zoroastrian priesthood: provincial mowbeds, and the driyōšān-jadaggōv-ud-dādwars.

Mention is made in Greek, Latin, Armenian and Perso-Arabic sources about a royal council that exerted considerable influence upon the king’s rulings. The Mowbedān-mowbed and the Wuzurg-framādār (or the Hazārbed) were almost for sure members of this council. But we do not know anything sure about the workings and composition of this key organ of the Sasanian state. Did it have a fixed number of members? Were some officials (other than the two mentioned above) automatically members of this council when they rose to their office? Was the king forced by custom (or even by law) to at least consult with the council before he took any important decision?

According to Ahmad Tafazzoli, the successor of the throne was customarily appointed in the presence of the Wuzurg-dībīr and the Mowbedān-mowbed, and he quotes as an example a passage of Ferdowsī’s Šāh-nāma in which Šābuhr II designated his brother Ardaxšīr as his successor (the future Ardaxšīr II).

 

[Avernite]

Very intriguing and deep story, for what is essentially rather dry stuff. Nice!

I was struck by the similarity between Jund (army) and Junta (usually used for a military council leading a state), but wiki tells me they're unrelated

As to the tension you see between the professional and noble armies of the Sassanids, perhaps it was a weird mix? Say, there is a professional army, but its commanders are drawn from the accomplished military minds among the leaders of the noble 'levy' troops. And because of that, said officers also have an outside powerbase so when they rebel, they tend to take their professional troops with them under personal title rather than being marked as an army rebellion on the Roman model? I would say the various Baroque European armies had strong influence of noble commanders, while being clearly professional - never quite noble enough to fall apart on those lines, but close enough.

 

[Semper Victor]

Very intriguing and deep story, for what is essentially rather dry stuff. Nice!

I was struck by the similarity between Jund (army) and Junta (usually used for a military council leading a state), but wiki tells me they're unrelated

As to the tension you see between the professional and noble armies of the Sassanids, perhaps it was a weird mix? Say, there is a professional army, but its commanders are drawn from the accomplished military minds among the leaders of the noble 'levy' troops. And because of that, said officers also have an outside powerbase so when they rebel, they tend to take their professional troops with them under personal title rather than being marked as an army rebellion on the Roman model? I would say the various Baroque European armies had strong influence of noble commanders, while being clearly professional - never quite noble enough to fall apart on those lines, but close enough.

As far as I know, Middle Persian gund (found in its Arabized form jund in most Islamic texts) is unrelated to Spanish junta. The latter is a name derived from the verb juntar ("to gather", "to put together", "to unite" so it literally means "gathering" or "union"). It is related to the English verb "to join" and its related words ("joint", "junction", etc.), which in turn comes from the French verb joindre. Juntar and joindre come from the Latin verb iungere ("to unite", "to tie", "to put under a yoke"). And here my etymological knowledge stops. I don't know if Latin iungere may be related or not to Middle Persian gund.

The issue of the tension between the Sasanian state and the power of the noble class is indeed the key to the whole history of the empire, and to a certain point, the main "storyline" of these threads. How an empire which was able to build such vast works in the V c. CE in its northern borders (which necessarily implied a very strong andf powerful state) could coexist with the vast power, estates and private armies of the noble class.

As we advance into this thread, we'll see that during the reign of Hormazd IV this tension finally gave way to an open confrontation between the House of Sasan and part of the nobility, and this was one of the main reasons for the fall of the empire. According to Parvaneh Pourshariati, who published a controversial and influential book in 2008 dealing with this subject, the "centralizing" attempts of Kawad I and Xusro I may have caused the unraveling of the "covenant" between the dynasty and the nobility, although her thesis has met much opposition among scholars (for example, Touraj Daryaee).

 

[Avernite]

As far as I know, Middle Persian gund (found in its Arabized form jund in most Islamic texts) is unrelated to Spanish junta. The latter is a name derived from the verb juntar ("to gather", "to put together", "to unite" so it literally means "gathering" or "union"). It is related to the English verb "to join" and its related words ("joint", "junction", etc.), which in turn comes from the French verb joindre. Juntar and joindre come from the Latin verb iungere ("to unite", "to tie", "to put under a yoke"). And here my etymological knowledge stops. I don't know if Latin iungere may be related or not to Middle Persian gund.

I don't know either; wiki suggests the Persian word may be a semitic derivative, in which case no (as the Latin is apparently derived from PIE) , but also may be from old Avestan, in which case maybe.

In any case it'd be a false friend in the sense that junta is clearly militarized in at least Dutch and English after the Spanish term had the military-free association, while the middle Persian Gund was already militaristic. But still striking

edit: diving deeper down the hole, the derived persian term is supposedly juft or yug (for join and yoke, respectively, each of which is a derivative too in English, though yoke via Germanic and join via Latin), not jund/gund. but juft is just close enough that without linguistic skill I don't dare say if my idea is ridiculous or just out-there.

 

[Semper Victor]

I don't know either; wiki suggests the Persian word may be a semitic derivative, in which case no (as the Latin is apparently derived from PIE) , but also may be from old Avestan, in which case maybe.

In any case it'd be a false friend in the sense that junta is clearly militarized in at least Dutch and English after the Spanish term had the military-free association, while the middle Persian Gund was already militaristic. But still striking

edit: diving deeper down the hole, the derived persian term is supposedly juft or yug (for join and yoke, respectively, each of which is a derivative too in English, though yoke via Germanic and join via Latin), not jund/gund. but juft is just close enough that without linguistic skill I don't dare say if my idea is ridiculous or just out-there.

I've always found it odd how the word "junta" has such "military" connotations for native English speakers, while at least in modern peninsular Spanish it's not imbued with any such militaristic overtones. It is a very current word used commonly to designate a deliberative or administrative body of a purely civilian nature, or even to designate the permanent commitee that represents any association, community or assembly. For example, the property of the subterranean garage where my father parks his car is divided among many owners (or "shareholders") who elected a "junta" among them several years ago when it was necessary to carry out major reforms in the garage.

 

[Avernite]

I've always found it odd how the word "junta" has such "military" connotations for native English speakers, while at least in modern peninsular Spanish it's not imbued with any such militaristic overtones. It is a very current word used commonly to designate a deliberative or administrative body of a purely civilian nature, or even to designate the permanent commitee that represents any association, community or assembly. For example, the property of the subterranean garage where my father parks his car is divided among many owners (or "shareholders") who elected a "junta" among them several years ago when it was necessary to carry out major reforms in the garage.

I think it's because English (and Dutch) have perfectly serviceable words for 'board' or its equivalents where Spanish uses junta, leaving only the special case of 'board of generals ruling a state' for the borrowed term.

 

[Nabed]

I am a little late but about Dara:
I disagree regarding Persian numerical superiority as is described by Procopius. Belisarius description of Persian infantry is not incorrect as it becomes clear at the ending stage of battle that these were not a fighting force. Since Persians intention was to put a siege to Dara they brought with them workers to the bidding, it was a practice that they always used, meaning using farmers as siege workers in sieges and giving them wicker shields.
However in this instance instead of siege they got a pitched battle and for some reason be it just actually showing numerical superiority or something else they gave them spears and put them in ranks. But obviously this force was not a fighting force so infantry was never used in battle and this superiority was not tactical but maybe rather strategical in order to put fear in Romans. Regardless the actual fighting force must have been closer to Roman numbers.

The reason for not moving the center was also a matter of following practice that existed at least from time of Sassanids founder. Center of army should only move if center of enemy moves, if not the center should stay where it is.

About Mazdaki Massacre the most complete source regarding the whole incident which is several pages long puts the killing at the time of Kawad himself but it states that this was done by his son Khosrow which was against Mazdak and his followers and made them want to actually kill Khosrow. They also did try to kill Kawad in a fire temple which failed.
I guess others sources just ignored Kawad role in this because the actual thing is done by Khosrow and as you said they did intend to ignore Kawad in favor of His son i also suppose there must be another reason as is stated by some modern authors that perhaps there was two killings, one in time of Kawad and second in time of his son and at Kawos rebellion. In that case a confusion is understandable.

 

[Victor1234]

In spite of knowing how this story ends, I think I speak for everyone when I hope we'll hear the next parts and a satisfactory conclusion to an amazing series.

 

[Semper Victor]

In spite of knowing how this story ends, I think I speak for everyone when I hope we'll hear the next parts and a satisfactory conclusion to an amazing series.

Thanks for the appreciation. After my stroke, I had a long leave from work and I had plenty of time to advance with the writing. But I'm back at work now and I'm finding it very difficult to find the time. I'm carrying sequels from the stroke, and I have trouble concentrating for long periods of time and I need to sleep more (both because I tire more easily and because of doctor's orders). I intend to retake the narrative, but considering the situation, I can't promise anything.