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The Turkish Factor in Byzantine-Iranian Relations (558 – 628)

David Frendo

Introduction

The westward migration of the Turks and their arrival some time around 557 - 558[i] at a location somewhere north of the Oxus River in proximity to the eastern frontier of the Sasanian Empire marked the start of a series of events, which were to have multiple and unexpected consequences. These events and their consequences need to be studied within a broader framework of historical interpretation and analysis than has previously been the case, if they are to be properly understood.  To this end, it will also be necessary to examine briefly the policies and attitudes current at the time in the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires with regard to each other and to the peoples living beyond the confines of these two self-contained and culturally cohesive civilizations.

The Sequence of Events

Before turning to these events, it might prove helpful to consider briefly and in very general terms the nature of Byzantine-Iranian relations during the period in which they took place.  It was a period of fifteen years of virtual peace[ii] followed by nineteen years of almost continuous warfare,[iii] followed in turn by twelve years of apparent friendship and peace,[iv] and finally by the onset of twenty-five years of relentless and mutually destructive war.[v]  The two empires were at peace, then, for twenty-seven and at war for forty-four out of a total of approximately seventy-one years.  Before that, they had already fought eleven different wars of varying duration and intensity in the space of less than two hundred and forty years.[vi] 

The westward movement of the Turks was, admittedly, only a part of a larger pattern of migration by a variety of Ural-Altaic peoples over a much larger time-span.[vii]  Nevertheless, their arrival close to the eastern frontier of Iran was soon to have important consequences for both the Sasanian and the Byzantine empires.  Moreover, their arrival and continued presence coincided with a period of steadily deteriorating Byzantine-Iranian relations and of mounting chaos.  At all events, it appears from two short notices in the Arabic chronicle of Tabari that Khusrau I, who was by common consent the shrewdest and the most successful of the late Sasanian kings, had received prior intelligence of the westward advance of these Kök Turks and had considered it worth his while to conclude a marriage alliance with them.  The two short notices in question may be rendered roughly as follows:

1. Now Khusrau had a number of accomplished sons.  However, he designated to be king after him his son Hurmuz, whose mother was the daughter of the Khatun and the Khaqan, because Khusrau knew that he was well-balanced and decisive in the pursuit of policy and that Hurmuz possessed what in consequence he expected of him in the way of a firm hold on government and the capacity to organize the empire and to handle its subjects.[viii]   

2.  Then Hurmuz, the son of Khusrau Anushirvan became king and his mother was the daughter of the elder Khaqan.[ix] 

On the basis of this information it is possible to arrive at an approximate date for the first official contacts between the Sasanian monarch and the Turks.  Khusrau I died in February 579 and his son and successor, Hormizd IV died in the summer of 590,[x] having been deposed and succeeded on the throne shortly before his death by his son and successor, Khusrau II.[xi]  Assuming Khusrau II to have been as young as sixteen[xii] at the time of his accession and his father Hormizd IV no older than sixteen at the time of his son and successor’s birth, we arrive at the year 558.  And if we allow one to two years for contact to be established, a marriage alliance to be arranged and a son to be born to Khusrau I and the daughter of the ruler of the Turks, that gives us a date of 556 – 557 for the first official contacts between the Sasanian Empire and the Turks.

But in 558 there occurred two events in which the Turks played a decisive role, and which were to have far-reaching consequences for Byzantine-Iranian relations.  One of these was the partial destruction of the Hepthalite Empire as a result of the defeat and subjugation by the Turks of those Hephthalites who lived north of the Oxus River.[xiii]  This ensured a continued Turkish presence close to Iran’s eastern frontier, with important though not entirely predictable consequences.  The other event was the arrival in Constantinople of an embassy from the Avars.  It is important to note that the case of the Avars is one of displacement rather than migration.  They had in fact fled from Western Asia to the region of the Caucasus, after their defeat by the Turks.[xiv]  Making a great show of their vaunted military strength, they demanded valuable gifts, an annual subsidy and a grant of fertile land in exchange for an alliance with Byzantium.[xv]  The emperor Justinian yielded conditionally to these demands, a move, which met with some initial success.[xvi] 

The earlier friendly relations between the Persians and the Turks, which had been cemented by a marriage alliance and appear to have resulted in joint and mutually advantageous action against the Hephthalite Empire, were to be of short duration.  A conflict of interest both territorial and economic in nature seems to have arisen as the Turks extended their control over the peoples formerly subject to Hephthalite domination.  Significantly, a substantial extant fragment of the History of Menander records a Turkish embassy to Byzantium,[xvii] which it dates to “the beginning of the fourth year of the reign of Justin.”[xviii]  After noting the arrival of the embassy, Menander immediately proceeds to an account of two earlier embassies, which the Turks sent to the Persians.[xix]  Neither embassy is referred to any datable event, but it is clear from the general context of Menander’s narrative that they are of recent occurrence.  Accordingly, they may reasonably be dated to some time between 567 and 568.  Menander’s relatively sober and matter-of-fact account[xx] is extremely valuable both for the explanation it offers of how hostility first arose between the Persians and the Turks and for the light it indirectly throws on Turkish territorial aims at the time.  According to Menander, the Sogdians, who had previously been subjects of the Hephthalites, asked their new masters, the Turks, to send an embassy to the Persians requesting access to Persia for the Sogdians in order for them to sell their raw silk in Persian markets.  The ruler of the Turks, Sizabul, agreed and sent off an embassy composed of Sogdians under the leadership of a certain Maniakh.  When they reached Persia, the Sogdians asked for permission to sell their raw silk in that country without hindrance.  The Persian king (Khusrau I) was not at all happy with the idea of such an arrangement, lest it result in their being free to come and go as they pleased on Persian soil.  So he kept putting off his reply.  But the Sogdians kept importuning him for an answer and he eventually consulted his advisers on what course of action to take.  The advice he followed was that of Katulph the Hephthalite, who had allegedly betrayed his own people to the Turks in pursuit of a private vendetta and taken refuge at the Persian Court.  Katulph’s advice was not to send the silk back but to pay a fair price for it and then set fire to it and burn it in the presence of the envoys, a gesture intended to show that he would do no one an injustice but that neither would he have any truck with raw silk from the Turks.  Consequently, the Sogdians returned home greatly chagrined at what had happened.  Sizabul, however, appears to have been particularly concerned at the time to establish friendly relations with the Persians, so that despite the failure of the Sogdians to promote their commercial interests he sent another embassy to Persia.  This time the embassy seems to have been composed of Turks.[xxi]  But when it in turn had arrived, the king decided in concert with the Persian magnates and with Katulph that it was altogether against Persian interests to establish friendly relations with the Turks.  Moreover, he had many of the envoys secretly poisoned as a disincentive to any further visits.  At the same time, a report was put out to the effect that the Turks had succumbed to the stifling arid climate of Persia with which they were physically ill equipped to cope.  Although they suspected a different explanation, the survivors, on their arrival home, simply echoed the Persian account of events.  Sizabul, however, immediately suspected foul play and that was the start of outright enmity between the Persians and the Turks. 

Taking advantage of the altered situation, Maniakh, the leader of the Sogdians, suggested to Sizabul that it would be better for the Turks to make friendly overtures to the Romans and turn to them as an outlet for their raw silk since they were by far the greatest consumers of that commodity.  He, for his part, was only too willing to accompany the Turkish envoys and in this way the Romans and the Turks would become friends.  Sizabul agreed to this proposal and sent off Maniakh and some others to act as envoys to the emperor of the Romans and to convey his greetings, a not inconsiderable quantity of raw silk as a gift and a letter. 

But before turning to what Menander has to tell us about the Turkish embassy to Byzantium, it is, I think, essential to consider what may be deduced from his account of these two earlier Turkish-Iranian exchanges of the deteriorating relations and conflicting interests of both peoples.  When Menander tells us that Sizabul “wished to make the Persians friendly to his own state”,[xxii] such a remark can only mean that by 567 – 68 the earlier cordial relations had become distinctly cool.  That should come as no surprise.  What had started off as a basically predatory and opportunistic alliance aimed at the dismemberment of the Hephthalite Empire and a marriage of convenience in every sense of the word was unlikely to endure.  Once the spoils had been divided, it was inevitable that greedy eyes would soon be cast towards neighbouring territory from either side of the Oxus River.  And if the Persian emperor was concerned not to see the lucrative monopoly in raw silk pass via the Sogdians from the Hephthalite Empire to an emerging Turkish one, it is equally clear from Menander’s account that the security and territorial integrity of the Sasanian Empire was also a major consideration for Khusrau.[xxiii]  But why then did Sizabul, in the face of the rebuff suffered by the first embassy, show such sudden interest in reverting to friendly relations with Persia?  One possible explanation is that he had designs on portions of the territory of both the Byzantine and the Sasanian empires (as subsequent events were to show) but that he had decided to attack Byzantium first.  At this point in time, however, both empires were at peace and given the existing situation on his own western frontier, Sizabul could hardly risk marching off with the bulk of his forces on a relatively distant expedition without first securing considerably more than a promise of neutrality from the Iranian side.

What, according to Menander, occasioned a complete change of plan on the part of the Turkish ruler was the particularly uncompromising and brutal manner in which Khusrau chose to reject his friendly overtures, a situation skilfully exploited by Maniakh.  Incidentally, there is nothing inherently improbably about the story of the selective poisoning of the Turkish envoys.  Indeed the at first sight puzzling statement that the survivors, even though they had their doubts, simply repeated the innocent explanation of what had happened put about by the Persians tends to confirm its authenticity.  Such a course of action on their part was probably the best way of forestalling any suspicion of complicity.  But, be that as it may, the Turkish embassy to Byzantium seems to have secured its immediate objectives: friendly relations were established between the two peoples and some kind of agreement on trade and cooperation against mutual enemies.[xxiv]  Justin II in fact decided to send a return embassy to the Turks led by Zemarchus the magister utriusque militiae per Orientem.  It set out in August 569 together with the Turkish embassy under Maniakh.[xxv] 

Menander’s detailed account of Zemarchus’ long journey to the place where the Khagan was residing at that time need not detain us here,[xxvi] but the brief notice[xxvii] of how Zemarchus was instructed by Sizabul to accompany him on the first stage of his campaign against the Persians and of how, when Sizabul had encamped at a place called Talas (“on the river of the same name between the rivers Chu and Syr Darya”[xxviii]), a Persian embassy came to meet the Khagan is extremely  important.  The hostile exchanges that ensued and the abrupt departure of the Persian ambassadors appear in fact to mark a point of no return and the beginning of outright hostilities, an event, which may reasonably be dated to not earlier than late 570.[xxix] 

When the Byzantine embassy led by Zemarchus returned home[xxx] it was accompanied by a second Turkish embassy this time headed by Tagma, Maniakh having died in the meantime.[xxxi]  The effect of this second embassy on the impressionable and unstable Justin II has been emphatically noted in another surviving fragment of Menander’s History[xxxii].  Menander’s remarks are so important that they merit translation in full:

There were many other causes of the war between the Romans and the Persians but the nation that did most to encourage Justin to take up arms against the Persians were the Turks.  They it was in fact who invaded and ravaged the land of Persia and sent an embassy to Justin with a view to getting him to make war with them against the Persians.  They urged him to pursue his friendship with the Turks more actively and to join them in destroying their mutual enemy.  Thus, between the Romans attacking on one side and the Turks on the other, the Persians would be destroyed.  Buoyed up with these hopes, Justin thought he would easily overthrow and annihilate the might of the Persians.  Accordingly, he made every preparation in order to keep his friendship with the Turks on the firmest possible footing.

All that remained now was for Justin to commit himself finally and irreversibly to war with Persia.  In the event, it took little more than a year for that fateful decision to be implemented.  In the summer of 572, an embassy, which Khusrau had sent under the leadership of Sebokhth, a Persian Christian, reached Constantinople.  Both Khusrau’s choice of ambassador and the conduct of negotiations on the Persian side indicate a conciliatory approach aimed at averting an unnecessary war, if at all possible.  Yet Justin not only refused to pay the first annual subsidy due under the terms of the Fifty Years’ Peace of 561[xxxiii] but he threatened to intervene militarily on behalf of the Armenians of Persian Armenia, who under the leadership of Vardan Mamikonean had rebelled (in 570 – 72) against Persian rule.[xxxiv]  And when the Persian ambassador sought, both in his official capacity and as a fellow Christian, to dissuade the emperor from taking precipitate action, reminding him among other things that any invasion of Persian territory would, owing to the geographical distribution of that country’s population, bring him into immediate conflict with his co-religionists, Menander informs us that “Justin did not see fit to be persuaded by these moderate and reasonable arguments.  Instead, he said that if the Persian king were to move an inch, he would move an ell[xxxv] and march into Persia, and that he was confident that if he set off for war he would slay Chosroes and himself place a king on the throne of Persia.  And so, expressing himself in this intemperate fashion, he dismissed Sebokhth.”[xxxvi] 

It is interesting to note here how an over-confident Justin seeks to put a justificatory gloss on his rash and bellicose utterances by claiming that he will act as champion and defender of the Christians of Persarmenia, whereas Menander had portrayed the emperor’s thinking a year earlier as informed by a cynical rationale of expediency and force. It is a contrast that here as elsewhere Menander exploits for his own rhetorical purposes, but it is by no means incompatible with the reality of power politics then or, for that matter, in any other age.  But perhaps more importantly, it is clear from Menander’s narrative (though nowhere is it explicitly stated) that the Roman emperor was completely outwitted by the Khagan of the Turks.  Whereas Sizabul had engaged his forces in a lightening raid of pillage and plunder against a part of the territory of the Sasanian Empire, Justin rushed heedlessly into a full-scale war with the only other major power in the area.  This Byzantine-Iranian war was in fact to drag on for about seventeen years or so and to tie down the bulk of the forces of both powers in such a way as virtually to leave Sizabul with a free hand to raid and even occupy at will those parts of the territory of both empires over which he had long harboured expansionist designs.  In the event, it was Sizabul’s son and successor Turxanthus who, exploiting to the full a situation, which his father had done so much to bring about, found a pretext for invading the territory of his Roman allies.  When a Byzantine embassy to the Turks, headed by Valentinus, which had set out some time in the winter of 576,[xxxvii] finally reached its destination, Sizabul had just died and been replaced by his son Turxantus.[xxxviii]   The purpose of the embassy, it appears, was to confirm the earlier treaty between the Romans and the Turks and to persuade the Turks to make a timely attack on their mutual enemy the Persians now that the Romans and the Persians were at war.[xxxix]  But Turxanthus’ reply to this request was to accuse the Romans of treachery and duplicity, alleging that they had broken their earlier treaty of friendship by making a treaty with the Avars, even though they knew these to be the rebellious subjects and irreconcilable enemies of the Turks.[xl]  Then, after obliging the envoys to attend Sizabul’s funeral and to slash their cheeks with daggers as a sign of mourning as custom required, Turxanthus dismissed Valentinus with a declaration of outright hostility: he would lay siege to the city of Bosporus forthwith.[xli]       

Not long after that in fact the city was captured and by mid 579 the Turks appear to have overrun the whole of the Crimea.[xlii]  Just for the record, fragmentary though it is, it should perhaps be noted that on this particular occasion the Romans were both powerless to refute the charges of duplicity that had been levelled against them and far less culpable than appeared to be the case.  In 571, after the Avars had inflicted a crushing defeat on his army, Justin was reluctantly persuaded to come to terms with them, which he had so far refused to do.[xliii]  But to refute the charges directly would have required an open acknowledgement of military weakness and defeat at the hands of the Avars, the most hated and despised of Turxanthus’ foes,[xliv] and that was the last thing Valentinus could afford to do.  Quite possibly the new Khagan understood the situation only too well and decided to extract the maximum advantage from it.  Indeed our extant fragment of Menander contains more than a hint that Turxanthus was well aware of the extent of Byzantine weakness at the time.[xlv]  Moreover, some of the earlier embassies referred to by Menander[xlvi] in this fragment must presumably have occurred between 571 and 576.   Why did he decide to wait five years before making an issue of a treaty, which the Avars had forced upon Justin?

The evidence for successful Turkish pressure on the Sasanian Empire during this period is a lot patchier but equally compelling.  We learn in fact from a passing but invaluable mention in the Histories of Theophylact Simocatta that the Persians were reduced to paying an annual tribute of forty thousand solidi.  Eventually, according to Theophylact, the Turks drove the Persians to war by demanding a large increase in the annual tribute.[xlvii]  Unfortunately, Theophylact’s brief notice can be related to only one firm date.  We know that a Persian army commanded by Bahram Chobin “decisively defeated the Turks at a great battle near Herat in 589”.[xlviii]  What we do not know however is the date at which the tribute was first successfully imposed, though a possible clue is afforded by another fragment of Menander’s History.  In it we learn that Hormizd IV in his uncompromising rejection of Bzantine negotiations in 579 made the resumption of the annual payments of thirty thousand solidi (agreed to under the terms of the Fifty Years’ Peace Treaty concluded in 561) the absolute sticking point for any future peace deal.[xlix]  It is a possible though of course, not a necessary inference that at some time between Hormizd’s accession in February 579 and the point (probably towards the end of that same year) when negotiations finally broke down, Turxanthus had succeeded in imposing this annual tribute of forty thousand solidi.  Faced with a war on two fronts at a time when it was in a process of transition from the long reign of Khusrau II to that of Hormizd IV, the Sasanian Empire would have been particularly vulnerable.  If the new monarch had chosen to buy peace on one front, he may well have insisted that the Byzantines resume their annual payments not only because they were owing to him under the terms of the Fifty Years’ Peace but because he needed them in order to offset this very considerable new item of expenditure. 

Iran was indeed fortunate in disposing of the services of one of its ablest generals at such a perilous moment in its history.  But the unexpected sequel of Bahram’s victory was to prove disastrous for the Sasanian Empire and to have unimaginably far-reaching consequences, which nobody at the time could possibly have foreseen.  The strange turn of events during the period from Bahram’s victory over the Turks near Herat in 589 to his defeat by the Roman general Romanus in Caucasian Albania in the autumn of the same year and immediately thereafter is, I think, best illustrated by combining the information contained in Theophylact’s Histories with the much fuller account offered by the Chronicle of Seert.[l]  The latter is an anonymous work of Nestorian provenance written in Arabic some time probably in the first half of the thirteenth century[li].  Despite the late date of this work, its author; may have drawn upon much earlier material, since he claims at this point to be basing his account on what was established in the “Annals of the Kings” (“akhbâr al-mulûk”).  The relevant passage may be rendered roughly as follows:

Hormizd had a commander of an army, whose name was Bahram Chobin, whom he sent to fight against the Turks.  And he was victorious over them and he collected a huge amount of booty and sent off to Hormizd such plunder as he had acquired, and his standing with him [i.e. with Hormizd] was high.  Then the companions of the king became envious of him [i.e. of Bahram] and hit out at him they disparaged greatly what he had sent in comparison with what he had obtained for himself from the land of the Turks.  And he [i.e. Hormizd requited him for his heroic services by sending him a red dress and a distaff and a ball of yarn.  And he said [i.e. in a message]: “these are the clothes that a person of your kind should wear.”  Now the army would have none of it and were angry for him and refused obedience to King Hormizd.  And the order came for him [i.e. Bahram] to go and present himself before him [i.e. before Hormizd].  And again he was driven to disobedience.

Bahram’s famous victory must have greatly increased his prestige and his power.  But his very success appears, according to the Chronicle of Seert, to have provoked the envy of those who were most influential in court circles.  In consequence of which, Bahram’s enemies at court sought to engineer a rift between the king and his most powerful general by suggesting that the latter had taken more than his fair share of the spoils of victory.  Up to this point the account given is both plausible and coherent, but what comes next would make very little sense if we did not have Theophylact’s account with which to supplement it.  In Theophylact’s account, Hormizd, infuriated at Bahram’s defeat by a Roman army, sends his general the insulting gift of female attire and dismisses him from his command.[lii]  But the writer of the Chronicle of Seert has omitted all mention of this defeat.  Yet it is precisely Bahram’s defeat that not only does much to account for Hormizd’s behaviour but also explains the symbolic significance of his act, which derisively holds up a charge of cowardice and incompetence as the grounds for an ignominious dismissal.  This seemingly bizarre omission lends some support to the Chronicler’s claim that he is drawing on the Iranian tradition, since it is a well-known tendency of that tradition to enlarge upon victories and to gloss over or even ignore defeats.[liii] 

On the basis of these two accounts then, it seems not unreasonable to conclude that, in the short interval between Bahram’s victory over the Turks and his defeat by Romanus, palace intrigues had managed to poison the Persian emperor’s mind against his most powerful and successful general.  The reverse suffered by Bahram and his army would then have afforded Hormizd the pretext and the opportunity for which he was waiting in order to bring matters to a head.  It was a situation, which he exploited in a spectacular manner and with disastrous consequences.  Bahram secured the support of his army for action against Hormizd.  Bahram’s initial intention may well have been to march against Hormizd, depose him and replace him with his son Khusrau.  In the meantime however Hormizd was in fact dethroned and replaced by Khusrau as the result of a palace conspiracy.  This left Bahram no longer in the position of a potential kingmaker but in that of a rebel, who was fearful for his own safety and unwilling, perhaps with good reason, to throw himself on the mercy of his new sovereign.  Events had moved fast and would continue to do so.  On the 15th of February 590, Khusrau had been crowned king, not more than four days later Hormizd had been murdered and by the 20th of February Bahram and his army were only a few miles distant from Ctesiphon.  Bahram had little difficulty in defeating Khusrau’s hastily assembled forces on the 28th of February, but he was to face an insuperable obstacle on the 9th of March, when, unable to secure the collaboration of the Zoroastrian clergy, he placed the diadem on his own head, thereby attempting to overthrow by the single act of self-coronation one of the mightiest pillars of Sasanian society, the principle of dynastic legitimacy.  Moreover, subsequent events were soon to seal Bahram’s fate.  Khusrau together with a small retinue had fled on the 1st of March and managed to make his way to the Byzantine frontier to seek the protection of the emperor Maurice and his help in an effort to regain the throne.  This he succeeded in doing but at the cost of very substantial territorial concessions, which ultimately were to prove a serious destabilizing factor in Byzantine-Iranian relations. And if the internal stability of Iran had been imperilled as the indirect result of a successful campaign against a relatively new enemy, that of Byzantium was even more seriously threatened twelve years later as a consequence, at least in part, of protracted campaigning against another new arrival, the Avars. And their presence in such uncomfortably close proximity to the Byzantine Empire, it should be recalled, had been occasioned by their defeat and westward displacement about forty years earlier by the Turks. 

The proximate cause of the mutiny of 602, which brought the centurion Phocas to the throne and resulted in the murder of the emperor Maurice and his family, was the insistence of the Roman general Petrus that the emperor’s order to cross over to the north bank of the Danube and attack the Slavs be obeyed, even in the face of appalling weather conditions.[liv]  On the other hand, the background to the mutiny is far more complex but it is not our concern and need not detain us here.[lv]  It was this mutiny however, which provided Khusrau with the opportunity for invading the Byzantine Empire under the pretext of avenging the murder of his friend and benefactor, the emperor Maurice.  It may be that Khusrau’s initial intention was simply to recover the territory earlier ceded to the Romans in return for their help in regaining his throne.  But a series of remarkably Persian victories led inexorably to a war of expropriation and outright conquest, which culminated in a life-and-death struggle between the two empires that was to leave the one exhausted and the other mortally wounded and to pave the way for the Arab Conquests.

Ethnic Perceptions: Byzantine-Iranian Relations in Theory and in Practice

The day after the garrison commander Probus had admitted him into the frontier city of Circesium, Khusrau wrote a letter to the Roman emperor Maurice, in which he asked for protection against the usurper Bahram Chobin and for military assistance to help him regain his throne.  Theophylact Simocatta gives us what he claims is an accurate version of the original document.[lvi]  The first part of this letter is particularly instructive in that it contains a formal statement by a Sasanian monarch on the ideal and existing relationship between the two empires and on the place, within the scheme of things, of the peoples living at the fringes and beyond the confines of these two traditionally antagonistic but theoretically complementary political entities.[lvii]  It runs roughly as follows:

To the most prudent emperor of the Romans, a beneficent peaceful sovereign, lover of true lineage and hater of usurpers, clement, exacting in pursuit of justice, saviour to those who are wronged, both ready to do good deeds and to forget evil ones, from Chosroes emperor of the Persians greetings.  The Deity has brought it about from the very beginning that the world should be given light through the agency of two eyes so to speak, namely that of the most powerful realm of the Romans and of the most   prudent sceptre of the Persian state.  For it is by these paramount powers that the unruly and warlike peoples are winnowed and the conduct of men is ordered and guided throughout.  And one can see that the course of events is consistent with our words.  Moreover, since certain sinister and wicked demons who wander about the world are hastening to subvert in its entirety the good order of things ordained by God, even though their attempt is unsuccessful, yet it is right that men who enjoy the favour of heaven should fight against them, receiving as they do from God a storehouse of wisdom and the strong arm and weapons of justice.   

Now in these days the most destructive demons have attacked the Persian state and inflicted terrible damage, enlisting slaves against their masters, servants of the palace against the monarchy, disorder against order, impropriety against decorum, and supplying weapons to the enemies of good deeds.  For Bahram, that abominable slave who was raised to dazzling heights by our ancestors, could not contain the greatness of his glory and has kicked over the traces and followed the road to ruin, and courting kingship has thrown the entire Persian state into disarray.  And he stops at nothing in order that he may dim the brightness of a great and powerful eye[lviii] and that in consequence savage and most vicious peoples may be emboldened and empowered against the most civilized kingdom of the Persians, and that then they may thereafter exercise against your subject peoples too irresistible force to deadly effect.

Certain features of this extract require specific comment and elucidation.  Firstly, the formula of address in the intitulatio is accommodated to the central message and actual occasion of the letter, which is an appeal from one monarch to another for help against a usurper.  Like every attempt to bridge barriers (regardless, that is, of motivation), it may appeal to common ground but it cannot erase differences.  Thus the expression “lover of true lineage and hater of usurpers” comprises two honorific epithets (“phileugenês” and “misotyrannos”), which also do duty as an appeal from one legitimate emperor to another for help against a usurper.  At the same time, these terms in the context of Khusrau’s letter presuppose a concept of strict dynastic legitimacy vested in blood relationship to a single irreplaceable royal house, which had no parallel in Byzantium.[lix]  Secondly what immediately follows the intitulatio is a clear statement of acceptance in principle of the idea of the necessary coexistence of the Sasanian and Byzantine empires.  Thirdly, the threat to the established order posed by the usurpation of Bahram Chobin is perceived both in terms of the Sasanian notion of strict dynastic legitimacy and of traditional Zoroastrian piety,[lx] which is perhaps a further indication of the underlying authenticity of this document. Finally, the consequences of Bahram’s machinations, if they are allowed to go unchecked, are seen as exposing to attack by hostile peoples the outer zone of influence of both empires.  The relative lack of alarmist rhetoric in this last statement, coming as it does from a fugitive monarch in such dire straits, is perhaps an indication of the overwhelming sense of confidence and superiority habitually felt by both the Sasanians and the Romans towards the peoples living at the fringes of their empires.

Similar views and attitudes are in fact widely attested on the Roman side and indeed have been adequately illustrated simply on the basis of the material contained in the extant fragments of Menander’s History as the following pertinent observations by R. Blockley should make clear:

The view of the foreign opponents of Rome is also traditional: they, like their leaders, are greedy, cunning, arrogant, lacking in self-control and untrustworthy.  The implication is that they must be met by force.  The exception is the Persians.  Certainly they are barbarians and are possessed by some of the vices of barbarians, especially cunning and arrogance.  But the state of Persia is, with that of Rome, the greatest of the states, its king is the brother of the Roman Emperor, and they should coexist in Menander’s formulation, “on equal terms”.  This is the view of Tiberius (and later of Maurice).[lxi] 

But before pausing to consider just how much the idealized picture resulting from this comfortable mixture of static political theorizing and ethnic stereotyping came to diverge in practice from the reality of a rapidly evolving and often chaotic historical situation, it might prove helpful to take a brief look at some further material on official Sasanian views and attitudes.  This material, which comes from a so far little utilized source touches especially on the question of how best to promote the internal stability and welfare of the state.  The material is contained in the tenth-to-eleventh century Universal History (tajârib al-’umam) of Miskawayh.  What concerns us here belongs to an extract, which Miskawayh claims to have written down from a work, which according to his description is an autobiography of Khusrau I Anushirwan.  Mario Grignaschi has drawn attention to this material in an important article in the Journal Asiatique and has shown in the introduction to his annotated French translation of the excerpt that it is itself a translation of a lost Pahlavi work, which rests ultimately on the official Sasanian Annals.[lxii]  Suffice it to note here that Miskawayh marks the beginning of this extract (or rather series of extracts) with a summary indication of content, which may be rendered:

A quotation from a fragment of the life and policy of Aushirwan:  I it wrote down just as Anushirwan himself reported it in a book, which he composed on his conduct in life and on the way in which he ruled his kingdom.[lxiii] 

Thereafter, each extract is introduced by the formula: “Anushirwan said” or “he said”.  Similarly, Miskawayh marks the end of the allegedly autobiographical material with the statement:

And I read together with this biography at the end of this book, which Anushirwan wrote concerning his own life, that when Anushirwan had wound up the affairs of the kingdom and had become [old and] enfeebled in [attending to] them, he summoned to him the knights along with the generals and the grandees and the marzbans and the men of piety and the mobads and the most exemplary of people with them and he delivered a speech to them.[lxiv] 

Of particular interest is Khusrau’s account (presented here in the form: “Anushirwan said”) of an incident in which the chief mobad accuses certain prominent members of the nobility of heresy, of his advice to Khusrau and of the latter’s endorsement of that advice.[lxv] The chief mobad’s justification for enforcing uniformity of belief is that diversity is potentially harmful to the state and may lead to subjects pursuing different goals and upholding different standards in matters of religion from those of the king.  When, on the other hand, both king and subjects share the same beliefs, the army is strengthened thereby and is victorious in battle against the enemy.[lxvi]  Incidentally, I think it should be noted that the Roman position in these matters is, mutatis mutandis, remarkably similar.  As A. H. M. Jones aptly remarks, after considering the position of the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine:

Some emperors were less convinced of the supreme importance of maintaining God’s favour, and less conscientious in enforcing the measures requisite for that purpose; some had hesitations as to what beliefs were pleasing to God.  But none questioned the basic axiom that victory over barbarians and the prosperity of the empire were dependent on God’s favour and that it was the emperor’s duty to see that he was conciliated.  It remained moreover a constant belief that uniformity in doctrine was the prime condition of God’s favour.[lxvii] 

Another extract from what Miskawayh presents as Khusrau’s autobiographical reminiscences shows the Sasanian emperor’s openness to foreign influences and readiness to borrow and adapt from outside those ideas and practices of which he approved.[lxviii]  But perhaps more importantly, it also shows an exaggerated sense of superiority, fondness of ethnic stereotyping and generally contemptuous attitude towards most other peoples, traits that in fact bear a remarkable resemblance to those routinely displayed by the Romans.  And whereas Khusrau had been ready to take lessons in statecraft from the Romans and the Indians, he left the other peoples out of consideration, claiming that he had found them to be deficient in intelligence and reason.  What then follows with regard to these others is a long list of negative stereotypes.[lxix] 

On closer inspection, however, things wore a rather different aspect.  Not only did both powers often fail to defend the populations of their frontier provinces from being overrun by a succession of mobile and predatory peoples but one or the other major power would often encourage its nomadic allies to attack its neighbour’s territory.[lxx]  Worse still, the hollowness of Khusrau II’s claim that “it is by these paramount powers that the unruly and warlike peoples are winnowed and the conduct of men is ordered and guided throughout” is exposed by even a most cursory glance at the historical record.  It was precisely in the very area in which collaboration between these two potential antagonists was most urgently required and was most certain to prove mutually advantageous that friction most often arose, namely in the Persian demand for financial assistance towards the cost of guarding the Darial pass, as has rightly been pointed out.[lxxi]

Conclusion

For about six centuries the Near East had been controlled and dominated by the two major powers of Rome and Iran.  Even the emergence in the third decade of the third century A.D. of the new aggressive and expansionist policies of the Sasanian dynasty had done little to alter this situation.  Borders fluctuated, battles were won and lost on both sides, but much remained the same.  And despite the greatly enhanced potential for future conflict afforded one hundred or so years later by the transfer from Pagan Rome to Christian Constantinople of the political and military nerve centre of the old Empire, a sort of uneasy coexistence, punctuated though not seriously threatened by frequent but limited warfare, continued to prevail.

But the accepted normality of this precarious state of affairs was abruptly terminated as the result of a single, rash and ill-considered decision.  In 572, Justin II embarked upon a joint attack with his new Turkish allies aimed at disabling the Sasanian Empire and thus altering in Byzantium’s favour the existing balance of power in the region.  Soon Byzantium and Iran were embroiled in an increasingly vicious and destructive conflict, with damaging consequences for the internal stability of both empires.  Perhaps the most surprising thing of all was that the newly arrived Turks, under the remarkable leadership of Sizabul and subsequently of his son, had succeeded in outmanoeuvring the Byzantine emperor and drawing him into a war of his own making.  In the past, the Romans had often succeeded through a skilful combination of selective subsidies and diplomatic intrigue in weakening or even destroying the peoples threatening the frontiers of their empire by pitting them against one another.[lxxii]  This time however something quite unprecedented occurred and the tables had been turned.  Much worse was to come in the next few decades as each side sought to inflict increasingly greater damage on the other.  First it was the turn of the Persians.  By about 615 they had successfully wrested Mesopotamia and Syria from the Romans.  By a masterstroke of political calculation, Khusrau II went to great lengths to implement a policy of complete religious toleration in all his newly acquired domains, allowing freedom of worship and belief to all the various Christian sects, whilst according majority privileges to anti-Chalcedonians wherever these were clearly in the majority.[lxxiii]  Yet, we have seen that the politico-religious ideology of both empires regarded uniformity of belief as essential to the internal and external security of the state.  Such a move then was clearly intended to destabilize these territories should they ever revert to Byzantine control.  Then, when in 626 the Persians combined with the Avars, the Slavs and the other peoples subject to Avar domination to besiege and if possible capture and destroy Constantinople all the theoretical and unspoken rules between the two empires (assuming such had ever existed in practice) were definitively broken.

Finally, after the defeat of Persia and the overthrow and death of Khusrau in 628, it was the Roman emperor Heraclius who decided to inflict the maximum possible damage on the Sasanian monarchy and state.  On the 27th of April 630, the Persian general Shahrbaraz with the support and at the instigation of Heraclius seized power and usurped the throne.  In this way Heraclius attempted to deal a lethal blow to the Iranian state through the removal of its most important political and religious institution, the divinely- sanctioned rule of a single irreplaceable royal line.  But this outrage to Iranian national sentiment and tradition was swiftly avenged and within two months of his usurpation, Shahrbaraz was assassinated.  Yet, the damage already done was not so easily repaired[lxxiv] and Heraclius appears to have continued in his efforts to weaken Iran still further until he too was overtaken by the course of events.[lxxv] 

Altogether, the years that run from the murder of the Roman emperor Maurice in 602 to the death of the Prophet in 632 mark the inception of a period of growing recklessness, desperation chaos, which was to engulf both Egypt and the Near East.  It was a world turned upside down in which anything might happen.  What did happen was quite as unexpected and as remarkable as anything that had taken place so far throughout the entire course of recorded history.