II

JAHILIYYA

Religion taught by a prophet or by a preacher of the truth is the only foundation on which to build a great and powerful empire.

Ibn Khaldun, A Universal History

2

IRANSHAHR

Shah Thing

Any Persian king who doubted that he ruled the most favoured of peoples had only to stroke his chin. Whereas the creator of the universe, in His ineffable wisdom, had seen fit to give the inhabitants of more benighted regions hair that was either too curly or too straight, He had granted the men of Persia beards that embodied the “happy medium.”¹ Here, in the magnificence of their personal grooming, the Persians found evidence of a far more profound pre-eminence. “Our land,” they liked to point out, “lies in the midst of other lands, and our people are the most noble and illustrious of beings.”² As with facial hair, then, so with the various attributes and qualities that made for greatness: the Persian people appeared to enjoy the best of all possible worlds.

And certainly, in the centuries that had followed Christ, the name they had carved out for themselves had been a splendid one. Their dominion had spread far beyond the limits of Persia itself: from the frontiers of Syria in the west to those of the Hindu Kush in the east; from the deserts of Arabia in the south to the mountains of Armenia in the north. Nevertheless, the very wealth and glory of such an empire could on occasion lead to anxiety as well as pride. Just as flies were drawn to sumptuous banquets, and locusts to fields of corn, so savages were to silk and gold. The Persians, whose reputation for “courage, and boldness, and skill on the day of battle”³ was well merited, had rarely deigned to regard such intruders as anything other than annoyances, to be swatted every so often with an almost disdainful ease; but that, over the course of the fourth Christian century, had begun to change. Rumours of war from distant frontiers had come to shadow the mood of the Persian heartlands. Victories were still being won, but against increasingly fearsome opponents. The waves crashing against the bulwarks of Persian power appeared to be growing more violent with every passing year. Whole tribes of people, whole nations, were on the move. Soon enough, and the news was darkening even further. Nomads were alarming enough; but not half so alarming as nomads with a taste for putting down roots. By the middle of the fifth Christian century, the empire of the Persians was standing eyeball to eyeball with a menacingly new order of foe: a kingdom of warrior horsemen who had parked themselves directly on its north-eastern flank.

Who were the Hephthalites, and where did they come from? No one was entirely sure. When a people such as the Persians, long settled in a much-cherished homeland, ventured to contemplate the drear immensity of the lands that stretched northwards of their empire, the origins of the savages who infested it, and of the winds that gusted though its grasses, were liable to appear to them mysteries equally without an answer. One popular theory, it was true, held that the enigmatic newcomers were Huns: the most fearsome, as they were the ugliest, of all the steppeland tribesmen. Others, however, pointed out that the Hephthalites—despite their curiously elongated skulls, their sinister taste for mullets and their contemptibly un-Persian beards—“had countenances that were almost attractive.”⁴ Their skin was not a sallow Hunnic yellow but, like that of the Persians themselves, fetchingly pale. Some took to calling them “White Huns”: a suggestion of hybridity that emphasised precisely why the Persians found them so unsettling. These were savages who had dared to found their own monarchy, their own capital city, even their own body of laws. The Persians—who had long gloried in their own triumphant possession of those appurtenances of civilisation—could not possibly ignore such presumption. Nomads who forgot their place needed to be reminded of it—and fast. Indeed, so urgent was the problem that the Persian monarchy decided it could no longer afford to do as it had traditionally done, and delegate the patrolling of the eastern frontier to its underlings. The peril had grown too great. The time had come for the King of Persia, the Shahanshah, the “King of Kings” himself, to tame the Hephthalites.

So it was, during the campaigning season of AD 484, that an immense army advanced across the Gurgan Plain, an unsettled frontier zone extending east from the southernmost tip of the Caspian Sea, and which had increasingly come to mark the limits of Persian power.⁵ Beyond a landscape patterned with the reassuring marks of civilisation—fields, kilns and canals—there lurked untenanted badlands. “The realm of the wolves,” men called them: fit reflection of their aura of menace. As the wooded ramparts of a great chain of mountains, the Alburz, gradually receded into the distance, there came to stretch ahead of the taskforce an unbroken immensity of wild barley, and oats, and corn, rippling, so it seemed, to the limits of the world: the beginning of the steppes. Featureless as this landscape was, and lacking in anything that the Persians would have recognised as civilisation, it had repeatedly frustrated the ambitions of would-be conquerors. Yet, on this occasion, to anyone watching the great host of men, horses and elephants as they trampled down the grasses, the invaders’ prospects must have appeared no less glittering than the heads of their ferociously heavy lances. A Persian army at full strength was a fearsome sight. “Everything so far as the eye can reach,” as one awe-struck observer put it, “is filled with the shimmer of arms. Whole plains and hills are crowded out by mail-clad horsemen.”⁶ And by banners as well: since if there was one thing that a Persian warrior really adored, it was a showy flag. Every unit of cavalry possessed one, great, heavy drapes slung from crossbars, and emblazoned with flamboyant heraldic devices: stars, lions, boars. Most splendid of all, it went without saying, was the royal banner: immeasurably the largest, it was also the most sumptuously adorned. Seeing it flapping massively in the breeze, the sunlight glinting off its embroidered gold, silver and jewels, no one could have doubted who was leading the expedition into the realm of the Hephthalites.

The King of Kings, like all his royal ancestors, possessed a literally supernatural mystique. Every Persian knew it, and what was owed to it: not merely their empire, but their very freedom. Two and a half centuries previously, when their forefathers had been slaves of foreign masters, the banner of their independence had been raised by a nobleman named Ardashir—a mighty hero possessed of a mandate from the heavens. No one in the whole of Persia had been more favoured of the gods. One of Ardashir’s ancestors, a man named Sasan, had officiated as the high priest of the country’s holiest and most venerable temple, at Istakhr. Here, ever since ancient times, it had been the custom to present the severed heads of vanquished enemies to the great warrior goddess, Anahita, “the Strong and Immaculate.” Ardashir himself had proved a worthy lieutenant of this ferocious divinity: by AD 224, he had liberated Persia from the rule of outsiders, and to such crushing effect that he had established the Persians themselves as the masters of a host of subject peoples. It was scarcely surprising, then, in the light of such a colossal achievement, that his countrymen should have distinguished about his person the eerie flickering of an aura more than human. His farr, the Persians termed it: the mark of his divine election. Here, no less than the empire he had founded, had been a precious heirloom. Unceasingly, as the years went by, and generation sprung from the family of Sasan succeeded generation to the throne of Persia, so had a farr continued to shadow each new king. Sometimes it was glimpsed in the shape of a ram; sometimes as a golden ray of light; sometimes in human form, like the sudden flitting of a figure that was no reflection across a mirror. The glamour of it all, naturally enough, helped contribute to a fearsome reputation. Even the Sasanians’ enemies, people with every reason to loathe their pretensions, found it difficult not to cringe before them. “A monarchy that is proud and exceedingly powerful”: so one foreign commentator described the dynasty in a tone of rueful awe. “For it is old and most intimidating, most intimidating indeed, to those who inhabit the world.”⁷

Peroz, the king who had led the massive army into the Gurgan Plain, was, like all his predecessors, a descendant of Sasan. Indeed, in many ways, he was the epitome of a Sasanian: tall and handsome, in the imposing manner expected by the Persians of their royalty, and with an exceptional talent, even by the standards of his forefathers, for playing the dandy. Just as the great banner that billowed above his tent glimmered with fabulous adornments, so did the king himself: for it was his habit to sport, in addition to all his other sumptuous jewellery, “a pearl of wonderful whiteness, greatly prized on account of its extraordinary size”⁸ as a stud in his ear. Foreigners may well have viewed such obsession with personal adornment as effeminate, but the Persians themselves knew better. A haughty and refined delicacy of manner; a sashaying, hip-swaying gait; a reluctance so much as to be seen in public “stepping to one side in response to a call of nature”: these were the marks, in Persia, of a bold and gallant warrior.⁹ Anyone who had the wherewithal was fully expected to pose and strut like a peacock. Rare was the Persian who knowingly underdressed. The gorgeous showiness of their fashion was notorious. “Most of them,” it was reported of the Persian upper classes, “are so resplendent in clothes gleaming with many shimmering colours, that although they leave their robes open in front and on the sides, and let them flutter in the wind, yet from their head to their shoes no part of the body is seen uncovered.”¹⁰ Yet Peroz himself, for all his manifest talent at cutting a dash, was not defined by his sense of fashion alone. Just as significant, in the eyes of his subjects, was his palpable concern for their welfare. Vain he might have been; but he was also, in the noblest tradition of his forebears, determined to battle chaos, uphold order and propagate justice. Which was just as well: for troubles, and the efforts of Peroz to resolve them, had been a feature of his twenty-five-year reign since day one.

It had begun with a drought. Even as Peroz was being crowned, his people had been famine-stalked. The young king had responded with energy, boldness and vision. He had slashed taxes; lavished state subsidies on the poor; pressured the nobility into sharing their stockpiles of food with the hungry and desperate masses. Centuries later, this reform programme was still being commemorated in admiring tones: “Only one man … died of hunger in the entire empire.”¹¹ Witness, even if not literally true, to a model of famine-relief.

Next, looking to the north-east frontier, Peroz had shown himself similarly determined to fight the growing menace of the Hephthalites. More than any Sasanian before him, he had committed himself and all the resources of his empire to the great game that was the interplay of tribal rivalries in Central Asia. Merv, an ancient city midway between the Hindu Kush and the Caspian Sea, and with the potential to dominate Persia’s north-eastern marches, had been transformed into a mighty bastion of royal power: massive ramparts, crowned by fired-brick towers and scored with arrow slits, were built around a vast circular citadel. Meanwhile, other strongholds, strategically situated along the frontier itself, had been founded from scratch; treasure had been lavished on fortifications, garrisons and supply depots.¹² Snaking across the fields of the Gurgan Plain, for instance, fashioned out of red brick and extending over some 150 miles, was an immense wall: the single greatest barrier ever constructed in the Near East.¹³ By the time Peroz, with a quarter-century of such efforts behind him, ventured out into the steppes through the gates of the red-brick wall, it was as a general with a most formidable reputation: as “a daring and warlike man.”¹⁴

Simultaneously, however, there was a darker side to Peroz’s record. “Our kings,” so the Persians liked to boast, “have never been accused of treachery”¹⁵—and yet this was, perhaps, to gild the lily just a bit. Even in his dealings with the White Huns, Peroz had been known to indulge in the occasional bout of collaboration. Born a younger son, he had only been able to seize the throne in the first place with Hephthalite backing. More damaging to his good name, however, had been the disastrous consequence of an earlier expedition he had led into the realm of the White Huns, eastwards of the steppelands, to the region known as Bactria, where he had found himself being ambushed in a wooded valley, surrounded, and forced to sue for terms. Predictably enough, these had proved debilitating and humiliating in equal measure: a number of key Persian strongholds had been surrendered, a crippling ransom imposed, and the Shahanshah himself, that god among men, obliged to prostrate himself before the boots of the Hephthalite khan.

Returning to the fray for a second time, then, Peroz was undoubtedly motivated as much by personal revenge as he was by the grander demands of geopolitics. Injured dignity required him to travel to war amid all the magnificence appropriate to the King of Kings. A teeming retinue of chefs, cooks, domestics, make-up artists and wardrobe assistants; treasury officials with chests of silver coins; even a princess or two: all had been brought to accompany their master into the anonymous immensity of the steppes. It was not only by force of arms that Peroz sought to tame the savage Hephthalites: he aimed to dazzle them as well.

Nor were the Hephthalites his only targets. Peroz faced a challenge south of the steppeland frontier as well as north of it. The lords who ruled there—in the great swath of territory that stretched between Persia and the Hephthalite kingdom—could lay claim to a heritage that was scarcely less glorious than that of the Shahanshah himself. Prior to the revolt of Ardashir, it was their ancestors who had ruled the empire that now ranked as Sasanian. Parthians, they called themselves; and they still cherished memories of their golden age, when the Persians and a whole host of other peoples had been kept satisfyingly under their thumb. Not that the power of the greatest Parthian families had ever truly been broken. Although, in the wake of Ardashir’s famous victory of AD 224 over the Parthian king, members of the royal family had been variously exterminated or driven into exile, the warrior barons had easily weathered the change of regime. The seven great lords of Parthia acknowledged no superiors, save for the Sasanians themselves.¹⁶The foundations of their dominance had been cemented into place, over the course of many centuries, “by ancient law.”¹⁷ Impressively, the mightiest Parthian dynasty, the Karin, could trace a history of heroic prowess back to the very beginnings of time, when one of their forefathers had toppled a demon king, no less. Dahag, a necromancer so evil that two venomous serpents had sprouted from his shoulders and promptly started munching on the brains of babies, had ruled the world for an entire millennium—until the ancestor of the Karin, a blacksmith by the name of Kava, had led a revolt against the tyrant. Such a pedigree was a fitting measure of the pretensions of the Parthian lords—pretensions that had the backing of prodigious wealth and manpower. Indeed, it was the measure of these that the Sasanian kings, focussing their energies and attentions upon the western half of their empire, had traditionally been content to give the east a wide berth. No Shahanshah would ever admit it, of course, but across much of Parthia Sasanian royal authority was largely a matter of smoke and mirrors. The Karin and their fellow dynasts governed their fiefdoms less as subjects of the Persian monarchy than as partners in a sometimes uneasy confederacy. “For you are the lords each of your own province,” as one of them had once declared ringingly to his fellows, “and the possessors of very great power.”¹⁸ Persian the empire may have been—but it remained, in its eastern provinces, a Parthian one as well.¹⁹

And here, for a Shahanshah with little choice but to devote his energies to combating the Hephthalites, was a most awkward complication. The urgent need to strengthen imperial defences along the north-east frontier, whether by buttressing existing cities or by raising new ones, hardly sat well with the time-honoured policy of not treading on Parthian toes. For all his swagger, Peroz was highly sensitive to this problem. While Hephthalite support had been useful in helping him claim the throne, the decisive blow had actually been struck by a Parthian warlord: Raham, of the family of Mihran. It was he who had defeated, captured and executed Peroz’s elder brother and then crowned Peroz as his “protégé.”²⁰ Twenty-five years on, the Persian king’s ambitions still rested on the support of the Parthian dynasts. Without it, he had no chance of defeating the upstart Hephthalite kingdom. Simultaneously, however, there could be no prospect of ultimate victory without marching his armies and labour-gangs directly across Parthian land. A most awkward circle to square.

But not, perhaps, wholly impossible. Peroz was subtle as well as bold; and he knew that the pen might, on occasion, be wielded alongside the sword. Even while summoning his warriors and engineers to the defence of his empire, he had also been busy mustering his minstrels, his bards and his scribes. Conscious that the days when it had been sufficient for the House of Sasan to trumpet an exclusively Persian descent were gone, Peroz had settled upon a simple but audacious expedient: he had ordered its past rewritten.

A new family tree, one more acceptable to Parthian sensibilities, more inclusive, more multicultural, was now required. So it was, obedient to their master’s requirements, that scholars in the royal service had set themselves to a comprehensive upgrading of the Sasanian lineage. Fortunately, preserved in ancient texts and in the memories of priests and poets, the perfect ancestors had been waiting shimmeringly to hand. The Kayanids—like Kava, the blacksmith from whom the Karin claimed descent—were heroes from the fabulously distant past, with biographies that featured talking birds, flying chariots, fortresses raised by demons and other fantastical wonders. Unlike Kava, a mere blacksmith, however, they had all of them been graced with the farr—since so impeccably royal had been their dynasty that even its very name derived from the antique title of “Kai,” or “King.” This, however, was not the main reason why Peroz was suddenly so keen to claim descent from them. Rather, the true appeal of the Kayanids lay in the location of their realm—which had lain, not in Persia, but in Parthia and, northwards, into Gurgan. It was here that the Kayanid kings, the tireless guardians of their people, had made heroic stand after heroic stand, fighting in defence both of their kingdom and of their farr, resolute against savage enemies whose fiendish ambition it had been to filch both. As Peroz advanced northwards from Parthia against the Hephthalites, he made sure to do so as the self-proclaimed heir of the Kayanids: as a king whose ultimate roots lay in the self-same lands he had come to defend.

“Airan,” these had anciently been called: “the realm of the Aryans,” or “Iran.” The Persians, who traced their own origins back to this primordial north-eastern kingdom, and therefore regarded themselves as being not a whit less Aryan than the Parthians, had always been keen on the name. Long before the time of Peroz, the House of Sasan had been making great play with it in their inscriptions, their titles and all their endless bragging. They had even termed their own empire Iranshahr—“the Dominion of the Aryans.” Now, though, under Peroz, the manufacturing of links between the Sasanian monarchy and the fabled Kayanid homeland had become an obsession. As the king gazed into a perilous and uncertain future, so had he sought to influence it by sponsoring an official systematisation of the past. Blatant fabrications had enabled Ardashir to be enshrined once and for all as what Peroz so desperately needed him to be: a descendant of the Kayanids. Meanwhile, in order to buttress the plausibility of this fraud, centuries of history were simply erased. The end result was a lineage that perfectly served the desperate needs of the time. No less than a stockpile of weapons on the great north-eastern trunk road, or a raw new fortress on the red wall beyond the Alburz Mountains, it spoke of both a crisis and an implacable determination to resolve it.

Battle-hardened pragmatist and self-appointed heir to ancient kings who had fought demons: the Shahanshah rode to war as both. That Peroz had resurrected the antique title of Kai; that he had named his eldest son “Kavad,” after the first of the Kayanids; that he had stamped his coins with any number of allusions to the legendary dynasty: here were no mere idle self-indulgences. Rather, they served as potent markers of his utter seriousness of purpose. He had a dual strategy: to win the hearts and minds of his Parthian subjects even as he met the Hephthalites with an iron fist. And it seemed to be working. The decisive adventure had been launched. Peroz and his army had passed through the gates of the great red wall and headed out on to the steppes. Advancing on the nearest Hephthalite stronghold, just beyond the frontier, they had found it abandoned.²¹ Clearly, the terror of the royal name had rendered the savages too terrified to stand and fight. Peroz ordered the settlement razed to the ground. Meanwhile, behind him, in Parthia, everything appeared calm. Now, all that was needed was to track down the enemy, corner them, and wipe them from the face of the earth.

Then the Shahanshah received the news he had been yearning to hear: the Hephthalites were ahead of him. Their outriders had been spotted, and their main army was drawing near. Peroz issued brisk orders, summoning the champions of Iranshahr to battle. At once, the stir of preparation spread across the camp: archers oiled and tested their bows, drivers heaved war-towers onto the backs of their elephants, and footsoldiers dusted down their wicker shields. Most urgent of all, however, was the need to ready the expedition’s ultimate killers: the deadliest strike-force in the world. A one-piece helmet, “skilfully crafted to look exactly like a man’s face”;²² iron plates, greaves and gloves; whips and maces, slung from the belt; a lance so long and heavy that it could be handled only if first secured to the side of a mount: these were the tools of an armoured horseman in the service of the Shahanshah. Barely human such a warrior might appear, when fully furnished: “a moving image wrought by a hammer.”²³ Lifted up into their saddles on the shoulders of attendants, urging forward steeds that were themselves sheathed in mail and plate, forming themselves into a glittering line in the front rank of the army, the heavy cavalry of Iranshahr could know themselves worthy heirs of their ancestors: heroes of steel, just as the Kayanids had been.

And glancing behind them, at the slight rise where their king had stationed himself, as every Shahanshah did prior to a battle, they saw the ultimate reassurance of this. Now, more than ever, Peroz aimed to pose as a figure of epic. Great care had been taken to ensure that his horse was the tallest and most handsome around. Attendants stood poised by the royal mount, to ensure that it would not whinny, nor urinate, nor in any other way lower the heroic tone. The king himself, as ever, was positively ablaze with sumptuous jewellery. Meanwhile, planted behind him, where it could be seen by everyone in the ranks, there fluttered his massive standard: the Derafsh Kaviani, or “Flag of Kava.” An expression of Sasanian power, it was also authentically, and heroically, pan-Iranian. It was no coincidence, for instance, that its name bore witness to the fabled ancestor of the Karin: for once, prior to its adornment with jewels and tassels, it had been a humble leather apron, worn, so it was said, by the demon-slaying blacksmith himself. Now, as Peroz gave the order for his cavalry to advance, it was his aim to emulate the feat of Kava: for he was looking to rout a whole army of demons.

Lumbering forwards, trotting at first, then breaking into a thunderous gallop, the heavily armoured cavalrymen aimed their lances at the more lightly armed Hephthalites. Through the dust clouds kicked up by their horses, it appeared that the enemy was clumping together in a disorganised panic. Then the Hephthalites broke, turned and streamed back across the dead centre of the plain. Raising a cry of triumph, the Persian cavalry immediately fanned out, aiming to encircle their retreating foes. They charged ever faster; the dust rose ever thicker. Arrows, hissing down through the clouds of grit, began to rattle and bounce off their armour; but the men of Iranshahr disdained so much as to flinch. From head to foot, their iron cladding was “proof against any missiles, and a sure defence against all wounds.”²⁴ The arrows of contemptible nomads could do them no harm. They were, to all intents and purposes, invulnerable. Victory, surely, was theirs.

Then, suddenly, they felt their horses’ hooves give way and begin to paw the air. The riders themselves flew forwards and found themselves dropping, through a nightmarish haze of dust and arrows, into the bowels of a massive ditch. Too late, the front ranks of the Persian cavalry realised that the Hephthalites had prepared for their attack with fiendish cunning. They had excavated a great trench, dug across most of the plain, which they had then covered with a thin layer of reeds and earth. They had left only the centre intact, to facilitate their own retreat; meanwhile, the pursuing Persians had blundered directly into the death-trap. “And such was the spirit of fury with which they had launched their pursuit of the enemy that those to the rear of the vanguard failed to notice the catastrophe which had overwhelmed those in the front rank. And so with horse and lance they continued to ride into the trench, and to trample down their own fellows, so that all were destroyed. And among the dead was Peroz himself.”²⁵

As to how precisely the Shahanshah had met his end, various accounts were given. Some said that as he crashed into the Hephthalite trench, he had torn off his own ear, and kept it clenched in his palm: for he had not wanted some savage nomad to lay claim to his famous pearl. Others said that he was left trapped in a cleft in the ground, where he died of hunger; and others yet that he had crawled away from the killing field, “only to be devoured by wild animals.”²⁶

Two things were certain, though. First, neither Peroz’s body nor his great pearl was ever found; second, his farr had abandoned him for good.

Fire Starter

Only a few weary and grime-streaked Persian survivors managed to stumble back from the killing fields of Gurgan. The news that they brought with them could hardly have had more menacing implications. The gore that had filled the Hephthalite trenches might as well have been the lifeblood of Iranshahr itself. No realm in the world could endure for long without treasure or men—and the slaughter had left the Sasanian Empire drained of both. Only a massive effort on the part of the imperial tax-collectors had enabled the expedition to ride out in the first place; now, with the flower of the empire’s cavalry destroyed, there was nothing left to blunt the scythings of the Hephthalites’ own horsemen. The frontier stood wide open. All the bulwarks that Peroz had laboured so hard to construct lay abandoned and tenantless. Whisperings of terror, thickening into ever more certain rumour, were soon darkening the eastern dominions of Iranshahr: of whole regions, where once the Kayanids had ruled, turned by the Hephthalites to shambles of blood and ash.²⁷

Here, in the picking to the bone of the ancient heartlands of the Aryan people, was a fearsome challenge to the practical functioning of the entire Sasanian realm. Both its prestige and its tax base were under mortal threat. But this was not the worst. The Hephthalite flames were scorching more than fields and cities. The conflagration was also consuming structures regarded by those who had raised them as sources of a truly awesome holiness. Just as fire, in the hands of the wicked, might be used to destroy, so also, in the hands of the virtuous, might it be consecrated to the service of the heavens. This was why, studded across Iranshahr, there were temples that contained no statues but rather, in each one, “an altar in the middle of an enclosure, holding a large quantity of ashes, where priests keep a fire eternally burning.”²⁸ Desecrate such an altar, so it was believed, and the order of the cosmos itself would start to totter. In the aftermath of Peroz’s “overpowering and crushing defeat,”²⁹ as fire temples across the northern reaches of Parthia were sent crashing into ruin by the Hephthalites, there were many in Iranshahr who saw in the annihilation of the royal army something far more troubling, and portentous, than a mere military debacle: a darkening of the universe itself.

Yet, hope remained. The three holiest fire temples—the most luminescent and charged with power—remained inviolate. One, the “Fire of the Stallion,” was enclosed within rings of towering fortifications on the summit of a hill in Media, the mountainous region that lay to the north of Persia; the second, the “Fire of the Farr,” stood secure within Persia itself. Only the third, the Adur Burzen-Mihr—“Fire of Mihr is Great”—seemed at potential risk from the Hephthalites: for it lay close to the front line, in Parthia, on the ancient highway that led directly to the steppelands of the north.³⁰ To the devout of Iranshahr, however, the notion that one of their three most sacred fire temples might be despoiled, its ashes scattered, its flame extinguished, appeared almost sacrilegious in itself. To imagine such a thing was to contemplate a cosmos terminally sick.

No mortal hand had brought the three great fires into being. Rather, the Good God, Ohrmazd—the Eternal, the All-Radiant, the Supremely Wise—had lit them, “like three lights, for the watching of the world.”³¹ And the world had urgently needed watching. Ohrmazd, the fountainhead of all that was good and pure and right, was not the only creator god. “Truly,” ran an ancient verse, “there are two primal Spirits, twins, renowned for being in conflict. In thought and word and deed, they are two: the best and the worst.”³² While Ohrmazd had brought Asha—“Truth and Order”—to the universe, his shadow, Ahriman, snake-haired and darkness-vomiting, had spawned their opposite: Drug—“the Lie.” The cohorts of evil were everywhere. They ranged from nomads, such as the Hephthalites, to that most fiendish and wicked of all Ahriman’s creations, the frog. In the ongoing struggle against such adversaries, mortals choosing the path of righteousness and light had long cherished the assistance that Ohrmazd sent them. Back in primordial times, the great fires had swept across the face of the earth, going wherever they were needed: one had helped in the overthrow of Dahag, the serpent-shouldered necromancer; another had assisted a Kayanid king in a particularly arduous bout of idol-smashing. Stationary though the fires had since become, they had lost not a spark of their heavenly potency. They remained what they had always been: the surest guardians of the proper ordering of the world.

Humanity too, however, had a part to play. Mortal men and women everywhere needed to commit themselves to the cause of light: to live in such a way as to render themselves branches of living flame. Fortunately, they were not without guidance from the Lord of the Universe on how best to achieve this. Many centuries earlier, a man named Zoroaster had seen a vision. Emerging from a ritual immersion in a river, into the luminous purity of a spring dawn, he found himself suddenly bathed by the infinitely purer light of Ohrmazd. Words sounded in his head: the teachings of the divine. For the first time, the Supreme Creator had revealed Himself to a mortal as He truly was: the fountainhead of all that was good. Over the succeeding years, Zoroaster witnessed many more visions. The nature of the cosmos was revealed to him, and the rituals by which he and all mortals should lead their lives. Forced into exile by the refusal of his own people to listen to his teachings, he succeeded in winning converts in a strange land. These new followers, despite all the efforts of neighbouring tribes to crush them, eventually triumphed in war; their infant religion endured and thrived. Zoroaster himself, through whom the revelations of Ohrmazd had been perfectly refracted, would be commemorated ever afterwards as the human equivalent of a sacred fire: as a divinely forged link between heaven and earth. This, in the opinion of his followers, was what it meant to be a mathran, a “possessor of the words of God”—a prophet.

“For Zoroaster alone has heard Our commands.” So Ohrmazd Himself had pronounced. “He alone has made known Our thoughts.”³³ A ringing commendation—and one that ensured that the priests who followed Zoroaster’s teachings displayed a steely and unblinking concern for propriety. As they tended the sacred fires, they adhered to the regular performance of ferociously complicated rituals, knowing that each one completed would see the order of the cosmos buttressed. Yet the priests could not hope to take the fight to Ahriman unaided. Others too had to be steeled to the cosmic fight. Even the lowest slave might have a part to play. If he only performed the five daily prayers that Zoroaster had demanded of the faithful, and kept his teeth shiny clean to boot, he too could help to purge the Lie. Understandably, then, the priests of Iranshahr sought to keep a tight leash on the beliefs and behaviour of their countrymen. As one foreign commentator observed, “Nothing is held to be lawful or right among the Persians unless it is first ratified by a priest.”³⁴ Without such discipline, there could be no prospect of winning the great battle for the universe.

Yet, ultimately, in the spiritual dimension as well as the earthly, one protagonist mattered more than any other: the Shahanshah himself. He alone could claim to have been touched by the divine. Asha—that supreme virtue of Ohrmazd—could not possibly be maintained without him. Nor, indeed, could the privileges and pretensions of the priesthood. Ahriman, in the malignancy of his cunning, had always been assiduous in his attempts to cultivate heresy and demon-worship. Not every corner of Iranshahr had been illumined by the light of Zoroaster’s teachings. While some of the Iranians’ ancient gods—the Lady Anahita pre-eminent among them—had come to be ranked by the Zoroastrian priesthood as loyal lieutenants of Ohrmazd, others, so Zoroaster himself had warned, were not gods at all, but demons. Their cults, idols and adherents all needed smashing. Only the Shahanshah, in the final reckoning, was up to the job. If the religion of Zoroaster, instituted of Ohrmazd Himself, self-evidently existed to serve as the protector of humanity, then it was the function of kingship, in the opinion of the priesthood, to serve as “the protector of religion.”³⁵

A role to which the House of Sasan, over the years, had only fitfully measured up. Although many kings had certainly been piously Zoroastrian, many had not. The royal understanding of what Asha should be was not necessarily that of the priesthood. Religion, in the opinion of the Persian monarchy, existed to buttress the power of the throne—not the other way round. Any notion that the Zoroastrian establishment might be permitted to obtain an identity that was independent of royal control, let alone political leverage, had long been anathema to the Sasanians. Accordingly, for all that priests were often employed by the monarchy as attack-dogs, they were never let off the leash. Any hint that they might be slipping their collars had always seen them thrust firmly back into their kennels. Petted and spoiled though they might be, they were never allowed to forget who held the whip hand.

But now, amid the calamities and convulsions of the times, that was starting to change. As the Persian monarchy, battered by the onslaughts of the Hephthalites, scrabbled desperately to shore up its position, the Zoroastrian establishment seized its chance. The priests who had provided Peroz with his Kayanid ancestry were in a position to exact a considerable price for their collaboration. Not all their energies had been devoted to serving the royal interest. In their redrafted history of Persia, the priests had given themselves the role they had always dreamed of playing: that of partner, indeed twin, of the Shahanshah. “Born of the one womb—joined together and never to be sundered.”³⁶ Earlier Sasanian kings would have scorned—and punished—such presumption. But Peroz did not, because he could not: his situation had grown too desperate. Rather than dismiss the pretensions of the priesthood as mere conceit, to be slapped down with disdain, he had little choice but to indulge the clergy, and then take advantage of what could be screwed out of them in return. Better a marriage of convenience than no marriage at all.

And certainly, despite the many tensions that remained between them, the monarchy and the priesthood shared similar goals. Just as it had been the ambition of Peroz to bring the antique order of the Kayanids to his tottering realm, the priests wished to enshrine the even more transcendent order of Ohrmazd within Iranshahr. It was only with an unwearying effort, of course, that such a campaign could ever hope to be won. Laws, long disregarded or only fitfully applied, had to be given added teeth. The guardians of light and truth had to be prepared “to smite, to smash and to overthrow the idol-temples and the disobedience that comes from the Adversary and the demons.”³⁷ Naturally, the greatest responsibility of all still lay with the Shahanshah; but the Zoroastrian priesthood too, as it increasingly began to slip royal control, had set to carve out its own, independent role. Across the empire, the power of the provincial governors was being matched, and sometimes even eclipsed, by that of the mowbeds—the chief priests. Officially, of course, these men remained answerable to the Shahanshah; but already, back in the reign of Peroz’s father, there had been the unmistakable glimmerings of an alternative chain of command. For the first time, there had been mention made of amodaban mowbed—a “chief of chief priests.” Here, putting down deeper roots with each decade that passed, was an institution that could claim to embody Asha indeed. The word that best described it, however, was not Persian at all, but Greek. What the priests were creating, in effect, was anecclesia—a “church.”

And it was the ambition of this Zoroastrian Church, a prodigious and a dazzling one, to institute an order that might be truly universal: reaching backwards as well as forwards through time. It was not chaos, after all, but deception that most menaced the universe—which meant in turn that it was vital, fearsomely and urgently vital, to establish the precise truth about the life and times of Zoroaster. Yet this presented a problem. The age of the great prophet was dizzyingly remote. So remote, in fact, that the long dead language in which he had made known his revelations, although lovingly preserved upon the tongues of the learned, had descended down the ages without so much as a script. This, to the fretful leaders of the Zoroastrian Church, had become a cause of mounting anxiety. Could memory truly provide a sufficient bulwark against the corrosive effects of time? If not, then the faithful, and the whole world, were surely damned. A script was duly devised.³⁸ Zoroaster’s revelations were entrusted, for the first time ever, to a book.

But the priests were not done with their labours yet. The process of transcribing the mathra—the word of God—had begged a couple of obvious questions: where and when had Zoroaster received it? Here were riddles not easily solved. There was barely a region in Iranshahr that had not, at some point, laid claim to the honour of having been the birthplace of the Prophet. Embarrassingly, the most ancient reports of all—dating from a time when the Persians’ ancestors had themselves been nomads, living on the steppes—placed it fair and square in what was now the realm of the Hephthalites. It is impossible to know if the leaders of the Zoroastrian Church were aware of this tradition; either way, it was literally beyond the pale. Instead, with a gathering confidence and assertiveness, the mowbeds promoted a very different biography of their prophet. Zoroaster, they taught, had actually been born in Media around a thousand years previously, in the age of the Kayanids.^a In fact, it was a Kayanid king, “mighty-speared and lordly,” who had offered him asylum in the wake of his exile and had served his nascent religion as its “arm and support.”³⁹ A veritable model of royal behaviour, in other words. Peroz, desperate for his own good reasons to identify himself with the Kayanids, had duly taken the bait. Riding to war, he had done so not merely as the heir of the dynasty as a whole, but also, and more specifically, as the heir of the Prophet’s first patron. Church and state: twins indeed. Priest and king: both, it had seemed, were winners.

Except, unfortunately, that Peroz had ended up dead. A calamity, his subjects fretted, that had reflected more than simple bad luck. “No one was the cause of such losses and destruction save the divine lord of the Aryans himself.”⁴⁰ This verdict, whispered increasingly across the entire span of Iranshahr, threatened to cripple the future of the House of Sasan. Critics condemned more than merely the royal battle tactics. Advancing towards the Gurgan Plain, the Shahanshah had passed the snow-capped Alburz Mountains: seat of a god named Mihr, whom it had always been peculiarly foolish to anger. The Zoroastrian priesthood ranked him—alongside Anahita—as one of the two foremost lieutenants of Ohrmazd: “sleepless and ever awake, the warrior of the white horse, he who maintains and looks over all this moving world.”⁴¹ And in particular, what Mihr kept watch for was oath-breakers: those who presumed to tell lies. Possessed as he was of “a thousand ears,”⁴² he was well equipped for the task. The god would certainly have tracked Peroz’s original expedition against the Hephthalites, when the Shahanshah, ambushed and taken captive, had been obliged to bow before the boots of the khan: for Peroz had craftily timed his obeisance to coincide with the sunrise, a moment when it was required of the faithful to offer up their prayers. Even more underhand, however, had been his scorning of the treaty forced upon him by the Hephthalites; for by its terms, he had sworn with great solemnity never again to cross the frontier. An oath which, of course, he had indisputably broken. What had the destruction of Peroz and his army been, then, if not the judgement of the wrathful heavens? “For you bring down terror upon those who lie, O Mihr. You take away the strength of their arms. You take away the swiftness of their feet.”⁴³

The King of Kings was either the defender of Truth, or he was nothing. The miseries that had overwhelmed Iranshahr in the wake of Peroz’s death certainly appeared to confirm the whispered notion that the House of Sasan had become agents of the Lie. Impoverishment and brutalisation were not the only spectres to haunt the realm: renewed drought compounded the miseries inflicted by the Hephthalites. As the grip of famine tightened, and the starving scrabbled after roots and withered grass amid the dust of their barren fields, ever more people started to believe that the heavenly judge was delivering his verdict on Peroz: “The villain who breaks his promise to Mihr brings death upon all the land.”⁴⁴ With “the Persian treasury empty and the land ravaged by the Huns,”⁴⁵ thefarr of Peroz’s heirs was barely glimmering. Over the course of the four years that followed the disaster of Gurgan, one of his brothers was executed as a pretender to the throne, and another was deposed and blinded. Peroz’s eldest son Kavad, who acceded to the throne on the back of this coup, was only just fifteen—the age at which, according to elite Persian custom, a boy was awarded a studded belt and became a man.⁴⁶ His rule could scarcely have begun in less propitious circumstances.

As to the full scale of the challenges confronting him, that could best be gauged, perhaps, by staring into the sightless eyes of his uncle. Menace was building at home as well as abroad. Not everyone in Iranshahr had been left impoverished by Peroz’s defeat. To the great lords of Parthia, in particular, the calamities overwhelming the Persian monarchy had presented opportunity as well as peril. By the time that Kavad acceded to the throne, one of them had already moved with such boldness and swagger as to establish himself as king in all but name. Even by the standards of his forefathers, Sukhra, the head of the Karin, was quite fabulously domineering. He had also, uniquely, enjoyed an excellent war. It was under his command that the few demoralised remnants of the imperial army had managed to escape from the Gurgan front: an achievement so assiduously trumpeted that Sukhra had even presumed to cast himself as “the avenger of Peroz.”⁴⁷ Amid the otherwise all-prevailing gloom, he possessed an undeniable aura of success—and exploited it to the hilt. He diverted taxes from the royal coffers into his own; he kept the warriors he had led back from Gurgan firmly under his own command. Kavad, “Lord of the Aryans” though he might be, appeared left with little save for impotence.

Between the Persian monarchy and the lords of Parthia, between the House of Sasan and the dynasties of the Karin and the Mihran, ghosts had always intruded. When Sukhra, in the pomp and glory of his magnificence, rode out beneath the great horseshoe arches of his palace, he did so at the head of warriors who seemed more like phantoms than men, conjured up from an age remoter by far than that of Ardashir, remoter even than that of Zoroaster himself. Their cloaks, their pennants, the livery of their chargers: all were green.⁴⁸ The colour was that of Mihr—the god whose anger with Peroz had turned the fields of Iranshahr brown. The god, if he could only be appeased, had the power to make the soil fertile and giving again. Sukhra, by invoking this conviction with such flamboyance, was not only thumbing his nose at the House of Sasan but laying claim to the most ancient and enduring of the traditions cherished by the Parthians. Not for nothing was their sacred fire named the “Fire of Mihr is Great”: for in the easternmost regions of Iranshahr, Mihr was worshipped as he had once been by all the Aryan people, with a peculiarly single-hearted devotion. So much so, in fact, that the fervour with which the god’s cult was practised across the plains and mountains of Parthia tended to leave little time for Ohrmazd Himself.⁴⁹ Just as Sukhra’s green-clad private army evoked a time before the Sasanians, so, even more scandalously, did the sacred fire of Mihr serve as a reminder of beliefs that pre-dated Zoroaster. Unsurprisingly, then, the mowbeds had done all they could to dim its renown. Too venerable to be extinguished entirely, it had nevertheless been demoted. Mihr’s fire, so the mowbeds had declared, was fit only for the masses: herdsmen, ploughmen, peasants. A doubly neat manoeuvre: for with it, the priests had served to cast the two remaining sacred fires—both of which lay securely within the Church’s own heartlands—as the only two with authentic pedigree. That the truth was far different—that the fire temple in Persia dated back only to the time of Ardashir, and the fire in Media even later, only to the reign of Peroz himself—had ceased so much as to register.⁵⁰ It was the mowbeds, after all, who enjoyed the ear of the king, who commanded the resources of a spreading Church, who wrote the books. Yet still, wherever the Karin rode, their green-clad horsemen were sure to follow: serving notice that there were beliefs older than the Prophet, and still very far from dead.

Not that everyone in Parthia was necessarily convinced by Sukhra’s posing as the agent of Mihr. While the Parthian dynasts had long resented Persian rule, they were far more suspicious of each other than they were of the Sasanians. Kavad, in this fractiousness, was able to distinguish a glimmering of hope. It was not only the Shahanshah who was affronted by the suffocating greatness of the Karin. So too was the Parthian dynasty which, decades earlier, had helped Peroz to the throne, and still regarded it as their god-given right to throw their weight around much as they pleased: the Mihran. They too, as their name suggested, regarded themselves as the favourites of Mihr; they too raised their own taxes; they too had private armies. Kavad, growing up into a full recognition of his weakness, decided that he had no choice but to turn to them for assistance. A desperate throw, and one that did little for the royal prestige, of course—but the “Lord of the Aryans” was beyond caring. To all the other miseries afflicting his people Kavad now added, as the consequence of his manoeuvre, civil war. The Mihran, wooed into making an open assault on their bitterest rivals, duly advanced against the power of Sukhra. Reaches of Iranshahr left untorched by the Hephthalites were now trampled down by the empire’s two foremost noble families. Finally, in a climactic confrontation, it was the Karin who were overthrown. Sukhra was taken captive, and all his treasure with him. Delivered into royal hands, the great warlord was put to death.

None of which, as it turned out, improved the position of Kavad one jot. “Sukhra’s wind has died away, and a wind belonging to Mihran has now started to blow”:⁵¹ centuries later, and the phrase was still proverbial. Bitterly as the gusts must have sounded in the king’s ear, however, they did not sound so cruelly as they did across the blackened fields, the weed-choked roads, and the abandoned villages of his unhappy realm. War and famine were emptying the countryside. Even in the best of times, those who worked on the land had laboured under crushing burdens. All the wealth of the Shahanshah in his many fabulous palaces, of the dynasts in their own strongholds, and of the mowbeds on their fine horses, all the splendour of the aristocracy’s shimmering silks, their jewels and their groaning tables, all their dancing girls, their musicians and their performing monkeys, almost everything enjoyed by the rich, in short, had been wrung from the exertions of the poor. Unsurprisingly, then, the flight of peasants from the fields had long been a cause of anxiety to the elite; and vagrants, if they were caught, could expect to be branded on their faces as rebels against Ohrmazd Himself. Increasingly, though, as misery was piled upon misery, the sheer number of people on the move started to overwhelm the authorities. Many rootless peasants headed for the cities, but many more, ganging together and brandishing cudgels and bill-hooks, took to the road and turned predator themselves. At first, they plundered their neighbours’ villages and attacked travellers on the highways. Then, as they grew in number and confidence, they started to aim higher. Barely believable news began to intrude upon the councils of the great. Gangs of the despised peasantry, “like demons set at large,”⁵² were moving against the nobility’s granaries and estates. They had stormed palaces and divided entire treasuries among “the poor, the base and the weak.”⁵³ Most shockingly of all, “the ignoble plebeians” were said to have passed around women captured during these assaults, handing even the perfumed wives of nobles from peasant to peasant.⁵⁴ A high-born lady streaked with the filth and the sweat of the landless: here was the ultimate image of order turned to chaos.

What did this turning of the world upon its head portend? Surely nothing less than the end of time itself. The Zoroastrian faithful had long believed that things were not eternal, and that the great struggle between Ohrmazd and Ahriman was destined to resolve itself in one final and climactic confrontation. No one, prior to Zoroaster, had ever contemplated such a notion: that mankind, rather than reproducing itself for ever, generation after endless generation, might instead be heading towards a fixed and definite end; that a terminal clash between good and evil might be approaching; that the whole universe might be weighed in the balance and judged. Such notions, doubtless, sat readily with troubled times; but the collapse of Iranshahr into near anarchy was not the only reason why anxiety and anticipation had risen, by the time of Kavad’s reign, to an unprecedented fever pitch. No less influential, perhaps, was the date that scholars had recently assigned to Zoroaster’s birth: a thousand years before the present. People had come to feel themselves living in the shadow of something truly portentous—a millennium. For decades, this had served to foster eerie whisperings: that a new prophet was destined to appear, one who would serve as the seal of all who had gone before him and would usher in, for his followers, a golden age of equality, justice and peace.⁵⁵The Zoroastrian establishment had found it increasingly difficult, amid the miseries of the age, to ring-fence such talk. The rumours spread; and, as they spread, they mutated and evolved. To the poor, especially, they seemed to offer a route map to a juster and happier future. The ragged armies of the dispossessed, when they seized the property of the rich, were motivated by more than mere hatred, or even hunger. Just as the mowbeds passionately believed themselves entrusted by Ohrmazd with the maintenance of the traditional order of things, so had the poor, no less passionately, come to believe themselves entrusted with a divine mission to bring it crashing down around their heads. Men, they declared, were created equal. It followed, then, that all good things, from food to land to women, should be held in common. The privileges of the nobility, the pretensions of the priesthood: both had to be dissolved. Such were the demands of the self-proclaimed “Adherents of Justice”: the world’s first communist manifesto.

How was it, in the bowels of the world’s most intimidating monarchy, that such a startling movement had come into existence? Clearly, the evils and injustices of the preceding decades had done much to inspire the spirit of revolution, as too had all the many varied currents of belief abroad in Iranshahr, the cults and shadowy heresies that had always plagued the Zoroastrian Church. Subsequent tradition, however, would attribute the unprecedented eruption of the Adherents of Justice to the teachings of a single prophet, the messenger from Ohrmazd long foretold: a one-time priest by the name of Mazdak. Four hundred years on, and historians would still commemorate how he had ringingly “proclaimed that what God had given to man should be distributed equally, and that men had abused this in their injustice to one another.”⁵⁶ Unfortunately, however, the murk that veils the lives of so many prophets from our gaze has, by and large, served to swallow up Mazdak as well. Although, in histories written a century and more after his lifetime, he is portrayed as a towering figure, no contemporary makes reference to him. Consequently, when attempting to make sense of his career, we are left with more questions than answers. Were his teachings original to him, or did he merely articulate doctrines that had been decades, even centuries, in the making? How much faith can we have in the traditional details of his biography? Did he even exist?⁵⁷

Amid all the uncertainty, though, two facts are clear. The first is that Iranshahr, by the time of Kavad’s reign, was teetering on the brink of a full-scale social revolution. The second is that Kavad himself, ever the opportunist, had helped to push it over the edge. Monarchs are rarely in the habit of promoting class warfare; but Kavad, “a man who for cunning and energy had no rivals,”⁵⁸ was desperately negotiating uncharted waters. His support for the revolutionaries had two aims: to ensure that his own estates were left untouched; and to foster assaults on those of the great Parthian dynasts. Yet, it is possible—even likely—that there was more to this strategy than mere cold calculation: perhaps he did genuinely look with sympathy upon the miseries and the demands of the poor. Tradition would recall that Mazdak, brought into the royal presence, had converted the Shahanshah to his infant faith; and tradition might conceivably be correct. Certainly, the sheer audacity of Kavad’s attempt to neutralise the nobility is the best evidence we have that Mazdak did after all exist. It is hard to believe that a Sasanian would ever have identified himself with peasant insurrectionists had he not possessed an inner assurance that he was truly fulfilling the divine purpose. Cynicism fused with religiosity: such was the combination, surely, that made of Kavad a Mazdakite.

Inevitably, though, his conversion stirred up a hornets’ nest. Events now began to move very fast. In 496, an alliance of nobles and mowbeds forced Kavad’s abdication. His brother, a young boy by the name of Zamasp, was proclaimed Shahanshah in his place. Kavad himself was immured in the empire’s most fearsome prison, the aptly named “Castle of Oblivion”—“for the name of anyone cast into its dungeons is forbidden to be mentioned ever again, with death as the penalty for anyone who speaks it.”⁵⁹ Yet, to Kavad—a king so enterprising that he had toyed with communism—this was never likely to prove a terminal roadblock. Sure enough, he soon procured a complete outfit of women’s clothes, gave his gaolers the slip while disguised as his own wife, and fled to the court of the Hephthalites. There, just as his father had done nearly four decades before, he secured the khan’s backing and returned to Iranshahr at the head of a Hephthalite army. The Parthian dynasts, struggling desperately to keep their heads above the Mazdakite floodtide, found themselves powerless to help their royal cipher; Zamasp was duly toppled without a battle; blinded with burning olive oil, or else with an iron needle, he was banished into oblivion himself.

So it was, by 498, that Kavad was once again the Shahanshah. Nevertheless, the desperate circumstances of his realm still threatened to give the lie to that title. The empire remained racked by religious controversy, social upheaval and dynastic feuding. It was also effectively bankrupt. How, then, was Kavad to pay his Hephthalite backers for their support? A challenge, it might have been thought, fit to defeat even his ingenuity.

But Kavad was, as ever, nothing daunted. Instead, with his entire empire seemingly on the verge of implosion, he opted to go on the attack: to fix his gaze towards the setting of the sun, to cross his western border, and to take the gold he needed from there.

He would go to war with the only empire in the world that could rival his own.

The Twin Eyes of the World

Once, the predecessors of the Sasanians had ruled a dominion so vast that it had reached the shores of the Mediterranean. Egypt, Syria and even a chunk of Europe had been theirs. Memories of this golden age had grown faint, yet there were still monuments to it in Persia itself: enigmatic tombs and reliefs on cliffs of bearded kings. Most haunting of all was a great wilderness of columns, some five miles south of Istakhr: the “Place of a Hundred Pillars.” Here, amid the ruins, priests would carve inscriptions—and noblemen offer sacrifices—to the spirits of the ancient kings who had built it, back in the fabulous reaches of time.

Most Persians had no doubt that these mysterious ancestors were the Kayanids. The sustained rewriting of history that occurred under Peroz had merely cemented the identification. Yet there were other traditions, very different, which endured as well. Far to the west of Iranshahr, the Greeks—a people to whom the Kayanids meant nothing—preserved the memory of a Persian king named Cyrus. He had been, according to their historians, “the best of all rulers,”⁶⁰ the first man ever to attempt the conquest of the world. A full half a millennium before Christ he had died—but still, among the Greeks, he was commemorated as the very model of a universal monarch. He and his successors had wielded a power more dazzling than that of any dynasty before them. One king had even sought to chain Europe to Asia by means of a bridge of boats, and to conquer Greece itself. He had failed—but only just. As a display of global reach, it had certainly proved a memorable one. Better than the Persians themselves, the Greeks knew precisely who the founders of the first world empire had been. It was not the Kayanids who had inhabited “the Place of a Hundred Pillars,” but the heirs of Cyrus. Indeed, Greek historians even had their own name for the ruin: “the City of the Persians,” or Persepolis.

It is hard to believe that the Persians themselves were wholly ignorant of this alternative history.^b Anything that touched on the glory of their ancestors was bound to tickle their fancy. Sure enough, distorted echoes of what the Greeks had recorded about Cyrus and his descendants could sometimes be discerned in the fables of the Kayanids: the majesty of their rule, the vastness of their empire, even, on occasion, their names. Yet ultimately, to the Zoroastrian priests who were responsible for chronicling the past ofIranshahr, history such as the Greeks understood it was of only incidental significance. Far greater issues, and far greater forces, were at play. The rise and fall of earthly empires were the mere shadow-play of something infinitely more cosmic: the clash between Truth and the Lie. Nowhere, in the opinion of the Persians, better illustrated just how violently this battle had reverberated throughout the ages than the Place of a Hundred Pillars. By the time of Kavad’s reign, there was a hardening consensus as to who its architect had been. Jamshid, according to fabulously ancient tradition, had been the greatest monarch of all time: ruler of the entire world, possessed of a farr so potent that it had kept the whole of humanity from death, the chosen one of Ohrmazd, the owner of a flying throne.^c Finally, though, after a reign of a thousand years, he had aspired to become a god—and at once his farr had abandoned him. Cornered by Dahag, the demonic necromancer, Jamshid had been hacked to death. Darkness and evil had prevailed. Of the fallen king, and all the manifold glories of his reign, nothing had been preserved, save only the great pillared city of stone.

Takht-e Jamshid, people had begun to call the ruin—“Jamshid’s Throne.”^d Yet, even with responsibility for its destruction firmly pinned on a brain-eating demon, the name of the true, the authentic culprit remained one fit to chill the blood of any devout Zoroastrian. Although the priests of Ohrmazd had long since forgotten what every Greek historian took for granted, that it was in fact no demon who had burned Persepolis, but rather an earthly warlord, their amnesia was far from total. In Persia, the name of the conqueror whose drunken arson had left the palace a smoking ruin had most certainly not been forgotten. Eight hundred years on, and the fame of Alexander the Great still blazed undiminished. To many, and not only in the West, he remained a figure of incomparable glamour: king of a once-backward Greek kingdom by the time he was twenty; master of the empire founded by Cyrus five years later; dead, having marched to the limits of the world, at the age of thirty-three. Even the Persians, whose dominion he had overthrown, were not wholly immune to the allure of his glory. At the royal court a craze was brewing for romances in which the great man, somewhat improbably, featured as the son of a Persian king. There were plenty in Iranshahr, however, less than thrilled by this innovation. To the Zoroastrian priesthood, in particular, any notion that the conqueror of their country might have been a hero was not merely anathema but heresy. The memories preserved by the mowbeds of Alexander were terrible ones: of a criminal, a vandal, accursed. “For he entered Iranshahr with terrible violence, war and torture, and killed the King, and destroyed and razed to the ground the court and all the kingdom.”⁶¹ Not exactly a demon, perhaps—but demonic, certainly. Even the non-existence of ancient books of Zoroastrian lore was attributed by the priests, not to the fact that they had only just come up with a script capable of recording their holy scriptures, but to Alexander’s imagined taste for burning libraries. There was just a single mercy, in short: that the fiend had ended up “plunged into hell.”⁶²

And the evil he had done lived after him. For centuries, Iranshahr had been left broken and humiliated. Even Ardashir and his successors, despite their self-evident status as favourites of Ohrmazd, had found it impossible to fulfil their stated ambition—“to restore to the Persian people the complete extent of their vanished empire.”⁶³ Long gone Alexander might be—and yet the path back to their one-time western provinces remained firmly blocked. A second superpower, no less vaunting in its pretensions thanIranshahritself, had come to occupy all the lands around the Mediterranean once ruled by Cyrus. This empire, however, was not Alexander’s. Indeed, it was not even Greek. Rather, it had been won by a people whose origins lay far to the west, in an iron-jawed city by the name of Rome. More than half a millennium had passed now since the winning by the Romans of lands that had originally provided Alexander with his own first taste of global conquest: Greece and Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. This, in itself, would have been more than sufficient to raise Persian hackles; but even more insufferable was the fact that the Romans seemed to have inherited Alexander’s appetite for pushing ever further eastwards. Time and again, the emperors of “Rum”—the Caesars, as they were known—had attempted to topple the dominion of the Persians; and time and again, the Persians had succeeded in “annihilating their invasions.”⁶⁴

As a result, when Kavad scouted around for some heroic exploit that might demonstrate to his dubious and unhappy subjects the potency of his farr, he did not have far to look. Nothing, not even a wholesale slaughter of Hephthalites, could possibly rival the glory to be gleaned from humbling a Caesar. Bragging rights over the Romans offered a Shahanshah the ultimate in self-esteem. The House of Sasan had grasped this right from the start. Ten miles to the west of Persepolis, chiselled into a rock face where the ancient kings of Persia had once carved out their tombs, could be seen a splendid portrait of the son of Ardashir, Shapur I, crowned and imperious on his war-horse, while before him—one on bended knee, the other raising his hands in pitiful submission—two Caesars grovelled for mercy. There was more to this relief, however, than simple boasting. To defeat Rome was to defeat the successors of Alexander. It was to affirm that good would triumph over evil, that the light of Truth would ultimately banish the darkness of the Lie. To a king such as Kavad—a self-confessed heretic—this offered a tantalising opportunity. What better way of demonstrating to the fretful and suspicious Zoroastrian Church that he was truly touched by the favour of the heavens than by winning a glorious victory over the Romans, those heirs of Alexander?

And the mark of his success, as well as glory, would be loot. Such, at any rate, was Kavad’s confident expectation. The land of Rum, as everyone knew, was quite sensationally rich. The Shahanshah would never have acknowledged it openly, but there was, in his decision to invade the West, just a hint of jealousy. While Rome had long served the Persians as a worthy—indeed the ultimate—foe, it had also encouraged in the House of Sasan a certain competitive sense of upward mobility. Shapur I, whose drubbings of a whole succession of Caesars had left him with an immense reservoir of prisoners, had set about exploiting the know-how of his captives with a particular gusto. Whether it was wall-paintings in the royal throne room, or a network of massive dams, or entire cities planted in the Iranian outback, his infant empire had been given a decidedly Roman makeover. Two centuries on, and the ambition of the Sasanian monarchy to emulate its western rival had diminished not a jot. A peculiarly ostentatious marker of this was Kavad’s love of bathing. Here, in the opinion of many Persians, and especially the mowbeds, was a thoroughly shocking innovation—one that positively reeked of the Roman. This, though, for Kavad himself, was precisely the point. More, very much more, than issues of personal hygiene were at stake. To imitate Rome would be to overtake her. Truly to become wealthy required learning all the lessons of Roman greatness. Even as Iranshahr tottered, Kavad’s fondness for a scrubdown served to signal to his people that he had his gaze fixed firmly on the future.

In the meanwhile, what could not be copied from Rome would simply have to be stolen. For more than a century, the extortion of danger money from their western neighbour had lain at the heart of the Sasanians’ foreign policy. The days of beating off Roman invasions were long gone. The last serious attempt made by a Caesar to overthrow the House of Sasan had taken place back in AD 363, under the command of a would-be Alexander named Julian, and had ended with the death of the emperor himself, and the imposition upon his successor of gratifyingly humiliating peace terms. From that moment on, the Roman high command had come to accept a painful and unsettling truth: Persia could not be beaten. To continue ignoring that lesson would result only in an endless haemorrhaging of blood and gold. Cheaper, in the long run, simply to purchase coexistence. So it was, to the delight of a succession of Sasanian monarchs, that they had found themselves able to screw out of their great enemy what the Romans, with a fastidious show of delicacy, termed “subsidies,” and what the Persians, amid much self-congratulatory clamour, termed “tribute.” Who, for instance, had helped to fund Peroz’s programme of fortifications along the northern frontier? Caesar. Who had helped to pay his ransom? Caesar. Who had contributed gold towards his final expedition? Caesar. Yet it was true as well that the annihilation of Peroz’s army, and of its calamitous aftermath, had not gone unremarked in the council chambers of the West. In 501, when Kavad found himself under pressure from the Hephthalites to pay off the dues owed to them for their backing, and wrote to the emperor of the Romans, a one-time bureaucrat and notorious miser by the name of Anastasius, demanding what he euphemistically termed a “loan,” Anastasius refused. Clearly, Caesar’s advisers had calculated that Iranshahr was now a broken reed. This, for Kavad, was a most ominous development. For a century and more, the intimidating reputation of Persian arms had served to reap the House of Sasan prodigious benefit; yet now, if Kavad were to allow the ink-spotted accountants of Rome to call his bluff, not only would the Hephthalites remain unpaid, but his own prestige, and that of his entire empire, would suffer a yet further body-blow.

The Shahanshah, however, was hardly a man to allow a good crisis to go to waste. Peril, in his philosophy, existed solely to be turned to advantage. The Hephthalites could be recruited as mercenaries. The nobility, rather than being left to snap and tear at one another, and at the heels of the king himself, could instead be recruited to the common cause. All the seething religious antagonism that was racking Kavad’s empire could be dissolved, so he trusted, upon a summons to punish the Romans. Iranshahr may have been bloodied, but it remained what it had always been: a state powerfully geared to war. Not all the repeated humiliations inflicted by the Hephthalites had served to diminish the confidence felt by Kavad in his killing-machine: for the paradox was, as he well knew, that his armies were far better suited to savaging the wealthy and globe-spanning empire of Rome than they were to crushing impoverished nomads. Whatever else might be said about the Romans, they were at least civilised. They had cities that could be put under siege and armies that were not forever melting away. Above all, unlike the Hephthalites, they lay conveniently ready to hand: not lurking beyond those regions where royal authority was at its weakest, but right where the Shahanshah wanted them, directly on the doorstep of the land that constituted both his ultimate powerbase, and the surest guarantee of Iranshahr’s rank as a superpower.

“The Heart of Iran,” it was called; and yet this land was not Persia, nor anywhere else inhabited by the Aryan people. Follow the trunk road that led from beyond the easternmost province of the empire—Khorasan, as it was known—and continue through Parthia and Media to the great range of mountains, the Zagros, that formed the western rampart of the plateau of Iran, and the traveller would then start to descend, through many twists and turns, to a very different world. Eragh, the Persians called it—the “Flat Land.” The contrast with the upland regions of the empire could hardly have been more striking. Unlike Iran, where the cities planted by a succession of kings served only to emphasise the immense emptiness of the salt flats, or the deserts, or the mountains, the lowlands revealed an immense monotony of crops and brick. Whether spreading fields of barley, or smudges of brown smoke on the horizon, the tell-tale smears of urban sprawl, here were the marks of a landscape as intensively exploited as any in the world. All the gold and pearls in the imperial treasury were not as precious to the Persian monarchy as this, the truest jewel in its crown: for nowhere was more dazzlingly fecund, more blessed with fertile soil. Westwards from Mesopotamia, or “The Land Between the Rivers,” as the Greeks called the region, there stretched nothing except for sand; but the two great rivers themselves, the fast-flowing Tigris and the sluggish Euphrates, had served between them to make what would otherwise have been fiery desert bloom.

Not unaided, however. Human muscle had been scoring the mud steppes since the dawn of time—but never had there been quite such enthusiastic sponsors of irrigation as the House of Sasan. If royal power, in the eastern provinces of Iranshahr, was a thing of often shimmering insubstantiality, then in the West it had always been wielded with an iron fist. Massive labour gangs, funded and controlled directly from the imperial centre, had toiled for centuries to ensure that the wealth of Mesopotamia was exploited to the full. Immense effort was required simply to ensure that the canals did not silt up, that the rivers did not flood, that all the fields and factories did not degenerate back into swamps. The Persian monarchy, though, had achieved more than merely keeping the sludge and the whining mosquitoes at bay: it had expanded the network of canals on a truly colossal scale. Most were simple irrigation channels, sliced in squares across the fields; but some, the most grandiose, were as wide and deep as the Euphrates itself. Kavad himself had commissioned the excavation of a canal that promised to be the largest that Mesopotamia had ever seen: testimony to the implacable resolve of the crown, even amid crisis and financial meltdown, not to stint on its engineering budget. Some investments were always worth the expense. Once completed, the new canal would provide fresh water for a whole new swath of Mesopotamia. Hitherto barren soil would flourish; the population would swell; cities would sprout and grow. The economy, as it had done ever since the conquest of the lowlands by the House of Sasan, would continue to boom.⁶⁵

Only follow the money. Rare was the Shahanshah who had failed to sniff majesty in the scent of the Mesopotamian mud. Even Ardashir himself, the original conqueror of this land back in AD 226, had quickly abandoned any notion of trying to rule it from Istakhr, venerable hometown of his dynasty though it was. The cockpit of Iranshahr, from his reign onwards, had lain instead on the banks of the Tigris. Ctesiphon—a sprawling agglomeration of once-distinct towns and villages ringed by bristling walls and dominated by the towering arches of a colossal royal palace—was certainly no stranger to such a role. By establishing its capital there, the House of Sasan had consciously planted its banner amid the rubble of countless former regimes. Opposite, for instance, on the far bank of the Tigris, lay Seleucia—a city named after one of Alexander’s generals. Once the haughty epitome of Greek power and self-confidence, all its streets and palaces had long since been lost to sand, and only gibbets now stood upon its walls. Ctesiphon itself, at the time of its capture by Ardashir, had been the capital of the Parthian kings. This pedigree—reinforced by the Sasanians’ own lavish building projects and the prodigious growth of its population—had served to stamp this city as the undisputed capital of Asia. Unsurprisingly, then, the Romans, eager to add to the graveyard of empires, and poised menacingly as they were just three hundred miles to the north-west, had always found it an irresistible target. A near-impregnable one as well: for only once, back in 283, had a Roman emperor actually succeeded in capturing the city from the Sasanians, and even then he had promptly been struck by lightning, certain proof of the indignation of Ohrmazd. Nor was it only the heavens that stood guard over Ctesiphon. Beyond the vast ring of walls encircling the city, there stretched the immensity of the irrigation system: moat after endless moat. Back in 363, during the course of the final Roman attempt to capture Ctesiphon, even mosquitoes had been summoned to the city’s defence: great clouds of them, in the wake of the deliberate cutting of the dykes by the Persians, had shadowed Julian’s approach, so that “by day the light of the sun, and by night the glitter of the stars, were blotted out.”⁶⁶

Kavad faced few such impediments to his own invasion. No natural frontier, no river or chain of mountains, marked the boundary between the empires of East and West. The border itself was little more than a line drawn in the sand. Those who dwelt on either side of it spoke the same language and shared the same way of life, “so that rather than live in dread of one another,” as one Roman commentator observed disapprovingly, “they inter-marry, bringing their produce to the same markets, and even shoulder the labours of farming together.”⁶⁷ As a result, both the Persian and the Roman authorities were as concerned with policing their own subjects as they were with intimidating the enemy. Indeed, by the terms of a peace treaty signed more than sixty years previously, the construction of new fortresses close to the border had been banned outright. De-militarisation, however, had effectively been a Persian victory by another name: for the Shahanshah, unlike his Roman adversary, already commanded a great city that sat almost directly on the frontier. Nisibis was its name: once the linchpin of the entire Roman defensive system in the East, but secured for Persia back in 363, following the defeat of Julian’s assault on Ctesiphon. Almost a century and a half on, and the Romans still had no rival stronghold from which to coordinate a response to any Persian invasion. For decades, as peace held between the two superpowers, this had scarcely mattered. But now, with Hephthalite mercenaries suddenly erupting across Roman territory, their hoofbeats were sounding a tattoo that generated terror hundreds of miles beyond the frontier.

Kavad’s ambition stretched well beyond stripping the Roman countryside bare: he planned to seize a great city or two. Cities, after all, were where the true wealth was to be found: gold, industry and slaves. Accordingly, the Shahanshah did not follow the lowland roads along which rural refugees were already streaming, but headed north, through the mountains of Armenia. His first target was the city of Theodosiopolis, which he surprised, and took with ease. Then, swinging back south, he made for an even richer prize. Amida, a heavily fortified stronghold some eighty miles beyond the frontier, where its massive basalt walls lowered grimly above the upper reaches of the Tigris, had shrugged off many previous Persian attempts to capture it; nor did it promise Kavad easy pickings now. Even prior to his invasion, the city’s governor had been prompted to stiffen its defences by an unprecedented array of evil portents: “locusts came, the sun was dimmed, there was earthquake, famine, and plague.”⁶⁸There was certainly no prospect of repeating the trick that had secured Theodosiopolis, and taking Amida by surprise. Upwards of fifty thousand villagers, from all across the region, had fled the approach of the Hephthalite cavalry and taken refuge inside the city, almost doubling its population. Even though this had rendered living conditions within Amida almost unendurable, it had at least ensured there would be no shortage of people to defend its walls. Sure enough, in time, the defence of Amida would become the stuff of ringing legend. Everything the city had in its arsenal was rained down upon the besiegers: from catapult bolts to arrows; from rocks to boiling oil. Even the women and children took to the walls and hurled down stones. Meanwhile, the city’s prostitutes chanted abuse at the Shahanshah and flashed their privates at him whenever he came into view.

After three months, though, it was Kavad who enjoyed the last laugh. A Persian detachment forced its way through a sewer that ran beneath the circuit wall and secured an inner tower. Kavad himself then stood at the base of the walls, sword drawn, to urge on the rest of his army, who raised ladders and swarmed up into Amida at last. Then, in an ecstasy of triumph and greed, they stripped the city bare. Although many of its inhabitants were taken as slaves, with the notables carefully rounded up to serve as hostages, far more were put to the sword. The streets ran with blood. Tens of thousands of bodies, when the killing was finally done, were slung beyond the city’s walls. Great piles of reeking corpses, tangled and gore-smeared, provided the Persians with an intimidating trophy of their victory. Decades later, the terrible slaughter would still haunt the imaginings of all those who lived along Rome’s eastern frontier.

Which, no doubt, had been precisely Kavad’s aim. Although the war he had launched would soon peter out into bloody stalemate, and although Amida itself, besieged in turn by the Romans, would end up being sold back to them, albeit for a tidy profit, theShahanshah could consider his war aims to have been more than met. A fearsome marker had been laid down. After long years of defeat and decay, the lord of Iranshahr had triumphantly demonstrated to his own subjects, and the rest of the world, that the spiral of his dynasty’s decline was over. There would be no collapse. The House of Sasan had weathered the storm. Nor was that all. It remained the goal of Kavad himself, ever bold, ever ambitious, not merely to redeem the Persian monarchy from the many perils that had been beleaguering it, but to set its power upon firmer foundations than it had ever enjoyed before. Its enemies everywhere were to be hamstrung and taught their place. In 506, he duly signed a treaty with the Romans, which once again obliged Caesar to hand over a payment of gold. Some of this, of course, along with the booty of Theodosiopolis and Amida, could be used to help pay off the Hephthalites—except that even on that front there was at last some promising news. Reports were starting to be brought in by travellers from the distant-most limits of the steppes of the rise to prominence there of a whole new breed of savages: a hitherto unknown people named the Turks. It appeared that the Hephthalites themselves might be suffering from their own nomad problem. Manifold indeed were the blessings of Ohrmazd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the Rivers of Babylon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A gift that, coming from the Almighty, could only be for keeps. Here, to the half a million or so Jews settled between the Two Rivers, was a flattering assurance. As they toiled in the fields that bordered the great canals north of Ctesiphon, or squatted cross-legged beside their market stalls, or drove their pack-animals laden with merchandise through the winding and narrow streets of the sprawling capital itself, they could know that they, unlike the teeming millions who lived alongside them in Mesopotamia, were a nation set apart: for they had a homeland granted them of God. This did not mean, by and large, that they actually wished to go and live in their Promised Land. Granted, any Jew who happened to dream of barley would, so their sages had pronounced, be expected to move there straight away^e—but most much preferred the idea of emigration to the reality. In truth, for many centuries now, there had been nothing to prevent the Jews from ending their exile, save only their own partiality to life in a land as fertile, cosmopolitan and prosperous as Mesopotamia. Certainly, the forced captivity imposed on them by their Babylonian masters had not endured for long. A bare four decades or so after the sack of Jerusalem, it had been the turn of Babylon herself to fall. Her captor, in 539 BC, had been none other than Cyrus of Persia, that trail-blazing exponent of global monarchy. The Jews, unsurprisingly, had hailed his achievement in rapturous terms: for not only had Cyrus humbled the hated strumpet-city of Babylon, but he had also granted them permission to return to Jerusalem, and rebuild their annihilated Temple. Yet though many had gratefully taken the Persian king up on his offer, just as many had not. Instead, they and their heirs had remained where they were, and put down such roots in the rich, thick soil of Mesopotamia that not all the savagery and swirl of great power politics, gusting across the landscape of the Near East for a millennium and more, had served to uproot them. Instead, it was upon the descendants of the Jews who had returned to the Holy Land that devastation, over the course of the centuries, had been repeatedly visited: so much so that by the early third century AD, when Ardashir and his Persians had first come clattering into Ctesiphon, it was not Jerusalem and its environs that provided the Jews with their surest heartland, but the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.

This was a development that verged, in the circumstances, on the miraculous. Immigrants to Mesopotamia were rarely in the habit of preserving the memory of their origins for more than a couple of generations, at best. The region had long experience of serving as a melting-pot: for the rich fertility of its soil was not the only source of its prodigious wealth. Lying as it did midway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, between the steppes of Central Asia and the deserts of Arabia, it was incomparably well positioned to serve as the world’s clearing-house. “All that exists in it is brought there,” boasted its Persian masters, “and is for our enjoyment, be it food, or drugs, or perfumes.”⁹¹ The consequence of this could be sampled with a simple stroll through Ctesiphon. Whether in the overflowing bazaars, or in the few streets large enough to cater to carts and livestock, or in the narrow alleyways through which only pedestrians could gingerly pick their way, there was not a language spoken under the sun but it could be heard somewhere in the monstrous city. Yellow-skinned men with slanted eyes, white-skinned men with straw-coloured hair, black-skinned men with flat noses: their peculiar jabberings served to season the fetid air. Yet all, over time, would prove so much mulch; for just as the streets were repeatedly being cleared of their ruts, and houses abandoned to spreading cess-pools, and whole neighbourhoods demolished to make way for new developments, so was the human fabric of Ctesiphon forever being recycled. Memories, like mud-bricks, rarely stood solid there for long. Only the Jews, it seemed, like some timeless landmark fashioned out of granite, stood proof against the process.

But how? Inimitable though their attachment to the distant homeland promised them by God certainly was, it would hardly have been sufficient in itself to prevent them from being digested into the maw of Mesopotamia. Fortunately, however, long previously, when issuing His grant of Canaan to Abraham, the Almighty had foreseen the risk. “This is my covenant which you shall keep, between me and you and your descendants after you: every male among you shall be circumcised.”⁹² Nor had He been content to leave things there. To a subsequent generation, so it was recorded in the Tanakh, He had issued yet further markers of the exceptional status that was theirs as the children of Abraham: never, so He had thundered, were they to eat pork, or any other meat that had not first been drained of its blood, nor were they to fashion “any likeness of anything,”⁹³ nor were they, on any account, to break a whole battery of other commandments, interdictions and prescriptions, which they were never to change or add to one jot. This awesome body of law was called the Torah—“Instruction”—and it gave the Jews, uniquely among the many peoples deported to Babylon, a sense that law derived ultimately, not from any mortal king, or sage, but from God alone. It was this, more than anything else, that had enabled them, throughout the long centuries of their sojourn in Mesopotamia, to preserve their identity as a nation apart. Unlike other, less privileged peoples, they had been brought by God to fathom the essence of what it meant to be human: that it lay not in any aspiration to empire, or liberty, or fame, but rather, and very simply, in being subject to a law.

Which was doubtless, for the Jews of Iranshahr, just as well. The House of Sasan, after all, did not look kindly upon sedition. That most Persian kings were prepared to tolerate the prickly exclusiveness of their Jewish subjects reflected their understanding that it posed their authority, not a threat, but the opposite. The bizarre distinctiveness of the Jews, in a city as teeming and inchoate as Ctesiphon, had come to the imperial bureaucracy almost as a relief: for it rendered them easier to regulate and fleece. All that was required to ensure that these peculiar aliens did not get ideas above their station, and paid their taxes obediently, was the appointment of one of their own as a tame puppet—an “exilarch.” This, ever since the reign of Shapur I, had been the settled policy of the Sasanian monarchy; and it was a measure of just how smoothly it had operated that the attitude of certain kings to the Jews had even, on occasion, stretched to a lukewarm favouritism. One Shahanshah had gone so far as to marry the daughter of an exilarch, and sit her by his side as his queen. Unsurprisingly, then, the Jews tended to regard their Sasanian masters as a cut above other pagans. Even the Persians’ notorious reluctance “to urinate in public”⁹⁴—regarded by everyone else as a laughable foible—met with glowing approval from Jewish moralists. Such a people richly merited obedience. “For they do protect us, after all.”⁹⁵

Yet this compact, like so much else in Iranshahr, had started to crumble during the reign of Peroz. Not every Persian was inclined to mimic the haughty tolerance of royalty. The Zoroastrian priesthood had long viewed the Jews’ obdurate refusal to acknowledge the manifest truths of Ohrmazd as a standing provocation. As what else did it brand them, so the mowbeds demanded to know, if not the spawn of Dahag, that brain-eating, serpent-shouldered fiend? “For it was Dahag who began the composition of the Jewish scriptures, and Dahag who was the teacher of Abraham, the high-priest of the Jews.”⁹⁶ No wonder, then, as the Zoroastrian Church increasingly sought to muscle its way free of royal control, that it should also have looked to purge Iranshahr of such an offensively demonic minority. Already, in the reign of Peroz’s father, the mowbeds had begun to lobby for the policy as a sure-fire way of regaining those portions of their ancient empire that had been lost for good to Alexander: “For only convert to one religion all the nations and races in your empire,” they had advised the Shahanshah, “and the land of the Greeks will also obediently submit to your rule.”⁹⁷ It was Peroz, however, eager to clutch at any straw, who had shown himself most receptive to the argument.⁹⁸ In 467, he had duly sanctioned the execution of leading members of the Jewish elite, including the exilarch. The following year, he had banned the teaching of their scriptures and the practising of their law. In 470, he had abolished the post of exilarch altogether.⁹⁹The reversal of long-term royal policy could hardly have been any more brutal. For the first time in their millennium-long history, the Jews of Mesopotamia had suffered active persecution. Worse: they had faced abolition as a distinctive people.

Swiftly and surely, however, “the wicked Peroz”¹⁰⁰ had been struck down. He and all his army had been obliterated. The agonies of Iranshahr, so the Jews could reflect with a grim complacency, had served as the verdict of an outraged heaven. Others too, of course, had arrived at much the same conclusion; and among them had been Kavad. The clinging to a discredited policy, just because the dropping of it might offend the mowbeds, was hardly the new Shahanshah’s style; and so it was, it appears, that the ban on the teaching of the Jewish law had been quietly dropped.¹⁰¹ Many Jews, eager to show their gratitude, duly rallied to his cause. In time, they came to play such a prominent role in his armies that Kavad himself, if obliged to fight on a Jewish holy day, had been known to request his adversaries for a temporary truce. Everything, it seemed, was back to normal. The balance that the Jews of Mesopotamia had always sought to strike, between obedience to their overlords and a yearning to be left alone, appeared restored to its customary equilibrium.

Except that the trauma of persecution could not so easily be forgotten. To ban Jews anywhere from studying their scriptures and their laws was, of course, to deliver them a crippling blow; and yet to ban the Jews of Mesopotamia was an act of peculiar vindictiveness. To a supreme degree, they were still, as they had ever been, a “People of the Book.” Scholarship possessed the aura for them of something incomparably glorious: for in Mesopotamia, attentiveness to the word of God, such as came naturally to any Jew, had fused with a robust pride in the region’s glamorous reputation for ancient wisdom, and which could be traced back to the giants who had flourished before the Flood. Tellingly, the Jewish sages who lived in the land of Abraham’s birth had always taken it for granted that the favours granted to their ancestor had been his due, not simply as a man of God, but as a polymath “superior to all others in wisdom.”¹⁰² No surprise, then, that by the time that Ardashir took control of Ctesiphon, Mesopotamia should have come to boast what ranked, by the admiring assent of the Jewish people everywhere, as the two leading centres of scholarship in the world. Sura and Pumpedita lay some hundred miles apart, but were in every other way the mirror image of one another. Both stood on the western bank of the Euphrates, both were largely populated by Jews, and both gloried in the possession of a yeshiva, or “school,” with ambitions to change the world.

It was the self-appointed mission of these two institutions, a bold and extraordinary one, to replicate on earth the very pattern of the heavens: for to understand the Torah properly, so the sages who taught in them believed, was to fathom the deepest and most hidden purposes of God. Naturally, the laws that had been given to their ancestors could never be altered; but what if there were more to them than met the untutored eye? Such was the question to which the sages of Sura and Pumpedita gave an answer quite staggering in its implications. In addition to the written Torah, so they taught, there had also been revealed a secret Torah, never recorded, but passed down instead through the ages by word of mouth, from prophet to prophet, from rabbi to rabbi, and which they in turn, in their schools beside the Euphrates, had inherited and entrusted to memory. This was the same Torah that God Himself, before embarking on the Creation, had made sure to peruse, that the angels studied ceaselessly, and that a mortal, if sufficiently learned, might use to sway demons, to change the weather, or to communicate with the dead. No wonder, then, that any sage who could legitimately lay claim to such an awesome body of wisdom should be hailed by his students as Rabbi—“Master.” No wonder, either, that the sages of Mesopotamia, in the wake of the shock that Peroz had given them, should have realised just how precarious a thing a yeshiva might be, and how very easy to close down. Was it really a safe bet, some of them began to ask, to entrust a treasure as incomparably precious as the unwritten Torah solely to the memories of rabbis?

Not, of course, that they were the only sages to have fretted over such a question. It was a very similar anxiety, ironically enough, that had prompted the mowbeds to put the sayings of Zoroaster for the first time into writing. Now, a couple of decades or so after the death of Peroz, and the rabbis of Mesopotamia were braced for an even more gruelling project of scholarship.¹⁰³ To transcribe those revelations of God that had hitherto only existed inside their heads was certainly no simple matter. Over the course of many years, the great scholars of Sura and Pumpedita had sought to demonstrate to the Jewish people that the demands of the Torah, both written and spoken, could be applied to even the most mundane aspects of day-to-day life: that geese, for instance, should not be permitted to copulate, and that it was wrong to laugh at the overweight, and that migraines could best be cured by pouring the blood of a dead rooster over the scalp. These, and a whole multitude of teachings like them, were not, so the rabbis claimed, additions to the unchanging law of God, but rather clarifications of it; and as such were themselves a part of the Torah. They too, accordingly, would all have to be recorded. Not so much as a single ruling, not a single detail, could be omitted. So it was that the written record of the rabbis’ learning, their talmud, was brought to testify to an apparently puzzling truth. The Torah, which the rabbis attributed to God Himself, and which they claimed had first been revealed to the Jewish people way back in the mists of time, was composed in part of their very own commentaries upon it. Not only their commentaries either. Even the size of their respective penises was held by the sages to merit detailed mention. This, to anyone untutored in the stern disciplines of rabbinical learning, might have appeared a nonsense; and yet the mysteries of God’s law, it went without saying, were hardly such as could be framed by mere mortal logic. Any new insight into the Torah, provided only that it derived from a rabbi with the requisite qualifications, ranked as a revelation direct from the Almighty—no more and no less so than the written Torah itself.

The task that the rabbis of Mesopotamia had set themselves, of transcribing their talmud, would take entire lifetimes to complete. Such a project could hardly be hurried, after all. The sages who trod the dusty streets of Sura and Pumpedita had their gaze fixed unblinkingly upon the dimension of the eternal. The focus of their researches was the entirety of creation, nothing less. They alone, by virtue of their prodigious feats of study, had fathomed the precise configuration of the will of God—and as a consequence, so it seemed to the rabbis, of the past and the future as well. Certainly, it never crossed their minds that there might have been a time when men such as themselves had not existed. The prophets of the Tanakh, the angels, even God Himself—all were recast in their own image, as rabbis. Likewise, in their heroic struggle to identify and define every conceivable application of the Torah, the scholars of Mesopotamia had no doubt that they were shaping the order that was to come. Fortress-like though the isolation of theiryeshivas certainly was, yet the rabbis were all too painfully conscious of the horrors in the crumbling world beyond. Their aim, in devoting their lives to study, was not to escape such evils, but rather to purge them upon the coming of a golden age: for God had given to the Jewish people the assurance of a new and blessed era, when “all ruined cities will be rebuilt,” when “the cow and the bear shall feed together,” and when “death will cease in the world.”¹⁰⁴ Only once Jews everywhere had been brought to a proper understanding of the Torah, however, would this blessed moment arrive. “If you are worthy, I will hasten it; if you are not worthy, then it will be left to arrive in its own good time.”¹⁰⁵ Such, the rabbis explained, was the bargain that the Almighty had struck with His people. The future of the world lay in their hands.

Yet like the mowbeds and the Mazdakites, whose yearning for an age when justice and mercy would prevail had seen them snatching after the reins of earthly power, the rabbis were not so unworldly as to disdain the making of a similar grab. Time was clearly dragging. God Himself, as every Jew well knew, had promised his Chosen People a saviour. “The Anointed One,” he would be called—the Mashiach, or “Messiah.” With such a king at the head of the Jewish people, the world’s promised redemption from suffering would have dawned—and who was to say that the convulsions of the present age did not herald its imminence? “When you see the great powers contending one with another,” so it was written, “then look for the foot of the Messiah.”¹⁰⁶ As yet, however, with not so much as a toenail in evidence, there was a desperate need for the Jewish people to be graced with an alternative leadership: one that could serve to instruct them in the obedience demanded of them by God, and thereby to speed the Messiah’s arrival.

And how fortunate it was, how very fortunate, that just such a leadership should have been ready to hand. “Teaching and the mastery of a people,” so a celebrated rabbi had once piously averred, “have never coincided”¹⁰⁷—but that had not stopped his successors from hankering after both. Tensions between the rabbis and the exilarchate had been seething for years—and now, with the exilarch vanished from the scene, the sages of Sura and Pumpedita did not hesitate to step into the breach. Even as they continued to toil away at their transcription of the Talmud, so also, with a quite awesome display of self-assurance, were they working to impose its dictates upon the entire Jewish nation. From highest to lowest, from landowners to labourers, all were to be shaped and controlled by it. Yet the rabbis, in their determination to force through this revolution, could not, as the mowbeds had done, draw upon royal backing, nor, like the Mazdakites, resort to armed insurrection. Nor, if they were truly to seize the commanding heights of their society, could they confine themselves simply to administering the law courts, or liaising with imperial bureaucrats. The power that the rabbis felt called upon by God to wield was hardly to be justified in terms of bare expediency. Only the single path would ever lead them to the rule of the Jewish people. The rabbis had to offer themselves, not as functionaries, nor even as judges, but as living models of holiness.

“Whoever carries out the teachings of the sages is worthy to be named a saint.”¹⁰⁸ Once, even in a land as respectful of learning as Mesopotamia, such a maxim would have been dismissed by many Jews as merely an ivory tower fantasy. Increasingly, however, as the leaders of the yeshivas responded to the convulsions of the age with an outward show of defiance and an inner display of certitude, they were gathering ever more admirers to themselves. Lacking in swords, or silks, or mail-clad horses the rabbis might have been; but they had their own markers of power, nevertheless. There were the pregnant women, eager for their unborn sons to be imbued with a spirit of sanctity and scholarship, who haunted the limits of Sura and Pumpedita. There was the widespread conviction that even a blind rabbi, should he ever be mocked, had only to turn his gaze upon the wretch who had insulted him, and the offender would immediately be reduced to “a heap of bones.”¹⁰⁹ Above all, saturating every level of Jewish society in Mesopotamia, there was the gathering acceptance that the rabbis were justified in all their soaring claims: that the will of God could indeed only be known through the prism of their scholarship. The Torah, revealed to a grateful people in all its hitherto unsuspected complexity and detail, could now begin its proper task: that of moulding every last Jew into a rabbi.

A consummation devoutly to be wished: for then the Messiah would come, every grape would yield “thirty full measures of wine,”¹¹⁰ and every woman would “bear a child on a daily basis.”¹¹¹ In the meanwhile, however, prior to the dawning of this happy age, there was an additional reason, perhaps, why the rabbis of Mesopotamia could revel in the gathering pace of their winning of Jewish hearts and minds. At the beginning of time, so it was recorded in the Talmud, God had spoken to all the nations of the world, offering them each in turn the Torah; “but all had repudiated it and refused to receive it.”¹¹² Only the ancestors of the Jews had been willing to accept the precious gift; and by doing so, they had preserved humanity from annihilation, for had the Torah only been rejected, the entire purpose of Creation would have failed. The rabbis, then, by awakening their countrymen to a profounder understanding of what was required of them by the law of God, were also working to keep the world itself upon an even keel. The more Jewish that the Jews became, in short, the better for everyone.

But what if the opposite happened? What if the Chosen People, seduced by some treacherous and plausible idolatry, should stumble, and fall, and lose their identity altogether? For centuries before the founding of the schools of Sura and Pumpedita, the Jews of Mesopotamia had managed to stand proof against the temptations of all the false gods of Babylon, and demonstrated that it needed no rabbis for them to maintain their distinctiveness. Yet over time, a new and more dangerous temptation had arisen, a teasing and honey-voiced heresy that adorned itself with the beauties of the Tanakh itself, and wore them as a whore would her paint. Across the entire span of Mesopotamia, living in the self-same villages, towns and cities in which the Jews themselves lived, there were people whose beliefs served as the most noxious mockery of everything that the rabbis taught. There was no hidden Torah, these minim, or heretics, claimed, beyond that which the rabbis themselves had fabricated; nor was there any need to prepare for the coming of the Messiah, for the Messiah had already come. His name, according to the minim, was Jesus; a man who, half a millennium previously, had been nailed by the Romans to a cross, and then risen from the dead. The reality, it went without saying, was far different. The real Jesus, so the rabbis of Mesopotamia could reveal, was in fact “the son of a harlot”:¹¹³ a failed student who had been dismissed by his rabbi for assorted sexual misdemeanours, and had then, out of pique, fallen to worshipping a brick. Far from reigning inheaven, as the minim laughably claimed, the truth was that he had been consigned to hell, where he would spend the rest of eternity in a plunge-bath of boiling shit.¹¹⁴ God Himself, in His infinite wisdom, had foreseen the threat that Jesus would pose His Chosen People, and that was precisely why he had given them a hidden as well as written Torah: so that the minim would not be able to get their filthy hands on it, “and say that they were the Chosen People.”¹¹⁵

Yet it remained terrifyingly the case that never, not in all their long history, had the Jewish people faced a more insidious and oppressive danger than that posed them by the worshippers of Jesus. Insidious, because the heresy was sufficiently similar to their own faith to exert a secret and terrible fascination on many of them, including even some rabbis; and oppressive because there was nowhere, it seemed, not in the whole world, that it had failed to reach. Far and wide across Mesopotamia, and Persia, and eastwards even of Iranshahr, the contagion had spread; but most alarming of all was its progress in the West. There, as even the Jewish subjects of the Shahanshah might be brought to admit, lay what was “the most important kingdom in the world: the kingdom of the Romans.”¹¹⁶This kingdom it was, for half a millennium and more now, which had exercised the mastery of Jerusalem and the Promised Land; and many had been the sufferings, in all that time, that it had inflicted upon the Jewish people. Now, however, five hundred years after the birth of Jesus, the Jews had a fresh reason to dread the power and the might of Rome. The Caesars, who had once, like the kings of Babylon, raised temples to a whole infinitude of demons, had since set to closing them down—but only to replace them with a cult that was, if anything, even worse. To what had the Roman people chosen to devote themselves, if not to the most menacing false idol of all? Christos, they called him—which meant, in Greek, “Messiah.”

Yes—in the palace of Caesar, it was now none other than Jesus who was worshipped. The Jews were no longer alone in believing themselves a people chosen of a single god. The Romans too, those lords of a dominion even richer and more intimidating than that of the Persians, had recently come to enshrine as the pulsing heartbeat of their empire a conviction that Jesus did indeed reign in heaven. The roots of this assurance, however, were of a very great antiquity: older than the written Talmud, older even than Jesus himself. That the Romans had been converted to a belief in Christ was true enough; but true as well was the fact that belief in Christ, across much of the world, had taken on a colouring that was more than a little Roman.

One empire, one god: an entire millennium’s worth of history had served to make them seem a natural fit.

^a A spider’s web of misinformation that it has taken generations of scholars to untangle. For a long while, it was widely assumed that Zoroaster had lived when the Sasanian priesthood claimed that he had lived: “258 years before Alexander,” or, according to our own dating system, in the early sixth century BC. Only recently has close analysis of the sacred texts served to push their likeliest date of origin very much further back, to some point between the tenth and seventeenth centuries BC. Also discounted has been the supposed Median origin of the Prophet: none of the sacred texts so much as mentions western Iran. As to whether the traditions told of Zoroaster are genuine, it is impossible at such an incalculable distance to say. “Such a choice is neither legitimate nor illegitimate: it is a mere wager” (Kellens, p. 3).

^b The degree to which the Sasanians were aware of Cyrus and his successors is hotly debated by historians. The likelihood is that consciousness of them faded over time, for reasons largely to do with the rewriting of Iranian history in the fifth century AD. “The Place of a Hundred Pillars” does seem to be an echo of one of the original names applied to Persepolis.

^c The stories told about Jamshid—or Yima, as he was originally known—bear testimony to centuries, and possibly millennia, of elaboration. Long before the time of Zoroaster, he was being commemorated by Iranians and Indians alike as the first man. In this primal myth, he was installed as the king of the underworld following his death.

^d This is the name by which Persepolis is known in Iran to this day.

^e Such, at any rate, was the testimony of Rabbi Zera, whose own dream of barley prompted his immediate emigration. Another anecdote described how an overly drunken celebration ended up with his throat being cut by a fellow rabbi. “The next day, this rabbi prayed on Rabbi Zera’s behalf, and brought him back to life. Next year, he said to Rabbi Zera, ‘Will you honour me, and come and feast with me again?’ But Rabbi Zera replied, ‘A miracle cannot be guaranteed.’ ”