79

The Dābūyid Ispahbadhs

c. 19–144/c. 640–761

Gīlān, Rūyān and the Ṭabaristān coastlands, with their centre at Sārī

The Caspian coastlands of Gīlān and of Māzandarān (in earlier Islamic times, Ṭabaristān), and the massive barrier of the Elburz Mountains which separates them from the central plateau of Persia, have always been a region of Persia with a very distinct character of their own. In particular, they have been a refuge area for peoples and ideas, so that ethnic splinter-groups, old or aberrant religious beliefs, ancient languages and scripts, and social ways, have often survived there after they have disappeared from the more accessible and open parts of Persia. Islam was late arriving in the Caspian region, and for several centuries after this time various petty dynasties lingered on there, some with roots in the late Sāsānid past. One of these, the Bāwandids, endured for six or seven centuries until II Khānid times (see below, no. 80), and the Bāduspānids (see below, no. 100) persisted from Seljuq times until the reign of the Ṣafawid Shāh ‘ Abbās I (i.e. until the end of the sixteenth century: see below, no. 148), when the line was suppressed and the Caspian provinces were fully integrated into the rest of the kingdom.

The Dābūyids were a line of Ispahbadhs (lit. ‘military chief, here ‘local prince’) who apparently arose in the south-western Caspian highlands region of Gīlān in late Sāsānid times. They were local governors for the Emperors, and themselves claimed Sāsānid descent, but from the time of Farrukhān I they moved eastwards and also controlled Ṭabaristān at the south-eastern corner of the Caspian lands, residing now at Sārī. The history of the dynasty is largely known from the historian of the Caspian lands, Ibn Isfandiyār, and his information on the succession and chronology of the early Dābūyids must be regarded as only semi-historical. Arabic raids into Ṭabaristān began in the caliphate of ‘Uthmān, but that of the governor of Iraq and the East, Yazid b. al-Muhallab, in 98/716, was the first serious attack. The Dābūyid Khurshīd II aided Abū Muslim against the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr and then the Zoroastrian rebel in Khurasan, Sunbādh. Hence in the caliph undertook the definitive conquest of Ṭabaristān, successfully drove out Khurshīd II and ended the dynasty of the Dābūyids (who, as Zoroastrians, had never accepted Islam; they are included here as precursors of the local Caspian dynasties who did, during the years shortly afterwards, accept the new faith, and as being historically involved with the Islamic caliphs).

Justi, 430; Zambaur, 186.

EI²‘Dābūya’ (B. Spuler); EIR ‘Dabuyids’ (W. Madelung).

H. L. Rabino, ‘Les dynasties du Māzandarān de l’an 50 avant l’Hégire à l‘an 1006 de l’Hégire (572 à 1597–1598) d‘après les chroniques locales’, JA, 228 (1936), 437–43, with a

genealogical table at p. 438.

W. Madelung, in The Cambridge History of Iran, IV, 198–200.