by Tom Holland
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 than Iranshahr itself, 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 im
mense 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, the Shahanshah 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.