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CP 15 Sasanian Military Conflict d. Second Golden Era (498–622) The second golden era began after the second reign of Kavadh I. With the support of the Hephtalites, Kavadh I launched a campaign against the Romans. In 502, he took Theodosiopolis () in . In 503 he took (Diarbekr) on the . In 505, an invasion of Armenia by the western from the led to an armistice, during which the Romans paid subsidies to the for the maintenance of the fortifications on the Caucasus. In year 525, he suppressed revolts in and recaptured . His with aid of Lakhmid ruler (a Sasanian vassal kingdom), al-Mundhir IV ibn al-Mundhir defeated the Byzatine army under command of famed twice, one in year 530 in Battle of Nisbis and other in year 531 in Battle of Callinicum. Although he could not free himself from the yoke of the Ephthalites, Kavadh succeeded in restoring order in the interior and fought with success against the Romans, founded several cities, some of which were named after him, and began to regulate the taxation.

After Kavadh I, his son I, also known as Anushirvan ("with the immortal soul"; ruled 531–579), ascended to the throne. He is the most celebrated of the Sasanian rulers. is most famous for his reforms in the aging governing body of Sasanians. In his reforms he introduced a rational system of taxation, based upon a survey of landed possessions, which his father had begun and tried in every way to increase the welfare and the revenues of his . Previous great feudal lords fielded their own military equipment, followers and retainers. Khosrow I developed a new force of dehkans or "" paid and equipped by the central government and the bureaucracy, tying the army and bureaucracy more closely to the central government than to local lords.

Although the (527–565) had paid him a bribe of 440,000 pieces of gold to keep the , in 540 Khosrow I broke the "eternal peace" of 532 and invaded , where he temporarily captured and plundered the city of . During Khosrow's en route return, he collected money from the different Byzantine cities.

In 565, Justinian I died and was succeeded by II (565–578), who resolved to stop subsidies to Arab chieftains to restrain them from raiding Byzantine territory in Syria. A year earlier the Sasanian of Armenia, of the Suren family, built a at near modern , and he put to death an influential member of the family, touching off a revolt which led to the massacre of the Persian governor and his guard in 571. Justin II took advantage of the Armenian revolt to stop his yearly payments to Khosrow I for the defense of the Caucasus passes. The were welcomed as allies, and an army was sent into Sasanian territory which besieged Nisibis in 572. However, dissension among the Byzantine generals not only led to an abandonment of the , but they in turn were besieged in the city of , which was taken by the Persians who then ravaged Syria, causing Justin II to sue for peace. Armenian revolt came to an end with a general amnesty from Khosrow I, which brought Armenia back into the .

Around 570, "Ma 'd-Karib", half-brother of the of , requested Khosrow I's intervention. Khosrow I sent a fleet and a small army under a commander called Vahriz to the area near present , and they marched against the capital San'a'l, which was occupied. Saif, son of Mard-Karib, who had accompanied the expedition, became King sometime between 575 and 577. Thus the Sasanians were able to establish a base in to control the sea trade with the east. Later the south Arabian kingdom renounced Sasanian overlordship, and another Persian expedition was sent in 598 that successfully annexed southern Arabia as a Sasanian province, which lasted until the time of troubles after Khosrow II.

Khosrow I's reign witnessed the rise of the dihqans (literally, village lords), the petty landholding who were the backbone of later Sasanian provincial administration and the collection system. Khosrow I was a great builder, embellishing his capital, founding new towns, and constructing new buildings. He rebuilt the canals and restocked the farms destroyed in the . He built strong fortifications at the passes and placed subject tribes in carefully chosen towns on the frontiers to act as guardians against invaders. He was tolerant of all religions, though he CP 15 Sasanian Military Conflict

decreed that should be the official religion, and was not unduly disturbed when one of his sons became a Christian.

After Khosrow I, Hormizd IV (579–590) took the throne. Hormizd IV was also a vigorous ruler who continued the success and prosperity established by his predecessors. During the reign of Khosrow II (590–628), the revolt of general Chobin (rival King Bahram VI) briefly threw the empire into crisis, but the crisis was short lived, and Khosrow II soon reestablished firm control over the empire. Taking advantage of a civil in the , Khosrow II launched a full-scale invasion. The Sasanian dream of restoring the Achaemenid boundaries was close to completion when and fell; fell soon after. In 626 also was under siege by Slavic and Avar forces supported by the Persians. This remarkable peak of expansion was paralleled by a blossoming of , music, and architecture. By 622, the Byzantine Empire was on the verge of collapse and the borders of the were restored on all fronts except for parts of .

e. Decline and fall (622– 651) Although hugely successful, Khosrow II's campaign had overextended the Persian army and overtaxed the people. The Byzantine emperor (610–641) retaliated with a tactical move, abandoning his besieged capital and sailing up the to attack Persia from the rear. Meanwhile, mutual suspicion had arisen between Khosrow II and his general . Byzantine agents showed Shahrbaraz pseudo letters indicating that Khosrow II was planning the general's execution. Shahrbaraz, fearing for his life, remained neutral during this critical period. Persia was thus denied the services of one of its largest and one of its best generals. To Khosrow's bad fortune, Shahin, the other great spahbod of Sasanian army who had conquered Caucasus and Anatolia passed away unexpectedly, further tipping the balance in favor of the Byzantines and drove Khosrow into state of melancholia. Heraclius, with the assistance of the and other Turkic troops, took advantage of Shahin and Shahrbaraz's absence to win several devastating victories against a Sasanian state substantially weakened by 15 years of war. Heraclius' campaign culminated in the Battle of CP 15 Sasanian Military Conflict

Nineveh, where the Byzantines (without the Khazars, who had left Heraclius) defeated the Persian army, commanded by Rhahzadh. Heraclius then marched through Mesopotamia and Western Persia sacking Takht-e Soleyman and the Palace of Dastugerd, where he received the news of the assassination of Khosrow II. Chaos and civil war followed after assassination of Khosrow II. Over a period of fourteen years and twelve successive , including two daughters of Khosro II and spahbod Shahrbaraz, the Sasanian Empire weakened considerably. The power of the central authority passed into the hands of the generals. It would take several years for a strong king to emerge from a series of coups, and the Sasanians never had time to be fully recovered.

In the spring of 632, a grandson of Khosrow I, Yazdegerd III who had lived in the hiding, ascended the throne. In that same year, the first Arab squadrons made their raids into Persian territory. Years of warfare had exhausted both the Byzantines and the Persians. The Sasanians were further weakened by economic decline, heavy taxation, religious unrest, rigid social stratification, the increasing power of the provincial landholders, and a rapid turnover of rulers. These factors facilitated the Arab invasion.

The Sasanians never mounted a truly effective resistance to the pressure applied by the initial Arab armies. Yazdegerd was a boy at the mercy of his advisers and incapable of uniting a vast country crumbling into small feudal kingdoms, despite the fact that Byzantine, under similar pressure from the newly expansive , no longer threatened. The first encounter between Sasanians and Muslim Arabs was in the in 634 which resulted in a Sasanian victory, however the Arab threat did not stop there and reappeared shortly from the disciplined armies of Khalid ibn Walid, once one of 's chosen companion-in-arms and leader of the Arab army. Under the Caliph `Umar ibn al-Khattāb, a Muslim army defeated a larger Persian force lead by general Farrokhzad at the plains of al-Qādisiyyah in 637 and besieged . Ctesiphon fell after a prolonged siege. Yazdgerd fled eastward from Ctesiphon, leaving behind him most of the Empire's vast treasury. The Arabs captured Ctesiphon shortly afterward, leaving the Sasanian government strapped for funds and acquiring a powerful financial resource for their own use. Had the empire not been exhausted, and divided, without an effective government, at the time of the Arab invasions, the Asawaran (Azatan) knightly could in all probablity have defeated them, if summoned at once, and massed as a single army. But they were never summoned in time, events unfolded too quickly, in a relative vacuum of power in the Empire. The result was the Islamic conquest. A number of Sasanian attempted to combine their forces to throw back the invaders, but the effort was crippled by the lack of a strong central authority, and the governors were defeated at the Battle of Nihawānd; the empire, with its military command structure non-existent, its non-noble troop levies decimated, its financial resources effectively destroyed, and the Asawaran (Azatan) knightly caste destroyed piecemeal, the Sasanian empire was now utterly helpless in the face of the invaders.

Upon hearing the defeat in Nihawānd, Yazdgerd along with most of Persian fled further inland to the northern province of Khorasan. He was assassinated by a miller in in late 651 while the rest of the nobles settled in central where they contributed greatly in spreading Persian culture and language in those regions and the establishment of the first native Iranian dynasty, the Samanid dynasty, which sought to revive and ressuscitate Sasanian traditions and culture after the invasion of .

The abrupt fall of Sasanian Empire was completed in a period of five years, and most of its territory was absorbed into the Islamic ; however many Iranian cities resisted and fought against the invaders several times. Cities such as Ray, and were exterminated thrice by Islamic in order to suppress revolts and to terrify Iranian people. The local population either willingly accepted Islam, thus escaping from various restrictions imposed on non-, including the requirement to pay a special poll tax (), or were forced to convert by the invading armies. Invaders destroyed the of Gundishapur and its library, burning piles of books. Most Sasanian records and literary works were destroyed. A few that escaped this fate were later translated into and later to Modern Persian. During the Islamic invasion CP 15 Sasanian Military Conflict

many Iranian cities were destroyed or deserted, palaces and bridges were ruined and many magnificent imperial were burned to the ground.

According to Al-Tabari, the Arab Commander Sa'd Ibn Abi-Vaghas wrote to Caliph Umar ibn Al- Khatab about what should be done with the books at capital Tyspwn (Ctesiphon) in province of Khvârvarân (today known as ). Umar wrote back:

"If the books contradict the Qur'an, they are blasphemous. On the other hand, if they are in agreement, they are not needed." All the books were thrown into the .

Under another ruler Gotaibeh ibn Muslim in Khwarezmia, all the historians, writers, and mobeds were massacred and their books burned in fire, so that after one generation, the people became illiterate.

Yazid ibn Mohlab is reputed to have ordered the decapitation of so many Iranians that their blood flowed in the water powering a millstone for one full day. There are many other massacres recorded.

3. Government The Sasanians established an empire roughly within the frontiers achieved by the Achaemenids, with the capital at Ctesiphon in the Khvarvaran province. In administering this empire, Sasanian rulers, took the title of Shāhanshāh (), became the central overlords and also assumed guardianship of the sacred fire, the symbol of the national religion. This symbol is explicit on Sasanian where the reigning monarch, with his crown and regalia of office, appears on the obverse, backed by the sacred fire, the symbol of the national religion, on the 's reverse. Sasanian queens had the title of Banebshenan banebshen (the Queen of Queens).

On smaller scale the territory might also be ruled by a number of petty rulers from Sasanian , known as Shahrdar overseen directly by Shahanshah. Sasanian rule was characterized by considerable centralization, ambitious urban planning, agricultural development, and technological improvements. Below the king a powerful bureaucracy carried out much of the affairs of government; The head of the bureaucracy and vice chancellor, was the "Vuzorg (Bozorg) Farmadar". Within this bureaucracy the Zoroastrian priesthood was immensely powerful. The head of the priestly class, the Mobadan, along with the commander in chief, the (Eran) Spahbod, the head of traders and merchants syndicate "Ho Tokhshan Bod" and minister of agriculture "Vastrioshansalar" who was also head of farmers were, below the emperor, the most powerful men of the Sasanian state. The Sasanian monarch usually acted with the advice of his ministers, who composed a council of state. Masudi, the Muslim historian, praised the "excellent administration of the [Sasanian] kings, their well-ordered policy, their care for their subjects, and the prosperity of their domains."

In normal times the monarchical office was hereditary, but might be transmitted by the king to a younger son; in two instances the supreme power was held by queens. When no direct heir was available, the nobles and prelates chose a ruler, but their choice was restricted to members of the royal family.

The Sasanian nobility was a mixture of old Parthian clans, Persian aristocratic families, and noble families from subjected territories. Many new noble families had risen after the dissolution of Parthian dynasty, while several of the once-dominant Seven Parthian clans remained of high importance. At the court of , the old Arsacid families of Suren-Pahlav and Karen- Pahlav, along with several Persian families, the Varazes and Andigans, held positions of great honor. Ardashir's successor, I , used as his symbol the Gondophar's crest (a circle surrounded by ), which may have indicated his relationship through his mother to the House of Suren-Pahlav. Alongside these Iranian and non-Iranian noble families, the kings of CP 15 Sasanian Military Conflict

Merv, , , Sakastan, , and , who are mentioned as holding positions of honor amongst the nobles, appeared at the court of the Shahanshah. Indeed, the extensive domains of the Surens, Karens, and Varazes had become part of the original Sasanian state as semi-independent states. The Suren-Pahlavs maintained their rule over the Sakastan, and one of their branches ruled the area around . Thus, the noble families that attended at the court of the Sasanian empire continued to be ruling lines in their own right, although subordinate to the Shahanshah.

In general, Bozorgan from Persian families held the most powerful positions in the imperial administration, including governorships of border provinces (). Most of these positions were patrimonial, and many were passed down through a single family for generations. Those of greatest seniority were permitted a silver throne, while Marzbans of the most strategic border provinces, such as the Caucasus province, were allowed a golden throne. In military campaigns the regional Marzbans could be regarded as field marshals, while lesser spahbods could command a field army.

Culturally, the Sasanians implemented a system of social stratification. This system was supported by Zoroastrianism, which was established as the state religion. Other religions appear to have been largely tolerated (although this claim is the subject of heated discussion; see, for example, Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia, or the Cambridge , vol. 3). Sasanian consciously sought to resuscitate Persian traditions and to obliterate Greek cultural influence.

4. Sasanian army

The backbone of the Persian army (Spah) in the Sasanian era was composed of two types of heavy units: and . This cavalry force, composed of elite noblemen trained since youth for military service, was supported by , , and archers. Sasanian tactics centered around disrupting the enemy with archers, war elephants, and other troops, thus opening up gaps the cavalry forces could exploited. Unlike their predecessors, the Parthians, the Sasanians developed advanced siege engines. This development served the empire well in conflicts with , in which success hinged

upon the ability to seize cities and other fortified points; conversely, the Sasanians also developed a number of (Click to enlarge) techniques for defending their own cities from attack. The Sasanian army was famous for its , which was very much like its predecessor Parthian army, albeit more advanced and fatal. The Greek historian Ammianus 's description of a Shapur II's clibanarii cavalry manifestly shows how heavily equipped it was:

All the companies were clad in iron, and all parts of their bodies were covered with thick plates, so fitted that the stiff-joints conformed with those of their limbs; and the forms of human faces were so skillfully fitted to their heads, that since their entire body was covered with metal, arrows that fell upon them could lodge only where they could see a little through tiny openings opposite the pupil of the eye, or where through the tip of their nose they were able to get a little breath. Of these some who were armed with pikes, stood so motionless that you would have thought them held fast by clamps of bronze.

In point of fact, the later dreaded Muslim heavy cavalry were literally Arabs who had adopted clibanarii cavalry weapons and tactics. It was this heavy cavalry, adopted from Persia, that overran the remainder of the until Charles Martel inflicted the most devastating major defeat of the Islamic Expansion Era at the , using both tactics inspired by the and terrain advantages to neutralize the Muslim heavy cavalry. CP 15 Sasanian Military Conflict

Ironically, the Sasanians, who had given birth to the first "Knights" with their Asawaran (Azatan) knightly caste, and clibanarii cavalry and saw those same "Knights" adopted by the Arabs, also were then the founders of western heavy cavalry, since Martel used captured , and from the Muslim dead at Tours to create the first western Knights and heavy cavalry. It is clear historically that the first "Knights" complete with their feudal caste system, and code of honor, developed in the Sasanian Empire in the Asawaran (Azatan) knightly caste, and clibanarii cavalry weapons and armour, and were adopted by the Arabs, who in turn, gave them to the West. The amount of money involved in maintaining a warrior of the Asawaran (Azatan) knightly caste required a small estate, and the Asawaran (Azatan) knightly caste received that from the throne, and in return, were the throne's most notable defenders in time of war. Had the empire not been exhausted, and divided, without an effective government, at the time of the Arab invasions, the Asawaran (Azatan) knightly caste could in all probablity have defeated them. But they were never summoned in time, events unfolded too quickly, in a relative vacuum of power in the Empire. The result was the Islamic conquest. Ironically, the Asawaran (Azatan) knightly caste would survive in spirit, in not in person, in , which came to adapt virtually the same system of warrior caste, feudal estates, code of knightly honor, and noble obligation to the throne, in the in Europe.

5. Conflicts The Sasanians, like the Parthians, were in constant hostilities with the Roman Empire. Following the division of the Roman Empire in 395, the Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, replaced the Roman Empire as Persia's principle western enemy. Hostilities between the two became more frequent. The Sasanians, similar to the Roman Empire, were in a constant state of conflict with neighboring kingdoms and nomadic hordes. Although the threat of nomadic incursions could never be fully resolved, the Sasanians generally dealt much more successfully with these matters than did the Romans, due to their policy of making coordinated campaigns against threatening nomads.

In the west, Sasanian territory abutted that of the large and stable Roman state, but to the east its nearest neighbors were the and nomadic tribes such as the White Huns. The construction of fortifications such as Tus citadel or the city of Nishapur, which later became a center of learning and trade, also assisted in defending the eastern provinces from attack.

In the south in central Arabia, Arab tribes occasionally raided the Sasanian empire. The Kingdom of Al-Hirah, a Sasanian vassal kingdom, was established to form a buffer zone between the empire's mainland and the Bedouin tribes. The dissolution of the Kingdom of Al-Hirah by Khosrow II in 602 contributed greatly to decisive Sasanian defeats suffered against Bedouin Arabs later in the century. These defeats resulted in a sudden takeover of the Sasanian empire by Bedouin tribes under the Islamic banner.

In the north, Khazars and other Turkic nomads frequently assaulted northern provinces of the empire. They plundered the territory of the in 634. Shortly thereafter, the Persian army defeated them and drove them out. The Sasanians built numerous fortifications in the Caucasus region to halt these attacks.