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The Transformation of Mard Ō Mard from a Persian Tradition to a Literary Topos

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The Transformation of Mard Ō Mard from a Persian Tradition to a Literary Topos The transformation of Mard ō Mard from a Persian tradition to a literary topos Written by: Ilia Calogero Curto Pelle In his brilliant survey of literary topoi in the early Arabic historical tradition, Albrecht Noth argued that, in using Arabic sources for the reconstruction of the Arab conquests of the 7th century, “we must take an all-encompassing view of the forms and the biases of early Islamic tradition as a whole, in order to assess accurately even one occurrence”.1 Noth dedicated a large part of his book studying the different literary schemata and topoi in Arabic futūḥ (conquest) narratives, their transferability from one event to another, and the complications for the reconstruction of early Arabic history when this “[s]ystematization and schematization” prevails “over purposeful description of actual events…”2 One of the elements of the early Arabic conquests that he labels a literary topos is the use of duels at the onset of battles between the Sassanians and Arabs.3 While he concedes that “single combat was beyond any doubt a custom of the early period, especially since this usage has its roots in pre-Islamic times”,4 his discussion of these duels is quite brief – only about a page in length. But the implications of this labeling of duels as mere topoi are similar to those of his discussion of Persian commanders’ names, which Parvaneh Pourshariati argued contributed to a “skewed reconstruction of Iranian history”,5 which forces us to “reckon with this period of Iranian history in a vacuum that has been occasioned by our own lack of research”.6 This is even more so the case because we know of a Sassanian military tradition of single combat – 1 Albrecht Noth, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition. A Source-Critical Study (Princeton: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1994), 18-19. 2 Noth, Early Arabic Historical Tradition, 12. 3 Noth, Early Arabic Historical Tradition, 168-169. 4 Noth, Early Arabic Historical Tradition, 168. 5 Parvaneh Pourshariati, Decline and fall of the Sasanian empire: the Sasanian-Parthian confederacy and the Arab conquest of Iran (London; New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2008), 164. 6 Pourshariati, Decline and fall of the Sasanian empire, 162. Page | 1 mard ō mard (man to man). Therefore, we must investigate what this tradition and its usage in the Arab histories tell us about the battles of the early conquest of Iraq. In this essay, I will argue that these duels had their historical basis in the tradition of mard ō mard, that the diverse descriptions of these duels in the first battles of the conquest of Iraq can make us fairly confident of their historicity, and that the internal controversies among our sources in the battle of al-Qadisiyyah testify to the transformation of this Sassanian military tradition into a literary topos. Before discussing this it is first necessary to provide the reader with a brief discussion of the key terms in this paper and with a short reconstruction of the historical events of the early Arab conquest of Iraq. The first key term of this paper is the name given to the Persian custom of single combat in the scholarly literature – mard ō mard. The term is translated from Middle Persian as “man-to-man” and was modeled after the cry that the Persian general would shout out to his opponents after the latter refused to submit to the rule of the Shahanshah and the Zoroastrian religion.7 This tradition seems to have preceded the Sassanian period, but it was under the House of Sassan that it developed “a firm law code”,8 strict regulations, and high ethical standards.9 For the Sassanian kings, military prowess was an important tool of dynastic legitimation, which led them to present their successes as victories of the king in single combat.10 These include the battle relief at Firuzabad, the rock-relief at the necropolis of Naqsh-e Rostam, the Paris cameo of the capture of Valerian, and the Picture Book of Sassanian Kings.11 In pre-Islamic literary works, we 7 Arthur Christensen, L’Iran sous les Sassanides (Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard,1944), 216; David Nicolle, Sassanian armies: the Iranian empire early 3rd to mid-7th centuries AD (Stockport: Montvert, 1996), 19. 8 Afsaneh Sh Shahbazi, “ARMY i. Pre-Islamic Iran,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, II/5, 489-499, last updated August 12, 2011. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/army-i. 9 Josef Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia from 550 BC to 650 AD, trans. Azizeh Azodi (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 198-199. 10 Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia, 199. 11 Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia, 198-199; Shahbazi „ARMY i.” Page | 2 have two instances, where mard ō mard is recorded. The first one appears in Procopius.12 During the first day of the battle of Dara, a Persian cavalryman issues a challenge to the Byzantine soldiers and is subsequently defeated by the Byzantine Andreas. This horrifies the Persians, who send a second soldier to face him and who is also defeated. Now, while the story of the individual Andreas and his duel might be a purely literary device, as Whately asserts, John Malalas, whose history seems to have been “based on official documents,” does make mention of duels at another stage of the same battle.13 Therefore, while Andreas himself might be mythical, the idea of a duel, initiated by the Sassanians, is not. We can find corroboration of this principle in the second description of such a duel. Malalas records that during the Roman-Sassanian War of 421-422 Bahram V offered a duel between his champion Ardazanes and a Roman champion to decide who the victor of the war would be.14 The Roman champion, the Gothic foederatus Areobindus, was victorious, and then Bahram allegedly negotiated a peaceful settlement to the conflict. Again, while the notion that a Sassanian shah would let an entire war hinge on a single duel is clearly spurious, Areobindus’s duel is also attested in the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates Scholasticus: “Areobindus… killed the bravest of the Persians in single combat”.15 Shahbazi and Charles both seem to accept the historicity of this duel, even if it did not lead to the end of the war, especially given that Charles identifies that Malalas correctly designated Ardazanes, a member of the Immortals, as a horseman and recorded the duel as occurring on horseback.16 Therefore, even if we choose to not trust the two narratives verbatim, we cannot simply dismiss the Persian tradition of mard ō mard as a literary 12 Procopius of Caesarea, The wars of Justinian, trans. H.B. Dewing (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014), 32-33. 13 Connor Whately, Battles and Generals: Combat, Culture, and Didacticism in Procopius' wars (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), 75. 14 Shahbazi „ARMY I,” 498; Michael B Charles, “The Sassanian Immortals,” Iranica Antiqua 46 (2011): 299. 15 Rev. Andrew C. Zenos, “The Ecclesiastical History of Socrates Scholasticus,” in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Father of the Christian Church Second Seris. Volume 2. Socrates, Sozomenus: Church Histories, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (New York: The Christian Literature Company, 1890), 162. HathiTrust. 16 Shahbazi „ARMY I,” 498; Michael B Charles, “The Sassanian Immortals,” Iranica Antiqua 46 (2011): 299-300. Page | 3 invention, since it is attested in Byzantine written accounts, Sassanian rock reliefs, and, as we will see, the Arabic historical tradition. Now let us briefly turn to the second important term in this essay – the literary topos. Here, we can readily accept Noth’s definition of a topos as “a narrative motif which has as its primary function the specification of content, and aims to elaborate matters of fact… and it is normally bound to description of a specific situation, definition of a brief moment, or characterization of a person.”17 Next, we need to review the narrative of the Arabic conquest by focusing more precisely on the battles between the invasion of Iraq and the battle of al-Qadisiyyah which included duels. In doing so, we will follow the most widely accepted sequence of events,18 but no exact dates will be offered due to the renewed disagreement in the field, prompted by Pourshariati’s early chronology for the conquest of Iraq.19 For the reader’s orientation, the events here would have occurred between 628 and 638 A.D. The first phase of the campaign was led by the “Sword of Allah” – Khālid ibn al-Walīd. After subjugating al-Yamāmah in the Ridda Wars (“Wars of Apostasy”), Khālid marched on Ubulla, allegedly with the approval of the first caliph Abu Bakr. 20 Khālid confronted a Sassanian army under Hormozd at the Battle of the Chains. Hormozd came forward and shouted: “Man to Man! Where is Khalid?”21 The duel that followed was won by Khālid and another Arab soldier despite the intervention of two other Persian soldiers on Hormozd’s 17 Noth, Early Arabic Historical Tradition, 109. 18 For a reconstruction of the events in the Arab conquest of Iraq, based on al-Tabari and other sources, see Michael Morony, “ARAB ii. Arab conquest of Iran,” Encyclopaedia Iranica II/2, 203-210, last updated August 10, 2011, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/arab-ii, Fred McGraw Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), Abd Al-Husain Zarrīnkūb, “The Arab Conquest of Iran and Its Aftermath,” in The Cambridge history of Iran. Volume 4: The Period from the Arab Invasions to the Saljuqs, ed. Richard N. Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1-56, and Agha Ibrahim Akram, The sword of Allah: Khalid bin al- Waleed, his life and campaigns (Karachi: National Pub.
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