Persian Empire
Deep Dive 9 min read

Khosrow I Anushirvan and the Sasanian Golden Age

Tabari, in his Ta’rikh, preserves a conversation between Khosrow I and a Bedouin visitor at the Sasanian court. The visitor, having seen the great palace at Ctesiphon, the royal hunt, the treasures, and the bureaucracy, asks the king how he has managed to acquire so much. Khosrow’s reply, as Tabari gives it, is: “By not being ashamed to ask for advice, and by not being too proud to learn from those who know.” The story may be a topos — Tabari was writing in the early tenth century, three centuries after Khosrow’s death — but it captures something the Greek and Armenian sources also preserve: the impression of a king who was interested in administration, in argument, and in the practical business of government. The sixth-century Sasanian court was, by the standards of late antiquity, a serious place. The Khosrow of the Shahnameh is more splendid, but less interesting.

This article is about the reign and its context.

The Mazdakite crisis, and what it set up

Khosrow came to the throne in 531 CE after a long minority and a contested succession. His father Kavad I had reigned twice: 488–496 and 498–531. The first reign had ended in a noble revolt and several years of exile among the Hephthalites; the second had been made possible by the support of a new religious movement, the Mazdakites, who advocated a radical form of social and economic equality. The Mazdakite movement, which had messianic and proto-social-revolutionary features, briefly threatened the property, the families, and the political power of the Sasanian nobility. Kavad supported the movement for political reasons, as a counterweight to the great houses. Khosrow, who was a more conservative and more authoritarian ruler than his father, suppressed the Mazdakite movement violently in 528 or 529 CE, executing the leader Mazdak and a substantial number of his followers. The numbers given in the Arabic sources are implausibly large; the historical fact of a violent suppression is not in doubt.

The suppression allowed Khosrow to break the political power of the Mazdakite faction, to confiscate the property of the nobility that had supported the movement, and to centralise the Sasanian state in a way that his father had been unable to do. Arthur Christensen, in L’Iran sous les Sassanides (1944, pp. 365–374), reads the Mazdakite episode as the decisive turning point of sixth-century Sasanian politics, and the reading has not been displaced. A more recent treatment, with attention to the religious and economic dimensions, is in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. III(2), pp. 991–1004 (Lampe, “The Mazdakites”).

The wars with Byzantium

Khosrow’s principal military undertaking was the long war with the Byzantine emperor Justinian. The war opened in 540 CE with a Sasanian invasion of Roman Syria. Antioch, the second city of the Byzantine Empire, was taken and sacked, and the population was deported to a new Sasanian foundation at Veh-Antiok-Shapur in Mesopotamia (the ruins are near the modern town of Anbar; the site is sometimes called the “Sasanian Antioch”). The war continued, with intervals, until 562 CE. Both sides won and lost battles; the Sasanians took Lazica (the Byzantine sphere in western Georgia) in the 540s and held it for most of the war, but were forced to give up some of their conquests in the south.

The war ended with the so-called Eternal Peace (Eirene) of 562 CE, a negotiated settlement in which the Byzantines agreed to make substantial annual payments to the Sasanian treasury in return for the return of Lazica. The exact figure of the Byzantine subsidy is debated — 30,000 solidi is the figure given in some modern sources, but the primary evidence is thin, and other figures (60,000 in some Armenian sources) have been proposed. The peace was a major Sasanian diplomatic achievement and established the Sasanian state as the dominant power of the Near East for the next generation. James Howard-Johnston’s The Last Great War of Antiquity (2021) treats the 540–562 war in detail and emphasises its long-term strategic significance; the relevant Procopius books (Wars I and II) are the principal Greek sources, with the Syriac chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah of Mytilene a useful supplement.

Khosrow also fought a major war against the Hephthalites. The Hephthalite empire, which had been one of the great powers of Central Asia, was destroyed in 557 CE by a Sasanian–Göktürk coalition, and the Hephthalite territories were divided between the two powers. The defeat of the Hephthalites opened the way for the Sasanian expansion into Transoxiana and for the integration of Sasanian Central Asia into the Silk Road trade. A third war, against the Byzantine emperor Tiberius in 576–579 CE, ended inconclusively with the Sasanian capture of the Byzantine fortress of Melitene. The Sasanian empire at the end of Khosrow’s reign was, by any measure, the strongest state in the Near East.

The tax reform

Khosrow was a serious reformer. The Sasanian tax system had been based on a complex set of local customary payments, levied by the great noble families on the agricultural population and passed up to the crown in a fixed proportion. The system was inefficient, corrupt, and politically dangerous: the great families used their position as tax-collectors to build local power, and the crown’s revenue was unpredictable. Khosrow reformed the system on the basis of a comprehensive cadastral survey of the empire’s agricultural land, a standardisation of tax rates, a centralised system of collection, and a network of state granaries to feed the army and the poor. The reforms are described in detail in the Pahlavi text Matikan i Hazar Datastan (the Book of a Thousand Decisions), which is the most important Sasanian legal text to survive in the original. The system was inspired, in part, by the Byzantine tax reforms of Anastasius I and Justinian, and is a useful example of the long administrative exchange between the two empires.

The Pahlavi text is, in my view, the single most important primary source for the Sasanian administrative system. It is also a difficult text. The manuscript tradition is fragmentary; the language is heavily Arabicised in some places, heavily Zoroastrian in others; and the dating of specific provisions is contested. But the picture it gives of a centralised, cadastrally-based, professionally-administered state is, on the whole, the picture the archaeological and inscriptional record confirms. The Pourshariati thesis that the Sasanian state was, in fact, a coalition of noble families with a veneer of centralisation is in tension with the Matikan; the tension is real, and not fully resolved.

The army

Khosrow also reformed the army. The Sasanian heavy cavalry (savārān) was reorganised on the basis of land grants to noble families, who were required to maintain a fixed number of cataphracts in return for the grant. The system — sometimes called the system of diwans in later literature — is the Sasanian predecessor of the Islamic iqta` (fief) system, and the connection is noted in the Islamic and Byzantine sources. The reform was not the wholesale creation of Khosrow I (the system had Parthian antecedents), but the Sasanian sixth century is the period in which the system was regularised and extended. The cataphract corps that fought at the Battle of Callinicum in 531 CE, the Battle of Nineveh in 627 CE, and the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 CE was, in substantial part, the cataphract corps that Khosrow had put together.

The Academy of Gondeshapur

The Academy of Gondeshapur, founded in the third century CE in the city of Gondeshapur in Khuzistan, was the major centre of learning in the Sasanian world. It was a multi-religious, multi-lingual institution that brought together Greek, Syriac, Indian, and Persian scholars in a programme of translation and original research. The Academy was particularly important for medicine, astronomy, and philosophy, and it was a major channel by which Greek scientific and philosophical texts reached the Islamic world. The methods, the personnel, and the library of Gondeshapur were inherited, in significant part, by the Abbasid translation movement in Baghdad in the ninth century, and the link is a major example of transmission from late antiquity to the Islamic world.

Khosrow is said to have welcomed a number of Greek philosophers who had been expelled from Athens by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in 529 CE (the closure of the Academy of Athens is the well-known event, although the exact political circumstances are debated). The seven philosophers, who were sometimes called the Hukayma in the Arabic sources, settled at Gondeshapur and are credited with translations of Greek philosophical and scientific texts into Syriac and Middle Persian. The story is, however, treated with caution by modern scholars; the number “seven” and the name Hukayma are not securely attested, and the actual content of the translations is hard to determine. The story tells us, at any rate, that the Sasanian court was seen as a serious intellectual centre by contemporaries. Whether it was as serious as the story implies is a question that the surviving evidence does not let us answer.

The cultural production

The reign of Khosrow I was a major period of Sasanian artistic and literary production. The famous Carpet of the Spring of Khosrow — a great silk and gold carpet that depicted a garden in full bloom, and that was later, according to the Arabic sources, cut up and sold as booty by the Arab conquerors after the fall of Ctesiphon in 637 CE — is probably legendary, but it is a fixed point of the Sasanian cultural tradition. The Sasanian rock reliefs at Taq-e Bostan, depicting the king in investiture and in hunting scenes, are a product of his reign or its immediate aftermath. The Sasanian silver plate of the sixth century, with its sophisticated combination of Greek, Iranian, and Central Asian motifs, was widely imitated in the Byzantine, Islamic, and medieval European worlds, and the export of Sasanian silverware is well documented in the archaeological record — the Hermitage plate collection, the Metropolitan’s holdings, and the British Museum’s Sasanian silver are the principal museum collections.

The Sasanian literary tradition of the sixth century was substantial. The Bundahishn (the Zoroastrian cosmogony), the Denkard (the Zoroastrian encyclopaedia), the Kar-Namag i Ardashir (the legendary acts of Ardashir I), and many other Pahlavi texts were compiled or expanded in this period. The Sasanian court poets, the gosan, were active at the court of Khosrow, and the Sasanian court was a major centre of poetic and musical activity. The Sasanian musical tradition, in particular, was highly developed, and the Sasanian court musicians were famous across the ancient world — the tradition that gives us the names of Barbod, Nakisa, and Sarkash is preserved mainly in later Arabic and Persian sources, but the underlying reality of a major musical culture at the Sasanian court is not in doubt.

What was the golden age, exactly?

The phrase “Sasanian golden age” is a modern construction, and it requires a little care. The Sasanian state, like every pre-modern state, was a mixture of brilliance and brutality. The suppression of the Mazdakite movement in 528/529 involved substantial violence, the wars with Byzantium were long and costly, and the executions of religious dissenters (the Mazdakites under Khosrow I, the Manichaeans under Bahram I) are part of the picture. The “golden age” is, however, a useful shorthand for the remarkable flourishing of culture, learning, and political power that characterised the Sasanian state in the sixth century CE. The military successes, the administrative reforms, the cultural achievements, and the intellectual ferment of the reign of Khosrow I shaped the political, religious, and intellectual traditions of the Islamic world, and the memory of the Sasanian golden age has shaped Iranian historical identity for more than fourteen centuries.

The Khosrow of the Shahnameh is the just king. The Khosrow of the Matikan is the reforming administrator. The Khosrow of the Syriac and Greek sources is the dangerous enemy. The Khosrow of the Pahlavi rock reliefs is the god-chosen ruler. None of them is the whole man, and reading the sources side by side is the only way to get close.

Selected reading

  • Christensen, Arthur. L’Iran sous les Sassanides (1944). The classic French synthesis; still useful for chronology.
  • Howard-Johnston, James. The Last Great War of Antiquity (2021). The best treatment of the Sasanian–Byzantine war of 602–628, with extensive background.
  • Daryaee, Touraj. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2009). The best single-volume introduction.
  • Canepa, Matthew P. The Two Eyes of the Earth (2009). For the artistic and ceremonial dimension.
  • Procopius, Wars of Justinian, trans. H. B. Dewing (Loeb, 1914–1928). The principal Greek source for the Sasanian–Byzantine war of 540–562.