Who Was Khosrow I Anushirvan?

Khosrow I Anushirvan was the most famous king of the Sasanian Empire, who ruled from 531 to 579 CE and presided over what later Persian, Arabic, and Islamic sources would call the Sasanian golden age. The epithet Anushirvan, “of immortal soul,” was added to his name after his death and became an enduring phrase in Iranian history. Khosrow became a model of the just king in later Sasanian, Arabic, and Persian literature, and the Shahnameh of Firdowsi treats him as the great example of Iranian kingship. Touraj Daryaee’s Sasanian Persia (2009) and the relevant Encyclopaedia Iranica entries are the working English treatments; James Howard-Johnston’s The Last Great War of Antiquity (2021) is the best treatment of the strategic context.

A short biographical note before the substance. Khosrow was the son of Kavad I, who had reigned twice as the Sasanian king of kings, from 488 to 496 and from 498 to 531 CE. The early life of Khosrow is not well documented, but the dates of his reign are well established. He succeeded his father in 531 CE, at Ctesiphon, and ruled for nearly half a century.

The Mazdakite suppression

The early years of Khosrow’s reign were marked by the suppression of the Mazdakite movement. The Mazdakites, who followed the prophet Mazdak, advocated a radical form of social and economic equality, and they had briefly threatened the property and the families of the Sasanian nobility. Kavad I had supported the movement for political reasons, as a counterweight to the great houses. Khosrow, a more conservative ruler than his father, suppressed the 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 marked a turning point in Sasanian history: it allowed Khosrow to centralise the state, to confiscate the property of the nobility that had supported the movement, and to break the political power of the Mazdakite faction. The Pahlavi sources, in particular the Kar-Namag i Ardashir and the Bundahishn, are mostly silent on the episode; the principal sources are the Arabic historians (Tabari, Mas’udi) and the Syriac chronicle tradition. The silence of the Pahlavi sources is itself a fact worth noting: the Sasanian clerical establishment was not, in the long run, comfortable with the memory of a movement that had threatened the Zoroastrian social order from within.

The wars with Byzantium

Khosrow was a great military commander, and he presided over a series of successful wars against the Sasanian enemies. The most important was the long war with the Byzantine emperor Justinian, which lasted from 540 to 562 CE. The war began in 540 CE, when Khosrow invaded Roman Syria and captured the great city of Antioch, the second city of the Byzantine Empire. The war continued for more than twenty years, with both sides winning and losing battles, and it ended with the so-called Eternal Peace of 562 CE, a negotiated settlement in which the Byzantines agreed to make substantial annual payments to the Sasanian treasury. The exact figure of the payment is debated — 30,000 solidi is the figure given in some modern sources, but the primary evidence is thin.

Khosrow also fought a series of wars against the Hephthalites, the “White Huns” of older literature, who had been a major threat to the Sasanian eastern provinces. The Hephthalite empire, which had been one of the great powers of Central Asia, was destroyed in 557 CE by a coalition of Sasanian and Turkic forces, and the Hephthalite territories were divided between the Sasanians and the Göktürks. A third war, against the Byzantine emperor Tiberius in 576–579 CE, ended inconclusively with the Sasanian capture of the Byzantine fortress of Melitene in 575 CE.

The reforms

Khosrow was a great reformer of the Sasanian administrative system. The Sasanian tax system, which had been based on a complex set of local customary payments, was reformed by Khosrow on the basis of a comprehensive cadastral survey of the empire’s agricultural land, a standardisation of the tax rates, a centralised system of tax collection, and a system of state granaries. The reforms are described in the Pahlavi text Matikan i Hazar Datastan (the Book of a Thousand Decisions), the most important Sasanian legal text to survive in the original. The system was inspired, in part, by the Byzantine system, and is an important example of the long exchange of administrative ideas between the two empires.

Khosrow also reformed the Sasanian legal system. The Sasanian legal tradition, which was based on the Avesta and on customary law, was codified in the reign of Khosrow in a series of Pahlavi legal texts. The Dastur-namag, a legal text attributed to the reign of Khosrow, was the basis of the Sasanian legal tradition. Khosrow also reorganised the Sasanian heavy cavalry on the basis of land grants to noble families, who were required to maintain a fixed number of cataphracts in return — the Sasanian predecessor of the Islamic iqta` system. Arthur Christensen’s L’Iran sous les Sassanides (1944) is still the indispensable treatment of the Sasanian legal and administrative tradition; the relevant entries in the Encyclopaedia Iranica (MacKenzie for the Pahlavi texts, Christensen for the administration) bring the picture up to date.

The Academy of Gondeshapur

Khosrow is also remembered as a major patron of learning, and his reign saw the consolidation of the Academy of Gondeshapur as the major centre of learning in the Sasanian world. The Academy, founded in the third century CE in the city of Gondeshapur in Khuzistan, 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 methods, the personnel, and the library of Gondeshapur were inherited, in significant part, by the Abbasid translation movement in Baghdad in the ninth century.

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 seven philosophers, who were sometimes called the Hukayma in the Arabic sources, settled at Gondeshapur and were credited with translations of Greek philosophical and scientific texts into Syriac and Middle Persian. The story is treated with caution by modern scholars, but it tells us that the Sasanian court was seen as a serious intellectual centre by contemporaries.

The verdict

Khosrow I died in 579 CE, and his reign was followed by a long period of decline. Hormizd IV (r. 579–590) and the great Khosrow II (r. 590–628) — Khosrow II was the grandson of Khosrow I — struggled to maintain the Sasanian state against internal and external pressures. The Sasanian state was destroyed by the Arab Muslim conquest in the 630s and 640s, and the memory of Khosrow I became a model of the just king in Islamic Persian literature. The Shahnameh of Firdowsi celebrates the reign of Khosrow I as a model of justice, wisdom, and military skill, and the Sasanian golden age of the sixth century has shaped Iranian historical memory to the present day. The epithet Anushirvan — “of immortal soul” — is, in literal terms, no exaggeration.

The Khosrow of the Shahnameh is the just king. The Khosrow of the Matikan i Hazar Datastan is the reforming administrator. The Khosrow of Procopius’ Wars is the dangerous enemy. The Khosrow of the Pahlavi rock reliefs at Taq-e Bostan 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. The historical Khosrow was, in my view, a serious and capable ruler who presided over a period of Sasanian power that has been, with some justice, called the Sasanian golden age. The epithet Anushirvan — “of immortal soul” — is, in literal terms, no exaggeration.