Notes · Book D11Short Reigns and a Crisis with Khoshnavaz

D11.1The Reign of Yazdegard, Son of Bahram Goor

Yazdegard takes the throne, gathers the scattered army, and opens with counsel against envy and against reproaching a man for a kindness done. He rules justly eighteen years, then passes over his elder son Pirooz and leaves crown and realm to Hormizd for his restraint. A week later he dies.

When eighteen years of sovereignty had sped: A long reign gets a page. Yazdegard is given an accession speech, a line saying he sent out armies and kept the world secure, and then his deathbed; there is no event in it at all. What reached Ferdowsi about this king was evidently a name, a length of reign and a character, and the poem is honest enough not to invent. Outside the poem he is remembered for wars in the east and for a hard religious policy in Armenia.

And is some years the elder, all the same: The father sets aside the elder son deliberately and says why: Pirooz has the farr and the frame, Hormizd has restraint. Sasanian succession went by designation and by the consent of the great men rather than by age, as the council at III, D9.8 shows; and here the passing over is the cause of the next chapter’s civil war.

D11.2The Reign of Hormizd, Son of Yazdegard

Hormizd is crowned and Pirooz, enraged, carries treasure to Faghanish of Chaghan and buys thirty thousand Heytalian troops with the promise of two frontier towns. He defeats his brother in a long war, then spares and embraces him, and Hormizd blesses his victory.

A chosen Heytalian army then: The Heytalians are the Hephthalites, the power that dominated the Oxus lands in these reigns, and this is the poem’s first use of their name for the eastern enemy it had been calling Turks and Chin. Note what the poem is quietly setting up: Pirooz wins his crown with a Hephthalite army, and a Hephthalite army is what will destroy him and most of his house (III, D11.3.4).

Let Tirmid and Visagard be my fee: The price of the throne is two towns of the Oxus frontier; Tirmid is usually identified with Termez on the river. Bahram Goor had fixed that frontier with a pillar and a treaty three reigns before (III, D10.21), and his grandson begins his reign by selling pieces of it — which is the ground of the quarrel that kills him.

His anger softened, and his love was found: The brothers’ war ends in an embrace, a horse, and a reading of the covenant. Rivals of the blood royal fare worse than this almost everywhere else in the Sasanian books, and Ferdowsi lets the beaten king have the last word, thanking God and wishing his brother a victor’s fortune.

D11.3The Reign of Pirooz

D11.3.1Pirooz’s Accession and Royal Address

Pirooz takes the throne with a speech on wisdom, forbearance and the death even of Jamshid. From his second year a drought lasts seven, killing men and beasts. He lifts taxes, opens the stores, compels grain-holders to sell, and has the people pray in the open. Rain comes in Farvardin.

For seven years, the people all had seen: A seven-year drought under this king is remembered outside the poem as well as in it, and seven lean years is itself one of the oldest measures of famine, as in Joseph’s Egypt. Ferdowsi gives it the detail that famine actually has: no room to stand for the dead, each drop of water reckoned as balm, and whole towns emptied onto the hillsides with their hands raised.

He may set any price on goods to sell: The relief is described as a set of decrees, and they are more interesting than a simple almsgiving. The Shah empties his own granaries, buys grain for coin, leaves the sellers free to name their price, and forbids only the withholding of food — on pain of the storekeeper’s life if anyone in his district starves. It is the same principle as Bahram’s pledges at III, D10.25: the treasury stands behind the loss.

In Farvardin, the eighth year’s clouds drew near: The rain comes in the first month of the year, which begins at Nowruz; see I, A8.3. The timing is the poem’s, not the weather’s: relief arrives with the new year, and the chapter ends with rainbows bent across the sky, the one purely happy image in Pirooz’s story.

D11.3.2Pirooz’s City-building and War with Turan

With the dearth over, Pirooz builds and prospers cities, then musters against the Turks. He leaves his younger son Balawsh on the throne with Sorkhab as minister, marches on Khoshnavaz, and at Bahram’s boundary pillar resolves to plant his own mark deeper in Turkish land.

Called Pirooz-Ram, a blessing to the land: Sasanian kings built their own names into their foundations, and Pirooz is the clearest case: Pirooz-Ram, joy of Pirooz, and Badan-Pirooz, which the poem identifies with Rey and with Ardabil (I, B1.11; I, B10.33). Compare Ormozd-Ardeshir elsewhere in this volume. A name of this shape is a claim on a place, and it is the peaceful half of what this king wanted.

He marched on Khoshnavaz with naked blade: Khoshnavaz is usually identified with the Hephthalite king whom the Arabic historians call Akhshunwar. He is the best-argued opponent in the Sasanian books: he writes, he cites a treaty, he prays, and he wins — and Ferdowsi, whose Bahram Goor made the treaty in question, puts the whole legal case in his mouth rather than the Shah’s.

D11.3.3Khoshnavaz’s Letter to Pirooz

Khoshnavaz writes that a king who breaks his ancestors’ pact is no king, and receives a furious answer. He fixes Bahram’s treaty on a spear, sends one last envoy, learns that Pirooz will not be moved, prays for his downfall, and digs a covered trench across his own front.

He fixed upon a spear the written deed: A document raised on a spear in front of two armies: the treaty becomes a battle standard, and the Turk fights under the signature of Iran’s most loved king. Ferdowsi has spent forty chapters on Bahram Goor’s justice, and he now turns that credit against Bahram’s own grandson, letting the enemy call on God, on Iran’s people and on Iran’s own past.

Full twenty arash spanned its sides so steep: The trench is measured in two ways, by a kamand’s length for its depth and by the arash for its width. The arash is the cubit, the length from elbow to fingertips, and the word appears to go back to an old Iranian term for the elbow, as the cubit does in many languages. It is the ordinary builder’s measure of the region, used here to size a grave.

D11.3.4Pirooz Falls in Battle with Khoshnavaz

Khoshnavaz marches from Samarkand and feigns flight. Pirooz charges after him into the hidden trench and dies there with his brother Narsi, seven crowned kings and the princes of his house. Qobad alone is pulled out alive and chained. Balawsh and all Iran mourn.

He plunged into the hidden fosse with all: The feigned flight that draws a heavy charge onto prepared ground is the classic tactic of the steppe, and the trench is the Shahnameh’s own siege-work turned into a weapon (on the khandaq, see I, B13.20). The historical tradition remembers Pirooz’s army destroyed in much this way, by a concealed ditch, and it is the poem’s bleakest death: no single combat, no name called, a king found with his back broken at the bottom of a hole.

Of all those kings, Qobad lived on that day: The one man drawn alive out of the trench is the future. Qobad is Pirooz’s son, and he is carried off in irons to the Hephthalites who will one day help him back to the throne; his reign, and the Mazdakite upheaval in it, come later in this volume (III, D12). Ferdowsi marks the survival in a single line, which is his usual way of laying a thread down for a hundred pages on.

D11.4Balawsh

D11.4.1Balawsh Ascends and Exhorts the Iranians

After a month of mourning for Pirooz, the troops and Mobadan set Balawsh on the throne. He charges the nobles to honor wisdom, warns against defying the crown, promises to punish injustice, and lectures them on humility. They leave the palace blessing him.

His face all scratched, with dust upon his head: The epic’s mourning is physical and fixed: scratched cheeks, dust on the head, torn robes, and in the next chapter helmets laid aside and a month of grief. The same gestures recur at every great death in the poem, and a reign that opens with them is marked from the start as a reign of unfinished vengeance.

The king is poison, then a healing brew: A hard figure for royal power: the king is both the venom and the antidote, and subjects must look for their rescue in the very thing that can destroy them. The pairing returns with force later in this batch, when Mazdak builds his whole case on a withheld remedy for snakebite (D12.6).

D11.4.2Sofrye Learns of Pirooz’s Death

Sofrye, the marzban left to guard the realm, hears that Pirooz has fallen. He mourns, musters a hundred thousand swordsmen, sends counsel to console Balawsh, and writes Khoshnavaz a letter of pure insult. Khoshnavaz replies that Pirooz died for breaking his oath.

From Bahram Goor that ancient pact arose: Both sides argue from a treaty: the frontier settlement made when Bahram Goor broke the eastern power, told earlier in this volume. In the Shahnameh a pact between kings binds their descendants, and a war can be justified or condemned entirely by the question of who trespassed on an inherited boundary.

Your Shah was slain, but not by will of ours: Ferdowsi lets the enemy make the better case. Khoshnavaz answers an abusive letter with an argument: he offered the old pact, Pirooz spurned it, and the man who treads his forebears’ treaties in the dust destroys himself. The poem declines to take Iran’s side against him here.

D11.4.3Qobad Is Freed after Sofrye’s Victory

Sofrye beats Khoshnavaz at Baigand and pens him in Kuhandizh. Rather than storm the fort he takes terms: the captives, Qobad and the Mobad Ardeshir among them, and all the plunder. He returns in triumph, and after four years removes Balawsh from the throne.

Turan and Chin are ours, Iran you hold.”: The enemy quotes the oldest settlement in the poem: Fereydoon’s division of the world among his three sons, told in Volume I, which left Iran to Iraj and the east to Tur. Every eastern war in the Shahnameh is fought across that line, and both sides appeal to it as law rather than as history.

He moved Balawsh from the throne, gently still: The poem lets Balawsh go quietly, with a wry line of acceptance. The histories are harsher: they report that the nobles deposed him after about four years and blinded him. Ferdowsi’s interest is in the Pahlevan who makes and unmakes kings, not in the king he unmakes.