Notes · Book D12Qobad and the Mazdakite Revolution

D12.1How Qobad, Son of Pirooz, Assumes the Throne

Qobad is crowned and moves from Istakhr to Tisfoon. He promises an open door, then delivers a long address on patience, contentment and the folly of greed. The nobles bless him. He is sixteen, and Sofrye, not he, governs the kingdom.

To Tisfoon in bright and royal array: Tisfoon is Ctesiphon on the Tigris, the working capital of the Sasanians, while Istakhr in Pars was the dynasty’s homeland and its ceremonial center. The new king’s first act is the journey between them. That capital later grew into the cluster of towns the Arabs called Madain, which the poem credits Qobad with founding (D12.5).

His years were sixteen; young, he held the seat: The poem’s arithmetic does not close: a king crowned at sixteen who reigns forty years should not die at eighty, as he does in D12.8. The historical Qobad did come to the throne as a youth and held it, with one violent interruption, for some four decades.

D12.2The Fall of Sofrye

Sofrye retires to Shiraz and rules Pars as a king without a crown. Courtiers persuade Qobad that he is a rival, and Shapur of Rey is sent to arrest him. Sofrye submits with dignity; Qobad imprisons him and, on the Mobadan’s advice, has him killed.

When Shapur rides from Rey to take the field: Under the court intrigue lies the real politics of the age: great noble houses, one seated in Pars and the south, another at Rey, and a king who survives by setting them against each other. Ferdowsi gives Shapur an ancestor out of the early Sasanian book, Mehrak, whose line Ardeshir had tried to end.

Bonds are ornaments on a hero’s hand.”: Sofrye accepts the chains without resisting, in a line with the ring of a proverb. The Sasanian books return again and again to the king who destroys the servant who saved him, and Ferdowsi has the service recited in full first, so the reader holds the whole indictment before the killing.

D12.3Jamasp Takes the Throne after Qobad’s Fall

Iran rises at the news of Sofrye’s death, storms the palace, kills the counselors and enthrones the young Jamasp. Qobad is fettered and handed to Sofrye’s son Rizmehr for vengeance. Rizmehr instead bows to him, and Qobad begins to plan his escape.

They bound Qobad’s feet; neither farr nor race: Birth is no protection here. The poem’s rule is that the farr deserts a king who rules badly (on the farr, see I, A4.1), and Qobad has just killed the man who put him on the throne. Compare Tus, whom royal blood did save (I, B12.20).

Spared King Qobad and answered hate with love: Rizmehr’s refusal of the vengeance everyone expects is the poem’s ideal of javānmardi (see I, B8.20), and it is also shrewd: the man he spares is restored within the year and makes him his first minister. Generosity is rarely left unrewarded in the Sasanian books.

D12.4Qobad’s Escape and Flight to the Heytalians

Rizmehr strikes off Qobad’s fetters and the two ride east with five confidants. At a village near Ahvaz Qobad marries a dehqan’s daughter, leaves her his signet, and goes on to the Heytalian king, who lends him forty thousand horsemen for the promise of Chaghaniyan.

Thus sped the seven like windblown dust in flight: The count is exact. Qobad had told Rizmehr that five men shared his secret (D12.3); with the two of them the party is seven. Ferdowsi keeps such small sums straight across a chapter break, and the flight of a deposed king with a handful of companions is one of his favorite shapes of scene.

He had with him one ring, and only one: A signet left with a bride is the standard token of recognition in folktale, kept against the day a child must prove its father. This story has no use for it: Qobad is back within the year and acknowledges wife and son himself, so the ring is planted and never needed.

Released his feet from fetters that same day: Greek and Arabic writers tell the escape differently, most memorably with Qobad smuggled out of his prison by a woman of his own family. The poem gives the whole rescue to the son of the man he had killed, so that the escape turns on a pardon rather than on a trick.

D12.5Qobad Returns and Reascends the Throne

Qobad reaches the village to find a son born, and names him Kisra. The nobles come out with the boy Jamasp to beg pardon; Qobad forgives them and retakes the throne. He rewards Rizmehr, campaigns in Rum, founds cities, and opens canals.

They named the newborn Kisra, bright and dear: Kisra is the Arabic form of Khosrow (Middle Persian Husraw), and it became the ordinary Arabic word for a Sasanian emperor, much as Caesar became a word for emperor in the west. The child is the great Khosrow, and the poem calls him Kisra until it gives him his famous title at the end of D12.8.

He said, “From valiant Fereydoon I came: The village father claims descent from Fereydoon, so the greatest of the Sasanians is given Kayanian blood through a country dehqan’s daughter. Ferdowsi, who names the dehqan class as keepers of the old stories, has quietly made one of them the model king’s grandfather.

He founded Madain as the royal seat: Madain is the Arabic al-Madā’in, ‘the Cities’: not a single foundation but the sprawl of towns on both banks of the Tigris around Ctesiphon (D12.1). The poem keeps both names and treats them as two places, which is roughly what they were.

D12.6Qobad Adopts the Faith of Mazdak

Mazdak rises at court as Qobad’s minister and treasurer. When drought brings famine he draws two judgments from the king, that withholding a remedy or food is murder, then tells the crowd to take the grain stores. Qobad, persuaded, adopts his faith.

There rose a man named Mazdak, shrewd and wise: Mazdak’s name was attached for centuries to a movement of religious reform under Qobad with a radical program about property. Almost everything recorded of it comes from its enemies, Zoroastrian priests and later Muslim historians, and the contemporary Greek and Syriac witnesses to the reign do not name him at all, so even his own part in it is disputed. Ferdowsi’s opening couplet grants him intelligence and eloquence, then withdraws all sympathy.

Another has the nush-daru nearby: On the nush-daru, the remedy that comes too late, see I, B8.22. Mazdak’s move is to make it a question of law: he obtains a ruling on an imagined snakebite, then applies that ruling to hoarded grain, so the emptying of the stores is authorized by the king’s own sense of justice. The poem reports the maneuver with something close to admiration before it condemns the man.

Women, goods, and houses are for all: This is the charge that fixed the movement’s reputation, and it is put in the flattest possible terms. Scholars generally read the community of women as a hostile distortion of teaching about marriage or inheritance; the poem is not interested in the distinction and gives the doctrine in the form its opponents preferred.

D12.7Anooshirvan Overthrows Mazdak’s Faith

Mazdak demands that Kisra join his faith; the prince asks five months and gathers sages. At the appointed debate a Mobad demolishes the doctrine, Qobad renounces it, and Mazdak with three thousand followers is handed to Kisra, who plants them head down in a garden and hangs their leader.

They are envy and vengeance, anger, need: The poem lets Mazdak state his ethics in full before destroying him. The five that mislead men are named as Divs to be conquered, in good Zoroastrian language, and the social program follows as their cure: abolish exclusive property and exclusive marriage and the passions lose what they feed on. The reasoning is coherent, which is why the answer to it has to be an argument too.

How shall a father know his son by name?: The Mobad replies not with scripture but with the social order: descent, inheritance, rank, and the question of who is left to do the work. The appeal is to nezhād, lineage, which the poem holds sacred (see I, B11.1). This is the aristocratic case against Mazdak, and Ferdowsi gives it the last word.

Like trees he fixed them firmly in the ground: The horror is built out of the gardener’s language Mazdak himself had used: he sowed a seed, and Kisra invites him to inspect the fruit. Men planted head down to make an orchard is the detail the tradition remembered above all others from this story, and the poem sets it down without a flicker of unease.

An aged Mobad told it otherwise: Ferdowsi records a second version instead of choosing between them, as he does throughout the Sasanian books: in this one Mazdak had claimed the crown and was buried head first. The variant turns the charge from heresy into usurpation, and shows how differently the same episode could be told.

D12.8Anooshirvan Is Named Qobad’s Successor

Qobad, feeling death near, writes his testament on silk, leaving crown and throne to Kisra, and entrusts it to a Mobad. He dies at eighty and is entombed with crown and golden throne. The will is read to the assembled chiefs, and Kisra is crowned Anooshirvan.

They named him Anooshirvan; his face: The name is a title: Middle Persian anōšag-ruwān, ‘of immortal soul’, which is why the poem withholds it until the accession. In Persian and Arabic writing afterward Anooshirvan the Just became the standard measure of good rule, the king every later adviser held up to his own master; the reforms of the next chapters are the reason.

The wolf and sheep drank as in some fair dream: Wolf and sheep at one stream is the poem’s shorthand for perfect justice, and it returns almost at once (D13.3). The image is old and widely shared, and Isaiah has the wolf lying down with the lamb; in the Shahnameh it measures not mercy but security, the strong no longer preying on the weak because the king will not allow it.