Notes · Book D9Yazdegard I and the Rise of Bahram Goor

D9.1Yazdegard Assumes the Throne

Yazdegard is crowned, glad of his brother’s death, and promises justice while threatening the insolent. Once secure he scorns the sages, drops the old ways, answers no petitions and rules by terror. His ministers keep the state of the realm from him and turn suppliants away.

And felt delight to know his brother dead: The line is flat and unforgiving, and it sets the terms for the whole reign. Zoroastrian and Arabic tradition remembers this Yazdegard as the sinner, while Christian sources of his own time remember him gratefully for calling off persecution and letting their bishops meet: Ferdowsi’s Sasanian history reaches him through the priesthood’s memory, and the priesthood had its reasons.

A minister, apprised of every suit: The picture is of a bureaucracy protecting the realm from its own Shah: a minister who hears every petition, sends the petitioners away with kind words, and tells them plainly that there is no road to the throne. It also prepares the ground for the nobles’ later refusal to take his son on trust, which is the political problem the rest of this book has to solve.

D9.2Bahram Goor Is Born and Raised by an Arab

In Yazdegard’s eighth year Bahram is born under happy stars, and the astrologers foretell that the seven climes will bow to him. Fearing the father’s nature, the Mobadan urge fostering him abroad. Yazdegard gives him to Monzer, who has him nursed, schooled and horsed.

At night went Numan, Monzer at his side: Monzer and Numan are al-Mundhir and al-Nu‘man, the names that recur among the Lakhmid kings of Hira on the lower Euphrates, the Arab dynasty that served the Sasanians as the Ghassanids served Rum (III, D8.1.2). The poem styles Monzer king of Yemen, reaching for the largest Arab title available, and it matters for what follows: Bahram grows up an Arab prince, and Arab troops will stand behind his claim to the crown.

Bore happy stars and omens bright for earth: The days of the Zoroastrian month are named, not numbered, and Ormozd is the first of them; on the day-names, see I, B9.43. Since the month is Farvardin, the prince is born on the first day of the first month — that is, at Nowruz (I, A4.1, A8.3). The poem is not merely dating the birth, it is pronouncing on it.

And read the Roman tables, closely scanned: On the astronomical tables, the zij, see I, B9.12. ‘Roman’ here means Greek: the Ptolemaic tables that reached Iran through Rum, used alongside the Indian tradition of the Sindhind (I, A8.17). Ferdowsi accordingly gives the Shah two astrologers, one Indian and one Iranian, working the same horoscope from different books.

D9.3Bahram Meets a Lady While Hunting

Hunting with Azadeh on his camel, Bahram shoots as she dictates: the buck’s horns off, two shafts where the doe’s horns would be, then head, hoof and ear pinned together. She calls it a Div’s work; he tramples her under the camel, and never hunts with a woman again.

Bahram Goor strung his bow; the plain’s repose: The epithet arrives in the middle of the chapter, and the lines around it show what it means: the gur is the wild ass whose hunting gives Bahram his name, and the shot that follows, one arrow through a lion into the gur beneath it, is the kind of feat it commemorates. On the gur and the Gur-e-Khar, see I, B12.5 and B8.2. Tradition has him end as he begins, vanishing into a pit while chasing one.

A pellet bow beneath his quiver lay: The pellet bow shoots clay balls rather than arrows, a hunting weapon for small game, and the trick Azadeh sets him needs both weapons in turn: a pellet to make the deer scratch its ear, then a shaft to pin ear, hoof and head together. The poem lists it with the rest of his gear, under the quiver, as a thing any accomplished rider would carry.

He drove the camel over her; its tread: This hunt became the single most painted episode of Bahram’s reign: the camel, the harpist seated behind the king, the deer and the arrows appear on medieval Persian ceramics and then in manuscript after manuscript. What the pictures almost never show is the last couplet, in which he throws her down and drives the camel over her, and the poem’s comment is not moral but practical — he took no woman hunting again.

D9.4Bahram Shows His Strength to Monzer

Monzer gathers Arab notables to judge Bahram’s prowess. Bahram rides down ostriches and plants four arrows so evenly that no hair divides the shafts. Monzer sends to Yemen for painters, has the feat worked on silk, and dispatches the picture to Yazdegard.

Soon ostriches appeared across the plain: The Persian for ostrich is shotor-morgh, ‘camel-bird’, so the next line’s camel running free of rein is almost a translation of the creature’s name. The realia are exact: the Arabian ostrich ranged the Syrian desert and the peninsula, where it was hunted from horseback, and it survived into the twentieth century before it was hunted out altogether.

He bade them paint on silk Bahram Goor’s skill: Bahram’s career as a subject of painting begins inside the poem itself. Monzer sends to Yemen for painters, has the shot worked on silk, and forwards it to court as evidence; thereafter, we are told, every feat is reported to Istakhr by fast rider. Ferdowsi could hardly have chosen a better opening for the king whose hunts became a favorite subject of Persian painters, and around whom Nezami built his Haft Paykar.

D9.5Bahram and Numan Visit Yazdegard

Longing for his father, Bahram rides to Istakhr with Numan and Yemeni gifts. Yazdegard lodges him well but works him like a servant. Bahram sends Monzer a secret letter of complaint; Monzer counsels patience and sends money, goods, and the handmaid Bahram loves.

Striped cloth and Yemen falchions formed the store: Monzer’s gifts are the specialties of his own country. Yemeni blades were proverbial for excellence in Arabic poetry, and Adan, named in the next line, is Aden, the port through which the goods of the Indian Ocean entered Arabia; its ‘gems’ came by sea rather than out of Yemeni rock.

Bahram Goor wrote as well: “My lot is pain: Ferdowsi sets two letters side by side. The Shah’s is formal and warm, thanking Monzer for rearing his son; Bahram’s is a boy’s secret complaint sent in the same saddlebag. The scene is completed by Monzer, who kisses the first letter and whose face turns yellow over the second.

D9.6Yazdegard Jails Bahram, but He Escapes

Caught dozing after a day’s service, Bahram is stripped of cap and girdle and confined a year. He persuades Caesar’s envoy Taynush to obtain his release and rides back to Yemen. Yazdegard’s star-readers then foretell his death near Tus, at the spring of Sav.

It happened then Taynush from Rum drew near: In the Shahnameh the Roman tribute arrives as a matter of course, gathered ‘as of old’, and an envoy who brings it can ask a favor. The payments behind this were real enough, but the two courts described them differently: what Iran recorded as tribute the Roman side usually presented as agreed contributions, much of it tied to holding the passes of the Caucasus.

The spring of Sav will draw him on his way: The oracle that names the place of a king’s death, is sworn against, and then fulfilled by the very road taken to escape it, is one of the oldest shapes in story; Croesus and Oedipus turn on it too. Ferdowsi gives it an Iranian finish by making the star-reader refuse to say more: such knowledge profits no one, and God’s secrets should escape our eyes.

D9.7Yazdegard Is Killed by a Water-Horse

A Mobad sends the bleeding king in a litter to pray at the spring of Sav. The bleeding stops and Yazdegard claims the cure as his own. A white horse rises from the water, stands quietly to be saddled, then kills him with one kick and vanishes into the spring.

A white steed from the water to him came: The horse that comes out of the spring, suffers the bridle and the girths without moving, kills the king at the last buckle and returns to the water is not Ferdowsi’s invention; the death of Yazdegard I by such a horse is told in the Arabic historical tradition as well. In the poem it is the oracle’s exact fulfillment: the cure he traveled to find is the thing that kills him.

Again the flock’s great king, Yazdan ignored: Ferdowsi’s Yazdegard is a tyrant and, worse, an ingrate, who takes credit for a cure he prayed for. Persian tradition remembers this king as ‘the sinner’, while Christian writers of his own century remember years of toleration under him and call him mild. The poem is not reporting; it is delivering the verdict of the tradition that reached it.

D9.8The Iranians Place Khosrow on the Throne

The chiefs bury Yazdegard and swear that none of his blood shall reign. Gashasp the scribe denounces the dead king; frontier lords claim the crown and the realm falls into tumult. The council in Pars looks for a just and generous man and crowns Khosrow, an aged noble.

Then chiefs, Mobadan, Pahlevans, and all: Kingship in the Shahnameh passes from father to son, but it is ratified by a council, and here the council refuses the son outright. Sasanian practice gave the great nobles and the chief priest much this part: they chose among the men of the royal house and could pass over the obvious heir. Ferdowsi’s scene, with its lists of candidates whittled from a hundred to four, is the fullest picture of that machinery in the poem.

There lived an aged man whose heart was light: Khosrow is a stopgap, and the poem treats him as one: old, rich, well born, crowned in a sentence, and given nothing to do afterward. His single memorable act will be at the lions, where he pleads his age and stands aside, and even there Ferdowsi lets him keep his dignity.

D9.9Bahram Goor Marches to Claim the Throne

Told that his father is dead and Khosrow crowned, Bahram mourns a month, then takes counsel with Monzer. Numan raises ten thousand Arab horsemen and harries Iran as far as Tisfoon. News of the vacant throne brings raiders from Rum, Chin, Hind and Makran.

From Shiban and the Ghassanians, raise: Bahram’s foster-family were the Lakhmid kings of Hira on the Euphrates, Iran’s Arab clients, whose names in Arabic are al-Mundhir and al-Nu‘man; the Ghassanids named here were the corresponding clients of the Roman side, and Shiban is the tribe of Banu Shayban. The poem seats Monzer in Yemen and makes him a king of all the Arabs, which is a story’s simplification of a frontier arrangement.

Our end is dust; no nush-daru can stay: On the nush-daru, the elixir that came too late for Sohrab, see I, B8.22. The Arabs console their prince in the proverb’s own terms.

D9.10The Iranians Protest Bahram’s Ravages to Monzer

Worn out by the raids, the Iranians send the scribe Javanuy to Monzer. Monzer sends him on to Bahram, whose presence strikes him dumb. Monzer’s reply blames Iran for starting the quarrel, and Javanuy ends by advising that Bahram be allowed to ride into Iran as a king.

That fluent man grew speechless, dazed in mind: The envoy is chosen for his fluency and loses it on sight of the claimant, forgetting the message he carries. This is how Ferdowsi makes the farr visible, in its effect on a professional talker rather than in description; on the farr itself, see I, A4.1. The formula used here for Bahram, wine flowing from his face and musk from his hair, returns in the mouths of the singing girls at D10.9.

Who draws a serpent from its hole will tread: Monzer answers a complaint of raiding with a proverb: whoever pulls the snake out of its hole will walk in his own blood, skirts trailing. His case is that Iran began this by refusing the heir, and he argues it, as the poem’s Arab chiefs like to, in the shape of a saying rather than a claim.

D9.11Bahram Goor Approaches with Monzer’s Army

Monzer levies thirty thousand Arab spearmen and camps on dry ground near Jahram. He advises Bahram to feast the Iranian chiefs and hear them out before fighting. Bahram sets an ivory throne on the plain, Numan beside him with a naked blade, and receives Iran’s nobles.

Went to Barzin’s fire-temple in their turn: The threatened Iranians go to pray rather than to arm. Barzin’s fire is usually identified with Adur Burzen-Mihr of Khorasan, one of the three great fires of the empire and the one belonging to the husbandmen, as Azargashasp belonged to the warriors and their king; on that fire see I, A7.1.

Upon the waterless expanse of land: Jahram is usually identified with Jahrom in Fars, on the edge of the dry country south-east of Shiraz. The geography is well chosen: the Arab army halts where the desert meets the Persian heartland, close enough to frighten the council at Pars and on ground of the kind its own horsemen know how to hold.

D9.12Bahram Goor Claims His Right to Rule

Bahram argues his hereditary right and is refused. The chiefs parade men mutilated by his father; Bahram curses his father’s dust, sets out the justice he intends, and proposes an ordeal, the crown between two chained lions. The lions are brought and chained to the ivory throne.

The chiefs then summoned men whose bodies bore: The chiefs do not argue, they exhibit: men without hands and feet, without ears or tongue, a man blinded. Mutilation was among the punishments a Sasanian king could impose, and Ferdowsi makes the parade into evidence at a hearing, with Monzer acting as counsel and the crown conditional on the son’s answer for his father.

Bring two fierce lions from their forest lair: On trial by ordeal (var), and Siavash riding through the fire, see I, B9.12. Two things are new here. The ordeal is not fire but lions, so that the same act proves innocence and strength at once; and it is the claimant himself who proposes it and sets the terms, which is why the chiefs are careful to say aloud that his blood will not be on their hands.

I am the shepherd; subjects are my sheep: The king as shepherd of the flock is the standing image of Iranian political counsel, and it is the ground of Bahram’s whole plea: not that the crown is his by descent only, but that his father kept the flock badly and he will keep it well. The image returns, turned inside out, when a Mobad ruins a village by telling it that everyone is a lord (D10.8).

D9.13Bahram Slays the Lions and Takes the Throne

Khosrow pleads his age and lets Bahram go first. With an ox-head gorz Bahram kills both lions, takes the crown from the ivory throne and seats himself; Khosrow submits and the chiefs shower jewels. A snowbound winter passage then closes the chapter.

He took an ox-head gorz into his hand: The gorz-e gāvsar is Fereydoon’s weapon, forged for the binding of Zahhak (I, A5.2), and by this late reign it has become the mark of a legitimate claimant rather than a working weapon. The poem’s oldest arm arrives in the hands of one of its last kings, who wins an inherited crown with it.

In Azar, on Soroush’s day, the cheer: Every day of the Zoroastrian month carries a divinity’s name as well as a number, and Soroush’s is the seventeenth. It falls well for this accession: Soroush is the messenger and the voice that intervenes at the turning points of the poem, as he does to stop Fereydoon’s hand (I, A5.9).

A cloud has risen and obscured the moon: Ferdowsi breaks in here in his own voice: snow over everything, no firewood, no salted meat, no barley until harvest, the tax-collector expected, and an estate that will not stand unless a friend takes his hand. These winter passages are among the few places in the poem where the poet speaks of his own circumstances, and he closes this one by turning briskly back to the story.