Notes · Book E5Hormizd, Son of Anooshirvan

E5.1Hormizd’s Accession and Address

An autumn prologue on the ripe apple and the vanished spring. Ferdowsi names his informant, Makh of Herat. Hormizd takes the throne and promises justice, bounty and protection for the poor; the rich hear him with dread, the sages and the poor with gladness.

Summer laughed to see the apple red: Ferdowsi opens the great reigns with a prologue on a season or a cup, and chooses for Hormizd a poem about autumn: the blossom traded away for fruit, the garden stripped, the poet drinking to a remembered spring. He then crowns the season like the king. The reign that begins here is where the Sasanian house starts down.

His name was Makh, experienced and wise: Ferdowsi names his source for the reign: an aged frontier lord of Herat, questioned about what he remembered. He does this at several turns of the poem, and the effect is always the same — the story arrives with a warrant. On the dehqan as keeper of such memory, see I, A6.23 and I, B14.1.

The wealthy men were filled with inward dread: The accession speech divides its audience in the last four lines, and the division is the reign in miniature. The one threat in it — that any man who uses wealth to reach at a throne will lose his head — reads as justice here; within a chapter it will be the excuse for killing everyone his father trusted.

E5.2Hormizd’s Slaughter of the Ministers

Hormizd turns on his father’s men. He starves and kills Izad Gashasp, poisons the High Mobad Zardosht for visiting him, traps Simah Barzin through Bahram Azarmihan and kills both. A sealed scroll of his father’s foretells his own blinding and death.

They said the baj, as was their custom then: Two old usages in one couplet. The bāj is the grace said over food, after which the meal is eaten in ritual silence; the barsom is the bundle of twigs held in the hand at prayer, which in later practice came to be made of metal rods. The force of the scene is that the two condemned men keep every form while the king who condemned them keeps none.

He touched the food and drew the marrow free: The poison works through etiquette, not chemistry. A king’s offering a morsel from his own hand was a mark of high favor, and the High Mobad, who has already guessed what is in the dish, cannot refuse it twice. Hormizd has tasted every other dish himself in front of him. It is the coldest thing in the Sasanian books.

He called for nush-darus from town and store: On nush-daru and the great instance of an antidote that came too late, see I, B8.22. Ferdowsi brings the word back for a man who sends for it in time and dies anyway, cursing the king who fed him.

‘This Turkish line should never rule on high: Hormizd’s mother was a daughter of the Khan, brought from Chin by the embassy Mehran Setad describes in E5.5, and his maternal descent is remembered outside the poem too. Here the nobles are made to have said at the succession council that her blood disqualified him; Bahram will throw the same thing in his face some fifty lines later, calling him simply ‘O Turk’.

He read: “For twelve full years shall Hormizd reign: Ferdowsi gives away the end of the reign in the middle of it, as he does with Siavash (I, B9.40): twelve good years, then disorder, enemies on every side, one of them like Ahriman, the troops scattered, the king blinded and killed. Every clause will be carried out in order. From here the reader is not wondering what happens but watching it arrive.

E5.3Hormizd Renounces Tyranny

Remorseful, Hormizd keeps a seasonal round of Istakhr, Isfahan, Tisfoon and the Arvand plain, and proclaims harsh penalties for trespass on crops. His own son Khosrow Parviz’s horse offends; the Shah has its ears and tail docked and the damage paid from the prince’s treasure.

To fair Istakhr, and there would three months stay: Four residences by season: Istakhr for the short nights, Isfahan for autumn, Tisfoon for winter, the Arvand plain for spring. The Sasanian court is generally understood to have moved like this, and Ferdowsi’s calendar of it is one of the most concrete pictures of the practice anywhere in the poem.

The Shah had one beloved son, Parviz: The first appearance of Khosrow Parviz, last of the great Sasanian kings, whose reign and whose Shirin will take up more of Volume III than anything else (E6, E7). Ferdowsi introduces him in a dispute about a loose horse in a cornfield. The epithet Parvīz is usually explained as ‘victorious’.

Cut off that horse’s ears and tail, I say: The decree’s first victim is the crown prince’s horse, which is the point: a king proves his justice on his own household. The second anecdote is sharper than it looks — the captain’s son buys the farmer off with a gem-set belt, and the farmer forgives him because the alternative is a hanging. Ferdowsi lets the cost of that justice show without naming it.

E5.4The Realm Rises against Hormizd

In his tenth year enemies come from every side: Saveh of the Turks from Herat with elephants, Caesar from Rum, Khazars into Armenia, Arab horsemen on the Euphrates. With his counselors dead, Hormizd buys off Rum, beats the Khazars, and is left facing Saveh.

He then repented all the sages slain: The crisis arrives exactly when the men who could have met it are in their graves, and Ferdowsi has arranged the two chapters so that no reader can miss the order of cause and effect. The frontier lords put it to the king’s face: his scribes and Mobadan are dead, and he is now his own chief priest.

You heard what fell on Goshtasb, overthrown: The Mobad argues from the Shahnameh itself. Arjasp’s invasion, the ruin of Balkh and Esfandiyar’s rescue of the realm (II, C6) are cited as a precedent the king is expected to know, in the way a lawyer cites a case. The poem’s characters treat the poem as their book of statecraft, and Bahram Chubin will do the same thing in E5.6.

Because Hormizd had taxed their native land: The Arab raid is a tax revolt, and Ferdowsi gives it four couplets on the way to a bigger war. He has just had Bozorgmehr foretell an army coming out of the Hijaz with scanty arms to end the line (E4.7), and he does not join the two passages up. He does not need to.

E5.5Hormizd Calls for Bahram Chubin

Nastooh brings his aged father Mehran Setad, who tells how he chose Hormizd’s Chinese mother and how a Mobad then foretold a dark, lean horseman called Chubin who would break the Turk. He dies as he finishes. Bahram, son of Goshnasp, is found at Ardabil.

Require a daughter of the queen instead: The rule Anooshirvan lays on the embassy — a daughter of the Khan’s queen, not of a slave — is the whole Sasanian anxiety about the mother’s blood in one line, and Mehran Setad keeps it, passing over four decked princesses for the unjeweled girl who alone is the queen’s. It buys Hormizd nothing: the nobles will still call him a Turk (E5.2).

They call him Chubin; from the Parthian line: The epithet arrives before the man, which is how the poem’s heroes generally do. Chūbīn is usually taken from chūb, wood: a name for a man as lean and hard as a shaft, or for his handling of the javelin. The poem gives him descent from the Parthian kings; the record remembers him as a Mehranid, of one of the great Parthian houses.

Even as he spoke, his living spirit fled: Ferdowsi times the death to the sentence. The last man alive who remembered the prophecy delivers it and dies in the same couplet, and the Shah says as much: an hour’s delay and it would have gone with him. The reign’s one piece of good fortune arrives as the door to the past closes.

E5.6Bahram Chubin Takes Command

Bahram reaches court, argues against buying peace, and is given command. He enrolls twelve thousand armored men, all aged forty, defends both choices from the poem’s own history, and receives from the Shah’s hand the dragon banner of Rostam.

Then Rostam chose twelve thousand horsemen bold: Bahram argues by precedent, as the Mobad did in E5.4, and all three of his cases are episodes of this poem: Rostam freeing Kavus from Hamavaran (I, B6), Gudarz taking vengeance for Siavash (II, C3), Esfandiyar against Arjasp at Ruyin Dezh (II, C7). Twelve thousand is the Shahnameh’s standing figure for a picked force, and he knows it.

All those enrolled were forty years of age: He strikes both the young and the old off the roll, and defends it with the best speech in the chapter: a man of forty has been tested, has a wife and children, remembers bread and salt (I, B12.24), and fears blame more than he fears the enemy. A youth, he says, cannot weigh what things cost.

Then came the violet dragon-banner bright: The Shah hands him Rostam’s own dragon banner — on the banners of the heroes, see I, B8.16 — with the words that a second Rostam has risen in Iran. Nothing in the reign is more generous or more ill-advised. Bahram will end by taking the crown itself, and the poem has just told him what he is.

E5.7Bahram Chubin Rides against Saveh

Bahram asks for a recorder of deeds and marches from Tisfoon. He takes a sheep’s head from a seller’s basket as an omen of Saveh’s beheading. The Shah, warned he will one day turn, tries to recall him and is refused. A horseman is executed for stealing straw.

Let him record each warrior in the fight: His first request as commander is for a scribe to write down who strikes whom, so that the names go round the world. A general arranging his own chronicle, inside a chronicle — and Ferdowsi keeps the chief scribe on stage for the rest of the book, first to be abused for cowardice (E5.11) and then to deliver the panegyric.

Then raised a sheep’s head high for all those near: Taking an omen from the first thing met on the road is ordinary practice, and Bahram reads the seller’s basket at once: so shall he strike off Saveh’s head. The interest is that the Shah’s agent, watching from the crowd, reads the same sign and adds a second half — that the man will turn on his king. One omen, two readings, and both come true.

Who steals a straw shall not be left to live: A commander establishes his authority by an exemplary punishment, and the thing stolen is chosen for its smallness: a poor woman’s sack of straw, paid for with a man cut in two before the whole camp. It is worth holding on to when Bahram, nine chapters later, cannot keep his own hands off two cloths and a pair of boots (E5.16).

E5.8Bahram Chubin Answers King Saveh

Saveh sends word that Hormizd has sent Bahram to his death. Bahram answers that he serves with his life, then, pressed, offers Saveh a choice: peace with gifts and safe conduct to the Shah, or his head sent to court.

He answered, “If the king desires my death: Saveh’s first move is to tell Bahram that his own king has sent him to die, and Bahram answers with perfect obedience — he serves with his life, and yields whatever the Shah cares to claim. The reader has just watched Hormizd try to recall him and be refused (E5.7). The loyalty is real, and it is temporary.

You shall not see me till we meet in fight: The exchange of boasts through envoys is one of the poem’s fixed forms, and Ferdowsi gives it three chapters here before a blow is struck. Bahram ends by naming what Saveh will see instead of him: the violet dragon flag he was handed at court, and under it the stroke that splits his helmet.

E5.9Saveh and Bahram Chubin Face Each Other

Saveh drums out his army and finds Bahram already holding the ground with Herat at his back, leaving the Turks a cramped and thorny field. He ranks forty thousand on each wing and a hundred thousand in the center, with elephants in front, and grieves at the confinement.

He left me thorny scrub and narrow ground: Saveh names the trick the moment he sees the field, and names the right man: Kharrad’s long parley (E5.7) was never about terms but about time, spent so that Bahram could take the ground first. Ferdowsi makes the whole battle turn on room rather than numbers, which is the only way twelve thousand can be made to beat four hundred thousand.

Before the front, the elephants stood tall: Elephants were used by Sasanian armies as well as by their eastern enemies, and in the poem they are the standard measure of overwhelming force — twelve hundred of them here. Drawn up in front of a line that has no room behind it, they are also a standing danger to their own troops, which is exactly how the battle will end (E5.11).

E5.10The Second Exchange with King Saveh

Saveh boasts of uncountable troops, a thousand armored elephants and the homage of every king, and offers Bahram his daughter, a crown and Iran’s throne. Bahram answers with proverbs and gives him two days before his head goes up on a spear.

No reckoner could number them for me: Saveh’s whole speech is an inventory: troops beyond leaves, beasts beyond raindrops, tents and stores past any clerk’s tallying, seas and mountains too weak to carry his treasury. In the Shahnameh the arithmetic of a boast is a reliable forecast, and Bahram answers by refusing the scale altogether: your court, your elephants, your throne, I count them nothing.

A chief once said, ‘The faster runs the hound: Against a king’s inventory Bahram sets a countryman’s weapon. Twice in this speech he quotes a saw attributed to some earlier chief — beggars driven from one town claim to have ruled it from the next; the faster the hound runs the farther the water gets from its mouth — and neither needs explaining. It is the plainest speech anyone makes in the book.

E5.11Bahram Chubin Slays King Saveh

Bahram dreams of defeat, prays, and has his archers shoot the elephants’ trunks; the beasts turn and trample the Turks. He overtakes Saveh, shoots him through the spine, beheads him, and puts to death the warlock who confesses to sending the dream.

And set his thumb against the deer-hide band: Ferdowsi builds the shot exactly as he built the most famous shot in the poem, down to the choosing of the arrow, the thumb on the deer-hide string and the four eagle feathers: compare Rostam against Ashkabus, I, B13.28, and the thumbstall noted there. Lending Bahram that scene, couplet by couplet, is the strongest thing the poem does to make him a second Rostam.

The sorcerers began their spells in air: Saveh’s answer to a steady line is weather: a wind, a black cloud, arrows out of the murk. Turkish armies fight with storms throughout the Shahnameh, and Muslim writers report a stone by which the Turks were said to raise rain. Bahram’s reply is simply to call it trickery and hold the ranks, and the captured warlock afterward confesses that all he managed was a bad dream.

Among these troops we are one white hair shown: The royal scribes provide the only ordinary human voices on the field: they compare the Iranian force to a single white hair on a black ox, are told that ink and paper are their proper trade, and climb a hill to watch from a safe distance. Ferdowsi keeps them there through the battle, so that the heroism has something to be measured against.

E5.12Bahram Chubin Announces His Victory

Bahram beheads the Turkish chiefs, sets their heads and banners on mules, and sends Saveh’s head to Hormizd on a spear. The Shah gives thanks, spends the treasure on the poor, the fires and the roads, remits four years’ tribute, and grants Bahram the eastern lands.

He set King Saveh’s head upon a spear: The head sent to the capital on a spear is how a victory was reported, and Ferdowsi makes a display of it: each dead chief beheaded, his own banner planted behind his head, the whole lot loaded on mules with an escort to guard them day and night. The trophy is arranged to be read, like the scribe’s account that travels with it.

For Nowruz and for Sadeh, he decreed: On the two festivals see I, A4.1 and I, A2.2. What is new is fiscal: a third of the treasure is settled on the fires and their priests so that the feasts can be kept, which is the poem’s usual sign that a reign is sound. It falls five chapters after Bozorgmehr foretold that Sadeh’s feast would fade from sight (E4.7).

E5.13Bahram Chubin Overcomes Parmudeh

Parmudeh crosses the Jihun to avenge Saveh. Warned against Wednesdays, Bahram spends one feasting in a garden and is surrounded; he breaks out, then storms the Turkish camp by night. Parmudeh flees to Avaza, and Bahram rings the fortress.

“On Wednesday, draw no weapon from its sheath: A star-reader’s warning before he left Iran. The almanacs assigned each day of the week its fortunes, and Wednesday is among the days that day-lore tends to count unlucky. Bahram’s way of honoring the warning is to start nothing and drink instead, in a garden between the two armies, which is how Parmudeh comes to find him ringed and half-drunk.

Bahram, half-drunk, with dart within his hand: Ferdowsi lets the phrase stand twice without apology, and the sortie succeeds anyway. It is the first crack in the portrait: the man who cut a soldier in two over a sack of straw (E5.7) ignores an omen he himself paid for, wins regardless, and learns the wrong lesson from it.

E5.14Parmudeh Seeks Mercy from Bahram

Bahram calls on Parmudeh to open the gate, send down his treasure and ask for grace. Parmudeh answers with a long warning on Fortune’s turns, admits his father sought what was not his, and agrees to ask the Shah — not Bahram — for quarter.

Mock not the fallen, sepahbod; I too: Ferdowsi gives the best speech in the chapter to the man who has lost, and its subject is the reversal waiting for the man who has won: the sky keeps its purposes hidden, and he who makes bloodshed his trade will have his own blood spilled. On this register of loss, and where the poem learned it, see I, B9.39.

You serve; a king by birth and rank am I: The point of honor that runs the rest of the episode. Parmudeh will surrender to a king but not to a king’s officer, and Bahram’s rage two chapters on comes of exactly this. It is the same line that shut the shoemaker’s son out of the scribes’ office (E4.2), drawn now between the two most capable men in the poem.

E5.15Bahram Seeks Mercy for Parmudeh

Bahram writes asking a safe-conduct for the Khan. Delighted, Hormizd rewards the envoy, has the warrant written on silk under seal with God as witness, and orders Parmudeh brought to court with honor and the spoil forwarded to the treasury.

On silk a warrant, formal, sealed, and bright: On the word of quarter, see I, A8.16. What is new here is that it has become an instrument of state: drawn up by a scribe on silk, sealed, naming God as witness, and carried up to the fortress to be read there. Parmudeh comes down on the strength of a document, which is a very Sasanian way to end a siege.

A crown and Pahlevanship go to you.”: Hormizd pays for the victory in titles, and the second half of the promise at the chapter’s end is the one to watch: a crown, and the Pahlevanship. On jahān-pahlavān, the office Rostam held, see I, B6.8. The reign is now arranging its own destruction out of its rewards.

E5.16Bahram Chubin’s Anger at Parmudeh

Parmudeh rides past without a glance; Bahram has him dragged on foot and strikes his head. Warned, he repents and sends gifts, but Parmudeh will not hide it from the Shah. The scribes inventory Avaza, where Siavash’s belt lies — and Bahram keeps two prizes back.

A wanton stroke that filled the chiefs with dread!: Ferdowsi very rarely condemns a hero in his own voice, and here he does it in half a line. The blow to the head of a surrendered king is the act the rest of the book grows from, and both Kharrad and the chief scribe are brought on at once to say what the narrator has just said.

Among the goods of Siavash came to light: The inventory folds the whole legendary past into a Sasanian campaign. A belt of Siavash’s, and earrings that Kay Khosrow gave Lohrasp, Lohrasp gave Goshtasb and Arjasp carried off (I, B9; II, C5, C6), have been lying in Avaza ever since, with the spoils of Afrasiab’s wars. Volume I’s treasure turns up in Volume III as a line item.

The captain chose to keep that treasure still: Two cloths of Yemen and a golden crown, left off the account. Ferdowsi is exact about the size of the fault that ends a career: after a victory that saved Iran and a treasury too large to count, the quarrel that undoes Bahram will begin with a theft he could have afforded not to commit.

E5.17Parmudeh Appears before Hormizd

Parmudeh arrives with the treasure. King and Khan each watch to see who will dismount first, and the chamberlain settles it by taking the rein. Hormizd lodges him royally and feasts him. A punning remark about Chubin’s wooden music leaves the Shah suspicious.

The chamberlain reached out and seized his rein: Ten lines on who gets off his horse first. Between a king and a king who has surrendered the question is exact, and neither will move: so the chamberlain takes hold of the bridle and gives Parmudeh a reason to dismount that costs him nothing. Ferdowsi says outright that the tact is what wins his case. On the court’s forms of homage, see I, A6.17.

Izad replied, “When Chubin’s wooden strain: The book ends on a pun. Chūbīn is taken from chūb, wood (E5.5), so the name can be turned into an instrument: when a wooden strain resounds, the trees will shed their fruit in pain. It is said at a banquet, in answer to praise of the man who has just saved the realm, and it is all Ferdowsi needs to plant the suspicion the rest of the reign grows out of.

E5.18Hormizd Seeks Alliance with the Khan

The chief scribe reports that Bahram Chubin has kept part of the Turkish spoil, including Siavash’s crown. Hormizd, angered, honors the captive Parmudeh instead, binds him by oath and sends him home laden; the Khan snubs Bahram on the road, and the Shah’s resentment hardens.

Which famed Siavash had worn in ancient fight: The spoil of the eastern war is said to include Siavash’s own crown, kept in a Turkish treasury since the murder Volume I tells. Objects are how the Shahnameh binds its ages together: a crown carries the Kayanian past into a Sasanian quarrel over loot, and the theft of it is the first charge laid against Bahram.

“Bahram has strayed from right, by your report!: Chubin is usually explained from chub, ‘wood, shaft’, an epithet for a lean, tall man: something like ‘javelin-like’. It is a nickname rather than a family name — his house is named at the parley (E6.5) — and Khosrow will throw the epithet back at him there.

By Azargashasp’s enduring sacred flame: The oath climbs a ladder: God, then the planets, then sun and moon, then crown and throne, then the fire of Azargashasp (I, A7.1), and last the signet-ring and diadem — the instruments by which a king’s word was actually made binding. The escalation is the shape of a formal oath, not a poet’s flourish.

E5.19Hormizd Shames Bahram Chubin

Hormizd writes Bahram a letter of contempt and sends him a woman’s outfit — distaff, spindle and cotton, a gown and a veil of golden thread — with iron fetters, with a base envoy instructed to add insults and to announce his removal from command.

A distaff, case, and spindle laid with care: To send a man a distaff, spindle, case and raw cotton is to tell him he is a woman; the gown and the veil of golden thread finish the costume. The historians report that Hormizd sent him a chain and a spindle in this same quarrel, so the insult is not the poet’s invention. Iran remembers the whole revolt by this one object: everyone in the chapters that follow calls it the spindle-case.

Here is the robe of honor fit for you: A Shah rewarded service with a robe of honor (I, B14.18), handed over at court with the words that went with it. Hormizd keeps the entire form and empties it: the robe is a woman’s, the envoy is picked for his coarseness, and the phrase ‘fit for you’ does the rest. The ritual of reward turns out to be the most efficient way to humiliate.

E5.20Bahram Turns the Insult

Bahram takes the insult in silence, then puts the women’s clothes on, summons his nobles and asks what answer to give. They renounce the Shah and refuse to follow Bahram if he stays the Shah’s servant; Bahram only feigns to restrain them as they walk out.

In woman’s trailing red he sat arrayed: He puts them on. Bahram wears the trailing red and the veil in front of the assembled nobles, spinning cotton on the distaff, and asks them what answer to give — turning a private insult into evidence. Clothes argue all through this quarrel: Bandvi will later save Khosrow’s life by putting on the royal robes where Bahram’s horsemen can see them (E6.9).

Recall the sage at Rey, that ancient seer: The chiefs argue from Rey: a sage there once turned from priest and Shah in anger at Ardeshir, who ignored the hardships of the men who served him. A Mobad of Rey will be quoted again at the next council (E5.24). Rey is Bahram’s own city and his family’s seat, and the rebellion comes supplied with its own wisdom, hostile to the founder of the dynasty.

E5.21The Lady Foretells Bahram’s Future

Hunting, Bahram follows a strange Gur-e-Khar to a splendid palace where a crowned lady seats him beside her and speaks with him in private. His men are feasted; he leaves shaken and transfigured, guided back by the same animal, and tells no one what happened.

A crowned lady sat in sovereign grace: A crowned woman on a golden throne in a palace nobody has seen before, who knows him, seats him beside her and sends his men a feast: the army will call her Bahram’s Luck (E5.23) and the High Mobad will call her a witch. Fortune in woman’s shape is old in Iran — in the Pahlavi book of Ardeshir the royal khwarrah follows the fugitive prince in the form of a ram — and Ferdowsi offers both readings without choosing. On the farr, see I, A4.1.

A serving man came in with barsom sprays: Barsom (Avestan baresman) is the bundle of twigs held by the officiant at Zoroastrian worship, plant stems in early practice and metal rods later. The enchanted palace keeps the observances exactly: a servant brings the sprays, the words of praise are spoken, and only then is the feast spread. Whatever the lady is, she is not irreligious.

The Gur-e-Khar led onward all the way: The animal leads him in and leads him out again, and the Mobad will explain it as a Div wearing a shape (E5.23) — which the poem has done before, in the Akvan Div who appears as a Gur-e-Khar (I, B14.28). Bahram chases it through a whole hot afternoon and never lays a hand on it.

E5.22Bahram Chubin Claims Royal Title

Bahram holds court on an ivory throne, wearing Siavash’s crown. The chief scribe warns Kharrad, and the two flee Balkh by night. Horsemen bring the scribe back; Bahram, hearing that he fled in fear, pays him for his losses and returns him to his desk.

He wore Siavash’s crown of ancient gold: Usurpation begins as furniture. Chinese brocade on the floor, golden seats, Siavash’s own crown, an ivory throne — Sasanian kingship was intensely visual, and the poem tracks the revolt through its properties long before anyone says the word. Bahram will not call himself Shah until E6.11; his scribe and his counselor read the ivory well enough to run that same night.

He bound his wrists in an unyielding chain: Two men in one chapter: he sends a hundred horsemen to drag a frightened scribe back for execution, then hears his excuse, repays everything he lost, adds more, and puts him back at his desk. Ferdowsi keeps doing this to Bahram. Every cruelty in the revolt is followed within a few lines by a scruple, which is why the episode resists being read as a simple condemnation.

E5.23Bahram Sends Swords to Hormizd

Kharrad reports the palace and the crowned lady; the High Mobad reads the vision as a Div’s trap and blames the Shah’s insult for the loss of Iran’s trust. Bahram sends Hormizd twelve swords; the Shah returns them snapped, and Bahram’s troops curse his line.

With twelve broad blades of watered steel, well known: Three messages in this quarrel travel as objects: a spindle, twelve bared swords of watered steel, and the same blades sent back snapped. None of them needs explaining — Bahram reads the broken steel aloud to his chiefs as a sentence passed on the whole army, and they answer with a curse on the Shah. It is the briefest exchange of letters in the book.

“That Gur-e-Khar was a Div in disguise: The High Mobad reads the vision as a dream-interpreter reads a dream: the animal was a Div in a shape, the palace was magic, the lady a witch sent to swell his pride. His lore of Divs may be doubtful; his politics are exact. The shameful dress was a blunder, Iran’s men have withdrawn their trust, and the army must be got out of Balkh. The Shah repents the cotton and recalls nothing.

E5.24Bahram Chubin Reveals His Ambition

Bahram lays his case before his chiefs, who answer in riddles and proverbs. His sister Gurdiyeh breaks in and argues from precedent that no subject has ever taken the crown. The council praises her; Bahram, unmoved, calls for wine and for Esfandiyar’s Seven Stages.

Fair Gurdiyeh, endowed with noble grace: Gurdiyeh’s speech is the longest sustained argument against usurpation in the Shahnameh, and she makes it like a lawyer, from precedent: Rostam refusing the crown while Kavus lay captive, Sofrye refusing it for the boy Qobad, Rizmehr freeing the king he was handed to kill (III, D11–D12). She is a historical figure, remembered by the historians as Gordya, and the poem has not finished with her.

Then tossed into the air his signet-ring: The council answers in riddles because a plain yes is treason: a ring thrown up to measure how long a subject may hold a crown, a date not worth reaching past its thorns, a saying of a Mobad at Rey that an hour as king beats a lifetime at the royal door. Only Gurdiyeh speaks in the open, and she begins the debate behind a curtain.

“Sing only Seven Stages; let it flow: For the wine after the council he asks the minstrel for one story only: Esfandiyar’s seven stages and the Ruyin Dezh (II, C7). A man who has just decided to take a crown calls for the episode about a prince who was promised a crown, was sent out to earn it, and died of the promise. On the haft khān, see I, B5.1.

E5.25Bahram’s Plan of the Coinage

Bahram writes to the Khan seeking peace, empties his treasury among his troops, garrisons Khorasan, and rides from Balkh to Rey, where he founds a mint striking coins in Khosrow Parviz’s name and sends a merchant to spend them in Tisfoon.

And made Prince Khosrow’s royal name appear: Name and title on the coin, with a mint mark, were the working proof of who reigned, so to strike a prince’s name was to publish a revolt in that prince’s name — and the merchant is told to spend the coins where they will reach the palace door. Coins struck in Bahram’s own name survive from his brief reign, which is not what the poem has him do here: this scheme is aimed at a father’s suspicion rather than at the public.

On Khordad day, within the month of Dey: Zoroastrian dating names both units: each of the thirty days of the month carries a divine name, as each month does, so a date is given as day-name within month-name — Khordad of Dey here, Khorshid of Azar at Bahram’s coronation (E6.11). When the two names coincide the day is a feast; Mehr of Mehr is Mehrgan (I, A6.1). On the month names, see I, A7.1.

E5.26Bahram’s Letter and Khosrow’s Flight

Bahram’s letter renounces Hormizd and declares for Khosrow, hoping the father will kill the son. Hormizd, seeing letter and coins, orders Khosrow poisoned. Warned by a chamberlain, Khosrow flees to Azar Abadagan, where the frontier lords swear to him; Hormizd imprisons his kin.

To swear before Azargashasp’s bright flame: Khosrow flees to the province of the fire and takes his oaths in front of it; he will promise it his crown and his horse if he wins (E6.5). The shrine of Azargashasp is usually identified with Shiz in Azar Abadagan, the modern Takht-e Soleyman, the great fire of the warrior estate, where kings are said to have made offerings before campaigns. On the fire itself, see I, A7.1.

E5.27Hormizd’s Captain Is Slain

Hormizd sends Ayin Gashasp against Bahram, with orders to sound him out first. A freed convict joins the army; a star-reader at Hamadan names him as the chief’s killer. Ayin Gashasp sends him to court carrying his own death warrant; the man reads it and beheads him.

There is an aged wealthy dame whose sight: The poem’s star-readers are usually Mobadan at court. This one is a provincial woman, aged and rich, famous enough in Hamadan to be fetched with a horse of her own and called the eye of heaven’s sphere — and the reading she gives is of the oldest kind: not the stars at all, but the face of the man who happens to walk past the tent.

Then broke the seal and read what it would say: The letter that carries its bearer’s death sentence is among the oldest stories there is: the Greeks told it of Bellerophon, sent to Lycia with folded tablets, and the Hebrew Bible of Uriah, sent to Joab with his own killing in his hand. Ferdowsi’s turn on it is that the sentence was begged for by the man the letter kills, and that the seal gets broken on the road.

Let him who seeks for honor never stand: A practical maxim in the middle of a murder: the poet stops to warn a commander never to sit alone in his tent in wartime, with no aide, no steed and no blade within reach. The asides in the Sasanian books are often like this, less consolation than field advice — and this lapse is why the chapter ends with an army dissolving like sheep in a snowstorm.

E5.28Hormizd Refuses Audience and Falls

The Shah shuts himself away, and rumor empties his court. Bandvi and Gostaham break out of prison, raise the city and lead troops to the palace; the crowd curses a king who sought his own son’s blood. They pull Hormizd from the throne and burn out his eyes.

A glowing bodkin pierced both eyes outright: The eyes are destroyed and the life spared, because a bodily blemish barred a man from the throne: blinding deposes without the odium of killing a king, and Byzantium used it for the same purpose. The record agrees with the poem that Hormizd was blinded in this coup and did not survive it long; his own wife’s brothers will finish the work with a bowstring (E6.8).

Such are the turns of heaven’s transient stage: Ferdowsi’s standing figure for the world as a lodging one passes through (on sarāy-e sepanjī, see I, B14.10) arrives here instead of a verdict. He says nothing about whether the blinding was deserved, though he has just shown us the mob at the gate and the iron. He will let Khosrow and Bahram argue that question for a whole chapter (E6.5), and will not settle it there either.

E5.29Khosrow Learns of His Father’s Blinding

A courier rides to the shrine of Azargashasp with news of the coup. Khosrow grieves, disclaims all joy in it, and marches from Barda, Ardabil and Armenia toward the capital, which welcomes him and sets up an ivory throne, while he thinks of his father in despair.

The young prince paled like fenugreek in flower: Shanbalid, usually taken as fenugreek in flower, is the poem’s standing image for a face draining to yellow. It falls three times in these chapters: on the prince here, on Khosrow again when he understands what his uncles have done (E6.8), and on the Caesar reading his letter (E6.14) — a son, a fugitive and an emperor, all the same color.

If this ill news has filled me with delight: He must be heard saying it. Khosrow’s disclaimer of any pleasure in his father’s ruin is made to his own men before he moves, because the charge of wanting it is exactly what Bahram will build his case on at Nahravan (E6.5) — and because his uncles are about to make the charge substantially true.