Notes · Book E6Khosrow Parviz

E6.1The Prelude

A short prelude on the turning heavens: one man is crowned, another feeds the monsters of the sea; one goes bare and sleepless, another lies in silk and fur; both end in dust. The poet then takes up the thread of Khosrow’s life again.

Another feeds the monsters of the sea: The bleakest of the poem’s reign-prologues opens the longest reign in the Sasanian books, and its terms are the ones this reign will turn on: one man crowned by Fate, another drowned, and wisdom itself only a way of feeling the hardship more clearly. The reign begins with a son at his blinded father’s feet and ends with another son doing worse (III, E8).

E6.2Khosrow Parviz Takes the Throne

Khosrow is crowned and jewels are showered on him. He tells the great men that the throne came by God’s grace, promises justice and peace, and binds his court by three pledges: not to harm the just, not to rebel, and not to covet other men’s goods.

And on the new crown let their jewels fall: Gems are scattered over the new crown: nesār (I, A6.4), the showering of coins and jewels over a king, a bride or an honored guest, which survives at Iranian weddings in the coins and sweets thrown over the couple. Here it is performed by men who have just changed sides, and by men who are about to.

E6.3Khosrow Seeks His Father’s Forgiveness

Khosrow comes to the blinded Hormizd and weeps, offering his service. Hormizd asks three things: his son’s voice each morning, a warrior and a sage with the chronicles of kings for company, and the deaths of Bandvi and Gostaham. Khosrow grants the first two.

Let him bring ancient books of kings of old: The blinded king asks to have the book of kings read to him. The Sasanian court kept such a chronicle — the Khwadāy-nāmag (I, A6.7) stands behind Ferdowsi’s own source — so Hormizd is asking for an earlier draft of the poem he is inside, to be read aloud by a scribe while a Pahlevan keeps him in talk of war and hunting.

The third: your mother’s brothers must no more: The third request is that the blinding be repaid: he wants his wife’s brothers dead. Khosrow pleads Bahram’s cavalry and does nothing, and within days those two uncles strangle Hormizd (E6.8). They made this reign and are the first thing in it that has to be destroyed; both came to violent ends at Khosrow’s hands or by his contriving, as the hermit will warn him (E6.13).

E6.4Bahram Leads His Troops against Khosrow

Bahram marches to Nahravan. Khosrow’s spies report a rebel who keeps royal state: audience, cheetah hunts, the book of Dimna. A Mobad lectures on the four shares of wisdom; Khosrow announces that he will ride out alone and offer peace before fighting. The armies camp across the water.

He hunts with cheetahs, as the kings have done: Coursing game with trained cheetahs was a royal sport in Iran from antiquity down to modern times, the animals carried to the field behind the saddle. The spies list it beside holding audience and reading Dimna’s book: a checklist of kingship, and the rebel passes every item on it. Notice what Khosrow sent them to learn — not numbers, but manners, and whether the army is of one mind.

The dehqan’s portion is a meager dole: The Mobad divides wisdom in four: half to kings, a share to the pious, a share to those who stand near the throne, a meager dole to the dehqan, and none at all to the thankless. Ferdowsi belonged to that landholding class (I, A6.23) and had his story from its keepers. He lets the court priest rank it next to last, and does not comment.

While Nahravan flowed on, a liquid bar: The Nahravan was a canal, not a river: the great artery east of the Tigris that watered the country around the capital, broad enough to halt an army and crossed by bridges, exactly as the poem has it. The same canal gave its name to the battle in which Ali broke the Kharijites.

E6.5Khosrow and Bahram Parley

Across the Nahravan the king and the rebel abuse and argue with each other at length. Khosrow offers him command of Iran; Bahram offers a gibbet. They dispute whether kingship comes by blood, merit or conquest, trading precedents from Ardeshir to Rostam, until Khosrow laughs and turns back.

God founded kingship on a threefold claim: Khosrow’s formula is the axis of the whole parley: justice, merit, ancestral name. He holds the third and argues that God supplies the rest; Bahram claims the first two and treats the third as an accident of five hundred years. It is the nearest the Shahnameh comes to arguing its own politics out loud, and the strongest case against hereditary right is given to the rebel.

Did Ardeshir not strike Ardavan dead: Bahram’s best card, and he plays it more than once: the dynasty he is attacking began exactly as he proposes to begin, when Ardeshir killed Ardavan and took the crown by force — a story this volume has already told (III, D7). Khosrow does not deny it. He answers that Ardeshir was the worthiest man alive and that God crowned him, which is an argument about merit, not blood.

Five hundred years of Sasan’s rule are spent: A round figure of the kind the poem uses for long dynasties: from Ardeshir’s victory to this parley is nearer three hundred and fifty years. Bahram is not dating anything. He is saying that the Sasanian turn has run its length, and the number is there to do the work of the argument.

I spring from famed Arash, and in the fight: The genealogy is a political claim. Bahram traces himself to Arash (I, B3.5) and to Gorgin son of Milad (I, B11.6), and his family, the Mehran, was one of the great Parthian houses, seated at Rey. ‘From Pars to Rey I shall transfer the crown’ and ‘Great power rightly to the Ashkanians falls’ make up the Arsacid case against the Sasanians, pressed three and a half centuries late.

E6.6Gurdiyeh’s Counsel and Khosrow’s Purpose

A Turk’s kamand takes Khosrow’s crown before Gostaham cuts the rope; Bahram, furious that his parley was broken, withdraws. Gurdiyeh presses him again with fables and the example of Sahm. Khosrow plans a night attack, tells too many men, and is talked out of it.

His kamand wound in sixty coils held tight: The rope of sixty coils is a standing formula in the poem, most often Rostam’s. Here a Turkish horseman uses one to lift the crown off a king’s head in front of both armies, and Gostaham’s blade on the rope is all that keeps the dynasty going. Bahram’s rage is genuine: the throw broke a parley he had agreed to, and he curses the man who made it.

An ox’s horns; and both his ears were gone.’: Gurdiyeh argues in fables — a sage of Balkh on the bitterness of true speech, then the ass that coveted an ox’s horns and came away without its ears, a tale of overreaching told all over the Near East. Her case against her brother is that he is that ass, and it is the last clean argument anyone makes before the fighting starts.

A night assault may alienate your own: Gostaham’s objection is the whole difficulty of a civil war, and he puts it as kinship: grandfather here and grandson there, a brother in one camp and his father in the other, and a night attack kills them in the dark without knowing which is which. On the shabikhun, see I, A6.21. The plan is also lost for a plainer reason — the king announced it to his troops first.

E6.7Khosrow Flees the Night Attack

Bahram strikes first at cockcrow with six thousand swordsmen. Khosrow watches the slaughter from a hill, charges the three Turks, and is deserted. He sends the treasure over the bridge, fights Bahram, shoots two horses from under their riders, then breaks the bridge and rides for Tisfoon.

He strung his bow and struck the charger’s chest: He shoots the horses. Twice within a few lines the young king puts an arrow into a charger’s chest and leaves its rider standing — Bahram first, then Yalan-sina — which is Rostam’s move against Ashkabus (I, B13.28). It is the one piece of heroic technique Khosrow is given in a chapter that is otherwise a rout, and it is how he reaches the bridge alive.

Timely retreat is better than to fight: The poem lets a king say what the heroic books never allow: a withdrawal in good time beats a fight. He says it aloud, counts his remaining ten companions, acts on it, and cuts the bridge behind him. Khosrow Parviz wins this war by outliving it, and the reader is told as much in the chapter where he loses the first battle.

E6.8Khosrow Leaves His Father and Flees

Khosrow tells the blinded Hormizd of his defeat and proposes Arab allies; Hormizd sends him to Rum and the Caesar’s kinship instead. As Bahram’s dragon banner appears, Khosrow rides for Rum; Bandvi and Gostaham turn back, strangle Hormizd with a bowstring, and rejoin him.

Depart at once; in Rum seek safer home: The one piece of Hormizd’s counsel in the whole reign that works. The flight into Roman territory is history: Khosrow appealed to the emperor — Maurice, whom Ferdowsi never names, calling him only Caesar — and Roman troops did put him back on his throne. The poem grounds the appeal in kinship rather than diplomacy: Rum descends from Fereydoon’s son Salm, so Caesar and Shah are cousins.

And from a war-bow loosed the braided string: They kill him with a bowstring, while the son who has just promised to guard his head rides for the frontier; the record likewise has Hormizd dead soon after his blinding. What Ferdowsi does with it is quieter than the murder. Khosrow reads their faces, understands everything, says nothing, and sends them by the desert road. The reign’s first act is a silence.

E6.9Bahram’s Pursuit and Bandvi’s Rescue

Bahram sends six thousand horsemen after the king. Khosrow rests at a Christian shrine on unleavened bread, watercress and date wine; when the pursuers appear, Bandvi puts on the royal robes, shows himself on the roof as the king, and buys a day’s delay while Khosrow escapes.

The bishop said, “We make clear wine from dates: Date wine, clear and garnet-colored, is right for lower Iraq, where the vine gives out and the palm takes over; so is the rest of the board — unleavened bread and watercress in a religious house whose stores are nearly empty. The king drinks three cups, eats barley bread, and sleeps on sand with his head in his uncle’s lap.

With his two courtiers, barsom twigs in hand: A Zoroastrian king says his prayers with barsom twigs (see E5.21) in a Christian house, is fed by its bishop and saved by its roof. The historical Khosrow Parviz was on famously good terms with Christians: letters preserved on the Roman side record his offerings to the shrine of Sergius in thanks for a prayer granted. The hospitality in this chapter is not sentimental invention.

He donned the robe embroidered all with gold: The stratagem is that the regalia are the man: crown, earrings, torque and the gold-woven robe from Chin, seen at a distance from a roof, and six thousand horsemen conclude that the king is cornered inside. Then he changes back into ordinary clothes and negotiates as himself. A quarrel that began with a spindle and a shift (E5.19) keeps being fought in clothing.

E6.10Bandvi Is Taken to Bahram Chubin

Bandvi tells the pursuers from the roof that Khosrow is long gone, and asks quarter to speak to their chief. Young Bahram takes him alive; Bahram Chubin rages at both, spares Bandvi’s life, and has him chained in the young man’s keeping.

But Khosrow’s hand will kill you soon; that day: Bahram refuses to kill the man who has just made fools of a whole detachment, and instead tells him, accurately, who will: the historians have Khosrow put Bandvi to death in the end. The rebel keeps being handed the true prediction and the scruple about prisoners, and it is the legitimate king who does the killing.

Know that the king of kings is kin to me: Bandvi’s defense is his blood — he is the king’s mother’s brother — offered to a man whose entire case is that blood confers nothing. He and Gostaham are usually reckoned to one of the great Parthian houses, which makes this war less a rebellion against a dynasty than a quarrel between such houses with a Sasanian standing in the middle of it.

E6.11Bahram Chubin Claims the Throne

Bahram puts the question of the throne to Iran’s chiefs. Some hail him, some urge him to seek Khosrow’s pardon; when one proposes waiting for a royal heir, Bahram swears to behead any woman of the royal line. A written pact is signed and sealed, and he is crowned.

My sharpened sword shall strike her head away: The one moment the poem lets him be simply monstrous, and he picks it himself, in front of the men he is asking to elect him: to keep the throne he must end the line, and any woman of it dies. Their swords come out — and his next order is that nobody may draw a sword in his hall. He has just found out what he is afraid of.

A lesser star usurped the solar throne: The coronation gets no description at all. It gets a date and images of substitution: a lesser star on the sun’s throne, the world turned to dust and shadow, the royal cypress felled, briars in the garden. Ferdowsi has just let four chiefs praise the man at length, and enters his own verdict as omen instead of comment. On the dating, see E5.25.

Each chief then testified and signed his name: The election is recorded as a legal instrument: a pact drafted at night, every chief testifying and signing, the whole written on precious silk and closed with a golden seal. Bahram did reign, and coins were struck in his name (E5.25). Many scholars think Ferdowsi’s source here included a separate book about Bahram Chubin, which would help explain how much of the rebel’s own case the poem preserves.

E6.12The Plot against Bahram Chubin

In prison Bandvi works on young Bahram until the young man makes him swear on the Zand-Avesta, frees him, and plots to kill Chubin at polo. The plotter’s wife, in love with Chubin, betrays him; Chubin feels the hidden armor, cuts him down, and Bandvi flees toward Mawsil.

He brought the Zand-Avesta to his side: The Zand is the Pahlavi commentary on the Avesta, and ‘Zand-Avesta’ the two taken together; an oath sworn on the book is the strongest these Zoroastrians have. Both sides quote the same page at each other: Khosrow cites its rule on the man who leaves the holy road — counsel him a year, then put him to death — at the parley, and a chief in Bahram’s own council cites it straight back (E6.11).

Chubin touched each back gently, keen to feel: A polo ground is the one place where a man has no armor on, which is why it is chosen for the killing and why Chubin goes along the line patting backs through the silk. On chowgān, see I, B6.6. The plot fails on a domestic matter — the plotter’s wife is in love with the man her husband means to kill — and sentence is carried out in the middle of the game.

E6.13The Hermit’s Prophecy to Khosrow

Crossing the desert, Khosrow is fed by an Arab caravan chief and by a merchant, and a storm breaches the walls of Karsan for him. At Warigh a hermit knows him at sight and foretells Caesar’s help, a daughter’s hand, victory within a year, and betrayal by Gostaham.

He bade his scribe, Rozbeh, record the name: The king’s scribe takes down the name and the village of a man who has fed the army. The poem keeps the whole list from this flight — the bishop with his watercress, Kais son of Haris with his cow and his kabab, the merchant with his bales — and those names survive only because a fugitive with nothing left still traveled with a secretary.

Your mother named you Bistam; yet you claim: The couplet preserves both names of one man: the poem’s Gostaham is the Bistam of the histories, Khosrow’s maternal uncle, and the hermit uses the birth name to show that he knows what he is talking about. He is right, too — Bistam’s revolt against Khosrow ran for years in the east. He is not the Gostaham of Volume I (I, A7.4).

You shall have legions, and his daughter fair: Roman troops for a Persian claimant are history. The marriage is another matter: Persian tradition makes Khosrow the Caesar’s son-in-law — the Maryam of this poem — while the Greek historians say nothing of such a match and many scholars doubt it took place. The hermit promises legions and daughter in one breath, which is how the tradition remembers the bargain.

E6.14Caesar’s Horseman Comes to Khosrow

A Roman horseman brings Caesar’s welcome and a promise of arms. Khosrow briefs his envoys for the Roman court — to win at polo and archery, to write few words for philosophers to weigh — and sends them. Kharrad delivers the letter standing, and Caesar weeps.

His wise philosophers will weigh each word: The briefing treats Rum as the one rival worth out-arguing: keep the letter short because their philosophers weigh every word, leave them nothing to catch, and beat their chiefs at polo and archery while you are there. Ferdowsi’s Rum is not a barbarian court but a place of measured speech, which seems to be the estimate the Sasanian chancery held of its opposite number.

Kharrad replied, “The Shah has not deemed fit: Kharrad refuses to sit in the emperor’s hall because he is carrying his master’s letter and has not been given leave to sit in front of it. The envoy’s body is part of the message: his four colleagues take the four gold seats, and he stands. Protocol of exactly this kind is what the poem’s embassies are for.

E6.15Caesar’s Reply to Khosrow

Caesar tells Kharrad that he holds Khosrow above his nearest kin and would give his eyes if they were asked for. He has an old scribe write a generous answer promising men, arms and treasure, and sends it by a horseman to the waiting Shah.

If he should ask my eyes, I would agree: A courtesy formula — I would give him my eyes — spoken to the envoy of a man whose father had his eyes burned out a few weeks earlier, and reported without a flicker. Ferdowsi does not point at it. The Sasanian books are full of these collisions, and they are part of why the late reigns read as grimly as they do.

Both arms and gold are ready to your hand: Caesar promises men, arms, treasure and, if he lacked them, borrowed money, in a letter written to gladden the heart like Paradise — and his sages talk him out of every word of it in the chapter that follows. The promise and the refusal are set as two short chapters in a row, so that the reversal lands on the reader at the speed it lands on Khosrow.

E6.16Caesar Refuses Aid to Khosrow

On his counselor’s advice Caesar calls in four Roman sages, who advise refusing aid: Iran has bled Rum since Iskandar, and a restored Khosrow will demand tribute. Caesar changes his mind and writes so. Khosrow answers with restrained anger, threatens to seek the Khan instead, and sends Tukhar back to Rum.

They said, “Since Iskandar departed life: The Roman sages give a Roman reading of the last nine centuries: Iranian aggression ever since Iskandar, now being repaid by a God who has let Sasanian fortune dim, so give the man nothing. Ferdowsi lets the other side have a case, and a reasonable one. Khosrow’s reply is to refer the whole question to historians — ask old men who keep such matters, and ask Rum’s own sages.

Envoys shall go where the Khan’s banners lead: The counter-threat is the real logic of the frontier: two empires bidding for the Turks, and a Persian king shut out of Rum can turn east instead. It is not an empty gesture toward a distant people — Bahram Chubin himself will end his life among them. Khosrow makes the threat, keeps his temper, and sends the letter back by Tukhar.

Let them decide which bird began the fight: The war of the crows and the owls is one of the tales of Kalila and Dimna, a quarrel so old that nobody can say which bird began it. Khosrow throws it at a court that has just billed him for nine centuries of Iranian wrongs — and the book he is quoting is the one his enemy was reported to be reading on the march (E6.4).

E6.17Khosrow Receives Caesar’s Second Letter

Caesar consults his minister and astrologers, who foretell a long reign for Khosrow. He then writes offering troops, treasure and his daughter, provided Khosrow swears to end the ancient feud, forgo Rum’s tribute and leave the Roman frontier alone. Khosrow’s Iranians welcome the peace.

For thirty-eight full years his reign shall last: The figure is the one the record gives Khosrow Parviz: some thirty-eight years, from his restoration to his murder. Ferdowsi lets Rum’s star-readers announce the true length of the reign before it has properly begun, so that the whole of this magnificent book is read against a term already fixed.

I have consulted Plato’s tables old: Astrological tables (zij, see I, A8.17) are credited here to Plato — a Roman authority for a Roman court. Persian and Arabic writers regularly turned the Greek philosophers into masters of the stars, though the tables actually used in Iran descended from Ptolemy and from Indian models. Caesar’s men forecast by book, as Iran’s do.

E6.18Khosrow Replies on the Alliance

Khosrow answers in Pahlavi, swearing to demand no tribute, to restore the towns Rum has lost, and to take Caesar’s daughter as his wife. He traces his line from Kioumars to Ardeshir and claims kinship with Rum through Salm. Caesar reads it and consults his chiefs.

Among your distant fathers Salm is known: The claim is genealogical, not merely polite. In the Shahnameh Rum descends from Salm, eldest son of Fereydoon, so Caesar and Khosrow are branches of one house and the long war between them is a family quarrel over the murder of Iraj (Volume I). On that footing a Roman marriage can be presented as a reunion rather than a foreign match.

In ancient Pahlavi his hand portrayed: Pahlavi, Middle Persian, was the language of Sasanian government and of the books from which Ferdowsi’s sources descend. He names it at the solemn moments of these reigns — this treaty, Khosrow’s battlefield prayer in E6.24, the victory dispatch in E6.39 — a quiet signal that the document behind the verse is an old one.

E6.19The Mystery of Caesar’s Talisman

Caesar has his adepts build an automaton of a weeping widow. Gostaham, Balvi, Shapur and Andiyan all counsel it in vain; Kharrad alone sees that its motions repeat and exposes the trick. Caesar then shows him a rider hung in the air beneath a lodestone dome.

She lets the drops fall always on one place: Kharrad’s argument is from repetition: the tears always fall in one spot, the hand always travels the same path, and the attendants are as still as the woman. In a poem where the truth is usually disclosed by a dream, an omen or a messenger from heaven, this is a rare piece of plain detection, and it is the silence of the servants that gives the game away.

The dome of lodestone holds him there displayed.”: An iron figure suspended in air beneath a magnetic vault is among the oldest wonders in the books; ancient writers describe temple statues hung by loadstone, and the marvel passed through Arabic and Persian collections as a standard curiosity. Persian calls the magnet āhan-robā, ‘iron-snatcher’, formed like kahrobā, ‘straw-snatcher’, for amber (see I, A4.4).

E6.20Kharrad’s Counsel to Caesar

Caesar asks about Indian belief, and Kharrad describes cow-veneration, fire-entry and the sphere of ether. He then turns on Rum, quoting the Messiah’s own precepts against Roman wealth and war, and sets out the Zoroastrian estates. Caesar praises him and gives him a crown.

And holds the barsom twigs with reverent care: Barsom (Avestan baresman) is the bundle of twigs, in later practice metal rods, held in the hand during Zoroastrian prayer. Ferdowsi has laymen hold it as well as priests: Bandvi takes it up at the king’s own table (E6.29), and Yalan-sina hands it to Bahram in a crone’s hut, where he cannot remember the words (E6.27).

‘If someone seizes your shirt, let anger go: Kharrad answers Rum out of its own book, stringing together the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount — give up the shirt, take the blow, return no harm for harm — to argue that Roman palaces and legions refute the Roman creed. Sayings of Jesus in this vein circulated widely in Arabic and Persian devotional writing, and the Iranian sage quotes them accurately enough to sting.

E6.21Caesar Sends Aid and a Bride

Caesar sends seventy thousand troops under his brother Niyatus and gives his daughter Maryam to Khosrow with an enormous dowry. He rides three stages with the train, charges Niyatus with her safety, and turns back weeping. Khosrow greets bride and legions with joy.

He had a daughter, Maryam by name: The Caesar of these chapters is the emperor who really did restore Khosrow to his throne with Roman troops, Maurice. The marriage to an imperial daughter is reported in eastern sources and doubted by modern historians. Maryam has a long afterlife in Persian poetry: in Nezami’s Khosrow and Shirin she is the Roman queen who stands between the king and Shirin.

On Bahram day great Caesar led the way: Every day of the Zoroastrian month carries a name (see I, A7.1), and the twentieth is Bahram day, belonging to the yazata of victory, Avestan Verethragna. It is chosen here to launch an army. The same day returns as the worst in the calendar for the man who bears its name: Bahram Chubin dreads it, shuts himself away on it, and dies on it (E6.37).

E6.22Bandvi Meets Khosrow on the Road

Khosrow musters at Duk, gives the legions to Niyatus, and rides toward Khanjast, where he finds Bandvi alive and Mawsil of Armenia waiting. He hears how Bandvi escaped, rewards Mawsil, prays at the fire of Azargashasp, and returns to camp as Nimruz’s troops arrive.

Armenia’s chief, a man of high estate: Mawsil is usually identified with the Armenian prince Mushegh Mamikonean, who brought his cavalry to Khosrow’s side in the war against Bahram. Armenian and Roman help, not Iranian loyalty, is what puts this king back on his throne — a debt the poem records plainly and the king repays at length in E6.30.

And jewels on the sacred Fire he placed: The belt (kamar) was the badge of rank, and a king who unbuckles it and lays its jewels on the fire gives away his standing before he asks for victory. On Azargashasp itself see I, A7.1; the fire burned in Azarbaijan, which is why the whole campaign against Bahram is fought around it, and Khosrow returns to it twice more (E6.28, E6.30).

E6.23The Intercepted Letter of Bahram Chubin

Bahram writes secretly to Khosrow’s chiefs, urging them to abandon the Sasanian line. His envoy, disguised as a merchant, sees Khosrow’s strength and hands the letters over. Khosrow forges encouraging replies, and Bahram, deceived, ignores his elders and marches to Azar Abadagan.

Do not put trust in the Sasanian throne: Bahram is not simply a mutinous captain but a claimant with an argument. He belonged to the Mehran, one of the great Parthian houses that outranked the Sasanians in antiquity, and his letters treat Ardeshir’s line as upstarts who devour their own servants; coins were struck in his name during his brief reign. The case is put here in its fullest form, and it is not a stupid one.

He called a scribe; false letters were prepared: The forgery is Khosrow’s one clever stroke of the war, and Ferdowsi makes it cost something. On the battlefield Bahram taunts Shapur with a letter Shapur never wrote, and the king has to promise publicly to clear his name (E6.25). The trick that beats the rebel also shames the loyal man in whose hand it was written.

E6.24Khosrow Battles Bahram Chubin

The armies meet. Bahram kills the Roman champion Kut in single combat and sends the split body back; Khosrow laughs, and Niyatus rebukes him. A Roman charge is destroyed, the dead heaped into a hill called Bahram-chid, and Khosrow gives the next day’s fighting to Iranians.

And called it Bahram-chid, a dreadful sight: Naming a place from what happened there is a regular habit of the poem’s geography. The name is most plausibly read as Bahram’s piling-up, from chidan, to heap or stack, though the reading is not settled. The hill is a monument to the rebel raised out of Roman bodies, and it is Khosrow’s own men who put his enemy’s name on it.

A man like Kut Hazara, first of men: Kut’s second name appears to mark his command: hazār is a thousand, and Niyatus had just set seventy chiefs each over a thousand men (E6.21). The Roman who demanded to be shown the slave who had put a king to flight is sent home split to the breast, strapped upright on his own horse, with the wound packed in musk and a message for Caesar.

E6.25Soroush Saves Khosrow from Bahram

Bahram’s elephant is shot from under him and he fights on foot. Khosrow rides out with fourteen chosen men, who scatter; chased into a blind cave, he prays and is carried to safety by Soroush. Bahram, seeing it, despairs of his fortune, and Khosrow renews the battle.

Robed green, he rode upon a snow-white steed: On Soroush see I, A1.1. What is new here is the use the king makes of him. Khosrow comes down the far side of the mountain and turns the rescue into an announcement: heaven has declared for him, and his flight was no cowardice. It is the one open miracle of the Sasanian books, and within a page it is doing political work.

“O knave, your secret note declared you mine: The taunt is the return of the forged letters of E6.23. Bahram believes he holds Shapur’s pledge, Shapur knows he wrote nothing, and only Khosrow knows why the letter exists; the king promises to clear the matter up in its proper season, which is the most a forger can offer the man he has forged.

E6.26Khosrow Overthrows Bahram Chubin

Bahram’s arrow, Khosrow’s spear and Khosrow’s sword all fail in single combat. That night Bandvi sends a herald between the armies proclaiming pardon, and by dawn the tents across the plain stand empty. Bahram loads three thousand camels with his treasure and rides away.

The sword-blade shattered with that mighty blow: Arrow, spear and sword fail in turn: Bahram’s shaft lodges in the king’s brocade, Khosrow’s spearhead snaps on the rebel’s belt, and the royal sword breaks off inside his helmet. Khosrow cannot kill this man with his own hand. It will take a hundred-year-old Turk with a knife under his sleeve to do it (E6.37).

For God’s sake, he forgives each one of you: The war is settled by a herald rather than a sword. Bandvi sends a clear-voiced crier between the lines at night to promise pardon for every offense, hidden or public, and by morning the plain is bare. Bahram, who has out-fought the king on three days running, wakes a private man with three thousand camel-loads of gold.

E6.27Bahram Escapes to the Khan of Chin

Nastooh gives chase. Bahram, resting at an old woman’s hut, is served barley bread on a sieve and wine in a gourd, and hears from her what the world thinks of him. He fires a reed-bed, takes Nastooh, spares him, and rides on by Rey to the Khan.

She brought an ancient sieve and on it spread: Everything in the scene is poor: a sieve lined with a scrap of waterskin for a table, barley bread, a cut gourd for a wine-cup. Into it Ferdowsi puts the only honest verdict on Bahram in the poem, spoken by a woman who does not know his face — that the wise laughed at him from the day he rose. He answers in the third person and condemns him to barley bread on the sieve and wine from the gourd.

Yalan-sina gave barsom for the prayer: Even in flight the meal is taken with the proper rite: Yalan-sina produces the barsom (E6.20) for the grace said over food, and Bahram, who has just lost an empire, cannot remember the words. It is the smallest detail of his collapse and the one that says most.

E6.28Khosrow Takes Bahram’s Camp

Khosrow gives Bahram’s camp to his troops, prays in the thorny dust, and writes his victory to Caesar. Caesar returns a crown, gold and priestly vestments sewn with jeweled crosses. Khosrow fears both wearing them and refusing them, and wears them on his counselor’s advice.

If jeweled crosses deck my royal dress: Caesar’s gift is a wardrobe of Roman church vestments, and the king’s difficulty is entirely political: to wear them is to look like a convert, to refuse them is to insult his patron. Khosrow Parviz was in fact open-handed toward Christian shrines and is reported to have sent offerings to the shrine of Saint Sergius. The poem shows the awkwardness rather than the devotion, and the court draws both conclusions at once.

By God’s command, I barred his path of flight.”: The dispatch improves on the facts. Khosrow tells Caesar that God shut off the rebel’s escape, though E6.27 has just shown Bahram riding clear, burning his pursuers in a reed-bed and sending the captured Nastooh home alive with a message. This is the official version being drafted, a page after we were given the other one.

E6.29Maryam Reconciles Niyatus and Bandvi

At the victory feast Khosrow, dressed in Roman robes, murmurs the Zoroastrian grace while Bandvi holds the barsom. Niyatus throws down his bread in protest, Bandvi strikes him, and the Romans arm. Maryam goes to their camp and reconciles them before the quarrel becomes a battle.

The Shah began the mealtime prayer’s low drone: The murmured grace is the bāj, said in an undertone over food with the barsom in hand (E6.20) and not to be broken by speech. Niyatus sees jeweled crosses on the king’s robe and hears a Zoroastrian prayer said over the bread, and reads the combination as a studied insult to Christ — a quarrel manufactured entirely out of Caesar’s own gifts.

And struck the Roman lord across the face!: The blow across a Roman prince’s face at the king’s own table is in character: Bandvi is the uncle who makes kings and breaks manners. Khosrow covers for him here and Maryam saves the alliance, but the king is keeping a longer account, and he settles it in E6.44.

E6.30Khosrow Rewards Niyatus and the Romans

Khosrow musters and pays the Romans, restores to Niyatus the cities taken from Rum, and sends them home. He worships a week at Azargashasp, then holds court in Anooshirvan’s palace, granting provinces to his chiefs and proclaiming justice and relief for the poor.

All cities Qobad took from Roman hands: This is the price of the Roman legions, and the poem remembers it accurately. The settlement that followed the war handed back to Rum the disputed frontier towns and most of Persarmenia — the gains of Qobad’s and Anooshirvan’s wars, bought with a great deal of Iranian blood. Ferdowsi presents as a gift to Niyatus what the record presents as a cession.

The royal stores shall grant three man of wine: A man — the maund of later usage — is a weight rather than a measure, and its value varied widely by place and period. The striking part is the provision itself: a daily ration of wine from the treasury for any man who needs his breakfast, on the single condition that he bless the king. Royal justice in these chapters is always costed out.

E6.31Ferdowsi Laments the Death of His Son

Ferdowsi breaks off to mourn his son, dead at thirty-seven while the poet lives on at sixty-five. He reproaches the young man for going first and outrunning his slow steps, then prays that God light his soul and forgive his faults.

At sixty-five I linger under heaven: One of the few places the poem can be dated from the inside: the poet is sixty-five and has buried a son of thirty-seven. Ferdowsi is usually thought to have been born around 940, which would put this passage in the first years of the eleventh century, with the whole reign of Khosrow Parviz still ahead of him.

He proved a harsh companion on the road: The grief is held inside a single figure: two travelers on a road, one of whom has walked off ahead, found younger company and left an old man with the load. It is the son, not death, who is reproached, and the complaint is about manners.

E6.32Bahram Chubin and the Khan of Chin

Bahram is received in Chin with honor and an oath of friendship. Noting that the Khan’s champion Makatura carries off a thousand dinars every morning, he persuades the Khan to refuse him. Makatura rages, and the two exchange an arrow and a sword as tokens of challenge.

Each dawn a thousand dinars he would claim: Turan is being used to think about Iran. The Khan keeps a champion stronger than himself and buys his loyalty by the thousand dinars each morning, because if the payments stop the army rises — close to the position Hormizd found himself in with Bahram. In Chin the rebel destroys the kind of man he had been, and lectures a king on the danger of over-mighty servants.

Chubin reached down and loosed his sword of pride: The challenge is delivered in objects. Makatura hands over an arrow and Bahram his sword, each giving his enemy the instrument he means to kill him with, to be kept until its use becomes clear.

E6.33Makatura Falls to Bahram Chubin

The two fight before the Khan and his Turks. Makatura shoots first and his arrow is turned by Bahram’s jowshan; Bahram’s shaft goes through his spine, and he dies upright, his feet bound to the saddle. The Khan, secretly delighted, loads Bahram with treasure.

Chubin held his ground and stood apart: Bahram concedes the first shot on a point of etiquette, since Makatura began the quarrel, then stands still to let the archer spend his art before answering. The shape of the fight is that of Rostam’s duel with Ashkabus (I, B13.28): the hero absorbs everything the other man has, then needs one arrow.

For he had lashed his feet before the fight: A rider’s feet were strapped to the saddle so that he could not be shaken out of it, and the precaution produces the chapter’s grim joke: Makatura dies sitting upright, and the Khan, looking on, insists he is asleep. Bahram’s correction takes the form of a blessing — may all your enemies sleep so, on Turanian horses.

E6.34Bahram Chubin Slays the Lion-Ape

A monster called the Lion-Ape has swallowed the Khan’s daughter, and the Khan is too ashamed to ask for vengeance. His queen appeals to Bahram, who rides out alone and kills the beast with arrows, spear and sword. The Khan gives him a second daughter in marriage.

The people called the creature Lion-Ape: The last monster in the Shahnameh, and a composite one: larger than a horse, tawny-hided, black of ear and mouth, with two cable-thick locks for a mane, a lion’s claws, and the power of drawing its prey in by its breath, as the poem’s dragons do. The fight gives the rebel abroad the heroic career Iran would not let him have — a haft khān of one stage.

Revenge, though it should bring me praise or shame: The Khan will not admit that a beast ate his daughter, because the telling would shame a horseman; so his wife keeps the matter sealed for months and then hires a foreigner. Women carry much of the business of these chapters — this queen, Maryam between two armies (E6.29), Gurdiyeh at the head of one (E6.42).

E6.35Khosrow Writes to the Khan of Bahram

Khosrow demands Bahram in fetters; the Khan refuses, standing on his oath. Khosrow’s chiefs advise sending a patient envoy instead. Bahram meanwhile urges the Khan to invade Iran, promising him Rum as well, and marches out of Chin with Turkish troops behind him.

The Heytalian crown rests beneath my sign: The Heytal are the Hephthalites, whose eastern empire was broken in the sixth century by the Turks in alliance with Anooshirvan, so the Khan’s boast that their crown lies under his seal is historically just. Their king Khoshnavaz appears earlier in this volume as the man Pirooz broke faith with — the cautionary tale Caesar quotes in E6.17.

On Sapandarmad day he led his train: Another named day (see E6.21): Sapandarmad, the fifth of the month, belongs to the Amahraspand of the earth, Avestan Spenta Armaiti. Ferdowsi dates both great marches of this war by the day-name, and gives Bahram’s invasion the day of the earth he means to take.

E6.36Kharrad’s Mission to the Khan

Kharrad Barzin goes as envoy and wins the Khan’s favor with wise talk, but cannot shake his oath. Turning to the women’s quarters, he recruits a steward, befriends the despised old Turk Kulun, and earns the queen’s gratitude by curing her daughter’s fever.

For Hormizd’s mother was a daughter born: The kinship is real within the poem. Anooshirvan married a daughter of the Khan of Chin, in the embassy of Mehran Setad told earlier in this volume, and Hormizd was her son; the Turkish blood in Khosrow therefore comes through his father.

And kashk he fed through poverty and pain: Kashk, soured milk curds dried into hard cakes and softened again in water, was the cheapest protein in the Iranian countryside; a man living on millet and kashk in a coat of skins is the poorest man in Chin, which is exactly the instrument Kharrad wants. It survives in Iranian cooking still, most familiarly as kashk-e bādemjān.

“And streamside chicory, the herb we need.”: Pomegranate juice and wild chicory are cooling remedies of the standard Persian pharmacy, prescribed for an inflamed liver and a fevered head. Chicory, kāsni, is still sold in Iran as a cordial for those complaints. The disguise is plausible because a scribe of Kharrad’s training would genuinely have known some medicine.

E6.37Bahram Falls by Kharrad’s Design

Kharrad arms Kulun with a knife and the Khan’s seal, stolen in clay by the queen. At Marv, on the unlucky Bahram day, Kulun stabs Bahram and keeps silent under torture. Bahram counsels his sister, bequeaths his army to Yalan-sina, repents, and dies.

Mark well Bahram day; keep that day in sight: The twentieth of the month is Bahram day, the day of victory (E6.21), and the one day in thirty that Bahram Chubin fears: he shuts himself in with a dish of apples, quinces and pomegranates and sees nobody. Kharrad, who has watched the habit for years, sends the knife on that day. The man named for victory is killed on his own name-day.

She pressed the clay upon his signet’s face: Authority in a Sasanian document lay in the seal rather than the signature, and letters traveled closed with a lump of clay struck by the owner’s signet; such clay sealings survive in quantity. That is why a queen can steal a king’s power while he sleeps off his wine, with nothing but a pinch of clay pressed to his ring.

Should but one daughter live of Sasan’s line: Gurdiyeh’s reproach is a prophecy the poem keeps. She tells her brother that one surviving daughter of Sasan would have had the obedience of every town in Iran — and the dynasty’s last years do put two Sasanian women on the throne, Poorandokht and Azarmidokht (III, E9).

E6.38The Khan’s Vengeance for Bahram

News of the murder reaches the Khan, who mourns, burns Kulun’s children and their whole quarter, hunts Kharrad in vain, and drags his own queen out by the hair and strips her of her wealth. He puts all Chin into blue mourning.

The Khan and court put on the mournful blue: Dark blue is the color of mourning in the Shahnameh; the word covers indigo and the livid color of a bruise, and a grieving household is put into blue or black. The Khan dresses a whole country in it for a foreign rebel, having just burned an assassin’s children and robbed his own wife.

But Kharrad did not fall into his hand: The design works exactly as drawn. The Khan burns a household, disgraces his queen, sends dromedaries out too late, and never touches the man who arranged any of it. Dying, Bahram had already reasoned out that nobody but Iranians could have managed the thing (E6.37).

E6.39Khosrow Rewards Kharrad

Kharrad returns and is rewarded with a crown, jewels and a hundred thousand dinars. Khosrow announces the victory through the realm in Pahlavi, writes to Caesar, feasts a week, endows the fires, and draws the moral that an aged Turk can fell the bravest man.

He filled his mouth with jewels, bright and rare: Filling a man’s mouth with jewels is the court’s way of paying for words, as a robe of honor pays for service; the reward names the faculty it rewards. Kharrad won this war with his tongue, in the Khan’s audience hall and the queen’s private rooms, and is paid in the mouth.

An aged Turk may cast him into dust.”: Khosrow reduces the whole war to a maxim — leave the rightful way and a hundred-year-old Turk will put you in the dust — and his Mobadan promptly turn the maxim into a curse for anyone who crosses the king. Bahram Chubin has become a proverb within a page of his death.

E6.40The Khan’s Suit to Gurdiyeh

Ashamed of neglecting Bahram’s family, the Khan sends his brother to Marv with gifts, an account of his vengeance, and an offer of marriage to Gurdiyeh. She praises the Khan, pleads her house’s mourning, and promises an answer in four months.

To noble Gurdiyeh; speak for my sake: Gurdiyeh, Bahram’s sister, belongs to the record as well as the poem — the Gordiya of Sasanian history — and the chapters ahead give her more room than any woman in these reigns: she brings an army out of Turan, is drawn into Gostaham’s revolt and married to him, then kills him and reaches Khosrow’s own court. The Khan’s suit, arriving wrapped in an apology, is the first of several offers she will weigh.

When four full months of mourning have passed by: Her answer is a small masterpiece of delay in which no single statement is false. She praises the vengeance, grants that marriage is the proper lot of a woman with no road home, pleads a house in mourning and the scandal of a hasty wedding, and asks four months — which is the time she needs to muster and pay an army (E6.41).

E6.41Gurdiyeh Takes Counsel and Flees Marv

Gurdiyeh tells her counselors that marriages between Iran and Turan end as Siavash’s did. She writes secretly to Gordvi, musters and pays eleven hundred and sixty picked riders, loads three thousand camels, and slips out of Marv by night for Iran.

Recall the end that Siavash received: Gurdiyeh argues from the poem itself. The one great marriage between Iran and Turan was Siavash’s to Afrasiab’s daughter, and it ended with his head struck off and two countries at war for generations (I, B9). The Shahnameh’s characters read the Shahnameh, and cite it as a precedent book.

Eleven hundred and sixty she chose: The exact figure, set against the round three thousand camels, is the point. She summons the muster officer, pays the men at the divan, inspects them herself, and takes eleven hundred and sixty, each reckoned a match for ten — everything a sepahbod does before a march. Then she tells them they may stay behind if they would rather.

E6.42The Khan Sends Tobarg after Gurdiyeh

Deserters bring word to the Khan, who sends Tobarg with six thousand Turks to bring Gurdiyeh back by persuasion or by force. In her brother’s armor she meets him unrecognized, hears the Khan’s new terms, challenges him, and kills him with her spear.

She donned her brother’s armor for the fight: A woman in her brother’s armor, unrecognized until she lifts her helmet, is a scene Ferdowsi has staged before: Gordafarid rode out against Sohrab and was unmasked when her helmet came away (I, B1.6). The difference is who controls it. Gurdiyeh chooses the moment to show her face, and kills the man she shows it to.

The Khan would call him “Old Wolf” time and again: The Khan’s name for his champion is a compliment where it is given: Turkic tradition honored the wolf as an ancestor, and wolf-names were worn with pride. In these chapters the word is used to wound, as when Gordvi calls his own brother a mottled wolf across the battle line (E6.25) — one animal, two opposite manners. Iranian naming could go either way: Gorgin, whom Bahram claims for an ancestor, is a wolf-name too.

E6.43Gurdiyeh Writes to Gordvi

Gurdiyeh halts at Amuy and writes to her brother, reporting Bahram’s death, the pursuit and her victory, asking him to lay her case and her counsel before the Shah, and waiting there for an answer.

Upon the fourth day Amuy came in sight: Amuy is the crossing-town on the Jihun, the Oxus; the river’s modern name, Amu Darya, is usually traced to it. It is not the Amol of Mazandaran that the earlier books keep returning to (I, A6.1), though the two names are easily run together — and these are the crossings the Khan had ordered watched (E6.35).

E6.44Bandvi Is Slain by Khosrow

Secure at last, Khosrow can no longer bear that his father’s killer is also his kinsman. He has Bandvi bound at the wine-board and his hands and feet cut off, and sends a rider to summon Gostaham out of Khorasan.

My father’s killer passes here each day: Bandvi and Gostaham are the uncles who deposed and killed Hormizd to make this king, and Khosrow has waited until Bahram was dead to settle with them. The record agrees: Khosrow II had Bindoy put to death, and his brother Vistahm — the poem’s Gostaham — raised the east in revolt for years afterward. That is where the rider at the end of this chapter is going.

E6.45Gostaham Rebels and Weds Gurdiyeh

Hearing that Khosrow has killed his brother Bandvi, Gostaham raises the north in revolt and lives off raids. Gurdiyeh reaches him with her warriors after her flight from Chin. Yalan-sina sounds her out, and she agrees to marry Gostaham because he is Iranian.

He heard that Khosrow, drunk, had Bandvi slain: Bandvi and Gostaham are Khosrow’s own maternal uncles, the men who pulled his father Hormizd down and set him on the throne. That is the knot of this whole revolt: the vengeance he owes for his father’s blood can only fall on his mother’s brothers. The histories tell much the same story of Vinduyih and Vistahm, and of their long rising in the north and the east, with the Caspian mountains behind them.

She said: “An Iranian lord of noble birth: Her name belongs to the same root as gord, ‘brave’ (see I, B8.9), and the histories call her Gordiya. The answer she gives is dynastic, not romantic: fresh from the Khan’s pursuit, she will keep her house inside Iran, and Gostaham is both a Pahlevan and the Shah’s uncle. It is the first of several bargains she drives in this cycle, and the only one she loses.

E6.46Gurdiyeh Is Moved to Slay Gostaham

Khosrow and Gordvi devise a letter promising Gurdiyeh marriage, provinces and honor if she will bury her husband. Gordvi’s wife carries it to the elm wood. With five helpers Gurdiyeh smothers Gostaham in the dark, then arms, shows the chiefs the royal letter, and wins them.

And ink with ground black musk to trace each line: Chancery realia: the letter is written in musk-ground ink, folded in patterned silk, and its signet pressed into musk. Sasanian seals survive in quantity, and the scent was part of the ceremony of a royal dispatch. On the formula such letters open with, see I, B12.20. Ferdowsi lets all this courtesy dress an order for a murder.

Their jewels upon the letter they had read: The chiefs scatter their jewels over the letter as one scatters them over a bride or a king (nesār, see I, A6.4). Homage is paid to a piece of paper, which in this scene is exactly where the power lies.

The chief in darkness died, deprived of light: The couplet does the judging, one man’s darkness set against another’s brightening night, and the poet adds nothing. Gurdiyeh is neither praised nor blamed here or afterward; she is rewarded. The historians agree that Khosrow was behind Vistahm’s death, though they differ on the hand: one strand of the tradition gives it to his wife, another to an allied prince of the east.

E6.47Khosrow Receives and Weds Gurdiyeh

Gurdiyeh writes to report the deed and ask for orders. Khosrow, delighted, summons her by a sweet-tongued envoy. She pays her troops and comes with treasure; the Shah seeks her hand, has the Mobad wed them by the old rite, and sets her above his other women.

Then bade the Mobad wed them by old rite: A marriage needed a priest to witness it, here the Mobad; Ferdowsi marks the legality each time this Shah marries. The politics are plainer still. By taking Bahram Chubin’s sister, who is also Gostaham’s widow, Khosrow draws the two great families that nearly destroyed him into his own bower.

Khosrow beheld that cypress, tall and bright: The portrait is the standard one: the straight cypress for stature (I, A6.6), spring for the cheek, the pheasant for her walk, pearls for teeth. Ferdowsi keeps the whole conventional inventory for a woman he has just shown holding a cushion over a man’s face in the dark, and the incongruity does not seem to trouble him.

E6.48Gurdiyeh Displays Her Grace and Skill

Asked to show how she fought the Khan’s men, Gurdiyeh arms in mail and Roman helm and rides a display of spear-work in the garden before twelve hundred women. Shirin warns that she may be nursing vengeance for Bahram. Khosrow laughs and sets her over the women of his bower.

Gurdiyeh neared the Shah and asked a Turk: Armed women are rare in the poem: Gordafarid, who unhorses Sohrab and then laughs at him (I, B1.6), and Rostam’s daughter Banu-goshasp, of whom Ferdowsi says very little (I, B10.15). Gurdiyeh is the only one who commands troops under her own name, and the only one rewarded for it in open court. On the jowshan, see I, B13.30.

Across the world four chiefs their posts maintain: The four guardians with twelve thousand men apiece are the four quarters of the empire. Sasanian government divided the realm into four great military commands, each under a sepahbod (I, B10.31), a reform the histories credit to Anooshirvan; the same four are set out region by region in E6.51.

Then Shirin said, “Why arm her so, O king?: Shirin walks in at the head of the twelve hundred and speaks once, to warn the Shah against an armed rival. It is a small, deft introduction: the woman whose book is coming (E7) enters the poem watching another woman too closely, and in E7.4 that watchfulness kills.

E6.49A Cruel Warden Is Sent to Rey

A cup engraved with Bahram’s name enrages Khosrow, who orders Rey trampled by elephants. His minister objects, so instead the Shah has the basest, ugliest man in Iran searched out and given Rey to govern. The wretch kills the household cats, tears down the roof-gutters, and ruins the city.

They cursed Bahram, the cup that bore his name: Rey suffers because it was Bahram Chubin’s country: the great family the histories assign him to held Rey and its district. On Rey itself, see I, B1.11. A king who punishes a city for a name engraved on a wine-cup has begun to be the tyrant of E7.9, and Ferdowsi puts the scene here for that reason.

Ill-starred, red-haired, with nothing wise or brave: The specification inverts the Persian ideal of beauty point by point: red hair, squinting green eyes, a crooked nose, a sallow face, big teeth, a wolf’s shambling walk. Ugliness is a moral sign in this poem, and Khosrow is dictating it himself. The man who murders him is described out of the same catalogue (E8.5).

He ordered every household cat be slain: The two cruelties are chosen with care. A cat keeps the mice out of the grain; a gutter carries the rain off the roof. Take away both and an ordinary house becomes unlivable, which is why Ferdowsi remembers to say that when the rains came there was not a gutter left in Rey. Gurdiyeh undoes it all with one cat (E6.50).

E6.50Khosrow Grants Rey to Gurdiyeh

Spring comes and the court drinks in the garden. Gurdiyeh brings in a kitten in earrings and gold trappings, mounted like a prince, and when the laughing Shah asks her wish she begs for Rey and the recall of its governor. Khosrow grants her the province.

The dales were dappled like a leopard’s hide: A spring set-piece, the kind of passage Persian poetry made into a genre of its own, placed here to open a feast in Farvardin (I, A8.3): rain as large as hail, tulips in the valleys, the earth in brocade, the deer coming down to the flowers. The dappled leopard’s hide for a flowered meadow is among the oldest of these images.

Then clever Gurdiyeh brought a kitten near: The petition is made in mime. A cat with rings in its ears and gold on its tack rides in like a prince to plead for the cats of Rey, and the king laughs and grants what the minister’s reasoned protest could not. It is one of the few jokes in the Sasanian books, and the only advocate in them with claws.

E6.51The Ordering of Khosrow’s Realm

Khosrow orders his empire: four armies of twelve thousand guard the Roman march, Zabul, the Alan road and Khorasan. He gives away his father’s hoarded coin, beheads the men who shed his father’s blood, then divides day and month into quarters of justice, feasting, prayer and study.

He portioned all the world in quarters wide: The four commands of E6.48, now named: the Roman frontier, Zabul, the pass into the Alan country, and the east from Heytal to Chin. The empire really was administered in four quarters, each with its own frontier army, and Ferdowsi’s brief for each march, watch-posts, spies, wages drawn on provincial treasuries, reads like an abstract of standing orders.

He charged them with the gateway of the North: The Caucasus passes, which the Sasanians fortified more heavily than any other frontier against the Alans and the peoples of the steppe; the wall running down to the Caspian at Darband is the largest of the works. Persian tradition credited such building to Anooshirvan, and Caesar praises him for it in E6.53.

He portioned day and night in quarters four: The ordered royal day belongs to the Pahlavi books of counsel: one watch for the Mobad’s report and the redress of wrongs, one for wine and minstrelsy, one for prayer, one for the stars. The monthly quarters that follow, riding and polo, chess and the deeds of old heroes, histories read aloud, envoys answered, read like a court’s own memorandum on how a king should spend his time.

E6.52The Ill-Omened Birth of Shiruyeh

In the sixth year of the reign Maryam bears a son, named Qobad in a whisper and Shiruyeh aloud. The astrologers find ruin in his chart: through him the earth will suffer. Khosrow seals the horoscope, hides a week, then writes cheerfully to Caesar.

No prayer-call then was whispered in the ear: Ferdowsi stops the story to note that the Muslim custom of whispering the call to prayer into a newborn’s ear did not yet exist. These quiet corrections are how he keeps the Zoroastrian past distinct from his own world instead of dressing it in eleventh-century clothes.

The Shah named him Qobad in whispers low: Both names are historical. He will reign as Qobad, second of that name, while the Greek historians know him by the familiar form, Siroes; Shiruyeh is an affectionate diminutive of shēr, ‘lion’. Ferdowsi’s two-name custom explains why the record carries him twice over, and why the watchmen can change a reign in E7.10 simply by crying the other name.

For Maryam now has borne a prince,” it read: Maryam, Caesar’s daughter, is the Persian tradition’s account of the alliance that won Khosrow his throne back from Bahram Chubin; Roman writers do not record an emperor’s daughter married to him. The peace with Rum rests on her in this poem, which is why her death by poison (E7.4) is more than a domestic crime.

E6.53Caesar Seeks the Cross of Christ

Caesar keeps seven days’ festival for his grandson and sends ten caravans of treasure with the envoy Khanagi. His letter praises Khosrow’s line, recalls the old feud of Salm and Tur as settled by the marriage, and asks one gift: the Cross of Christ from the Iranian treasury.

Christ’s holy Cross within your treasure stands: Behind the courtesy lies the war the poem does not tell. Khosrow’s armies sacked Jerusalem in 614 and carried the relic of the Cross to Iran, and the emperor Heraclius recovered it after Khosrow’s fall. Ferdowsi received the reign through a Persian court chronicle that gave him the relic without the campaigns, so the Cross simply lies in the treasury, and becomes a favor asked between relatives and refused.

The feud with Salm and Tur in days of old: Caesar argues inside the Shahnameh’s own mythology. When Fereydoon divided the world in Volume I, the West fell to Salm and Turan to Tur, and the brothers murdered Iraj; so a Roman emperor can call centuries of war a family quarrel and the new marriage its settlement. It is diplomacy conducted in the poem’s terms rather than history’s.

E6.54Khosrow Answers with Gifts

Khosrow thanks Caesar, defends his own faith, and refuses the Cross: God has no son, the wood is rotten, and sending it would make Iran call him a Christian. He offers any other gift, says he fears Shiruyeh, reports Maryam’s devotion, and loads the embassy with treasure.

I feel no shame for Hushang’s ancient way: Khosrow calls the Good Religion Hushang’s rather than Zardosht’s, the faith of the first kings and older than its prophet, which is how the Shahnameh generally presents it. The creed he then states, one God with no partner, son or consort, is Zoroastrian and would satisfy Ferdowsi’s Muslim readers equally well; the poet lets a Sasanian king make the argument for him.

She strives in Christ’s own faith from day to day: A Christian queen in the royal bower was nothing strange. Christianity was widespread in the Sasanian empire, with a recognized church of its own and Christians in royal service, and Khosrow’s tone here is worth noting: contemptuous of the relic, indulgent toward his wife’s devotion.

I fear Shiruyeh, mighty in his reign: The father confides his dread of his infant son to the boy’s own grandfather, in the middle of a state letter about a relic, and then blames the old feud of Salm and Iskandar for it. Ferdowsi keeps the horoscope of E6.52 alive across the whole length of the reign by asides of this kind.