Notes · Book E7The Story of Khosrow Parviz and Shirin

E7.1The Prelude

The poet turns to the story of Khosrow and Shirin. He claims sixty thousand couplets for his work, complains that the king, misled by slanderers, gave the old tales no heed, hopes the chief minister will read them, and closes with a dehqan’s saying on experience.

Full sixty thousand couplets I have wrought: The round boast. Modern editions print rather fewer, somewhere near fifty thousand couplets, and the count moves with the manuscripts. What he is claiming is not arithmetic but scale: a single poem larger than the rest of Persian verse to his date put together, and therefore worth a king’s notice.

They envied all my labor and its song: The grievance against the patron who would not pay grows louder through the Sasanian books; here the poet hopes that the Shah’s chief minister will read the tales, find their worth, and speak for him at the throne. Later tradition, above all Nezami Aruzi’s Chahār Maqāla, worked complaints like this one into the famous story of Mahmud’s meager reward and the poet’s refusal of it.

E7.2Khosrow’s Love for Shirin

Shirin, Khosrow’s love since before his accession, has been neglected through the war with Bahram. As he rides out with a vast hunting train she dresses in her finest, climbs to the roof, and reproaches him in Pahlavi. He weeps, sends her to his bower, and marries her.

Shirin was then his mate, his living light: On Nezami’s romance of Khosrow and Shirin, and on Farhad and Bistoon, see I, A9.3 and I, B1.4. Almost none of it is here. Ferdowsi’s Shirin is already the king’s from his youth: no courtship, no portrait, no rival sculptor, no Armenian princess, no milk-channel cut through rock. The greatest love story in Persian literature begins in the Shahnameh as a woman on a roof complaining that a man has stopped coming, and the poet’s interest is in what marrying her costs the crown rather than in what she feels.

In Pahlavi she voiced her love’s travail: Ferdowsi marks several speeches in this book as spoken in Pahlavi, Middle Persian: Shirin’s reproach here, Khosrow’s farewell to his treasure (E7.11), Barbad’s lament (E8.4), Shirin’s letters at the end (E8.6). The tag appears to come from the written source, which quoted set pieces in the old language, and in the poem it works as a claim that these words are preserved rather than invented.

Seven hundred falconers came in train: The hunt is an inventory: three hundred gilded horses, eleven hundred and sixty footmen with javelins, seventy lions and leopards led in golden chains, two thousand minstrels on camels, slaves with censers, water-carriers to lay the dust before the king. The Sasanian books are full of such lists, which read as though they came from a court’s own registers; the same manner produces the roll of treasuries in E7.8.

E7.3The Nobles Question Khosrow over Shirin

The city curses the marriage and the nobles stay away three days. The Mobad tells the Shah to his face that Shirin stains the royal line. Khosrow has a bowl of blood carried in, then scoured and filled with wine, and the objection collapses into blessings.

Where fresh, warm blood defiled the bowl below: The king answers an argument with an object, and makes the Mobad give the verdict twice over: first that the bowl is foul, then that his order has made a paradise out of hell. It is the nearest thing in the poem to a staged parable, and it wins by shifting the question, from whether Shirin’s name was stained to whether a stain can be washed out.

When sire is pure but mother’s virtue fails: The complaint is about breeding and repute, not religion: a stained line, a woman no forefather would have taken, a Div seated beside the guardian of the state. Nothing is said of her faith, though Christian writers of the east remembered a queen Shirin as one of their own and a builder of churches. Whatever she was in history, in this poem she is simply a woman of no standing whom the Shah insists on keeping.

E7.4Shirin’s Crime and Shiruyeh’s Fall

Shirin poisons Maryam unseen and a year later receives her chambers. At sixteen Shiruyeh neglects his lessons for savage toys, and his tutor takes fright. By the twenty-third year of the reign the Shah shuts Shiruyeh and more than three thousand of his followers in a comfortable prison.

At last she gave her poison, darkly planned: Two lines, no comment, and no one in the poem ever learns of it. Ferdowsi hands the secret to the reader and keeps it there until E8.6, where Shirin defends her honor before the assembled nobles and nothing can be found against her. It is also the detail the later romance could not use: Nezami’s Shirin is a pattern of virtue.

He cast Kalila’s pages to the floor: The fables Barzvi had brought from Hind for Anooshirvan (III, E2) were the schoolbook of princes, and the boy pushes them aside for a dried wolf’s claw and a horn knocked together. Ferdowsi judges character by play: the toys are all bone and noise, and the tutor needs no horoscope to be frightened by them.

To make one prison dwelling of them all: Princes held in honorable confinement were ordinary in this world, and Khosrow will argue in E8.2 that his sons lacked for nothing: hawks, cheetahs, wine, minstrels, the treasury open to them, forty guards to keep them in sight. Fifteen of the sixteen are killed on the day their brother’s men kill their father (E8.5).

E7.5Khosrow Builds the Throne of Taqdis

The poet gives the throne’s history: made for Fereydoon by Jahan Barzin, enlarged by each king, given the heavens by Jamasp, broken by Iskandar, its fragments hoarded. Khosrow gathers eleven hundred and twenty masters and rebuilds it in two years, with a jeweled carpet of the world spread before it.

Its oldest story reached Zahhak’s dark day: The throne is a chain of custody. Fereydoon gives Iraj three treasures, this seat, the ox-headed gorz (I, A5.2), and the jewel called the Seven Springs; every king adds to it; Iskandar breaks it up in ignorance, which is the act that marks him in the Iranian tradition. That the last great Shah of Iran is the one who pieces it together again is the point of the whole digression.

The twelve celestial signs, the planets seven: Taqdis is a model of the heavens as well as a seat: the signs and planets are figured on it, the moon shows in whatever sign it stands, and a man who knows the stars can read the hour from it. The whole structure turns with the year, facing the garden in Tir and its back to the sun in Leo. The name has been explained as ‘arch-shaped’, from tāq, an arch, though other readings have been offered; on the shiz wood worked into it, see I, A7.4.

They called it the great carpet, rich and vast: Seven years’ work by one man of Chin, the seven climes woven on it with battles and forty-eight crowned kings, gems on red gold. It recalls the most famous lost object of the Sasanian court, the great jeweled carpet that the Arab historians say was found at Madain when the empire fell and cut into pieces to be shared out.

E7.6The Minstrels Sarkash and Barbad

In the twenty-eighth year Barbad comes to court, and Sarkash bribes the chamberlain to bar him. Barbad dyes his clothes and lute green, hides in a cypress in the royal garden, and sings three songs between cups. The delighted Shah finds him and makes him chief minstrel.

A tune called Sabz dar sabz that pierced the heart: On Barbad and the barbat, see I, B4.1. What is new here are his three titles: Dadafrid, Paikar-e-Gurd, and Sabz dar sabz, ‘green within green’, which also describes the man singing it, green-clad in a green tree. Names of this kind survive in later lists of the royal modes, and tradition eventually credited Barbad with a melody for every day of the year.

His clothes and lute alike he colored green: The three songs are timed to three cups, so that the king’s wonder rises with his drinking, and each search of the garden finds only cypress, willow, pheasant and rose. Sarkash, who knows perfectly well who is in the tree, saves himself with a compliment: the Shah is so favored that the garden makes music for him. Ferdowsi gets his best comedy from a flatterer forced to praise the man he is ruining.

Now sixty-six full years of life have fled: The story breaks off and the poet gives his age and his claim that he will not die, having scattered the seed of speech. The boast is a commonplace of poets everywhere, Horace’s monument more lasting than bronze being the nearest western form of it, though few have had better warrant. It is placed, deliberately, beside the tale of a musician who will destroy his own hands (E8.4).

E7.7Khosrow Parviz Builds the City of Madain

Khosrow gathers craftsmen and sets a Roman master over the palace at Madain. Told the walls must settle before vaulting, the Shah refuses; the man flees and returns in the fourth year to prove by a sealed cord that they have sunk seven cubits. The palace takes seven years.

I tell of Madain and Khosrow’s grand seat: Madain, ‘the cities’, is the Arabic name for Ctesiphon and the towns around it on the Tigris, the Sasanian capital. Its huge ruined brick vault still stands and is called the Arch of Kisra, Kisra being the Arabic form of Khosrow; the histories usually assign it to Anooshirvan rather than to Parviz, but a poem that gives this reign every other superlative naturally gives it the palace too.

They measured; seven cubits less they found: An engineer’s anecdote preserved inside a royal chronicle. The Roman knows that new masonry settles and must be left standing before the vault goes on; he records the wall’s height in a length of silk cord, has it sealed in the treasury, and comes back four years later to show that the wall has sunk seven cubits. It is one of the few times in the poem that a craftsman wins an argument with a king, and he wins it with a receipt.

Below, the limbs of traitors met the eye: The Nowruz audience is staged as a picture of the world’s order: the Mobad nearest the throne, then the nobles, then the men of trade, then the poor, and at the foot the mutilated and the bodies of the slain. Then the herald tells the company to stop looking upward and count those below them, and the prisoners are freed and clothed. Mercy and terror are two movements of one ceremony.

E7.8The Majesty of Khosrow Parviz

The poet describes the height of the reign: tribute from Hind and Turan, six named treasuries, twelve thousand women in the bower, elephants and horses past counting. Twice he breaks off to say that none of it held, and that a base-born hireling’s hand brought the king down.

Then came Bad Awar, driven from the sea: Khosrow’s treasuries were remembered by name. Arūs is ‘the bride’; the Khazra is Arabic for ‘the green one’, as the poem itself says the Arabs called it; Bād-āvard means ‘wind-brought’, a hoard that came to him unlooked for; Sukhta is ‘burnt’. The names outlasted the contents, and the histories list them much as Ferdowsi does here.

Yet by a base-born hireling’s hand he fell: The inventory is a memento mori. On the world as a lodging one passes through, see I, B14.10; what is unusual here is that the sermon sits inside the accounts, one line dropped in straight after the camels, so that the reader closes the count already knowing how the reign ends.

E7.9Khosrow’s Injustice and the Chiefs’ Revolt

The just Shah becomes a tyrant. Farrokhzad strips the people, who flee the country cursing him. Guraz, holding the Roman frontier, is the first to turn; Zad Farrokh controls all access to the throne. The two conspire, and Guraz writes to Caesar to come and take Iran.

A mighty chief, Guraz, the Boar of fame: Gorāz is the wild boar (I, B5.10). The histories know this general as Shahrvarāz, commander of the Roman front, the man who took Jerusalem and Egypt for Khosrow and then went over to the emperor, and who seizes the throne himself in the chaos after Khosrow’s death. Ferdowsi keeps only the treachery, and makes it the first crack in the reign.

From town rose smoke of curses all around: The diagnosis is the one the poem has used since Jamshid: a king falls to his own favorites, not to his enemies, and the sign of it is that the people’s blessing turns to a curse. Jamshid and Kavus lose the farr (I, A4.1) through pride; Khosrow loses it by letting servants rob in his name, and the army will say so in as many words in E7.10.

E7.10Shiruyeh Is Released

Khosrow’s planted letter makes Caesar distrust Guraz and withdraw. Suspected himself, Zad Farrokh turns the army, and the chiefs resolve to crown the imprisoned Shiruyeh. Tukhar storms the prison and brings him out, and that night the watchmen cry Qobad’s name while Khosrow sleeps beside Shirin.

Bind it upon your right arm, firm and tight: The stratagem depends on the letter being caught. The courier is told to shape his road so Roman patrols will stop him, to say only that he is a servant carrying something to Guraz, and to bind the letter where a search must find it. Khosrow’s last success in the poem is a planted message, and it works perfectly; it merely saves him from the wrong enemy.

This king has lost the farr, the royal way: The army says aloud what the poem has been showing. On the farr, the light of kingship that leaves an unjust king, see I, A4.1. In the older books its departure is a visible marvel; here it is a verdict passed by soldiers standing in a courtyard, which is one measure of how far the Shahnameh has traveled by this point in the reigns.

Through every watch cry out Qobad alone: A reign changes hands in the dark, by a word. The name called through the night watches was how a king was kept before his city, so changing it publishes the coup before anyone has dared tell the king, who learns that he is deposed because Shirin, awake beside him, hears another name shouted from the walls.

E7.11Shiruyeh Sends Khosrow to Tisfoon

Hungry in the garden, Khosrow has a servant cut jeweled studs from his belt to buy food; a jeweler knows the workmanship and the search finds him. Zad Farrokh talks him into yielding, the old prophecy comes clear to him, and after thirty-eight years he is carried to Tisfoon.

“Cut off the jeweled strip of this gold belt.”: Five studs worth thirty thousand silver coins cannot buy bread and meat: the baker dares not touch them, the jeweler recognizes work that came out of the royal store, and the treasure hands its owner over. Ferdowsi then has the king address his hoard in Pahlavi and beg it to hide itself rather than gladden his enemies, which is the last tenderness left to him.

“Between two mountains shall your death be found: The oracle comes true in the wrong register, as oracles do. The two mountains are the heaped treasures of the garden, the golden sky is his own shield hanging from a branch, the iron beneath him is the armor he is sitting in, and the servant who kills him with no crowd present arrives in E8.5. The Greek oracles that ruined Croesus work the same way, except that Khosrow reads his correctly and it makes no difference.

On Dey-day, under frosty Azar’s sign: In the Zoroastrian calendar every day of the month has a name as well as every month (see I, A7.1), and three days in each month are called Dey, for the Creator, told apart by the name that follows. Khosrow is deposed on the day and in the month that the Indian letter had named to Shiruyeh as the date of his crowning, as the fallen king himself recalls in E8.2.