Ērān vs. Hrōm: The Final Cosmic War of Xusrō II & It's Reasons

on

Ērān vs. Hrōm: The Final Cosmic War of Xusrō II & It's Reasons

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ 

"In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."

When Xusrō II, Šāhān Šāh of Ērānšahr, declared war on Rome in 603 CE, he did not seek revenge—he sought finality. What began as vengeance for a murdered ally became a cosmic war of extinction, the last act in the four-century duel between Ērān and Hrōm, Light and Darkness, Aša and Druj.

For centuries, Persian kings had measured themselves against Rome, their chosen “Other.” From Ardašīr I to Šāpūr I to Xusro I, the hrōmāyīg was no mere foe but the embodiment of Falsehood, the Anērān realm destined to fall before Ohrmazd’s truth. Yet never before had an Iranian monarch envisioned erasing Rome itself from the map of creation. Under Xusrō II, war turned into eschatology by other means.

The spark was personal. Emperor Maurice, who had once restored Xusrō’s throne, was murdered in 602 by the usurper Phocas. To avenge him was, outwardly, justice—but inwardly, destiny. Xusrō’s kingship had been born of Roman aid; to destroy Rome was to invert that humiliation, to prove that Ērān—not Hrōm—was the axis of the cosmos.

Behind this resolve lay ancient theology. By the late Sasanian age, Zoroastrian cosmology and imperial ideology had fused: the Šāhān Šāh ruled as Ohrmazd’s viceroy in the material world. To conquer Anērān was to cleanse creation. Thus when Persian banners entered Jerusalem in 614 CE and seized the True Cross, it was not mere strategy but cosmic inversion—Ērān had toppled the god of Rome.

By the 610s, the empire of Constantine was collapsing under plague and civil war. Persian generals Šahrwarāz and Šāhēn swept across Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia until Xusrō’s rule stretched from the Nile to the Bosporus. In royal rhetoric he was “King of Ērān and Anērān,” lord of the entire created order.

Yet behind triumph burned anxiety. As modern historians such as Kh. Rezakhani and Baca-Winters observe, the late sixth and early seventh centuries were marked by climatic collapse, drought, and eschatological dread. The world felt near its end. In that age of omens, empire itself became salvation. To Xusrō, uniting all lands under Ohrmazd’s justice was both defense and deliverance, a desperate grasp at immortality.

Thus vengeance, faith, pride, and fear fused into one intoxicating vision—
the Final War.
To destroy Rome was to purify the world;
to enthrone Ērān was to fulfill divine order.

But in his zeal to end Hrōm forever, Xusrō II overreached. His cosmic war, meant to crown Ērān eternal, instead consumed both empires—and cleared the path for a new power rising from Arabia.

I. The Legacy of the Eternal Duel: Ērān and Hrōm in Zoroastrian Thought

Long before Xusrō II turned his armies westward, the struggle between Ērān and Hrōm had already been sanctified in the Iranian imagination. For the priests of Ohrmazd and the kings of the House of Sāsān, Rome was not merely a rival empire—it was the Anērān, the realm of the Lie (Druj), the outer darkness opposing the land of Truth (Aša). Since the founding of the Sasanian dynasty, each king had inherited not only the throne but a cosmic mandate: to defend the order of creation against the encroachment of deceit. In royal inscriptions and Zoroastrian scripture alike, this duality—Ērān and Hrōm, Light and Shadow—was portrayed as the theater of history itself. The wars of Ardašīr, the triumphs of Šāpūr I, and the diplomacy of Narsē were all expressions of a single metaphysical conflict that mirrored the eternal war of Ohrmazd and Ahriman. By the time of Xusrō II, this theology of enmity had matured into a political cosmology—a vision in which the final victory over Rome would not only avenge the past but fulfill the destiny of the world.

1. The Cosmic Enemy

When the Sasanian Empire arose under Ardašīr I (r. 224–241 CE), it did not merely revive Persian kingship — it resurrected a cosmic theater. In that theater, the stage of Ērānšahr stood at the center of Light 🌞, while all other lands — especially Hrōm (Rome) — were cast in the shadow of Darkness 🌑.

In Zoroastrian cosmology, the world was not morally neutral; it was a battleground of creation (gētīg) and spirit (mēnōg), of Aša (Truth) and Druj (Lie). The realm of Ērān, sanctified by Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazda), was the heart of order — the Xwanirah, the central continent of goodness. Surrounding it were six peripheral lands, each representing deviation, deception, and distance from divine Truth. Among them, Hrōm — the Roman world — occupied a privileged role as the most dangerous and deceitful of the outer realms, the imperial reflection of Ahriman, the Destructive Spirit himself.

⚖️ “The world was divided into seven climes (kišwar).
At its center stood Xwanirah — the land of the Iranians, full of all good.
Around it lay the realms of the deceivers: Hrōm, Tūr, Sīn, Hind, Dāh, and Sind.”
— Bundahišn (14:35–36)

As Agostini (2022) shows, this worldview gave the Sasanian monarchy its ideological spine. The early kings — Ardašīr I and Šāpūr I — did not wage war on Rome merely for land or tribute, but to vindicate the cosmic hierarchy.

By declaring himself šāhān šāh Ērān ud Anērān — “King of Kings of Ērān and Non-Ērān” — Šāpūr I gave political form to a theological truth: the King of Kings ruled both the realm of Light and the lands of Darkness, not as their equal, but as their divinely appointed master.

👉 In this scheme:

  • Ērānšahr = the physical embodiment of Aša, truth, divine order.

  • Hrōm = the imperial expression of Druj, the Lie, falsehood masked as civilization.

  • The Šāhān Šāh = the earthly deputy (xwadāy) of Ohrmazd, charged with advancing creation against Chaos.

Agostini notes that Rome acquired a “special cosmological status” in this ideological matrix — not simply one foe among many, but the mirror-opposite of Ērān, the other half of the world’s moral geography. Every Roman defeat thus became a symbolic victory of Ohrmazd over Ahriman.

⚔️ The Mirror of Heaven and Earth

The monumental reliefs carved by the first Sasanian kings make this theology visible in stone.
At Naqš-e Rostam, Ardašīr’s horse tramples the fallen Parthian king Artabanus IV, while beside him Ahura Mazda’s horse crushes a demonic figure — Ahriman, depicted by Shenkar as a bearded man with serpent-like hair and animal ears 🐍.

⬇️ Visual Equation:

Heavenly Realm (Mēnōg)Earthly Realm (Gētīg)
Ahura Mazda bestows the diadem of divine authorityArdašīr receives kingship as Ohrmazd’s reflection
Ahriman is crushed beneath the horse of the godThe Parthian pretender lies under the horse of the king
→ Cosmic Victory of Light→ Historical Victory of Ērān

Thus, the rock relief becomes a map of metaphysics. Shenkar observes that the first fully anthropomorphic images of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman emerge here precisely to express symmetry: king mirrors god, rebel mirrors demon. The king’s victory below mirrors Ohrmazd’s above — earthly conquest as a rehearsal of the final triumph at the end of time.

🏛️ Rome as the Human Face of Ahriman

With Šāpūr I, this symbolic grammar grew bolder. His trilingual inscription at the Ka‘ba-ye Zardošt records his triumph over three Roman emperors: Gordian III (slain), Philip the Arab (tributary), and Valerian (captured alive). But more than history, this was theology in imperial dress.

“And Caesar lied again (did druxt) and did injustice (winah kard) to Armenia.
Therefore, we entered the Roman Empire…” — ŠKZ 9

To the Sasanian scribe, the Roman emperor was not simply a political adversary; he was “the liar” — drux, a technical term in Zoroastrian ethics for one aligned with the forces of Druj. As Agostini notes, this “lying Caesar” trope mirrors the earliest Achaemenid rhetoric of Darius I, who defined rebels as “followers of the Lie.”

In Sasanian political language, therefore, Rome = Falsehood, not just diplomatically untrustworthy but cosmologically impure — a nation living under Ahriman’s shadow.

ConceptZoroastrian PolarityImperial Expression
🕊️ Ahura MazdaLight, Order (Aša), CreationĒrānšahr, the realm of the King of Kings
🦂 AhrimanDarkness, Lie (Druj), CorruptionHrōm, the deceitful outer world
👑 The Šāhān ŠāhViceroy of LightDefender of Creation against the Lie
🏛️ The CaesarServant of DarknessSupplicant before Ērān’s divine majesty

Every kneeling Roman emperor in Persian reliefs — Gordian, Philip, Valerian — became a ritual enactment of proskynesis before Light itself. As Matthew Canepa notes, these scenes were meant to “prefigure the eschatological victory of Ohrmazd over Ahriman.” Thus, each captured Caesar was a proxy Ahriman, subdued beneath the hooves of divine and royal horses alike.

🔱 The King as Viceroy of the Cosmos

By embodying Ohrmazd’s image (čihr az yazdān, “whose form derives from the gods”), the Sasanian king was more than ruler — he was a living reflection of divine Wisdom. Shenkar reminds us that Ahura Mazda was conceived anthropomorphically, his face and form mirroring ideal human kingship.

“The Sasanian king,” writes Shenkar, “was the visible manifestation of Ahura Mazda in the material world.”

Hence, when the king waged war, he did not act as a mere sovereign; he manifested the divine struggle itself. Conquest was a sacrament. Peace was temporary illusion.

From this fusion of iconography, theology, and imperial ambition emerged the Sasanian mission — to reorder the world according to Aša. When Šāpūr I declared himself ruler of “Ērān and Anērān,” he did not mean simply “Iran and abroad,” but rather:

🕊️ “The kingdom of Truth and the realm of the Lie — both under my judgment.”

🌀 Rome’s Unique Role in the Cosmic Drama

Why Rome, and not China or India, became the cosmic enemy lies in its mirror symmetry with Persia.

  • Both were universal empires claiming to rule the oikoumene.

  • Both traced divine legitimacy to Heaven (Zeus or Ohrmazd).

  • Both stood at opposite ends of the civilized world — west and east, dusk and dawn.

Agostini insightfully notes that by the fourth century, the Persians and Romans had even fashioned a modus vivendi — a “diplomatic language of coexistence.” Yet beneath this civility simmered metaphysical tension: the two suns could not share one sky ☀️☀️.

Rome was not merely outside Ērān — it was the reflection of Ērān inverted, the cosmic rival born of the same universalist impulse, but guided by false gods. In Zoroastrian cosmology, this made Hrōm the most insidious of all Anērān lands: not barbaric, but deceptive — the civilization of Ahriman in human form.

⚡ Conclusion — The Enemy as the Mirror of the Self

Thus, the Sasanian conception of Rome was at once theological, artistic, and imperial.

  • Theological, because Hrōm was the land of the Lie — Ahriman’s dominion on earth.

  • Artistic, because Sasanian reliefs made this cosmology visible, pairing divine and royal victories in sacred symmetry.

  • Imperial, because the Šāhān Šāh, “whose seed is from the gods,” embodied Ohrmazd’s will to restore order to the cosmos.

By the time Xusrō II took up the sword against Rome, he inherited not a mere frontier dispute but a 400-year-old theology of opposition. The war he would wage was the culmination of this vision: the final cosmic encounter between Light and Darkness — between Ērān and Hrōm.

II. Diplomacy and Dualism

By the late Sasanian age, the relationship between Ērān and Hrōm had become a paradox of cosmic etiquette — a rivalry draped in the robes of kinship. From the fourth to the seventh centuries, Persian kings and Roman emperors exchanged letters calling one another “brother,” spoke of divine cooperation, and even imagined themselves as the “Two Eyes of the Earth.” Yet beneath this rhetoric of light and symmetry lay the memory of a murder — the mythic fratricide of primordial times. For in Iranian sacred history, Rome was not only the land of the Lie — it was the land of the brother-slayer.

🌗 The Two Eyes of the World — Divine Diplomacy

From the late third century onward, as Agostini (2022) notes, the empires of Ērān and Hrōm developed a sophisticated diplomatic language — one that blended theology, cosmology, and royal etiquette. This litterae sacrae (sacred correspondence) portrayed the two great powers as co-creations of God, meant to rule in harmony over the inhabited world.

“God effected that the whole world should be illumined from the very beginning by two eyes,
namely by the most powerful kingdom of the Romans and by the most prudent sceptre of the Persian state.”
— Xusrō II to Emperor Maurice (Theophylact Simocatta, Histories 4.11.2)

💡 Rome and Ērān were thus imagined as twin lights — like the Sun and the Moon — illuminating the world together.

Celestial SymbolSasanian MeaningDiplomatic Parallel
☀️ SunEast, Ērān, source of royal xwarrah (divine glory)The Shahanshah — “of the rising Sun”
🌙 MoonWest, Hrōm, reflection of light and subordinate powerThe Caesar — “of the setting Moon”

When Kawād I addressed Emperor Justinian as “Caesar of the setting Moon,” Roman historians took it as an insult. But Agostini reinterprets it as an expression of Zoroastrian cosmology: the Sun and Moon were not rivals but hierarchical partners, both creations of Ohrmazd, ruling alternately over night and day.

🕯️ In other words: coexistence, yes — but never equality. Ērān was the Sun, Hrōm the Moon — reflected light, dependent illumination. Even in diplomacy, hierarchy glimmered beneath courtesy.

🤝 “Brotherhood” in the Language of Kings

The term “brother” (brāt) appears again and again in Sasanian–Roman correspondence.

  • Šāpūr II wrote to Constantius II: “I, Šāpūr, King of Kings, partner with the Stars, brother of the Sun and the Moon, to my brother Constantius Caesar, greetings.” (Ammianus Marcellinus 17.5.3)

  • Kawād I told Justinian: “We have found it written in our ancient records that we are brothers of one another.” (Malalas, Chron. 18.44)

  • Even Xusro II addressed their Roman counterparts in this way.

To Roman eyes, “brother” meant parity. To Persian eyes, it meant blood relation — and with it, ancestral grievance.

⚔️ The Mythic Fratricide — Salm, Tūr, and Ēraj

According to the Avesta, Pahlavi books, and later Šāhnāmeh, the first king of the world, Frēdōn (Fereydūn), divided the earth among his three sons:

SonRealmDescendantsMoral Symbolism
🏛️ SalmThe lands of Hrōm (Rome)Romans, “the Westerners”Pride, envy
⚔️ TūrThe lands of Tūrān (Central Asia/China)Turks, nomadsViolence, rage
🌿 ĒrajĒrānšahr (Iran and India)PersiansTruth, divine xwarrah

But when Frēdōn crowned his youngest son Ēraj — the one graced with divine glory (xwarrah) — his elder brothers were consumed by envy. They murdered him and his descendants, save one daughter, Wērag, who would preserve the Iranian seed.

“They looked for an occasion to set a trap and murdered their own brother… so that no one would be left alive.”
— Ayādgār ī Jāmāspīg 4:44

🩸 From that moment, malice (kēn) entered the world — an unhealable, hereditary hatred that could only be purged by revenge.

🧬 Rome as the Line of Salm — The Brother-Slayer

Touraj Daryaee and Agostini both show that by the late Sasanian period, this myth was historicized. The Romans were no longer just foreigners; they were identified as the descendants of Salm, the murderer of Ēraj. The Turks (and Chinese) were the line of Tūr. The Iranians — the true heirs of Ēraj — bore both divine favor and eternal grievance.

Mythic LineageHistorical EquivalentRole in the Cosmic Drama
🕊️ ĒrajIranians (Ērānšahr)Bearers of Truth (Aša), divine glory
🏛️ SalmRomans (Hrōm)Envious brother, the Liar (Druj)
⚔️ TūrTurks/ChineseViolent brother, the Destroyer
👑 FrēdōnPrimordial KingSource of universal sovereignty

This myth gave the term “brother” a double edge. When a Sasanian king called a Roman emperor brāt, he invoked a bond born in blood and broken by murder.

➡️ The result: what the Romans heard as flattery, the Persians meant as reminder — “you are our brother, yes, but the brother who killed us.”

🔥 The Politics of Cosmic Memory

As Daryaee explains in The Tripartite Sasanian Vision of the World, the Sasanians saw the world divided into three sacred regions — Ērān, Hrōm, and Tūrān. Each was a remnant of the original kingdom of Frēdōn, and each carried a spiritual destiny.

“While the Roman emperors called their Persian counterparts fratri meo, ‘my brother,’ for the Persians this gesture was not a sign of mutual respect but a reminder that the Romans were the descendants of Salm who had murdered Ēraj.” — Daryaee (2014)

Thus, every diplomatic “peace” between the empires was haunted by a cosmic memory of betrayal. The kēn — the inherited malice of the first fratricide — remained unhealed. No treaty could erase it.

🌍 The Two Eyes Go Blind

In this light, Xusrō II’s famous letter to Maurice — the “Two Eyes” metaphor — takes on darker hues. What began as a gesture of gratitude to the emperor who restored his throne carried within it the seed of apocalypse.

☀️ “The most powerful kingdom of the Romans”
🌙 “The most prudent sceptre of the Persians”

Two eyes meant two halves of vision, but also two potential rivals for the gaze of God.

When Maurice was murdered by Phocas, one of those eyes went dark — and for Xusrō, that meant cosmic imbalance. The surviving eye, Ērān, had to illuminate the world alone.

⚡ Diplomacy collapsed into destiny.
The rhetoric of brotherhood inverted into vengeance.
Rome was no longer the co-ruler of the world — it was the fratricidal liar, whose sin had to be avenged for the cosmos to be healed.

☄️ Conclusion — From Brotherhood to Apocalypse

The dualism of Ērān and Hrōm was thus a theology of mirrors:

  • The two empires reflected each other’s greatness — and each other’s doom.

  • They shared divine sanction, yet competed for the same cosmic throne.

  • They called each other brothers, but one remembered a primordial murder.

By the reign of Xusrō II, this tension reached its breaking point. The polite letters of brotherhood gave way to the swords of annihilation. What had been a language of balance became a prophecy of vengeance.

When Xusrō marched against Rome, he was not merely avenging Maurice —
he was avenging Ēraj, the slain brother,
he was fulfilling Ohrmazd’s justice,
and he was closing the circle begun at the dawn of the world.

🩸 Thus the Final War began —
a war not just of empires, but of memory and myth,
between the Sun and the Moon,
the Eye of Truth and the Eye of the Lie,
until both went blind in the darkness of the seventh century.

III. The House of Ohrmazd: Xusrō’s Inheritance

If theology gave Xusrō II his cosmic script, his youth supplied the fire to enact it. He was born into an empire already trembling with contradictions — the son of a pious yet embattled prince, the grandson of the legendary Xusrō I Anōšag-ruwān, and the heir to a world that believed itself divinely chosen yet perpetually endangered. When he was born, around 570 CE, the House of Sāsān stood at its zenith: his grandfather’s reforms had filled the treasury, fortified the borders, and redefined kingship as the earthly mirror of Ohrmazd. But even before the child could walk, that cosmic order began to crack.

At two years old, Xusrō saw his world erupt into war. The long peace with Rome shattered in 572 CE, igniting a nineteen-year conflict that scorched Mesopotamia and Armenia — a war that would last until the prince was nearly grown. Amid this turmoil, his father Ohrmazd IV (r. 579–590) inherited both the grandeur and the burdens of empire. As Baca-Winters observes, Hormizd’s reign was “a struggle between inherited glory and mounting disobedience,” torn between the royal will of his father and the restless pride of the nobility and clergy.

Then came the soldier who would shatter it all — Wahrām Čōbīn, the brilliant spāhbed of the East, who in 588 CE annihilated the Turkic Khagan, conquered Transoxiana, and returned crowned in glory. But victory fed ambition. Humiliated by the king’s ingratitude, Wahrām rebelled, marched on Ctesiphon, and declared himself king. The empire convulsed; the court turned cannibal. Xusrō’s father was strangled and blinded by his own uncles, Wīstaxm and Wīndōy, as palace and priesthood alike fractured into factions.

Thus, at nineteen, the prince of the gods became a fugitive. Fleeing eastward, he found no refuge in Ērān — only in its cosmic rival, Hrōm. The Roman emperor Maurice received him, clothed him, and restored him to his throne in 591 CE, driving Wahrām into exile. Yet the price of restoration was humiliation: half of Armenia and the Caucasus, up to Tbilisi, were ceded to Rome. Ērān’s child of light had been reborn through Rome’s mercy.

And as if to remind him that betrayal was hereditary, his uncle Wīstaxm soon rebelled in the east, ruling from 594 to 600 CE before being crushed. By the time the young Šāhān Šāh finally ruled alone, his heart had been seared by exile, fratricide, and cosmic shame. He had learned what his theology had never taught him — that the Lie did not only live beyond the empire’s borders, but within his own house.

It was this trauma, fused with divine ideology, that would later drive him to cleanse the world itself — to finish, with Rome, what his ancestors had begun.

1. The Heir of Anōšag-Ruwān: Xusrō’s Grandfather and the War of 572–579 CE

When Xusrō II Parwēz was born around 570 CE, he entered a world blazing with Persian confidence. His grandfather, Xusrō I Anōšag-ruwān (“The Immortal Soul”), ruled Ērānšahr as the very image of Ohrmazd’s wisdom on earth — the philosopher-king of legend. 👑

From the marble halls of Ctesiphon to the fortress walls of Gurgān, the empire seemed eternal. Trade caravans crossed from Syria to Sind, Persian merchants reached China, India, and Indonesia, and the walls of Darband and the Gurgān Gate shone as the empire’s ribs of iron — a terrestrial mirror of the divine order above. 🏛️🌏

Xusrō I had remade the Sasanian world. As Touraj Daryaee notes, he crushed the Mazdakite revolution, replaced the great feudal houses with a new class of dehgāns — loyal local gentry — and divided the empire into four military quarters, each under a spāhbed. He reformed taxation, revived learning, and welcomed the last Greek philosophers after Justinian closed the Academy of Athens. Plato’s dream of the philosopher-king had found its eastern form in Anōšag-ruwān. 📜⚖️

His very name became legend. His grandson, born amid that golden age, would be named for him — Xusrō, heir to both his glory and his burden. ✨

🌅 A World at Zenith — and Its Cracks

The first nine years of young Xusrō’s life were the apogee of Sasanian civilization. Persia’s dominion stretched from Yemen to the Oxus, its treasuries overflowed, its armies invincible. Yet beneath this perfection smoldered tension.

In the West, the long “50-Year Peace” of 562 between Rome and Persia began to unravel. As Lee Patterson notes, the new Roman emperor Justin II (r. 565–578) bristled at the tribute payments that had kept peace with Ērān. To Justin, gold paid to Persia was humiliation, an affront to Roman imperium. When Xusro I extended Persian influence into Yemen, blocking Red Sea trade, and built fire temples in Armenia, Justin’s pride ignited into fury.

➡️ The result: the War of 572–579 CE, a conflict that defined the childhood of the future conqueror.

⚔️ The Fire in the Mountains — Armenia and the War of Faith

The war began in Armenia, where Zoroastrian and Christian worlds clashed yet again. Xusro I, as Patterson explains, sought to secure Armenia politically, not destroy it religiously — but the Armenian nakharars saw the construction of a fire temple at Dvin as a symbol of Persian domination.

When the marzban Chihovr-Vshnasp tried to enforce conversion, the Armenians rose, killing him in 572 CE, and appealed to Emperor Justin II for aid. Justin seized the chance to proclaim himself protector of the Christians and the avenger of Rome’s dignity.

Thus the first fire of the Fifty-Year Peace went out.

⚡ “With the Turks attacking from one direction and the Romans from another, the Persians would be destroyed,”
wrote Menander Protector — echoing Justin’s dream of a two-front apocalypse.

Rome struck from the west, Armenia from within, and Persia from the east battled nomadic Turks and Hephthalites. The war stretched across frontiers — from the Caucasus to Mesopotamia, from Syria’s deserts to the steppes beyond the Oxus.

For the child prince in Ctesiphon, it must have seemed that the world was on fire. 🔥

🌗 The Mirror War — Rome and Persia as Twin Suns

And yet, as both empires bled, their kings mirrored each other — the law-giving Justinian had found his echo in the philosopher-king Xusro.
Both codified law, built monuments, and claimed to embody divine reason.
Both believed the world could only hold one cosmic order.

To Xusrō the child, these wars were not politics — they were myth made flesh. His tutors, priests of Ohrmazd, told him that Hrōm was the realm of the Lie, the shadow twin of Ērān. Yet now that realm of darkness had burned Persian Armenia and defied the Shahanshah himself.

The dualism he would later live and die by was already written into his earliest memories:

  • ⚖️ Truth (Aša) — his grandfather’s justice, the ordered empire, the radiant king.

  • 🦂 The Lie (Druj) — rebellion, treachery, and the Roman enemy.

And in the middle stood a child named after the “Immortal Soul.”

🌄 The Death of the Just King (579 CE)

When Xusrō I died in 579 CE, the boy was nine years old. The old world of Aša died with him. His father, Ohrmazd IV, ascended the throne — proud, devout, and suspicious of the nobility. The empire that had been light now flickered with intrigue.

But to the young prince, the lesson of his grandfather was clear:
only through conquest, order, and faith could one preserve the glory of Ērān.

That conviction — half theology, half trauma — would shape the man who, thirty years later, would try to erase Rome from creation itself.

🌞 “Ērān has become fearless,” his grandfather’s coinage had declared.
The grandson would spend his life proving it.

2. Ohrmazd IV — A King Between Reform and Revolt (579–590 CE)

When Ohrmazd IV (r. 579–590 CE) ascended the Throne at Ctesiphon, his son Xusrō was nine years old — a child of the court raised under the shadow of divine kingship. Yet, even in his boyhood, the empire that his grandfather Xusrō I Anōšag-ruwān had perfected was beginning to decay. The golden order of Aša — justice, hierarchy, cosmic balance — was dissolving into mistrust and rebellion.

Ohrmazd IV inherited a realm of immense power: Armenia subdued, Rome weakened, and the Turkic Khaganate humbled beyond the Oxus. In Bonner’s words, “the empire of Iran became the dominant power of the Near East… victorious on two fronts against the hostile powers which had assailed Iran from the days of his father.” For a moment, it seemed the flame of Anōšag-ruwān still burned bright.

But that same fire began to scorch its keeper.

⚖️ The King and His Enemies

Ohrmazd IV was a difficult heir to a perfect legacy. Where Anōšag-ruwān had ruled with measured justice and philosophical restraint, Ohrmazd ruled with pride, suspicion, and a temper sharpened by divine self-regard. Daryaee calls him “arrogant and tyrannical… hated by his nobles”. His confidence in his divine station made him deaf to the counsel of the wuzurgān (great nobles) and the mōbeds (clergy).

He believed, as Bonner notes, that the throne of Ērān stood upon two legs of gold and two of iron — the āzādān (nobility) and the dehgāns (landed gentry). But unlike his father, he weakened the first to empower the second. The dehgāns, small landowners tied directly to the crown, became the king’s chosen class, while the great Parthian houses — Mihrān, Ispahbudhān, Karen, and Surēn — were stripped of influence. The Magi, too, suffered under his cold reform.

According to Sebeos, Ohrmazd “killed many of the nobility and dealt harshly with the priests”, and his suspicion bred hatred throughout the empire. The Mihrān family, from which the great general Wahrām Čōbīn would rise, was particularly embittered. The royal line of Sāsān, once bound to the aristocracy through faith and family, now stood alone — isolated amid its own grandeur.

To the priests, the king’s impiety was unforgivable; to the nobles, his ingratitude was treason.

⛪ The Tolerant Heretic

Yet Ohrmazd IV’s reign was not without virtue — or rather, the kind of virtue that breeds revolt.

Unlike his predecessors, he refused to persecute the empire’s Christians and Jews. When the Zoroastrian clergy demanded the punishment of Christians in the 580s, the king refused, saying:

“As our throne cannot stand upon its two front legs without the two back ones,
so too our kingdom cannot endure if we arouse the hostility of Christians and others whose faith differs from our own.”

(Ṭabarī, ii.173; Chronicle of Seert II(1):196)

In an empire where Zoroastrian purity defined legitimacy, this tolerance was subversive. The Christian patriarch Ezechiel was honored, and his successor Ishoʿyahb welcomed at court. Bonner observes that the Chronicle of Seert remembers Ohrmazd as a “benevolent prince,” but that very benevolence “was a great irritant to the Zoroastrian nobility and priesthood.”

His impartiality broke the pact between the Šāhān Šāh and the mōbedsān mōbed (chief priest) — the twin pillars of xwarrah and dēn, divine glory and divine law. To the clerics, Ohrmazd had betrayed the gods; to the nobles, he had betrayed their privilege.

⚔️ The War That Would Not End

Even as civil tension deepened, the empire remained locked in war with Rome. When Xusrō I died, envoys of Emperor Tiberius II had offered generous peace: Armenia and Iberia ceded to Persia, and Dara returned to Rome. The late king might have accepted — but death came first.

Bonner’s Menander fragments tell us that when the letter reached Ctesiphon, the new king’s reply was curt and fatal:

“Xusro might have been content to return a city he acquired.
But I will not abandon what I have inherited.”

Thus continued the War, a grueling, decade-long struggle that drained both empires. Ohrmazd demanded annual subsidies from Rome; Rome refused.

According to Wignas and Dignas, “Hormizd IV made demands that the Romans could not possibly meet… The state of war continued and lasted throughout his reign.”

By 580, Roman armies advanced deep into Mesopotamia, nearly reaching Ctesiphon. But Persian generals — Adurmahān, Kardarīgān, and Tamxusrō — countered with devastating raids across the Tigris, ravaging Roman Syria. Both sides bled, both claimed victory.

Meanwhile, in the north and east, new threats loomed. The Khazars raided from the Caucasus, the Arabs tested the southern frontiers, and in the far northeast, the Western Turks menaced the Oxus frontier — the same steppe empire that had once overthrown the Hephthalites.

🏹 The Rise of Wahrām Čōbīn

In this chaos rose a name that would one day haunt Xusrō: Wahrām Čōbīn, spāhbed of the North-East, a member of the ancient House of Mihrān, claiming descent from the Arsacids. In 588 CE, Wahrām led the armies of Ērān against the Turks and annihilated them near the Oxus, killing the Khagan with a single arrow and capturing Balkh.

His victory was mythic. Persian poets later wrote that “he struck like Arash the Bowman, and the Turks became tributaries of Ērān.” Even Theophylact Simocatta, hostile to Persia, acknowledged his “military genius.”

Bonner observes: “For a fleeting moment, the empire of Iran was the foremost power of the Near East.”

Xusrō, now eighteen, grew up watching this legend unfold — a general from an older, nobler bloodline eclipsing his father’s glory.

⚠️ The Fall from Glory

But triumph turned to envy. Sebeos records that when the treasure of the Turkish campaign — three hundred camel-loads of gold and spoils — reached Ctesiphon, the court slandered Wahrām, accusing him of withholding his share. Ohrmazd, ever suspicious, believed them.

He sent Wahrām a spindle, a woman’s belt, and a necklace — the symbols of cowardice and servitude.

“Gird yourself with this,” the king wrote, “for perfidy and ingratitude are the attributes of women.”

To an Iranian general, a scion of the Mihrān, this was unbearable. The insult shattered the fragile peace between throne and sword. The same divine arrogance that made Ohrmazd reformer and justiciar now made him blind to danger.

Dignas remind us: his decision to dismiss Wahrām Čōbīn “would have far-reaching consequences for the course of Sasanian history.”

🩸 The Empire Turns Inward

By 589 CE, the empire was unraveling. The war with Rome dragged on, the nobility seethed, the clergy cursed, and the army — underpaid, insulted, and leaderless — muttered rebellion.

According to Theophylact, Ohrmazd even reduced military pay by a tenth, deepening the officers’ hatred. Rumors spread that his mother had been of Turkic blood, perhaps the daughter of the Gokturk Khagan Istami himself, a whisper his enemies weaponized to brand him as half-foreign.

In Bonner’s words: “The Persian throne was shaken first by the rebellion of a general not of the Sasanid line, and then by the son and brothers-in-law of Ohrmazd.”

For young Xusrō — now twenty, watching the pillars of empire tremble — this was revelation. The cosmic order of Aša could not hold if the Šāhān Šāh himself became unjust. The grandson of the Immortal Soul learned that divine kingship without wisdom was tyranny, and tyranny invited the Lie.

Within a year, the Lie would devour the king himself.

The once radiant empire of Ohrmazd’s father — the mirror of heaven — now stood before the mirror of ruin.

And in that mirror, the prince of Ērān saw both his future and his fate.

3. The Rebellion of Wahrām Čōbīn — The Parthian Counterrevolution

By the winter of 589 CE, the empire of Ērānšahr was a mirror cracked from crown to border. The long wars, the distrust of the nobility, and the king’s persecution of priests had hollowed the faith that bound the kingdom together. Into this void rode a man who seemed carved from the memory of older dynasties — the spāhbed ī xwarāsān, Wahrām Čōbīn, of the House of Mihrān — a Parthian by blood, warrior by profession, and legend by destiny.

The House of Mihrān was one of the Seven Great Houses of Ērān, claiming descent from the Arsacid kings. Its estates lay in Ray and Hamadan, its soldiers along the Oxus and the Caspian Gates. The Mihrānids were old nobility — older than the Sasanians, older even than Ardašīr’s revolution.

Wahrām Čōbīn embodied that older ideal: a noble of pure Parthian stock, tall, austere, ascetic, famed for his skill with the bow. The chronicler Theophylact Simocatta calls him “a man of enormous frame, eloquent in speech, majestic in bearing, and terrible in war.” To the soldiers of the northeast, he was not merely general (spāhbed), but a figure of fire and fate — the earthly reflection of Mithra’s wrath.

In 588 CE, Wahrām led the armies of Ērān against the Western Turks, whose Khagan had crossed the Oxus. He annihilated them near Balkh, killed the Khagan with a single arrow, and sent three hundred camels laden with gold and spoils back to Ctesiphon.

Persia rejoiced; For a moment, the eastern frontier — the grave of so many empires — was secure, But triumph invited envy.

🩸 The Insult That Shattered an Empire

When the spoils reached Ctesiphon, courtiers poisoned the king’s ear. They whispered that Wahrām had grown too proud — that he withheld treasure, that he dreamed of kingship.

Ohrmazd IV, already paranoid and hated, believed them. He sent Wahrām not thanks, but humiliation: a woman’s belt, a distaff, and cotton, symbols of cowardice and disgrace.

“Gird yourself with this,” the king mocked,
“for perfidy and deceit are the attributes of women.” 
The insult was fatal. A warrior descended from the Parthian kings could endure wounds and exile — but not dishonor.

Wahrām’s soldiers tore the royal emblems from their spears, lifted their general upon a shield, and hailed him “Šāhān Šāh Wahrām” — King of Kings, Son of the House of Mihrān.

Thus began the Parthian Counterrevolution.

⚡ The March of the Rebel

Daryaee writes:

“When Wahrām Čōbīn suffered a minor defeat in Armenia, Hormizd IV slandered him and made false accusations, which caused the general to rebel and move toward Ctesiphon. With the help of the nobility, led by Wīstahm and Wīndōy, they deposed the king and brought his son, Xusrō II, to power.”

What began as personal vengeance became a campaign of destiny. Wahrām marched west from Ray, taking city after city — Hamadan, Nisibis, and Hulwan. The garrisons defected to him; nobles joined him. In the highlands of Media, he proclaimed a return of the Arsacid glory, invoking the fire of Ādur Burzēn-Mihr, the sacred flame of Mithraic vengeance.

Bonner notes that Wahrām’s propaganda was apocalyptic:

“He promised to renew the religion and customs of the ancient Arsacids. He declared himself the living embodiment of the Fire of Exalted Mithra (Ādur Burzēn-Mihr), and foretold the rule of a man named Kay Wahrām, who would conquer Rome, India, and Turan.”

Among a war-weary, disillusioned army, this was intoxicating. The Parthian general offered both revenge and renewal — a vision of Iran freed from Sasanian tyranny and restored to its pre-Sasanian nobility.

👁️ The Fall of Ohrmazd IV

As Wahrām advanced, the nobles at Ctesiphon panicked. The court was divided: some feared the general, others hated the king. Among them were Ohrmazd’s own brothers-in-law — the powerful nobles Wīndōy and Wīstahm, uncles of the young prince Xusrō.

According to Theophylact and Dinawarī, the conspirators imprisoned Ohrmazd, tore the diadem from his head, and mocked him before the court. His eyes were put out, and he was strangled with his own turban — an execution Bonner calls “a ritual inversion of kingship.”

In spring 590 CE, the nineteen-year-old Xusrō, still known as Khusro, was placed upon the Throne as Šāhān Šāh Xusrō II Pawvēz — “the Victorious.”

But the throne was built on blood, and its foundation trembled.

👑 The Two Kings of Ērān

Even as the diadem was placed upon Xusrō’s head, Wahrām Čōbīn was crowned by his troops as King Wahrām VI. The empire now had two kings — one of divine blood but no army, and one of army but no divine blood.

Wahrām justified his claim through ancestral myth. He was of the House of Mihrān, descended from Mithra himself. The Sasanians, he said, had ruled too long; their fire had gone cold. He would restore the true faith and the just rule of the Aryans.

To the masses, his rise seemed foretold. Bonner observes that Sasanian apocalyptic texts like the Zāmāsp Nāmag and Ayādgār ī Jāmāspīg began circulating — some predicting a base-born usurper who would seize the throne before being struck down by a “victorious lord” (Aparwēz xwadāy). Both sides used prophecy as propaganda.

“The world trembled,” wrote Bonner,
“for the fall of the Sasanid line was imagined as the end of the age.”

⚔️ The Siege of Ctesiphon

Wahrām’s army soon reached the plains before Ctesiphon, crossing the Greater Zab River and seizing Nisibis and Arbela. Loyalist commanders deserted one by one.

The young Xusrō’s partisans — led by his uncles Wīstahm and Wīndōy — tried negotiation. A royal letter promised Wahrām wealth and second rank in the empire if he renounced his claim. His reply was cold and imperious:

“I will not be second to a boy.
The fire of Mithra burns in my breast.
I will restore the world as it was before the House of Sāsān.”
(Theophylact, IV.7–8)

The loyalists held the bridge of Nahrawān, the eastern defense of Ctesiphon, but their forces were exhausted. In one night raid, Wahrām’s veterans cut through their lines, slaughtered their baggage train, and broke their morale.

The dream of Sāsān’s house collapsed.

🏃‍♂️ The Flight of the Šāhān Šāh

At twenty years old, Xusrō II Parwēz faced the greatest humiliation of his life — flight.

His uncles urged him to flee east or south, but the east was held by rebels and the south by hostile Arabs. There remained only one path — westward, across the Tigris, toward the ancient enemy: Hrōm, the Roman Empire.

Thus, in autumn 590 CE, the young Šāhān Šāh of Ērān crossed the Euphrates with thirty companions. Pursued by Wahrām’s scouts, he found refuge in a monastery near Hīt. His uncle Wīndōy, disguised in royal robes, served as a decoy to mislead the pursuers — and was captured in his place.

From there, Xusrō’s caravan rode to Circesium (modern Buseira), the Roman fortress on the edge of Mesopotamia. The Roman commander Probus received him with solemn ceremony and sent word to Emperor Maurice in Constantinople.

Thus ended the first act of the Final War. The prince who fled into Roman lands carried not only the legacy of Sāsān, but the shame of being restored by the enemy of his faith.

To the priests, this was scandal. To Xusrō, it was destiny.

He had lost his throne, his father, and his homeland — but gained the one thing the Sasanians had never possessed: a debt from Rome.

Within a year, that debt would be repaid in fire and victory.
But for now, the heir of Ērān slept beneath the walls of Hierapolis,
a fugitive king dreaming of the world’s end.

4. Restoration by Rome — The Humiliation of Ērān

When Xusrō II Aparwēz (“the Victorious”) fled across the Euphrates in the winter of 590 CE, the empire of Ērānšahr stood at the brink of dissolution. The xwarrah (royal glory) of the House of Sāsān seemed extinguished. The usurper Wahrām Čōbīn, once spāhbed of the northeast, now claimed the diadem for himself, invoking Arsacid lineage and ancient Pahlaw pride against the centralizing Sasanian kingship. Within Ctesiphon, the nobles had strangled the reigning king Ohrmazd IV—Xusrō’s own father—and chaos consumed the empire from Armenia to Khurasan. The young prince, barely twenty years old, saw in these horrors the collapse not merely of a dynasty, but of divine order itself.

As Michael Bonner recounts, Xusrō’s flight was desperate and uncertain. With a small band of thirty companions—his uncles Windōē and Wistāxm, and a few loyal nobles—he rode westward through the ruins of his father’s realm: from Ctesiphon to Pērōz-Šāhpūr, across the Euphrates at Hīt, to Circesium, the Roman fortress where the frontier between Ērān and Hrōm met the desert. There, guarded by the Arab general Nuʿmān ibn al-Mundhir, the exiled šāhān šāh sent a message to the Emperor Maurice. The letter, preserved by Theophylact Simocatta, stands as one of the most extraordinary appeals in late antique history—a Persian monarch addressing the Roman emperor not as an equal, but as a suppliant:

“God has made two great lamps for the world,” Xusrō wrote, “the Empire of the Romans and the Empire of the Persians. Together we hold back the darkness of the barbarians. But now the demon of rebellion has overthrown me, and tyranny has overtaken my realm. If my empire falls, the wild nations will devour both east and west. Therefore, O Emperor, stretch forth your saving hand. Be to me a father; I shall be your son.”

This appeal—so alien to the proud vocabulary of Sasanian kingship—was both political necessity and spiritual humiliation. The Šāhān Šāh of Ērānšahr, heir of Kawad and Xusrō Anōšag-ruwān, now called himself pusr ī Māwrīk, “the son of Maurice.” His biological father, Ohrmazd IV, lay strangled by his own kin; in the aged emperor of Rome—fifty-one years old to Xusrō’s twenty—he sought a new paternal protector. As Jake Nabel has shown, this language of “father and son” echoed earlier Roman–Iranian diplomacy: the “guardianship” of Yazdgird I over Theodosius II, and Kawad I’s attempt to have his son Xusrō I adopted by Emperor Justin. Yet never before had such words carried the same urgency. For the first time, a Sasanian prince made himself the foster-son (parwartār) of the Roman basileus, renouncing divine autonomy for survival.

Maurice accepted. To the Romans, it was a triumph of diplomacy—Rome restoring a king of Persia as a Roman protégé. To Xusrō, it was a necessary indignity, one that burned deep into his soul. He vowed eternal gratitude to Maurice, who indeed treated him as a son, providing him protection in Hierapolis and later dispatching armies to restore him. But this fosterage, this dāyagīh, would become the deepest wound in the young king’s memory.

In early 591 CE, Roman and Armenian legions marched eastward under the command of John the Patrician (Iōannēs Patrikios) and the general Narsēs. Maurice’s strategic goal was clear: to stabilize the frontier by reinstating a friendly ruler, while securing the Caucasus and Mesopotamia for Rome. The armies of Xusrō and his uncles joined with Roman cohorts and Armenian contingents under Mušeł Mamikonean, a scion of that noble Christian house long torn between the two empires. Together they advanced across northern Mesopotamia—through Martyropolis, Mardin, and Dara—cities which, in return for this alliance, were promised to Rome.

At the same time, Wahram VI Čōbīn gathered his remaining forces in Azerbaijan. He too sought to enlist allies, appealing to the Armenians in the name of ancient freedom and invoking Ahura Mazda, Mithra, and the sacred elements as witnesses to his vow to restore Armenia’s independence. His letters, as recorded by Sebeos, mix grandeur with desperation. None answered.

In the spring of 591, near the sacred fire-temple of Ādur Gušnasp in Āturpātakān, the two hosts met in a battle that decided the fate of Ērān. Xusrō fought beneath the Roman standards, the imperial eagles shining beside the derafš-e Kāviān, the banner of Persian kings. The clash lasted for days—fierce, bloody, and uncertain. Bonner writes that the blood ran so thick “it irrigated the plain.” The turning point came when many of Bahram’s soldiers, disillusioned, defected to Xusrō’s side, urged on by envoys from Windōē and Wistāxm. The usurper’s army disintegrated; Bahram fled east to Balkh, seeking refuge among the Turks, only to be assassinated soon after at Xusrō’s instigation.

Thus, by midsummer of 591 CE, the young king re-entered Ctesiphon in triumph—restored not by xwarrah or divine favor, but by Roman steel. The restoration was complete, yet it was a poisoned victory. As Touraj Daryaee notes, it was the first time since the founding of the Sasanian dynasty that the šāhān šāh owed his throne to foreign arms. In gratitude—and under obligation—Xusrō ceded to Maurice the fortress cities of Dara and Martyropolis, as well as large swathes of Armenia and Iberia, leaving only Dvin and Tbilisi to Ērān.

The act was symbolically devastating. The empire of the Fire now owed its survival to the followers of the Cross. The xwarrah ī ērān, which Zoroastrian theology had long taught to be divinely ordained and indivisible, seemed now to rest in foreign hands. To the priests of Ādur Gušnasp and the nobles of Fārs, this was not merely political defeat—it was cosmic disarray, a rupture in the balance between Ērān and Anērān, the world of Light and the world of Darkness.

Xusrō himself carried this burden for the rest of his life. In the glow of his restoration, he expressed boundless devotion to Maurice, calling him his pid ī dōm, “second father.” But in the secret councils of his mind, shame burned. The humiliation of 591 would become the hidden engine of vengeance that, decades later, drove the king to unleash war on Rome with apocalyptic fury after Maurice’s murder. The restoration of Xusrō II by Rome saved Ērān from disintegration—but it also planted within him the consuming fire that would one day set both empires ablaze.

5. The Rebellion of Wistaxm (Vistahm) — The Fractured Empire

When the banners of rebellion rose again in the northeast, it was not a stranger who raised them, but blood.
Xusrō’s uncle Wistaxm—his own mother’s brother, his former guardian and ally—turned against him. What began as the restoration of the House of Sāsān ended as a civil war of vengeance, betrayal, and divine terror.

When Xusrō II returned to Ctesiphon in 591 CE, restored to the throne by Roman arms and by the aid of his uncles Windōē and Wistaxm, the empire seemed whole once more. The usurper Wahrām Čōbīn was dead, his head brought back from the Turkic steppe; the nobles had submitted; the crown gleamed again with xwarrah (royal glory). Yet as Michael Bonner writes, “a cloud of suspicion and doubt hung over him.”

The court murmured. The patriarch Ishoʿyahb had refused to accompany the king into exile and had prayed publicly for the rebel Wahrām instead. The nobles whispered that Xusrō owed his throne to the emperor Maurice of Rome, and that he was still “the Roman’s son.” Others muttered darker accusations—that he had been complicit in the blinding of his own father, Ohrmazd IV, whose murder had been arranged by these very uncles now standing beside him.

And so, barely had he been crowned when he resolved to cleanse the past. The men who had raised him up—Windōē and Wistaxm—were the same who had strangled his father. To rule, he must destroy them.

⚖️ Fratricide and Flight

The first victim was Windōē, the elder uncle. Bonner, following Dinawarī and Sebeos, describes the act with grim clarity: Windōē was seized under the pretext of corruption—he had allegedly misused the royal treasury—and executed in Hulwān. His limbs were severed, his body left to rot, and the Shah commanded that his corpse be stoned. As he died, Windōē cursed the House of Sāsān and prophesied its fall.

Wistaxm escaped. Summoned to court under the same pretext, he was warned by a noble named Mardān Bīh-Qahramān, who revealed the trap. The uncle fled eastward, through Media into Gīlān and the Daylamite highlands, where the mountains cradled old Parthian loyalties. There he met the remnants of Wahrām Čōbīn’s followers and the Hephthalite kings Šawk and Pariovk, who ruled the lands of the eastern marches.

In these desolate valleys, amid forests and mountain passes, the rebellion of Wistaxm began.

🏹 The Last Parthian Uprising

Like his brother before him, Wistaxm clothed his rebellion in genealogy. In his letters to Xusrō, recorded by Dinawarī, he mocked the Sasanian line as usurpers of true Achaemenid blood:

“Know that you are not more worthy of this power than I,” Wistaxm wrote,
“for I am the son of Dārā son of Dārā, who fought Alexander.
But you, O son of Sāsān, took what was rightfully ours by craft.
Your father was a shepherd—your crown is theft.”

It was more than treason—it was ideological war. The Pahlaw nobility of Parthia, long resentful of Sasanian centralization, flocked to him. Armenians in Isfahan rose and joined his ranks; Hephthalite chieftains pledged allegiance; mountain princes from Ṭabaristān and Gurgān rebelled. Even some spāhbeds hesitated in their loyalty. For the first time since Ardashīr’s rise three centuries before, the unity of Ērān itself seemed to dissolve.

From his base at Dastabā near Ray, Wistaxm struck westward, raiding Media and threatening Hamadān.
For years—seven long years, from roughly 593 to 600 CE—war flickered across the empire’s heartlands. Bonner notes that coinage minted in Wistaxm’s name continued through his tenth regnal year, proof that he ruled effectively in the northeast. It was not a rebellion—it was a rival empire.

⚰️ The Death of the Uncle — Treachery by the Hephthalites

But rebellion built on treachery died the same way. By the year 600 CE, Wistaxm’s alliances began to crack. The Hephthalite kings Šawk and Pariovk, fearing Xusrō’s vengeance, plotted against their ally.
Sebeos preserves the scene vividly:

“The king of the Kushans, Pariovk, came before Wistaxm with few men and bowed to the ground seven times.
Wistaxm dismounted and approached him. Pariovk said: ‘Bid your men stand aside, that I may speak words of counsel to the king.’
As they rode together, those in ambush rose from hiding and struck Wistaxm, killing him.
His wife, his treasure, and his goods were seized, and the army dissolved.”

Thus ended the last great Parthian revolt—the final echo of Arsacid pride. Some traditions, preserved by Dinawarī, darken the tale further: that Wistaxm’s wife Gurdiyā, sister of Wahrām Čōbīn, murdered him in his sleep at Xusrō’s secret command. Either way, the end was the same—betrayal upon betrayal.

🐫 The Triumph of Fear

The news reached Ctesiphon in the tenth year of Xusrō’s reign. The court rejoiced, and the king marked the victory with a spectacle of cruelty. The severed head of Wistaxm was hung from the neck of Šāpūr, son of Wahrām Čōbīn, and paraded through the capital on a camel—an image of humiliation, as the Chronicle of Khuzestan records. The message was unmistakable: no bloodline, no general, no noble could rival the Šāhān Šāh.

Yet what returned to Ctesiphon was not peace, but fear. The empire was once again whole, but the soul of its king was divided. He had survived revolt, exile, and betrayal, but at a cost—the death of trust itself.

Bonner captures the transformation well:

“When Xusro returned to the throne, a cloud of suspicion and doubt hung over him…
He created a new cause for aristocratic and military resentment.
And it was his uncle Bistam who raised the standard of revolt.”

After Wistaxm’s death, Xusrō’s reign hardened. He lavished rewards upon loyalists like Smbat Bagratuni, but his eyes never ceased watching the frontier and the court alike. His rule turned from benevolent to divine, his justice from paternal to cosmic. He was now not merely Šāhān Šāh—but the agent of Ohrmazd on earth, destined to purify a world defiled by rebellion.

☀️ The Calm Before the Eschaton

By the year 600 CE, Xusrō was thirty years old. The rebellions of Wahrām and Wistaxm were over. His empire stretched from Yemen to Transoxiana; his court gleamed with splendor, gold, and priests. The Roman alliance was secure; his Christian queen Shīrīn presided beside him; peace seemed restored.

But that peace was only the stillness before the apocalypse.

In two years, the emperor Maurice—his “Roman father”—would be murdered by the usurper Phocas.
And in the depths of that trauma, Xusrō would decide to avenge not merely a father, but the universe itself.
The wars that followed would not be for empire alone—they would be for creation.

Thus ended the age of revolt, and began the age of vengeance.
Ērān was whole again—but the man who ruled it was now consumed by the need to make the world one with his soul.

IV. The Spark: The Murder of Maurice and the Call of Destiny

1. The Death of a Benefactor

On 27 November 602 CE—late in the Persian month of Āzār (9 Āzār / Āθrō, 22 Nov – 21 Dec), the world as Xusrō II knew it changed in a single night. The emperor Maurice, the Roman sovereign who twelve years earlier had restored Xusrō to his throne, was executed by the usurper Phocas along with most of his family. The slaughter of Maurice was not a mere dynastic purge; to Xusrō it was sacrilege — a broken oath and the murder of a man who had acted as patron, guarantor and (in diplomatic language and in sentiment) a kind of second father. The murder in Azar, the fire-month, struck him as cosmically significant: fire (Āθrō) and betrayal together — a sacrament of outrage.

For Xusrō the motives that pushed him to war fused into one:

  • Personal. Maurice had been his savior in 591; the man who put the diadem back on Xusrō’s head. Maurice’s death read like a debt unpaid and a personal insult that demanded repayment in blood or in justice. Xusrō himself and his court framed the response as filial duty: the Roman emperor who had sheltered, armed and restored him had been murdered—Xusrō must act.

  • Theological / moral. In Sasanian political theology an oath — especially one between two crowned rulers — was sacred. Al-Ṭabarī and Syriac chronicles stress that the Romans “violated the covenant” (nakth / breaking of a solemn pact). In Persian symbolic language this was not only political treachery but a cosmic rupture that invited divine recompense. The month (9 Āzār) and the imagery of fire made the deed feel like a sacrilege that demanded a religiously authorized remedy. Xusrō wrapped his revenge in sanctified language: avenging Maurice became an act of cosmic rebalancing.

  • Political / strategic. The murder of Maurice left Rome chaotic, the western frontier vulnerable, and the moral authority of Constantinople shattered. For Xusrō this was both provocation and opportunity: to punish the usurper, to protect the Roman order that had upheld the parity of the two great sedentary powers, and to reassert Sasanian prestige after the humiliations of 590–591.

All three impulses—debt, sacrament, strategy—met and ignited.

2. Theodosius: the tangible symbol of legitimacy

Eastern witnesses supply a dramatic and decisive fact that pushed Xusrō beyond rhetoric into action: one member of Maurice’s family did survive. The Chronicle of Khuzistan (c. 660 CE) states bluntly that Maurice’s son Theodosius escaped the massacre, reached Xusrō, and was received with extraordinary honours. The Syriac chronicle’s key elements are lethal in their implications:

  • Theodosius was taken into a church by the Catholicos Sabrishoʿ I, a crown was laid on the altar, and he was crowned “according to the Roman rite.” This was public, ecclesiastical, ritual recognition — not a furtive pretence.

  • Theodosius was not left a figurehead only: Xusrō equipped him with an army and sent him forward. The Chronicle records that Theodosius marched against Phocas and was defeated near Bēt-Washi (close to Dara). He reported: “I have no power to stand before the Romans.” His failed expedition mattered: it turned a rumor into a political reality that demanded direct Sasanian involvement.

  • After Theodosius’ defeat Xusrō himself advanced from Māhozē (Ctesiphon) in winter, bringing the Catholicos with him — a deliberate fusion of spiritual legitimization and military action. The Chronicle’s narrative makes clear that Xusrō’s campaign was cast as rightful restitution for Maurice’s murder and as imperial restoration through the person of Theodosius.

Arabic–Persian memory repeats the same line. Al-Ṭabarī (drawing on Persian archival memory) states succinctly that Maurice’s son fled to Xusrō, that Xusrō “enthroned him over the Romans” and dispatched him with Persian commanders and massed forces. Al-Dīnawarī likewise preserves the escape and Xusrō’s immediate, armed reaction. These independent eastern testimonies — Syriac, Persian, Arabic — converge: Theodosius escaped, was crowned in the East, and became the nucleus around which Xusrō framed a war of vengeance and righting of cosmic order.

3. Dara, the call to arms, and the timing in ritual terms

Chronicles place key movements in ritually charged months: Theodosius arrives at Dara in March 603 (month Asfand / Ārmatōiš, 20 Feb – 20 Mar), a time that, in Xusrō’s eyes, signaled that “the gods and the calendar” were on his side. For a king steeped in symbolic rulership, celestial and seasonal timing mattered: the month’s associations with sacred devotion and the earth (Asfand) were read as sanction for a righteous campaign. The people and the clergy — both eager for retribution — read the same signs and urged war. The court, the priests (Zoroastrian and sympathetic Christian hierarchs like Sabrishoʿ), and the populace coalesced around one demand: avenge Maurice, restore order, erase the druj (falsehood).

What Xusrō saw now was simple and apocalyptic: Maurice’s murder had inverted the moral universe — Rome the guarantor of civilized order had become lawless; Phocas’ reign made the cosmic balance tip toward chaos. Xusrō framed his response as the necessary restoration of order and sanctity. Theodosius offered a legalistic and theatrical means to do so: a crowned Roman claimant, sanctified by the Catholicos, marching under the aegis of Persia.

4. From grief and sacrament to declaration

The effect in Ctesiphon was immediate. Xusrō’s grievance was both personal and public; al-Ṭabarī captures the tone: he was “deeply angered and indignant.” The rhetoric at the Persian court turned to mobilization:

  • Theodosius was publicly enthroned and paraded as the rightful Augustus (a provocation to Phocas and a clarion call to Christian eastern elites).

  • Xusrō prepared and gave armies to Theodosius, then took the field himself when the proto-campaign failed. The Catholicos’ presence with the army made the expedition not merely military but sacramental.

  • Dara — the great frontier fortress whose fate had been contested in the decades before — became the immediate strategic target. The Syriac Chronicle’s description of the siege (mines under the walls, fires, walls breached, blood pouring like water) signals that Xusrō’s war was to be ruthless and total.

The murder of Maurice in 9 Āzār had been the match; the escape and crowning of Theodosius in the winter that followed supplied the banner; the march in Asfand / March 603 was the moment when Xusrō turned private debt into public, cosmic war. For Xusrō, avenging Maurice was at once filial duty, sacramental cleansing, and geopolitical reordering. In his mind and in the eyes of the Eastern chroniclers, the crime demanded the ultimate response.

2. The First Campaigns (603–610)

When the fires of vengeance first blazed across the western frontier in 603 CE, it seemed to every Persian eye that the gods themselves had sanctioned Xusrō’s cause. The murder of Maurice in the month of Fire (Āzār) had been answered with fire: siege engines burning beneath Dara’s walls, the air thick with smoke, the banners of Ērān shimmering like tongues of flame against the sky. Every success that followed was read as proof that Ohrmazd had smiled upon his champion and loosed the chains that had once bound Persia beneath Rome’s arrogance.

Rome was collapsing from within. The usurper Phocas, who had murdered his sovereign and seized the purple, ruled through terror. Riots convulsed Constantinople; provinces muttered rebellion; and on the empire’s eastern marches, legions stood paralyzed between loyalty and survival. Narses, Rome’s own general in Mesopotamia, refused to acknowledge Phocas’ rule — a fracture that would prove fatal. Into that vacuum, Xusrō saw the opening of destiny.

As Adrian Goldsworthy describes, “Phocas’s regime was collapsing around him… and Xusro II, the ‘son’ he had helped back to power, announced that he would seek vengeance from the new regime through war.”
For the king of kings, this was not mere vengeance but cosmic retribution. The balance between the two eyes of the world — Ērān and Hrōm — had been broken. Now it would be restored, with fire and sword.

The War of the Covenant (603–604)

In early 603 CE, Phocas sent his envoy to Ctesiphon to announce his accession and offer the customary gifts. The reply he received overturned six centuries of diplomacy. Xusrō rejected the usurper’s legitimacy outright, imprisoned his ambassador, and ordered public mourning for Maurice throughout the empire. In the temples of Fire and in the churches of the East, priests intoned the same prayer: vengeance upon the murderer and restoration of justice.

The next act followed swiftly. Theodosius, the son of Maurice was brought before the court, crowned in the Roman rite by Catholicos Sabrishoʿ I, and proclaimed emperor. This gesture was not a charade. To the Christian and Zoroastrian alike, it fused divine sanction with political right: Rome had killed its anointed ruler, and Persia had become the guardian of lawful kingship.

When Xusrō’s armies crossed the Tigris and stormed westward that summer, they did so under the twin standards of Ohrmazd and Maurice.

In Mesopotamia, Phocas’ field commander fell in battle, mortally wounded as his troops broke and fled. Dara — once the bastion of Roman pride — endured a nine-month siege. Mines collapsed its walls; the bishop, fearing capture, killed himself; and blood, wrote the Chronicle of Khuzistan, “flowed like water.” Dara fell in 604 CE, the same year the old Catholicos died — a sign, many whispered, that his final act of blessing Theodosius had sealed Persia’s triumph.

Armenia and the North: Cleansing the Wounds of the Past

While Mesopotamia burned, Armenia became the next arena of judgment. There the war took on a darker rhythm — massacres, shifting loyalties, and mountain fortresses consumed by flame. Yet even in this rough country, the Persians prevailed. Cities like Theodosiopolis and Satala fell one after another, while the remnants of Rome’s armies were cut down or driven into flight. Each victory fed the Persian court’s conviction that Ohrmazd had turned His face toward Xusrō, and that Rome — seat of lies and the slayers of kings — was now under the shadow of Ahriman.

Every campaign year ended with the same pattern: Persian withdrawal to winter quarters in Atropatene, followed by renewed advance each spring. But as victories multiplied, the armies no longer withdrew. Garrison by garrison, province by province, they stayed. By 607, the old rhythm of seasonal war had ended; Persia was no longer raiding, but reclaiming.

The Fall of the Frontier (605–610)

After Dara’s fall, the rest of Mesopotamia folded like parchment. Cities long deemed impregnable — Carrhae, Callinicum, Circesium, Amida — fell in sequence. In many, citizens opened their gates willingly to Theodosius and Xusrō’s generals, convinced they were serving lawful authority. Persian governors restored local bishops deposed by Constantinople’s Chalcedonian policy, winning over the Miaphysite populations of Syria and northern Mesopotamia.

This religious tolerance was deliberate statecraft: Xusrō, though Zoroastrian, knew how to turn theology into diplomacy. The Christian chroniclers of Edessa record that “the Persians came not as destroyers but as deliverers.” The illusion was powerful — and it worked.

By 610 CE, everything east of the Euphrates was Persian again. Not since Šāpūr I had Ērān held such ground. But Xusrō was not content with ancient borders. His aim, as his courtiers knew though Heraclius never could, was nothing less than the final erasure of Hrōm as an equal power.

The Fall of Phocas and the Return to the Sea

In October 610, as Phocas’ tyranny collapsed in blood and smoke, Heraclius sailed from Africa, overthrew the usurper, and was crowned in Constantinople. By that month’s end, Xusrō’s legions had taken Antioch, Apamea, and Emesa, while Persian cavalry reached the Mediterranean at Zenobia (Halabiya) — seventy years after Xusrō I Anōšag-ruwān had last done the same.

It was a scene designed for memory: Persia’s horsemen watering their mounts in the sea, while Antioch’s bells tolled under a foreign sky.

When Heraclius sent his first embassy, pleading for peace and offering gifts “more lavish than any before,” Xusrō responded with thunder. He refused to recognize Heraclius’ rule, declared Theodosius the true emperor, and — in an act that shattered all precedent — executed the Roman envoys.

Diplomacy itself had died. The king of kings no longer recognized Rome as an equal; he recognized only his own justice.

Heraclius did not understand what drove his enemy. His envoys reported that Xusrō made no demands, offered no terms. To the Romans this was madness — war without an aim. But in Ērān everyone understood perfectly.

Xusrō did not want tribute. He did not want treaties. He wanted judgment — divine, historical, personal.
He sought to avenge Maurice, to purge the stain of Phocas, and to fulfill what every priest, every court poet, and every veteran whispered:
that Ērānšahr would one day extinguish the false light of Hrōm and stand alone as the rightful kingdom of the world.

By October 610, it seemed that day had come. From Ctesiphon to Antioch, from the Tigris to the sea, Persian banners flew where the eagles of Rome once stood.

The empire of light — so it was said in the fire temples — had at last consumed the darkness.

V. The Theology of Empire: Faith and Finality

1. War as Eschatology

By the dawn of the seventh century, the Sasanian monarchy no longer viewed empire as mere dominion — it was a cosmic vocation. Every victory, every investiture, every inscription on coin or stone proclaimed a single truth: that the King of Kings was the earthly instrument of Ohrmazd’s will, waging the final war between Aša (Truth, Order) and Druj (the Lie, Chaos). Under Xusrō II, that theology reached its apotheosis.

When he declared war on Rome in 603 CE, Xusrō did not imagine a campaign of borders or tribute; he envisioned the Frashō-kereti — the renewal of the world. The fall of Hrōm was not an end in itself, but the cleansing of creation. As Touraj Daryaee observes, “under Xusrō Parvēz, the Sasanian monarchy fused its imperial destiny with eschatology: conquest became the means of world restoration.” Every Roman defeat, every city consumed by Persian fire, was recited by Zoroastrian priests as a victory of Aša — the visible triumph of divine order over falsehood.

The King Who Outshone the Gods

Nowhere is this theology more vividly expressed than in stone — in the great investiture relief of Ṭāq-i Bustān, where Xusrō II stands between Ahura Mazdā and Anāhitā, receiving the diadem of divine sovereignty. As Michael Shenkar notes, this monument marks the culmination of a centuries-long evolution in Sasanian art: the king, once subordinate to the gods, now towers above them. His crown, elaborate and radiant, eclipses even the uncovered mural crowns of the deities beside him.

This is no accident of scale; it is ideology in sculpted form. By Xusrō’s age, the Sasanian king had absorbed the divine aura — xvarrah (khvarenah) — into himself. On his coins, for the first time in history, the legend xvarrah abzūd (“whose divine glory has increased”) appears beside his name. The light of divinity was no longer distant or bestowed; it was embodied. Xusrō’s glory expanded with each victory, radiating like a second sun from Ērān to the edge of the world.

The gods themselves had become attendants of empire:

  • Ahura Mazdā, once the transcendent Creator, now held out the ring of investiture to His earthly mirror.

  • Anāhitā, goddess of waters and fertility, offered the diadem of sovereignty to the king — a gesture that echoed through both royal ideology and sacred ritual.

  • And Ātar, the living Fire, was stamped upon his coins as a flaming bust — the visible soul of Truth itself, the son of Ohrmazd, guiding the Šāhān Šāh’s path of purification.

Even the iconography of his coinage echoed the theology of apocalypse: the divine bust in flames, the winged crowns, the aureate nimbus — all emblems of a ruler no longer merely anointed but transfigured. In Shenkar’s words, “the king visibly towers above the deities… the sophisticated crown of the Šāhān Šāh overshadows that of Ahura Mazdā.” To the people of Ērānšahr, this was no artistic flourish. It was the visible sign that the cosmic struggle was approaching its consummation — that the king himself had become the channel of Ohrmazd’s light.

The Divine Conflagration: Fire, Glory, and Renewal

Xusrō’s age was one of omens. The heavens dimmed with dust; plague and famine tore at the world’s edge. To the Magi and theologians of the Fire Temples, these were not catastrophes but harbingers of the End-Time — signs that Ahriman’s dominion was reaching its final convulsion.

The god Ātar (Ādur) — Fire, the son of Ohrmazd — blazed on Xusrō’s coinage and imperial seals as a youthful, flame-crowned figure. On Sasanian seals, flames rose from his head and shoulders, and ribbons streamed behind him like wings of light. To the priestly eye, Ātar was not simply a symbol of ritual purity, but the divine presence that purges the Lie from creation. His imagery on Xusrō’s coinage was deliberate: the world itself would be cleansed in fire, and Hrōm — the polluted body of falsehood — would be consumed first.

Thus every campaign westward was an act of ritual purification. The siege of Dara, the fall of Antioch, the march into Palestine — these were not imperial expansions but sacred burnings, in which the Fire of Truth devoured the darkness of Rome. In temple sermons, priests described the war as a renewal of the covenant between Ohrmazd and His chosen ruler: the return of the xvarrah ī Ērān, the Glory of Iran, to its fullness.

Eschatology Crowned in Stone

At Ṭāq-i Bustān, the theology reached its purest form. Xusrō’s colossal relief — flanked by the gods, crowned with the diadem, and astride an armored horse below — fuses two images of kingship: the divine and the martial. As Shenkar notes, the lower register’s nimbate horseman is likely no god at all, but Xusrō himself — transfigured, armored, and radiant — the warrior of Ohrmazd, the avenger of Light. His nimbus burns with the same halo once reserved for Fire and the Sun.

In this fusion, theology and kingship dissolve into one. The Šāhān Šāh has become both priest and savior — the earthly reflection of Vərəθraγna, the god of victory, and the agent of Frashō-kereti, the final renewal.

The relief is not merely art; it is eschatology in stone. It proclaims that under Xusrō, the sacred and the imperial have become indistinguishable. His war against Rome was not conquest, but creation’s final correction — the purging of the Lie so that the world might at last be made pure.

Faith, Fire, and Finality

By the 610s, as Persian banners stood upon the Mediterranean shore, the priests of Ērānšahr proclaimed that the age of victory had dawned. The Frashō-kereti had begun — not as a distant promise, but as a war. Rome’s fall was not to be an event of politics, but of cosmic purification.

In Xusrō’s vision, to erase Hrōm was to complete creation.
To conquer the world was to restore its order.
And to wage war in the name of Ohrmazd was to become, himself, the instrument of the world’s renewal — the flame through which the final darkness would burn away.

2. The Imitation of Alexander (Imitatio Alexandri)

When Xusrō II dreamed of empire, he dreamed in the language of myth. The King of Kings who sought to erase Rome forever also sought to absorb its soul. For centuries, Rome had imagined Alexander the Great as its own ancestral model — conqueror of the East, son of Zeus, ruler of the oikoumene. But in the seventh century, that mantle passed to the East.

According to Theophylact Simocatta, when a Christian bishop came before Xusrō at Ctesiphon bearing an image of the Virgin Mary, the king fell prostrate, kissed the panel, and declared:

“Its archetype appeared to me in a dream and said that the victories of Alexander of Macedon would be bestowed upon me.”

This vision, seemingly pious, was in truth political revelation. It signaled Xusrō’s intention to refashion himself as Alexander redivivus — the new Iskandar, chosen by heaven to conquer and unify the world.

The Persian Alexander

As Touraj Daryaee has shown, by Xusrō’s age, the image of Alexander in Persian thought had already transformed. In the Zoroastrian Middle Persian texts of earlier centuries, Alexander was gizistag — “the accursed,” destroyer of the Achaemenids and polluter of fire temples. Yet by the late Sasanian period, the myth had been rewritten. In the Xwadāy-nāmag, the royal chronicle of the Sasanian court, and later in Ferdowsī’s Šāhnāmeh, Alexander (Iskandar) became the half-brother of Dārā (Darius III) — a rightful heir who, though Western-born, was of Persian blood and destiny.

This reinterpretation was not literary whim, but imperial necessity. By claiming Alexander as part of Iran’s sacred genealogy, Xusrō could transform him from invader into precursor — the first world-unifier whose work the Sasanians would now complete. Just as Alexander had conquered East and West to forge one cosmos, Xusrō now claimed to restore that unity under the banner of Ohrmazd.

This mythic transformation served a precise imperial purpose. Between 603 and 619 CE, as Persian armies swept through Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Armenia, millions of new subjects — Greek-speaking Christians, Syriac clerics, Egyptian monks, and Armenian nobles — came under Persian rule. For them, Alexander was not the destroyer of Persia but the hero who had once bridged East and West, the ruler of both Greeks and Asians.

By invoking Alexander, Xusrō’s court could speak in a language intelligible to the conquered. The Christian Virgin promising him “the victories of Alexander” was not a random symbol; it was the perfect theological bridge. To the Zoroastrians, it meant divine sanction — Ohrmazd’s light shining through the Mother of the Messiah. To the Christians, it meant that the King of Kings had been chosen by the Theotokos herself to restore justice. To all, it meant legitimacy.

In Syria and Palestine, priests preached that the Persians were avenging the murder of the Christian Emperor Maurice. In Egypt, papyri written in Middle Persian from the Sasanian occupation (619–628 CE) mention “Alexander Caesar” (Aleksandar Kēsar) in official memoranda — evidence, as Daryaee notes, that Alexander was consciously invoked as a legitimizing figure for Persian administration in a Romanized land.

To these conquered peoples, the Sasanian king appeared not as an alien fire-worshiper, but as the heir of Alexander — the universal monarch who united all nations, Greek and Persian, Christian and Zoroastrian, under one just order.

In this way, Xusrō II’s Imitatio Alexandri became an integral part of late Sasanian imperial ideology — not imitation in style, but in scope. His court art, coinage, and ceremony all reflected the image of a king whose authority transcended the boundaries of religion and race.

  • On his silver coins, Xusrō appears radiant with xvarrah, divine glory blazing from his diadem — the Persian equivalent of Alexander’s solar aura.

  • In the reliefs of Ṭāq-i Bustān, the Šāhān Šāh stands between Ahura Mazdā and Anāhitā, receiving the ring of kingship in a pose that mirrors Hellenistic investiture iconography — but now elevated, the king towering over the gods themselves.

  • In ritual, he performed processions and enthronement rites that fused Iranian and Hellenistic motifs, presenting himself as both the anointed of Ohrmazd and the inheritor of Alexander’s cosmic dominion.

By doing so, Xusrō articulated a new world order — one that transcended Rome and Ērān alike. His empire was no longer merely Persian; it was the resurrection of the oikoumene, the inhabited world, purified and harmonized under divine Truth.

The Dream of Final Kingship

In his own mind, Xusrō stood at the end of history. He had restored the fallen order of the world, united the lands of Alexander, and avenged the murder of his benefactor Maurice. The world of the Lie — Hrōm — lay broken beneath his feet.

The Virgin’s promise and the Frashō-kereti’s prophecy had merged:

  • From Christianity, he borrowed the vision of divine election and world redemption.

  • From Zoroastrianism, he drew the apocalyptic fire that would cleanse creation.

  • From Alexander, he inherited the universal crown — the dream of an empire without boundary.

This was no mere propaganda. It was theology turned into destiny — the Persian synthesis of apocalypse and empire, in which Xusrō Parwēz became both the last king of the old world and the first king of the new.

In proclaiming himself the heir of Alexander, Xusrō sought not only to conquer Rome, but to supersede it — to become the world’s sole ruler, the divinely chosen lord of the oikoumene, the embodiment of Light’s final victory over the Lie.

3. Jerusalem and the Cross — Cosmic Inversion (614 CE)

When the armies of Ērān entered Jerusalem in 614 CE, they did not come merely as soldiers but as instruments of theology. To the Christians of the city, the event was apocalypse — slaughter, fire, and desecration. To the Zoroastrian Persians, it was Frashō-kereti in miniature: a sacred inversion of the cosmic order, the triumph of Aša (Truth) over the Druj (Lie).

The Persian armies under Shahrwarāz and Shāhēn besieged Jerusalem for twenty days. When its walls fell, according to Strategius and Sophronius, flames devoured the churches of the Holy Sepulchre and Zion. The relic of the True Cross — the holiest symbol of Roman Christianity — was seized, and the Patriarch Zacharias was carried off to Ctesiphon in chains. Tens of thousands perished. “The city of old men, children, and women,” Sophronius lamented, “was cut down by the bloody sword.”

Modern archaeology, as Sean Anthony and Gideon Avni note, reveals less physical devastation than the texts imply — yet the memory of Jerusalem’s burning consumed the late antique imagination. Even if the fires were fewer, their meaning was cosmic. The Persians may not have razed every stone, but they struck at the theological foundation of the Roman world. The destruction of churches, the seizure of relics, the humiliation of icons — all enacted a ritual victory over the god of the enemy.

In the eyes of Ērān, the conquest of Jerusalem was not military vengeance but cosmic rectification.

The War of Light and Darkness

In Zoroastrian cosmology, the universe was divided between the realms of Aša (Truth, Order) and Druj (Lie, Chaos). Ērān, the Land of Light, was the citadel of Truth; Anērān — the world beyond its borders, Rome above all — was the domain of the Lie. For centuries, this moral geography defined the Sasanian view of the world. Every war was a battle in the long struggle between Ohrmazd and Ahriman, the Creator and the Adversary.

In this scheme, Rome was not merely a rival empire — it was the earthly body of the Lie itself. Its God, from the Zoroastrian point of view, was an imposter spirit, its churches the temples of the Falsehood that had polluted creation since time’s dawn. When Xusrō II’s armies stormed Jerusalem, they believed themselves to be cleansing the world — purifying it by fire. The burning of churches was the burning of drujīg dēn, the “religion of deceit.”

To torch the Church of the Resurrection was, therefore, to invert the cosmos — to cast down the idols of the Lie and enthrone the fire of Truth in their place. It was not cruelty, but theology made visible.

Avenging the Blood of Ēraj

In Persian myth, recorded in the Šāhnāmeh and echoed in the Khwadāy-nāmag, the first sin dividing the nations was the murder of Ēraj, the just son of Farīdūn, slain by his brothers Salm and Tūr, ancestors of the Romans and the Turks. Ēraj represented the pure seed of Iran; his death at the hands of his jealous brothers marked the birth of the world’s corruption.

To later Persian kings, every war with Rome was an echo of this primordial crime. Šāpūr I carved his victories over Roman emperors as the vengeance of Ēraj’s blood; Xusrō II inherited that legacy. By the logic of mythic memory, the conquest of Jerusalem — Rome’s holy city — was the final act of vengeance, the settling of the ancient debt.

If Rome was the house of Salm, Jerusalem was his shrine. To sack it was to avenge Ēraj at last — to restore balance to the cosmos through fire and blood.

The Cross as the Axis of the Lie

For the Christians of the Near East, the Cross was the axis mundi, the vertical link between heaven and earth, the triumph of the divine over death. But to Persian priests, it symbolized Rome’s blasphemous claim that God could die. In Zoroastrian eyes, this was the ultimate inversion of Aša — a theology of death masquerading as life.

When the Persians carried the Cross away to Ctesiphon, they were not simply looting a relic; they were transferring the cosmic axis from the domain of Falsehood to the realm of Truth. The True Cross, borne across the desert, became a trophy of divine justice — the sign that Ohrmazd’s creation had reclaimed what was rightfully His.

Thus, the seizure of the Cross was not the desecration of Christianity, but its correction. The god of Hrōm had been defeated, his instrument of death made subject to the Fire of Ohrmazd.

Fire and Purification

The burning of Jerusalem’s churches — whether literal or symbolic — must be read as a ritual of purification. In Zoroastrian ritual thought, fire is not destruction but cleansing. Ātar, the divine flame, consumes pollution and restores cosmic order. To the Persian mind, setting fire to the shrines of the Lie was a cosmic duty.

Sean Anthony notes that much of the “destruction” described by Christian sources consisted of burning, not demolition. This detail, often overlooked, aligns precisely with Zoroastrian ritual logic. The Persians did not raze the temples of Hrōm to rubble — they purified them by fire, leaving the stone foundations intact for a new order to rise.

In the words of later Zoroastrian texts, “Fire consumes the Lie and returns the world to Truth.” The sack of Jerusalem, therefore, was not the ruin of a city but its transformation — from the capital of the Lie into a purified space within Ohrmazd’s cosmos.

The Fall of the God of Rome

To the Persians, the burning of Jerusalem was the visible proof that Ohrmazd had triumphed over the god of Hrōm. Just as Ahura Mazdā once cast Ahriman into darkness, so had His earthly king cast down the rival faith. The capture of the Cross symbolized that the divine weapon of the enemy had been seized and neutralized — the cosmic spear turned against its maker.

In Ctesiphon, the relic was not mocked but displayed as a sign of the world’s renewal. Xusrō’s court claimed that the divine favor once given to the Romans had passed to Ērān. In their own eyes, the Persians were not desecrators but redeemers — those who had restored the world’s axis to the side of Light.

The fall of Jerusalem thus stood as the theological mirror of creation’s first battle: Ohrmazd’s fire consuming the Lie, the old order ending so that the final one might begin.

Eschatology in Flames

In the cosmic imagination of late Sasanian Iran, the world was nearing its end. Famine, plague, and war were the signs of Ahriman’s last convulsions. The conquest of Jerusalem — Rome’s spiritual heart — was therefore not only political but eschatological. It was the opening act of the final purification, the dawn of the Frashō-kereti itself.

For Christians, the city’s burning meant divine abandonment. For Persians, it meant divine arrival. The fire that devoured the Holy Sepulchre was, to them, the Fire of Salvation — the same fire that would one day cleanse the entire world.

Thus, in the Persian imagination, 614 CE was not simply a year of conquest. It was the cosmic inversion of history — when the holy city of the Romans bowed before the servants of Ohrmazd, and the axis of creation turned once more toward the East, toward Ērān.

VI. The Political and Climatic Landscape

1. An Empire under Environmental Stress

By the dawn of the 6th century, the world of Ērān was tightening beneath the weight of climatic constriction. 🏜️
The paleoclimate reconstructions analyzed by Matthew J. Jacobson, Alison Gascoigne, and Dominik Fleitmann (2023) reveal that effective moisture in the Iranian plateau began to fall sharply after ~480 CE, long before the famous volcanic eruptions of 536 CE that heralded the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA). Across the western highlands and the Fertile Crescent, speleothem and lake records—from Gejkar, Hoti, Kuna Ba, and Neor—show sustained aridity through the late 5th and early 6th centuries.

🌍 The empire’s breadbasket was drying.

Yet paradoxically, rather than collapse, the Sasanian Empire expanded. Under Kawad I and Xusrō I Anōšag-ruwān, the state embarked on massive public works — canals, qanats, dams, and irrigation weirs — that turned crisis into infrastructure.
By the time Xusrō II Parvēz ascended in 590 CE, the empire had learned to survive drought through organization, taxation, and technical mastery.

And so, when the climate turned against them once again in his reign — when drought and plague and famine haunted the lands — Xusrō did not retreat.
He tightened the state, mobilized its resources, and drove it into total war. ⚔️

For the world of Xusrō II, aridity was destiny — and conquest, a form of adaptation.
The environmental pressures that crippled Himyar in Arabia or Rome’s agrarian fringes only hardened Ērān’s resolve. As Jacobson et al. note, the Sasanian economy’s resilience came from two qualities:

➡️ Omnivory — a diversity of crops, trade goods, and regions of supply.
➡️ Flexibility — the ability to rapidly redirect labor and water.

The qanat, drawing groundwater through hidden veins in the earth, became the metaphor for empire itself — unseen yet enduring, channeling the depths of Iran’s endurance beneath a dying sky.

“While Himyar’s terraces dried, Ērān’s qanats flowed.” – paraphrased from Manuel et al. (2018)

Thus, when the skies withheld rain, Xusrō Parvēz demanded victory.
Each campaign — against Rome, Arabia, and Armenia — was not only imperial ambition, but a hydrological answer to scarcity. Conquest meant grain, water, and tribute. To stand still was to starve.

2. Economic and Social Pressures

Yet this defiance came at an unbearable cost. 💰

The same records that testify to Sasanian ingenuity also reveal the limits of extraction. The archaeological surveys of Khūzistān, Deh Luran, and Bushehr show a peak in settlement and irrigation activity under Xusrō II — followed by a sudden collapse after 622 CE.
From Ctesiphon to Fārs, tax receipts halved within a generation (Christensen 1993; Daryaee 2022).
The empire had reached its maximum territorial and economic extent, but beneath the polished silver and fire temples lay an exhausted system.

The empire had conquered Egypt — but could no longer feed itself.

The Late Antique Little Ice Age deepened the strain. Plague swept through the realm in 627/628 CE, felling Xusrō’s heir Kawād II Šērōē mere months after murdering his father.
Civil war erupted. Armies dissolved. And within four years, eleven monarchs claimed the throne.
All the canals and qanats could not irrigate a broken empire.

Yet it must be said: climate did not destroy Ērān. Xusrō did.

His policies — centralization, war taxation, and the relentless drive for Roman tribute — were the human translation of environmental anxiety. He did not fear the drought; he weaponized it, hurling his empire against the only rival left on earth. 🌒

And when the rain finally returned in the 7th century — when paleoclimate records show a wet rebound around 680 CE — Ērān was gone.
The fields bloomed again under the Umayyad Caliphs, not the heirs of the House of Sāsān.

🜂 Summary: Climate as Catalyst, Not Cause

The droughts of the 6th century did not bring Persia to its knees — they lit the forge in which Xusrō II hammered his empire into iron.

☀️ Aridity bred ambition.
💧 Irrigation demanded organization.
⚔️ Scarcity justified conquest.

By 622 CE, the empire had reached the farthest limits of human endurance — not despite the climate, but because of it.
When the environment whispered collapse, Xusrō shouted empire.

VII. The Height of Power — and the Abyss

By 619 CE, the unimaginable had happened. Egypt — the granary of the Mediterranean — had fallen to the armies of Ērān.
By 620, Persian banners flew near the Bosporus, and Shahrbarāz’s legions could see the domes of Constantinople glittering across the waters of Chalcedon.
Never since the days of Darius had Iran ruled such a world.
From the deserts of Arabia to the mountains of Anatolia, from the Indus to the Nile, the empire of Ohrmazd had become the empire of the earth.

🜂 Ērānšahr now looked upon itself as the instrument of cosmic order fulfilling its final mission.

The Theology of Triumph

For centuries, the Zoroastrian dualism of Aša and Druj — of Truth and the Lie — had given moral form to imperial geography. Rome (Hrōm) was not merely the other empire; it was the embodiment of the Lie, the last bastion of Ahriman’s dominion in the West. Every war against Rome was not simply for territory, but for the purification of creation.

By Xusrō II’s reign, this theology had hardened into eschatology. The wars of Ērān and Hrōm were no longer political contests; they were apocalyptic rehearsals, preludes to the frašō-kereti — the final renovation of the world.
In Zoroastrian cosmology, it was foretold that the House of the Lie would be cast down before the coming of the Savior (Sōšyāns), and light would at last encompass creation.
To the pious eyes of Xusrō’s court, the victories of Shahrbarāz, Šāhīn, and Shahmardān seemed nothing less than the unfolding of that divine script.

“The sons of Ohrmazd had triumphed; the lands of Ahriman lay desolate.”

But theology, once turned into state ideology, cannot discern the difference between salvation and conquest.
As Theophanes, Agapius, and the Syriac chroniclers attest, after 619 the Persian armies plundered Egypt, Palestine, and Syria without restraint, stripping churches, enslaving populations, and hauling back to Ctesiphon “marble columns, altar tables, gold and silver vessels” — the treasures of Christendom itself.
Agapius tells us that Xusrō “was possessed by pride and conceit by reason of the many conquests that he had made and the great extent of his power.”

This was the theology of victory transmuted into greed — the Aša of conquest now corrupted by the Druj of domination.
In the eyes of the Zoroastrian priesthood, the war had been a sacred duty; in the chronicles of the Christians, it became blasphemy incarnate.

Vengeance, Empire, and Climate

Behind the rhetoric of cosmic justice lay something far more human: vengeance.
Xusrō II had not forgotten that his father, Ohrmazd IV, had been overthrown and blinded by his own kin, and that he himself had once fled to the very empire he now destroyed. When the Roman emperor Maurice restored him to his throne in 591, Xusrō swore eternal gratitude — but after Maurice was murdered in 602, that gratitude turned to righteous fury.
He saw in the usurper Phocas the face of betrayal, and in Rome itself the enduring symbol of deceit.

The result was total war.
And it came in an age when the skies had grown mean and the earth reluctant. The droughts of the late 6th century — those decades of dryness recorded in the caves of Hoti and the lakes of Neor and Van — had squeezed every harvest, reduced the granaries, and forced Ērān’s administrators to tighten taxation and requisition.
Conquest became a survival mechanism, an imperial metabolism feeding upon the wealth of the Mediterranean.
The famine of the plateau was answered by the plunder of the Nile.

Thus, when Xusrō sent his emissaries to strip the marble from the churches of Syria and Palestine, when caravans of captives and stone rolled eastward to Ctesiphon, it was not only pride — it was also hunger.
In the empire’s mind, these were not mere spoils of war; they were the transmutation of Roman wealth into cosmic restitution, the material proof that the Lie had been conquered and the World made whole.

The drought gave the war its urgency.
The theology gave it its legitimacy.
Xusrō’s vengeance gave it its ferocity.

The Empire of the End

By 620, Ērānšahr had become too large for its own soul.
The Sasanian administration — once the marvel of the East — was stretched to its limits. Tax burdens grew unbearable; governors ruled as warlords; the old nobility, who had tolerated Xusrō’s centralization under prosperity, now whispered sedition amid famine.
Even the Magi grew uneasy. The war that had begun as a holy campaign now reeked of hubris. The cosmic order seemed to tilt, the harmony of Aša strained by the weight of imperial arrogance.

Theophanes writes that “Xusrō hardened his yoke on all men by way of bloodthirstiness and taxation; for, being puffed up by his victory, he was no longer able to keep the established order.”
In those words, even the Roman chronicler captured what Zoroastrians themselves might have feared: that in conquering the world, Xusrō had begun to betray creation.
The gold and marble dragged from Roman churches adorned not the temples of Ohrmazd, but the palaces of a king who had made himself a god.
The line between king of kings and divine rival blurred — and when fear replaces reverence, empire cracks from within.

Thus, at the very moment when the banners of Ērān touched the sea and its power stretched from the Indus to the Nile, the empire began its slow inward collapse.
The droughts eased, but the empire did not recover. The climate of heaven had turned merciful; the climate of men had not.

The Paradox of Triumph

Xusrō II’s age was one of extremes — of glory that became madness.
The empire reached the boundaries of the known world, yet lost its balance between the moral and the material, the cosmic and the human.
The vision of Ērān as the earthly reflection of Ohrmazd’s order had once united kings and priests in harmony; under Xusrō, it became an empire’s delusion, a theology stretched past its breaking point.

He had sought to bring the world into Aša — and in doing so, summoned the Druj within his own house.
Within a decade, Rome would rise from the grave under Heraclius, the Persians would turn their swords upon one another, and the empire that once saw itself as the guardian of creation would lie open to conquest.

Thus ended the moment when Ērān stood as the axis of the world — at once the height of order and the edge of the abyss.

VIII. The Fall of the Cosmic King

For a fleeting moment, it had seemed that the Zoroastrian eschatological vision was being realized on earth. The House of the Lie was in ruins; the banners of Aša flew from the Nile to the Bosporus. But empires, like men, are most vulnerable at the peak of their power. The cosmology that had justified Xusrō II’s world-conquest now turned against him. The cosmic war demanded a cosmic reversal.

1. Heraclius Strikes Back: The Unmaking of a World

By 622, the Roman Empire was a ghost of its former self, its provinces ravaged, its treasury empty, its morale shattered. Yet, from this abyss, Emperor Heraclius forged a weapon more potent than any army: a holy war. He reframed the conflict from a political struggle into a Christian apocalyptic drama. The war was no longer for territory, but for the soul of Christendom and the recovery of its most sacred relic, the True Cross. In this, he mirrored Xusrō’s own Zoroastrian fervor, creating a clash of competing eschatologies.

Heraclius, funded by melting down church treasures, embarked on a campaign of breathtaking audacity. Instead of confronting the massed Persian armies in Syria, he sailed into the heart of the conflict—the Caucasus and Armenia. From 624 to 627, he orchestrated a series of brilliant campaigns deep within Ērānšahr itself. This was not merely a military counteroffensive; it was a desecration. In a calculated act of theological warfare, Heraclius sacked the great Zoroastrian fire-temple of Adur-Farrobay at Ganzak. The message was unmistakable: the god of the Christians could strike at the very heart of the Zoroastrian sacred landscape. As Touraj Daryaee notes, this was the first real crusade, a holy war between Christendom and the East, fought even before the rise of Islam.

The final, decisive blow fell on the plains of Nineveh in December 627. Heraclius, allied with the Western Göktürks, shattered a Persian army and stood unopposed at the gates of the Sasanian royal complex at Dastagird. He did not need to take Ctesiphon. The true battle was already won. The myth of Sasanian invincibility, carefully cultivated by Xusrō, evaporated. The king who had styled himself a cosmic victor was revealed as a mortal who could not protect the heartland of his own empire.

2. Revolt, Regicide, and Ruin: The Druj Within

The empire’s collapse was not born on the battlefield of Nineveh, but in the corridors of power in Ctesiphon. Heraclius, a master of intrigue, exploited the fatal cracks in the Sasanian edifice. The most devastating blow came from within the military elite. General Šahrwarāz, the very architect of Xusrō’s victories in the Levant and Egypt, halted his armies and entered into a secret correspondence with the Roman emperor.

The reason for this monumental betrayal was quintessentially Sasanian: palace conspiracy. Heraclius intercepted a damning letter from Xusrō ordering the execution of Šahrwarāz. By presenting this to the general, the Roman emperor turned the Sasanian king’s own paranoia against him. Convinced of his fate, Šahrwarāz refused to come to his king’s aid, effectively paralyzing the empire’s most powerful field army at its moment of greatest need.

This act of defiance was the signal for which the disaffected nobility and courtiers had been waiting. Burdened by Xusrō’s oppressive taxation and alienated by his autocratic rule, they conspired with his own son, Kawād II (Šērōe). In a swift and brutal coup in 628 CE, Xusrō II Parwēz—the "Victorious," the king who had brought Sasanian Ērān to its greatest territorial extent—was deposed, imprisoned, and executed after a show trial. The cosmic king was murdered in a dungeon, a final, humiliating testament to the triumph of the Lie he had sought to eradicate.

Kawād II’s reign began with a bloodletting that doomed the empire. To secure his throne, he committed fratricide on an unprecedented scale, ordering the execution of all his brothers and half-brothers—every eligible male heir of the House of Sasan. This act, while perhaps a grim necessity for his own survival, severed the dynasty’s lifeline. It left the empire without a clear line of succession, transforming the monarchy into a prize for the strongest warlord.

The unraveling was swift and total. Kawād II died of plague after a reign of mere months, His young son, Ardaxšīr III, was a puppet, and the empire plunged into a four-year civil war—the Fratricide of the Sasanians. A dizzying succession of eleven monarchs and contenders, including queens Bōrān and Āzarmīgduxt, and generals like Šahrwarāz who briefly seized the throne, fought for the crown. The central authority of the King of Kings dissolved. The empire fragmented, reverting to a feudal state reminiscent of the Parthian era, where powerful generals and regional nobility (dehgāns) held real power.

Into this vortex of political chaos, famine, and plague—the very horsemen of the apocalypse—stepped a new, unforeseen force. The wars of Ērān and Hrōm had exhausted both ancient empires, bled their treasuries dry, and shattered their ideological certainties. The frontier defenses were neglected, the populations were alienated, and the will to resist had been broken by decades of total war.

Within a generation of Xusrō’s execution, the armies of Islam, united under a new faith and a fresh imperative, would pour out of the Arabian Peninsula. They would inherit the exhausted worlds of both Rome and Ērān, ending one age and beginning another. The final cosmic war between the two eyes of the earth had left them both blind.

IX. Epilogue — The War That Ended the World

The war between Xusrō II Parvēz and Heraclius was more than a conflict; it was the Last War of Antiquity. It was the final, cataclysmic performance in a millennium-long drama between Ērān and Hrōm, a duel that had structured the world from the steppes of Central Asia to the pillars of Hercules. When the curtain fell, the stage itself had collapsed.

The peace treaty of 629, which restored the old frontiers and returned the True Cross to Jerusalem, was not a return to normalcy, but a recognition of mutual ruin. Both empires were spiritually and materially spent. Their treasuries were empty, their best legions lay buried in the fields of Mesopotamia and Anatolia, and the divine mandate of their kingships was broken. Heraclius returned to Constantinople a hero, but his empire was a hollowed-out shell, its provinces devastated and unable to muster the strength to hold the line against a new threat. In Ctesiphon, the Sasanian throne had become a slaughterhouse, its legitimacy sacrificed to the ambition of generals and the desperation of princes.

For the Zoroastrian faithful, the fall of Xusrō was a profound theological catastrophe, a tragic inversion of the cosmic script. The king who had been hailed as the instrument of Aša, the warrior-king destined to cast down the Lie of Hrōm, was instead consumed by the very fire he sought to command. His quest for cosmic order had degenerated into hubris (xwadāyīh); the sacred war had become a war of plunder. In the end, the Druj was not in Rome, but within the very heart of the Ērānšahr—in the betrayal of Šahrwarāz, in the patricide of Kawād II, in the fractious nobility. The House of Sasan, the "race of gods," had devoured itself. The cosmic war had been lost not on the battlefield, but in the soul of the empire.

In this spiritual and political vacuum, a new force emerged from the deserts of Arabia, a force neither empire had the vision to foresee or the strength to resist. The rise of Islam was the true frašō-kereti—the Renovation—but not one prophesied in the Zoroastrian or Christian texts. It was a renewal that swept away the ancient certainties of both. The Muslim armies did not just conquer territories; they conquered a narrative. They offered a new cosmology, a new law, and a new community to the exhausted populations of the Near East, for whom the grand, bankrupt ideologies of Caesar and King of Kings had ceased to hold meaning.

The millennial duel of Ērān and Hrōm, which had once defined the axis of the civilized world, did not end with a triumphant victory cry. It ended with a silence—the silence of a palace in Ctesiphon where no strong king ruled, the silence of a frontier that no longer mattered, the silence of a cosmic struggle rendered obsolete by history's sudden, decisive turn. The two eyes of the earth had gouged each other out, and in the ensuing darkness, a new world was born.

THE END

Works Cited

-

Primary Sources

Al-Dinawari, Ahmad ibn Dawud al-. Al-Akhbar al-Tiwal. Edited by Abd al-Mun’im ‘Amir, reviewed by Dr. Jamal al-Din al-Shiyal, Ministry of Culture and National Guidance, 1960.

Anthony, Sean W., and Stephen J. Shoemaker. The Capture of Jerusalem by the Persians in 614 ce by Strategius of Mar Saba. Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago, 2024.

Ferdowsī, Abū al-Qāsim. Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings. Translated by Dick Davis, Viking Penguin, 2006.

Harrak, Amir, translator. The Chronicle of Zuqnin, Parts III and IV: A.D. 488–775. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1999.

Hoyland, Robert G., translator. The ‘History of the Kings of the Persians’ in Three Arabic Chronicles: The Transmission of the Iranian Past from Late Antiquity to Early Islam. Liverpool University Press, 2018. Translated Texts for Historians, vol. 69.

---, translator. Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Liverpool University Press, 2011. Translated Texts for Historians, vol. 57.

Al-Kaʿbi, Nasir. A Short Chronicle on the End of the Sasanian Empire and Early Islam, 590–660 A.D. Edition, translation, and commentary by Nasir al-Kaʿbi, Gorgias Press LLC, 2016.

Leonis Grammatici. Chronographia. Ex Recognitione Immanuelis Bekkeri. Accedit Eustathii de Capta Thessalonica Liber. Bonn, Impensis Ed. Weberi, 1842.

Mangō, Cyril, and Roger Scott, with the assistance of Geoffrey Greatrex. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284–813. Clarendon Press, 1997.

Moosa, Matti, translator. The Syriac Chronicle of Michael Rabo (The Great): A Universal History from the Creation. Beth Antioch Press, 2014.

Palmer, Andrew. The Seventh Century in the West Syrian Chronicles. Liverpool University Press, 1993.

Ṭabarī, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Jarīr. The History of al-Ṭabarī (Taʾrīkh al-Rusul waʾl-Mulūk), Volume V: The Sasanids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen. Translated and annotated by C. E. Bosworth, edited by Ehsan Yar-Shater, State University of New York Press, 1999.

al-Tabari, Muhammad ibn Jarir. Tarikh al-Tabari = Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk. Edited by Muhammad Abu al-Fadl Ibrahim, Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1967.

Theophylact Simocatta. The History of Theophylact Simocatta: An English Translation with Introduction and Notes. Translated by Michael Whitby and Mary Whitby, Clarendon Press, 1986.

Thomson, R. W., translator. The Armenian History Attributed to Sebeos. Translated with notes by R. W. Thomson, historical commentary by James Howard-Johnston, assistance from Tim Greenwood, Liverpool University Press, 1999.

Whitby, Michael, and Mary Whitby, translators. Chronicon Paschale 284–628 AD. Liverpool University Press, 1989.

Secondary Sources

-

Adams, Robert McC. Land Behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains. University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Agostini, Domenico. “The Perception of Romans (hrōmāyīg) in the Sasanian and Zoroastrian Traditions.” Mediterranean Historical Review, vol. 37, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1–18.

Baca-Winters, Keenan. He Did Not Fear: Xusro Parviz, King of Kings of the Sasanian Empire. Gorgias Press, 2018.

Baum, Wilhelm. Shirin: Christian–Queen–Myth of Love: A Woman of Late Antiquity between Persia and Byzantium. Gorgias Press, 2004.

Booth, Phil. “The Ghost of Maurice at the Court of Heraclius.” Byzantinische Zeitschrift, vol. 112, no. 3, 2019, pp. 781–826.

Daryaee, Touraj. “Khusrow Parwēz and Alexander the Great: An Episode of imitatio Alexandri by a Sasanian King.” AfarinNameh: Essays on the Archaeology of Iran in Honour of Mehdi Rahbar, edited by Yousef Moradi, The Research Institute of Cultural Heritage and Tourism, 2019, pp. 146–52.

---. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. I.B. Tauris, 2023.

---, editor. Sasanian Iran in the Context of Late Antiquity. The Bahari Lecture Series at the University of Oxford, Ancient Iran Series vol. 6, 2018.

Dignas, Beate, and Engelbert Winter. Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity: Neighbours and Rivals. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Farridnejad, Shervin, and Touraj Daryaee, editors. Sasanian Studies: Late Antique Iranian World. Vol. 1, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2022.

---, editors. Sasanian Studies: Late Antique Iranian World. Vol. 2, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2023.

Fisher, Greg. Between Empires: Arabs, Romans, and Sasanians in Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press, 2011.

---, editor. Arabs and Empires before Islam. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Greatrex, Geoffrey, and Samuel N.C. Lieu, editors. The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars, Part II AD 363–630: A Narrative Sourcebook. Routledge, 2002.

Harper, Kyle. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Princeton University Press, 2017.

Howard-Johnston, James. East Rome, Sasanian Persia, and the End of Antiquity: Historiographical and Historical Studies. Ashgate, 2006. Routledge, 2016.

---. The Last Great War of Antiquity. Oxford University Press, 2021.

---. Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Jackson Bonner, Michael R. The Last Empire of Iran. Gorgias Press, 2020.

Jacobson, Matthew J., et al. “The Climatic Resilience of the Sasanian Empire.” Human Ecology, 2025. 

Kaegi, Walter E. Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Maas, Michael. The Conqueror’s Gift: Roman Ethnography and the End of Antiquity. Princeton University Press, 2025.

MacKenzie, D. N. A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1971.

Nabel, Jake. The Arsacids of Rome: Misunderstanding in Roman-Parthian Relations. University of California Press, 2025.

O’Donnell, J. J. The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History. Harper Perennial, 2009.

Patterson, Lee E. “Justin II and the Armenian Revolt of 572.” Revue internationale d’histoire militaire ancienne, no. 10, 2021, pp. 119–32.

Payne, Richard E. A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity. University of California Press, 2015.

Petersen, Leif Inge Ree. Siege Warfare and Military Organization in the Successor States (400–800 AD): Byzantium, the West and Islam. Brill, 2013.

Sarris, Peter. Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500–700. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Sauer, Eberhard W., editor. Sasanian Persia: Between Rome and the Steppes of Eurasia. Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Shenkar, Michael. Intangible Spirits and Graven Images: The Iconography of Deities in the Pre-Islamic Iranian World. Brill, 2014.

Soudavar, Abolala. The Aura of Kings: Legitimacy and Divine Sanction in Iranian Kingship. Mazda Publishers, 2003.

Syvänne, Ilkka. Late Roman Combat Tactics. Pen & Sword Military, 2024.

---. The Military History of Late Rome AD 565–602. Pen & Sword Military, 2022.

---. The Military History of Late Rome AD 602–641. Pen & Sword Military, 2022.

Whitby, Michael. The Emperor Maurice and His Historian: Theophylact Simocatta on Persian and Balkan Warfare. Clarendon Press, 1988.

Comments

Post a Comment