Ērān vs. Hrōm: The Final Cosmic War of Xusrō II & It's Reasons
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.
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
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:
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Ērānšahr = the physical embodiment of Aša, truth, divine order.
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Hrōm = the imperial expression of Druj, the Lie, falsehood masked as civilization.
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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
⬇️ Visual Equation:
| Heavenly Realm (Mēnōg) | Earthly Realm (Gētīg) |
|---|---|
| Ahura Mazda bestows the diadem of divine authority | Ardašīr receives kingship as Ohrmazd’s reflection |
| Ahriman is crushed beneath the horse of the god | The 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.
| Concept | Zoroastrian Polarity | Imperial Expression |
|---|---|---|
| 🕊️ Ahura Mazda | Light, Order (Aša), Creation | Ērānšahr, the realm of the King of Kings |
| 🦂 Ahriman | Darkness, Lie (Druj), Corruption | Hrōm, the deceitful outer world |
| 👑 The Šāhān Šāh | Viceroy of Light | Defender of Creation against the Lie |
| 🏛️ The Caesar | Servant of Darkness | Supplicant 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.
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Both were universal empires claiming to rule the oikoumene.
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Both traced divine legitimacy to Heaven (Zeus or Ohrmazd).
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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.
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Theological, because Hrōm was the land of the Lie — Ahriman’s dominion on earth.
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Artistic, because Sasanian reliefs made this cosmology visible, pairing divine and royal victories in sacred symmetry.
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Imperial, because the Šāhān Šāh, “whose seed is from the gods,” embodied Ohrmazd’s will to restore order to the cosmos.
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 Symbol | Sasanian Meaning | Diplomatic Parallel |
|---|---|---|
| ☀️ Sun | East, Ērān, source of royal xwarrah (divine glory) | The Shahanshah — “of the rising Sun” |
| 🌙 Moon | West, Hrōm, reflection of light and subordinate power | The 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.
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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)
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Kawād I told Justinian: “We have found it written in our ancient records that we are brothers of one another.” (Malalas, Chron. 18.44)
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Even Xusro II addressed Emperor Maurice 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:
| Son | Realm | Descendants | Moral Symbolism |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🏛️ Salm | The lands of Hrōm (Rome) | Romans, “the Westerners” | Pride, envy |
| ⚔️ Tūr | The lands of Tūrān (Central Asia/China) | Turks, nomads | Violence, rage |
| 🌿 Ēraj | Ērānšahr (Iran and India) | Persians | Truth, 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 Lineage | Historical Equivalent | Role in the Cosmic Drama |
|---|---|---|
| 🕊️ Ēraj | Iranians (Ērānšahr) | Bearers of Truth (Aša), divine glory |
| 🏛️ Salm | Romans (Hrōm) | Envious brother, the Liar (Druj) |
| ⚔️ Tūr | Turks/Chinese | Violent brother, the Destroyer |
| 👑 Frēdōn | Primordial King | Source 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.
☄️ Conclusion — From Brotherhood to Apocalypse
The dualism of Ērān and Hrōm was thus a theology of mirrors:
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The two empires reflected each other’s greatness — and each other’s doom.
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They shared divine sanction, yet competed for the same cosmic throne.
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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.
III. The House of Ohrmazd: Xusrō’s Inheritance
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
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:
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⚖️ Truth (Aša) — his grandfather’s justice, the ordered empire, the radiant king.
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🦂 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.
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.”
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.
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 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.
⚰️ The Death of the Uncle — Treachery by the Hephthalites
“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.
IV. The Spark: The Murder of Maurice and the Call of Destiny
1. The Death of a Benefactor: A Cosmic Wound
On 27 November 602 CE — late in the Persian month of Āzār (9 Āzār / Āθrō), the month sacred to Fire — the political equilibrium of late antiquity was incinerated in a single day of blood. Emperor Maurice, the architect of a decade of peace, the savior who had restored Xusrō II to his throne in 591, was butchered along with most of his family by the usurper Phocas.
To Xusrō, this was not a coup; it was a cosmic rupture. The man he called his pid ī dōm ("second father"), the Roman "eye" that balanced the world, had been extinguished by a murderer. The act, occurring in the month of Fire, was read as a sacrament of outrage — a violation of the divine and diplomatic order that bound the two empires.
The Triple Engine of War:
⚖️ Personal & Filial Debt: Maurice was Xusrō's parwartār (fosterer). In Sasanian ethos, an unpaid debt of salvation was a stain on royal xwarrah (glory). Vengeance was not optional; it was a filial duty.
⚔️ Theological & Moral: The murder shattered the pactum between the "Two Eyes." Phocas was drux — a follower of the Lie (Druj). Avenging Maurice became an act of cosmic rebalancing, a restoration of Aša (Truth) against Chaos.
🗺️ Political & Strategic: Rome was leaderless, chaotic, and vulnerable. For Xusrō, this was the moment to erase the humiliation of 591, reassert Persian primacy, and fulfill the ancient mandate to subdue the Anērān.
2. The Ghost of Theodosius: The Living Banner
Crucially, the spark found tinder. Eastern sources are unanimous: Maurice's eldest son and co-emperor, Theodosius, survived the massacre. Phil Booth's meticulous analysis confirms that rumors of his survival were treated with deadly seriousness by Phocas's regime, leading to purges and investigations as far as Alexandria.
The Eastern Testimony (Converging Lines):
| Source | Tradition | Core Claim |
|---|---|---|
| Chronicle of Khuzistan (c. 660 CE) | East Syrian / Nestorian | Theodosius flees to Xusrō, is crowned by Catholicos Sabrishoʿ I, leads Persian-backed army against Phocas near Dara. |
| Ps.-Sebēos (Armenian, c. 661 CE) | Armenian | Theodosius is with Xusro; is used to secure the surrender of Roman cities like Theodosiopolis. |
| Al-Ṭabarī / Al-Dīnawarī (9th-10th C.) | Persian-Arabic | A son of Maurice (explicitly named Theodosius by some transmitters) is crowned by Xusrō and installed as the legitimate Roman claimant. |
| Theophylact Simocatta (c. 630 CE) 🎭 | Roman (Official) | Acknowledges the pervasive rumor of Theodosius's survival and flight to Persia, but strenuously denies it, calling it a "barbarian error" and Persian propaganda. |
This convergence is decisive. The rumor was not mere Persian disinformation; it was a political reality that Xusrō weaponized. The coronation of Theodosius by the Catholicos was a masterstroke:
For Christians: It framed the war as a legitimate restoration, a crusade against a usurper who murdered God's anointed.
For Zoroastrians: It was divine justice — the Šāhān Šāh acting as the instrument of Ohrmazd to punish the Lie and restore rightful order.
➡️ Theodosius was the tangible symbol that transformed Xusrō's personal grief into a sacral, public cause.
3. The Diplomatic Rupture & Declaration of War
Phocas, following protocol, sent the ambassador Lilius to Ctesiphon in early 603 to announce his accession. Xusrō's response shattered centuries of diplomatic convention:
The Ambassador Imprisoned: Lilius was not received; he was detained.
Public Mourning Decreed: Xusrō ordered official mourning for Maurice throughout Ērānšahr.
The Usurper Rejected: Phocas's legitimacy was denied outright.
The Banner Raised: The crowned Theodosius was presented to the court and the army as the true Augustus.
Xusrō's declaration was not a list of territorial demands. It was a verdict. He was judge, jury, and divinely appointed executioner. The "Two Eyes" were gone; only the Eye of Ērān remained to illuminate and judge the world.
4. The First Campaigns: The War of the Covenant (603–610)
Phase 1: The Avenging Sword (603–604)
Target: Dara. The mighty frontier fortress, symbol of Roman defense. Its fall would be the first blow of justice.
The Siege (Late 603 – Mid 604): For nine months, Persian forces (nominally under Theodosius) besieged Dara. Mines, fire, and relentless assault characterized the attack. The Chronicle of Khuzistan grimly notes: "blood flowed like water."
The Fall (Summer 604): Dara capitulated. Its fall sent a shockwave through the Roman East. The same year, the aged Catholicos Sabrishoʿ died — seen by many as a sign his blessing had enabled the victory.
Target: Dara. The mighty frontier fortress, symbol of Roman defense. Its fall would be the first blow of justice.
The Siege (Late 603 – Mid 604): For nine months, Persian forces (nominally under Theodosius) besieged Dara. Mines, fire, and relentless assault characterized the attack. The Chronicle of Khuzistan grimly notes: "blood flowed like water."
The Fall (Summer 604): Dara capitulated. Its fall sent a shockwave through the Roman East. The same year, the aged Catholicos Sabrishoʿ died — seen by many as a sign his blessing had enabled the victory.
Phase 2: The Northern Front – Armenia (604–608)
While Mesopotamia burned, Xusrō turned to Armenia, a land perpetually torn between the empires.
A Calculated, Systematic Reduction:
604–605: Persian generals (Datoyean, then Senitam Khusro) engage and defeat Roman-Armenian field armies in a series of battles (Erewad, Getik, Anglon).
606–607: The psychological weapon is deployed. General Ashtat Yeztayar, accompanied by the "Caesar Theodosius," arrives before the walls of Theodosiopolis. The garrison, seeing the (purported) son of their former emperor, opens the gates. The use of Theodosius here, as reported by Sebeos, is a brilliant piece of psychological warfare.
608–610: One by one, the great fortresses of Roman Armenia — Citharizon, Satala, Nicopolis — fall. The Roman defensive system north of the Euphrates collapses.
Phase 3: The Swallowing of Mesopotamia (605–610)
With Dara gone, the Roman limes in Mesopotamia unraveled like a frayed rope.
📅 Reconstructed Campaign Timeline & Logic:
| Year (CE) | Action | Strategic Logic & Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| 605–606 | Capture of Carrhae, Callinicum, Circesium. | Securing the south. These were key cities on the routes to Syria. Opening gates to "Theodosius" is likely. |
| 607 | Fall of Amida & Resaina. | Chroniclers date these to 607-609. Taking the Tur Abdin fortresses (Cepha, etc.) was a slow, grinding necessity. |
| 608 | Mardin captured. | The last major obstacle in northern Mesopotamia falls. |
| 609 | Edessa, the "Blessed City," surrenders. | A colossal psychological blow. By now, all resistance east of the Euphrates has ceased. |
| Aug/Sept 609 | Persian vanguard reaches the Euphrates. | Logical culmination. With all Mesopotamia secure, the army consolidates on the river's eastern bank. |
| Oct 610 | Fall of Zenobia (Halabiya). | The first bridgehead WEST of the Euphrates. This happens as Heraclius seizes Constantinople (Oct 610). The timing is perfect: Phocas falls just as Persia crosses the final frontier. |
Phase 4: The Sea at Last (610)
In October 610, as Phocas was overthrown, Persian forces under Shahrwarāz took Antioch, Apamea, and Emesa. Persian cavalry watered their horses in the Mediterranean near Zenobia — a symbolic act last performed under Xusrō I seventy years prior.
🎯 The Strategic Picture by December 610:
✅ All territories east of the Euphrates: Under firm Persian control.
✅ Key Syrian cities (Antioch, etc.): Captured.
✅ Roman field armies: Defeated, dispersed, or tied down in civil war.
✅ Moral advantage: Xusrō fought as an avenger; Heraclius was an untested usurper.
5. Heraclius's Plea & the Point of No Return
The new Emperor Heraclius, desperate to stabilize his realm, sent a lavish embassy to Xusrō in early 611, pleading for peace.
Xusrō's response was apocalyptic.
According to Sebeos, he declared:
"That kingdom is mine, and I established Theodosius, son of Maurice, as king. But this one has become king without our permission and o¡ers us our own treasure as a gift. However, I shall not desist until I have taken him in my grasp."
He then executed the Roman ambassadors.
This was the Rubicon. By killing the envoys, Xusrō severed the very possibility of diplomacy. He was no longer negotiating with an equal (brāt, "brother"). He was issuing a divine ultimatum to a slave and a usurper. The war was no longer for vengeance or frontier adjustment. It was for annihilation.
🔥 The Spark had become an all-consuming fire. What began as a duty to a murdered father had, by 611, transformed into a cosmic crusade — the final, destined war to erase Hrōm from the map of creation and crown Ērān as the sole, luminous axis of the world. The march to Jerusalem, Egypt, and the gates of Constantinople now lay ahead.
V. The Theology of Empire: Faith and Finality
1. War as Eschatology: The Final Purification
By the 7th century, the Sasanian monarchy had transcended politics. Kingship was a cosmic office. The Šāhān Šāh was Ohrmazd's earthly viceroy, and empire was the battlefield in the eternal war between Aša (Truth/Order) 🌞 and Druj (The Lie/Chaos) 🌑.
Xusrō II's war was not for land or gold. It was the Frashō-kereti — the Renovation of the World — enacted through conquest. As Touraj Daryaee states, under Xusrō, "the Sasanian monarchy fused its imperial destiny with eschatology: conquest became the means of world restoration."
Every fallen Roman city was a theological victory. The burning of churches was purification by sacred fire (Ātar), cleansing creation of the Druj embodied by Hrōm.
The King Who Overshadowed the Gods: Ṭāq-e Bostān
The investiture relief at Ṭāq-e Bostān is the ultimate statement of this ideology. As art historian Michael Shenkar analyzes:
| Visual Element | Theological Meaning |
|---|---|
| 👑 Xusrō's Central Position | The king is the axis mundi, the pivot between heaven and earth. |
| ⚖️ Flanked by Ahura Mazdā & Anāhitā | He receives sovereignty from the supreme Creator and the Goddess of Waters/Fertility. |
| ⬆️ King TOWERS Over the Gods | Unprecedented scale. The king's elaborate crown eclipses the simpler divine crowns. The mortal king visually overshadows the deities. |
| 🐎 Lower Register: Armored, Nimbate Horseman | Xusrō himself as divine warrior (Vərəθraγna). The halo (nimbus) was once reserved for gods; now it crowns the king. |
This is not mere art; it is eschatology in stone. It proclaims: The Final King has arrived. The boundary between divine and royal has dissolved.
Coinage as Cosmic Propaganda
Xusrō's coinage broadcast this transfiguration:
Legend: Xwarrah abzūd ("His Divine Glory has Increased"). The xwarrah (kingly radiance) was no longer static; it expanded with each victory.
Iconography: Flaming bust of Ātar (Fire, son of Ohrmazd). This identified the king's campaign as the divine Fire's purging of the Lie.
➡️ In Xusrō's mind, he was not just a king waging war. He was the living instrument of Ohrmazd's final victory, the flame that would burn away the ancient darkness of Rome.
2. The Imitation of Alexander (Imitatio Alexandri): The Universal Heir
Xusrō's cosmic vision had a practical, geopolitical dimension. To rule the oikoumene (inhabited world) he was conquering, he needed a legitimizing language understood by millions of new Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian subjects.
The Dream of the Virgin: Theophylact Simocatta records that a Christian bishop presented an icon of the Virgin Mary to Xusrō. The king prostrated himself, kissed it, 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 was calculated theological syncretism:
For Zoroastrians: A sign of Ohrmazd's favor, using a Christian medium.
For Christians: The Mother of God anointing the Persian king as a new, righteous world-ruler.
For Hellenized Elites: The return of Alexander redivivus, the unifier of East and West.
Transforming the Accursed into the Ancestor
Centuries of Zoroastrian tradition had branded Alexander as gizistag — "the accursed," destroyer of the Achaemenids and Zoroastrian order. Xusrō's court mythographers rewrote this.
In the late Sasanian Xwadāy-nāmag (Book of Lords), Alexander (Iskandar) was reimagined as the half-brother of Dārā (Darius III). He was no longer a foreign destroyer, but a Persian-blooded heir whose world-conquest was a precursor to Sasanian restoration.
Why This Matters:
| Audience | Message of "Alexander's Heir" |
|---|---|
| Conquered Christians (Syria, Egypt) | "I am not an alien fire-worshiper. I am the heir to Alexander and Constantine, restoring lawful rule." |
| Zoroastrian Elite | "The work of the half-Persian world-unifier is now being completed under the true faith." |
| Xusrō Himself | "My dominion transcends Ērān and Hrōm. I am the lord of the oikoumene, fulfilling a destiny older than both empires." |
Evidence in Administration: Daryaee notes that Middle Persian papyri from the Sasanian occupation of Egypt (619–628 CE) refer to "Alexander Caesar" (Aleksandar Kēsar) in official memos. The propaganda was baked into bureaucracy.
➡️ Xusrō synthesized Zoroastrian eschatology, Christian symbolism, and Hellenistic universal monarchy. He was fighting the Final War not just as King of Ērān, but as the prophesied World-Ruler.
3. Jerusalem and the Cross: Cosmic Inversion (614 CE)
The sack of Jerusalem in 614 CE was the theological climax of the early war. It was Frashō-kereti in miniature.
The Event:
Persian armies under Shahrwarāz besieged Jerusalem for 20 days.
Churches (Holy Sepulchre, Zion) were burned.
The True Cross was seized.
Patriarch Zacharias was taken captive to Ctesiphon.
Tens of thousands were killed or enslaved (though archaeology suggests less total destruction than Christian sources claim).
The Tripartite Matrix of Meaning
| Theological Framework | Application to Jerusalem | Emoji Symbol |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Aša vs. Druj (Cosmic War) | Rome = the empire of the Lie (Druj). Its holy city was the pinnacle of falsehood. Burning its churches was cleansing creation with the fire of Truth (Ātar). | 🔥 ➡️ 🏛️ |
| 2. The Myth of Frēdōn's Sons (Primordial Crime) | Romans = descendants of Salm, who murdered his brother Ēraj (ancestor of Iranians). Sacking Salm's spiritual capital (Jerusalem) was avenging Ēraj's blood, settling the primordial kēn (unexpiated malice). | 👨👦👦 ⚔️ 💀 ➡️ ⚖️ |
| 3. The Cross as the "Axis of the Lie" | To Christians: The Cross = axis mundi, symbol of victory over death. To Zoroastrians: A god who dies is the ultimate blasphemy against life and order (Aša). Seizing the Cross was capturing the enemy's divine standard, proving Ohrmazd's supremacy. | ✝️ ⬇️ 🏺 (Trophy) |
The Logic of Fire: Sean Anthony notes the destruction was specifically by fire. In Zoroastrian ritual, fire (Ātar) does not "destroy"; it purifies, consumes pollution, and restores order. They were not razing a city; they were ritually cleansing a node of Druj.
The Meaning of the Captured Cross: In Ctesiphon, the Cross was not mocked. It was displayed as a sacred trophy of cosmic victory — proof that the divine favor (xwarrah) had passed from Rome to Ērān. The axis of the world had been wrenched from the Lie and reclaimed by Truth.
Conclusion: The Synthesis of Finality
Xusrō II operated within a tripartite Sasanian worldview, as elucidated by Daryaee. The world was divided among the descendants of Frēdōn's three sons: Ērān (Ēraj), Hrōm (Salm), and Tūrān (Tūr). This was not just myth; it was a sacred historical framework that defined Iran's relations with Rome (West) and the Turks/Chinese (East).
➡️ Xusrō's war was the effort to undo Frēdōn's partition. He sought to reunite the world under the Ērajian line — the descendants of Truth. This was the political enactment of Zoroastrian eschatology, where before the final renovation, the world would be made whole under a righteous king.
Thus, the war fused three strands of destiny:
🕊️ Zoroastrian Eschatology: The Final Battle of Aša vs. Druj, fought by the King of Kings.
🌍 Hellenistic Universalism: The mantle of Alexander, uniting East and West under one crown.
⚔️ Mythic Vengeance: The settling of the ancient, inherited kēn against the murderous line of Salm (Rome).
When Xusrō's banners flew over Jerusalem, he believed he was not just winning a war, but correcting the cosmos. He was fulfilling a destiny written in the Avesta, carved at Ṭāq-e Bostān, and prophesied in the dream of the Virgin. The Final War was, for him, an act of sacred creation.
VI. The Political and Climatic Landscape
1. An Empire under Environmental Stress
🌍 The empire’s breadbasket was drying.
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)
2. Economic and Social Pressures
Yet this defiance came at an unbearable cost. 💰
The empire had conquered Egypt — but could no longer feed itself.
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. 🌒
🜂 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.
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.
VII. The Height of Power — and the Abyss
The Empire at its Zenith: A Cosmic Moment (619–620 CE)
By 619 CE, the world was unrecognizable. The granary of the Roman Empire, Egypt, had fallen to the armies of Ērān. By 620, General Shahrwarāz stood at Chalcedon, gazing across the Bosporus at the domes of Constantinople. Persian power now stretched from the Indus to the Nile, from the Arabian deserts to the Anatolian mountains.
For the first time since Darius the Great, a Persian king ruled the entire Near East. In Ctesiphon, this was not seen as mere conquest. It was the fulfillment of a cosmic mandate.
The Theology of Triumph: Eschatology Realized
For centuries, the Zoroastrian dualism of Aša (Truth) 🌞 and Druj (the Lie) 🌑 had framed the imperial struggle. Rome was not just a rival; it was the earthly embodiment of Ahriman’s falsehood. Under Xusrō II, this hardened into active eschatology.
The Zoroastrian apocalyptic script (Zand ī Wahman Yasn) foretold a final king who would cast down the "House of the Lie" before the Savior (Sōšyāns) ushered in the Frashō-kereti (Renovation of the World). To Xusrō’s court, the victories of Shahrwarāz & Šāhīn seemed like that prophecy unfolding in real time.
But theology, weaponized as state ideology, has a fatal flaw: it cannot distinguish between divine mission and human greed.
As chroniclers like Theophanes and Agapius attest, after 619, Persian armies plundered systematically: stripping churches of marble columns, gold vessels, and altar tables; enslaving populations; hauling the wealth of Christendom eastward in endless caravans.
Agapius writes: "Xusrō was possessed by pride and conceit by reason of the many conquests he had made and the great extent of his power."
The sacred war of purification had degenerated into a war of plunder. The very priests who had blessed the campaign now watched as the Aša of conquest was corrupted by the Druj of avarice. The line between holy avenger and tyrannical extractor had blurred.
The Triple Engine of Catastrophe: Why the Empire Overreached
The empire’s fatal expansion was driven by three intertwined forces:
1. Vengeance: The Personal Fuel
Xusrō’s war was always personal. It fused:
The murder of his "second father" Maurice (602 CE)
The humiliation of his own restoration by Rome (591 CE)
The memory of his father Ohrmazd IV, blinded and strangled by kin
His fury was righteous, all-consuming, and infinite. He sought not just to defeat Rome, but to erase its memory as a rival.
2. Environmental Stress: Conquest as Survival
As paleoclimatology shows (Jacobson, Gascoigne, Fleitmann 2023), the late 6th–early 7th centuries were a period of sustained aridity and climatic instability — the "Late Antique Little Ice Age."
| Environmental Pressure | Imperial Response | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 🏜️ Drought on the Iranian Plateau | Reduced harvests, strained granaries, famine risk. | Conquest became a metabolic necessity. The wealth of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt was required to feed the imperial core. |
| 💧 Falling Water Tables | Massive investment in qanats and irrigation under earlier kings, but systems now strained. | The empire’s "hydraulic society" demanded external resources. Plunder subsidized the state. |
| 🌍 General Aridity (Hoti, Neor, Van records) | Increased centralization, heavier taxation, desperate search for stable revenue. | War was not a choice but an adaptive strategy. The drought gave the conflict its material urgency. |
The looted marble of Jerusalem and Antioch was not just vanity; it was the transmutation of Roman wealth into Persian survival.
3. Theological Hubris: The King as God
Xusrō’s iconography tells the story. At Ṭāq-e Bostān, he towers over Ahura Mazdā and Anāhitā. His coinage proclaims Xwarrah abzūd ("His Divine Glory has Increased").
He had begun to believe his own cosmic publicity. The king, the viceroy of Ohrmazd, was becoming a rival to the gods themselves.
Theophanes captures the resulting tyranny:
"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."
The Cracks in the Cosmic Edifice: 620–627 CE
By 620, the empire was overextended militarily, administratively, and spiritually.
Internal Strains:
💰 Tax Burden: Unbearable levies on conquered and core provinces alike.
👑 Alienated Nobility: The great wuzurgān families, squeezed by centralization, simmered with resentment.
🔥 Uneasy Priesthood: The Magi grew fearful that the sacred war had become blasphemous hubris.
External Reality: The empire now had to garrison and administer territories thousands of miles apart, from Egypt to the Caucasus, with a finite pool of Persian bureaucrats and soldiers. Logistical lines were stretched to breaking point.
The Paradox: At the precise moment Ērānšahr’s banners flew furthest, its foundations were crumbling. The empire had reached the edge of the abyss while standing at the height of its power.
VIII. The Fall of the Cosmic King
1. Heraclius Strikes Back: The Unmaking of a World (622–627 CE)
By 622, the Roman Empire was a hollow shell. Yet from this abyss, Emperor Heraclius forged a counter-eshatology.
The Roman Holy War:
💰 Funding: Melted down church treasures to finance his army.
⚔️ Strategy: Avoid the massed Persian armies in Syria. Instead, sail to the Caucasus, ally with local Christian kingdoms, and strike deep into the Persian heartland — turning Xusrō’s own tactics against him.
🔥 Theological Warfare: In 624, he deliberately sacked the great fire-temple of Ādur-Farrobay at Ganzak/Thebarmais, a sacred site founded by Ardashir I. This was not just a raid; it was a calculated desecration, proving the Christian God could strike at Zoroastrianism’s core.
| Year | Heraclius’s Action | Persian Response | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 622 | Trains a new army in Bithynia, wins first Roman victory in years (ambush). | Underestimates the threat; field armies are dispersed. | Morale shift. Romans remember they can win. |
| 624 | Marches into Atropatene (Azerbaijan), sacks Ganzak, winters in Caucasian Albania. | Khusro II is caught unprepared, forced to retreat. | Shock in Ctesiphon. The war is now on Persian soil. |
| 625 | Outmaneuvers three converging Persian armies, defeats them in detail. | Poor coordination between Persian generals (Shahen, Shahrwarāz, others). | Persian numerical advantage neutralized by Roman mobility and generalship. |
| 626 | Survives, sends troops to defend Constantinople during the great Avar-Persian siege. | Siege of Constantinople fails (Aug 626). Shahrwarāz’s army sits idle at Chalcedon. | Turning point. The joint knockout blow fails. |
| 627 | Allies with the Western Göktürk Khaganate. Leads combined Roman-Turkic force into Mesopotamia. Wins decisive battle at Nineveh (Dec 627). | Last major field army shattered. The path to Ctesiphon is open. | Strategic collapse. |
The Battle of Nineveh (December 627 CE)
Heraclius, possibly with Turkic allies, lured the last Persian field army into a trap. In thick mist, he attacked and shattered it. The Persian commander was killed. The road to Ctesiphon lay undefended.
Heraclius advanced to Dastagird, Xusrō’s lavish palace complex, which he plundered. He found 300 captured Roman standards — a symbolic reckoning.
2. Revolt, Regicide, and Ruin: The Druj Within
The empire’s death blow came not from Roman swords, but from Persian daggers.
The Betrayal of Shahrwarāz
The most catastrophic fracture was within the military elite. General Shahrwarāz, conqueror of Jerusalem and Egypt, halted his army and entered secret negotiations with Heraclius.
The Cause: Classic Sasanian palace intrigue. Heraclius intercepted a secret letter from Xusrō ordering Shahrwarāz’s execution. He showed it to the general. Convinced of the king’s treachery, Shahrwarāz withdrew from the war, paralyzing the empire’s strongest field army at its moment of greatest need.
The Palace Coup (February 628 CE)
The disaffected nobility and courtiers, led by Xusrō’s own son Kawād II (Šērōē), moved.
👑 Deposition: Xusrō II Parwēz — the "Victorious" — was arrested.
⚖️ Show Trial: Charged with tyranny, excessive taxation, and mismanagement of the war.
🏹 Execution: The cosmic king was shot with arrows in a dungeon, the traditional method for executed royalty. The man who sought to become a god died a prisoner’s death.
The Cosmic Inversion was Complete: The instrument of Aša was consumed by the very Druj he sought to eradicate. The Lie was not in Rome; it was in the heart of Ērānšahr itself.
The Fratricide of the Sasanians (628–632 CE)
Kawād II, to secure his throne, committed an act of dynastic suicide: he ordered the execution of all his brothers and half-brothers, every eligible male heir of the House of Sāsān.
He then died of plague six months later.
What followed was four years of chaos:
| Ruler | Reign | Fate | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ardashir III (child) | 628–629 | Murdered | Puppet of ministers. |
| Shahrwarāz (general) | Apr–Jun 630 | Murdered | Seized throne by force. |
| Bōrān (daughter of Xusrō II) | 630–631 | Possibly poisoned | First queen to rule. Attempted reform. |
| Āzarmīgduxt (sister of Bōrān) | 631–632 | Murdered | Second queen. |
| Multiple Claimants (Ohrmazd V, Xusro IV, etc.) | 630–632 | Killed in civil war | Total fragmentation. |
In four years, Ērānšahr saw approximately 10 rulers. The central authority of the King of Kings dissolved entirely. The empire reverted to a feudal free-for-all, with generals (spāhbeds) and regional nobles (dehgāns) ruling their own territories.
The state was dead. Thearchy had ended in anarchy.
3. The Peace of Exhaustion (629 CE) & The New World
The formal peace treaty in 629 was an admission of mutual ruin:
Borders: Restored to pre-602 status.
Relic: The True Cross was returned to Jerusalem.
Prisoners: Exchanged.
But both empires were ghosts.
Rome: Heraclius returned to Constantinople a hero, but his empire was economically shattered, depopulated, and militarily hollow. He could not even hold the regained provinces.
Persia: The Sasanian state had ceased to exist as a unified entity. It was a collection of warlord-ruled fragments, ripe for the taking.
IX. Epilogue: The War That Ended the World
The millennial duel of Ērān and Hrōm (c. 92 BCE – 628 CE) did not end with a victory cry. It ended with a silence.
It was the Last War of Antiquity. For over 700 years, this rivalry had structured the politics, economy, and cosmology of Western Eurasia. Its final, cataclysmic act exhausted the very civilizations that waged it.
The True "Frašō-kereti": The Rise of Islam
Into the spiritual and political vacuum stepped a new force neither empire foresaw: Islam.
The Muslim armies (633–651 CE) did not just conquer territories; they conquered a narrative. They offered a new cosmology, law, and community to populations for whom the grand, bankrupt ideologies of Caesar and King of Kings had lost all meaning.
The Conquest was Shockingly Fast:
636 CE: Battle of Yarmuk ➡️ Roman Syria lost.
637 CE: Battle of al-Qādisiyyah ➡️ Persian Mesopotamia lost.
641 CE: Egypt falls.
642 CE: Battle of Nihāwand ➡️ Persian heartland conquered.
651 CE: Last Sasanian king, Yazdgurd III, murdered in Merv. Ērānšahr extinct.
Why Did They Fall So Quickly?
Goldsworthy’s analysis is crucial: Small armies decided the fate of empires.
Exhaustion: Both empires were militarily, economically, and spiritually spent after the 25-year "Final War."
Neglect: Frontier defenses had been stripped for the great war.
Internal Fracture: Persia was in civil war; Rome was riven by doctrinal strife and dynastic disputes after Heraclius.
Arab Military Genius: The Muslim armies were highly motivated, brilliantly led, and moved with shocking speed. They learned from Roman and Persian tactics, and their egalitarian message appealed to marginalized populations.
The Arabs succeeded not because the empires were weak, but because they themselves were strong, united, and inspired.
The two "Eyes of the World" had gouged each other out. The cosmic struggle that defined antiquity was rendered obsolete by history's sudden, decisive turn.
Ērānšahr, the realm of Light, was extinguished, its fire temples fading or converted.
Rome survived, but as a rump state, a medieval kingdom clinging to Anatolia, its universal claim broken forever.
The world that emerged from the ashes of Xusrō’s cosmic war was no longer the world of Ērān and Hrōm. It was a new world, whose axis now ran through Mecca, Medina, and Damascus.
THE END
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