In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

Shah Thing

Any Persian king who doubted that he ruled the most favoured of peoples had only to stroke his chin. Whereas the creator of the universe, in His ineffable wisdom, had seen fit to give the inhabitants of more benighted regions hair that was either too curly or too straight, He had granted the men of Persia beards that embodied the “happy medium.”¹ Here, in the magnificence of their personal grooming, the Persians found evidence of a far more profound pre-eminence. “Our land,” they liked to point out, “lies in the midst of other lands, and our people are the most noble and illustrious of beings.”² As with facial hair, then, so with the various attributes and qualities that made for greatness: the Persian people appeared to enjoy the best of all possible worlds.

And certainly, in the centuries that had followed Christ, the name they had carved out for themselves had been a splendid one. Their dominion had spread far beyond the limits of Persia itself: from the frontiers of Syria in the west to those of the Hindu Kush in the east; from the deserts of Arabia in the south to the mountains of Armenia in the north. Nevertheless, the very wealth and glory of such an empire could on occasion lead to anxiety as well as pride. Just as flies were drawn to sumptuous banquets, and locusts to fields of corn, so savages were to silk and gold. The Persians, whose reputation for “courage, and boldness, and skill on the day of battle”³ was well merited, had rarely deigned to regard such intruders as anything other than annoyances, to be swatted every so often with an almost disdainful ease; but that, over the course of the fourth Christian century, had begun to change. Rumours of war from distant frontiers had come to shadow the mood of the Persian heartlands. Victories were still being won, but against increasingly fearsome opponents. The waves crashing against the bulwarks of Persian power appeared to be growing more violent with every passing year. Whole tribes of people, whole nations, were on the move. Soon enough, and the news was darkening even further. Nomads were alarming enough; but not half so alarming as nomads with a taste for putting down roots. By the middle of the fifth Christian century, the empire of the Persians was standing eyeball to eyeball with a menacingly new order of foe: a kingdom of warrior horsemen who had parked themselves directly on its north-eastern flank.

Who were the Hephthalites, and where did they come from? No one was entirely sure. When a people such as the Persians, long settled in a much-cherished homeland, ventured to contemplate the drear immensity of the lands that stretched northwards of their empire, the origins of the savages who infested it, and of the winds that gusted though its grasses, were liable to appear to them mysteries equally without an answer. One popular theory, it was true, held that the enigmatic newcomers were Huns: the most fearsome, as they were the ugliest, of all the steppeland tribesmen. Others, however, pointed out that the Hephthalites—despite their curiously elongated skulls, their sinister taste for mullets and their contemptibly un-Persian beards—“had countenances that were almost attractive.”⁴ Their skin was not a sallow Hunnic yellow but, like that of the Persians themselves, fetchingly pale. Some took to calling them “White Huns”: a suggestion of hybridity that emphasised precisely why the Persians found them so unsettling. These were savages who had dared to found their own monarchy, their own capital city, even their own body of laws. The Persians—who had long gloried in their own triumphant possession of those appurtenances of civilisation—could not possibly ignore such presumption. Nomads who forgot their place needed to be reminded of it—and fast. Indeed, so urgent was the problem that the Persian monarchy decided it could no longer afford to do as it had traditionally done, and delegate the patrolling of the eastern frontier to its underlings. The peril had grown too great. The time had come for the King of Persia, the Shahanshah, the “King of Kings” himself, to tame the Hephthalites.

So it was, during the campaigning season of AD 484, that an immense army advanced across the Gurgan Plain, an unsettled frontier zone extending east from the southernmost tip of the Caspian Sea, and which had increasingly come to mark the limits of Persian power.⁵ Beyond a landscape patterned with the reassuring marks of civilisation—fields, kilns and canals—there lurked untenanted badlands. “The realm of the wolves,” men called them: fit reflection of their aura of menace. As the wooded ramparts of a great chain of mountains, the Alburz, gradually receded into the distance, there came to stretch ahead of the taskforce an unbroken immensity of wild barley, and oats, and corn, rippling, so it seemed, to the limits of the world: the beginning of the steppes. Featureless as this landscape was, and lacking in anything that the Persians would have recognised as civilisation, it had repeatedly frustrated the ambitions of would-be conquerors. Yet, on this occasion, to anyone watching the great host of men, horses and elephants as they trampled down the grasses, the invaders’ prospects must have appeared no less glittering than the heads of their ferociously heavy lances. A Persian army at full strength was a fearsome sight. “Everything so far as the eye can reach,” as one awe-struck observer put it, “is filled with the shimmer of arms. Whole plains and hills are crowded out by mail-clad horsemen.”⁶ And by banners as well: since if there was one thing that a Persian warrior really adored, it was a showy flag. Every unit of cavalry possessed one, great, heavy drapes slung from crossbars, and emblazoned with flamboyant heraldic devices: stars, lions, boars. Most splendid of all, it went without saying, was the royal banner: immeasurably the largest, it was also the most sumptuously adorned. Seeing it flapping massively in the breeze, the sunlight glinting off its embroidered gold, silver and jewels, no one could have doubted who was leading the expedition into the realm of the Hephthalites.

The King of Kings, like all his royal ancestors, possessed a literally supernatural mystique. Every Persian knew it, and what was owed to it: not merely their empire, but their very freedom. Two and a half centuries previously, when their forefathers had been slaves of foreign masters, the banner of their independence had been raised by a nobleman named Ardashir—a mighty hero possessed of a mandate from the heavens. No one in the whole of Persia had been more favoured of the gods. One of Ardashir’s ancestors, a man named Sasan, had officiated as the high priest of the country’s holiest and most venerable temple, at Istakhr. Here, ever since ancient times, it had been the custom to present the severed heads of vanquished enemies to the great warrior goddess, Anahita, “the Strong and Immaculate.” Ardashir himself had proved a worthy lieutenant of this ferocious divinity: by AD 224, he had liberated Persia from the rule of outsiders, and to such crushing effect that he had established the Persians themselves as the masters of a host of subject peoples. It was scarcely surprising, then, in the light of such a colossal achievement, that his countrymen should have distinguished about his person the eerie flickering of an aura more than human. His farr, the Persians termed it: the mark of his divine election. Here, no less than the empire he had founded, had been a precious heirloom. Unceasingly, as the years went by, and generation sprung from the family of Sasan succeeded generation to the throne of Persia, so had a farr continued to shadow each new king. Sometimes it was glimpsed in the shape of a ram; sometimes as a golden ray of light; sometimes in human form, like the sudden flitting of a figure that was no reflection across a mirror. The glamour of it all, naturally enough, helped contribute to a fearsome reputation. Even the Sasanians’ enemies, people with every reason to loathe their pretensions, found it difficult not to cringe before them. “A monarchy that is proud and exceedingly powerful”: so one foreign commentator described the dynasty in a tone of rueful awe. “For it is old and most intimidating, most intimidating indeed, to those who inhabit the world.”⁷

Peroz, the king who had led the massive army into the Gurgan Plain, was, like all his predecessors, a descendant of Sasan. Indeed, in many ways, he was the epitome of a Sasanian: tall and handsome, in the imposing manner expected by the Persians of their royalty, and with an exceptional talent, even by the standards of his forefathers, for playing the dandy. Just as the great banner that billowed above his tent glimmered with fabulous adornments, so did the king himself: for it was his habit to sport, in addition to all his other sumptuous jewellery, “a pearl of wonderful whiteness, greatly prized on account of its extraordinary size”⁸ as a stud in his ear. Foreigners may well have viewed such obsession with personal adornment as effeminate, but the Persians themselves knew better. A haughty and refined delicacy of manner; a sashaying, hip-swaying gait; a reluctance so much as to be seen in public “stepping to one side in response to a call of nature”: these were the marks, in Persia, of a bold and gallant warrior.⁹ Anyone who had the wherewithal was fully expected to pose and strut like a peacock. Rare was the Persian who knowingly underdressed. The gorgeous showiness of their fashion was notorious. “Most of them,” it was reported of the Persian upper classes, “are so resplendent in clothes gleaming with many shimmering colours, that although they leave their robes open in front and on the sides, and let them flutter in the wind, yet from their head to their shoes no part of the body is seen uncovered.”¹⁰ Yet Peroz himself, for all his manifest talent at cutting a dash, was not defined by his sense of fashion alone. Just as significant, in the eyes of his subjects, was his palpable concern for their welfare. Vain he might have been; but he was also, in the noblest tradition of his forebears, determined to battle chaos, uphold order and propagate justice. Which was just as well: for troubles, and the efforts of Peroz to resolve them, had been a feature of his twenty-five-year reign since day one.

It had begun with a drought. Even as Peroz was being crowned, his people had been famine-stalked. The young king had responded with energy, boldness and vision. He had slashed taxes; lavished state subsidies on the poor; pressured the nobility into sharing their stockpiles of food with the hungry and desperate masses. Centuries later, this reform programme was still being commemorated in admiring tones: “Only one man … died of hunger in the entire empire.”¹¹ Witness, even if not literally true, to a model of famine-relief.

Next, looking to the north-east frontier, Peroz had shown himself similarly determined to fight the growing menace of the Hephthalites. More than any Sasanian before him, he had committed himself and all the resources of his empire to the great game that was the interplay of tribal rivalries in Central Asia. Merv, an ancient city midway between the Hindu Kush and the Caspian Sea, and with the potential to dominate Persia’s north-eastern marches, had been transformed into a mighty bastion of royal power: massive ramparts, crowned by fired-brick towers and scored with arrow slits, were built around a vast circular citadel. Meanwhile, other strongholds, strategically situated along the frontier itself, had been founded from scratch; treasure had been lavished on fortifications, garrisons and supply depots.¹² Snaking across the fields of the Gurgan Plain, for instance, fashioned out of red brick and extending over some 150 miles, was an immense wall: the single greatest barrier ever constructed in the Near East.¹³ By the time Peroz, with a quarter-century of such efforts behind him, ventured out into the steppes through the gates of the red-brick wall, it was as a general with a most formidable reputation: as “a daring and warlike man.”¹⁴

Simultaneously, however, there was a darker side to Peroz’s record. “Our kings,” so the Persians liked to boast, “have never been accused of treachery”¹⁵—and yet this was, perhaps, to gild the lily just a bit. Even in his dealings with the White Huns, Peroz had been known to indulge in the occasional bout of collaboration. Born a younger son, he had only been able to seize the throne in the first place with Hephthalite backing. More damaging to his good name, however, had been the disastrous consequence of an earlier expedition he had led into the realm of the White Huns, eastwards of the steppelands, to the region known as Bactria, where he had found himself being ambushed in a wooded valley, surrounded, and forced to sue for terms. Predictably enough, these had proved debilitating and humiliating in equal measure: a number of key Persian strongholds had been surrendered, a crippling ransom imposed, and the Shahanshah himself, that god among men, obliged to prostrate himself before the boots of the Hephthalite khan.

Returning to the fray for a second time, then, Peroz was undoubtedly motivated as much by personal revenge as he was by the grander demands of geopolitics. Injured dignity required him to travel to war amid all the magnificence appropriate to the King of Kings. A teeming retinue of chefs, cooks, domestics, make-up artists and wardrobe assistants; treasury officials with chests of silver coins; even a princess or two: all had been brought to accompany their master into the anonymous immensity of the steppes. It was not only by force of arms that Peroz sought to tame the savage Hephthalites: he aimed to dazzle them as well.

Nor were the Hephthalites his only targets. Peroz faced a challenge south of the steppeland frontier as well as north of it. The lords who ruled there—in the great swath of territory that stretched between Persia and the Hephthalite kingdom—could lay claim to a heritage that was scarcely less glorious than that of the Shahanshah himself. Prior to the revolt of Ardashir, it was their ancestors who had ruled the empire that now ranked as Sasanian. Parthians, they called themselves; and they still cherished memories of their golden age, when the Persians and a whole host of other peoples had been kept satisfyingly under their thumb. Not that the power of the greatest Parthian families had ever truly been broken. Although, in the wake of Ardashir’s famous victory of AD 224 over the Parthian king, members of the royal family had been variously exterminated or driven into exile, the warrior barons had easily weathered the change of regime. The seven great lords of Parthia acknowledged no superiors, save for the Sasanians themselves.¹⁶ The foundations of their dominance had been cemented into place, over the course of many centuries, “by ancient law.”¹⁷ Impressively, the mightiest Parthian dynasty, the Karin, could trace a history of heroic prowess back to the very beginnings of time, when one of their forefathers had toppled a demon king, no less. Dahag, a necromancer so evil that two venomous serpents had sprouted from his shoulders and promptly started munching on the brains of babies, had ruled the world for an entire millennium—until the ancestor of the Karin, a blacksmith by the name of Kava, had led a revolt against the tyrant. Such a pedigree was a fitting measure of the pretensions of the Parthian lords—pretensions that had the backing of prodigious wealth and manpower. Indeed, it was the measure of these that the Sasanian kings, focussing their energies and attentions upon the western half of their empire, had traditionally been content to give the east a wide berth. No Shahanshah would ever admit it, of course, but across much of Parthia Sasanian royal authority was largely a matter of smoke and mirrors. The Karin and their fellow dynasts governed their fiefdoms less as subjects of the Persian monarchy than as partners in a sometimes uneasy confederacy. “For you are the lords each of your own province,” as one of them had once declared ringingly to his fellows, “and the possessors of very great power.”¹⁸ Persian the empire may have been—but it remained, in its eastern provinces, a Parthian one as well.¹⁹

And here, for a Shahanshah with little choice but to devote his energies to combating the Hephthalites, was a most awkward complication. The urgent need to strengthen imperial defences along the north-east frontier, whether by buttressing existing cities or by raising new ones, hardly sat well with the time-honoured policy of not treading on Parthian toes. For all his swagger, Peroz was highly sensitive to this problem. While Hephthalite support had been useful in helping him claim the throne, the decisive blow had actually been struck by a Parthian warlord: Raham, of the family of Mihran. It was he who had defeated, captured and executed Peroz’s elder brother and then crowned Peroz as his “protégé.”²⁰ Twenty-five years on, the Persian king’s ambitions still rested on the support of the Parthian dynasts. Without it, he had no chance of defeating the upstart Hephthalite kingdom. Simultaneously, however, there could be no prospect of ultimate victory without marching his armies and labour-gangs directly across Parthian land. A most awkward circle to square.

But not, perhaps, wholly impossible. Peroz was subtle as well as bold; and he knew that the pen might, on occasion, be wielded alongside the sword. Even while summoning his warriors and engineers to the defence of his empire, he had also been busy mustering his minstrels, his bards and his scribes. Conscious that the days when it had been sufficient for the House of Sasan to trumpet an exclusively Persian descent were gone, Peroz had settled upon a simple but audacious expedient: he had ordered its past rewritten.

A new family tree, one more acceptable to Parthian sensibilities, more inclusive, more multicultural, was now required. So it was, obedient to their master’s requirements, that scholars in the royal service had set themselves to a comprehensive upgrading of the Sasanian lineage. Fortunately, preserved in ancient texts and in the memories of priests and poets, the perfect ancestors had been waiting shimmeringly to hand. The Kayanids—like Kava, the blacksmith from whom the Karin claimed descent—were heroes from the fabulously distant past, with biographies that featured talking birds, flying chariots, fortresses raised by demons and other fantastical wonders. Unlike Kava, a mere blacksmith, however, they had all of them been graced with the farr—since so impeccably royal had been their dynasty that even its very name derived from the antique title of “Kai,” or “King.” This, however, was not the main reason why Peroz was suddenly so keen to claim descent from them. Rather, the true appeal of the Kayanids lay in the location of their realm—which had lain, not in Persia, but in Parthia and, northwards, into Gurgan. It was here that the Kayanid kings, the tireless guardians of their people, had made heroic stand after heroic stand, fighting in defence both of their kingdom and of their farr, resolute against savage enemies whose fiendish ambition it had been to filch both. As Peroz advanced northwards from Parthia against the Hephthalites, he made sure to do so as the self-proclaimed heir of the Kayanids: as a king whose ultimate roots lay in the self-same lands he had come to defend.

“Airan,” these had anciently been called: “the realm of the Aryans,” or “Iran.” The Persians, who traced their own origins back to this primordial north-eastern kingdom, and therefore regarded themselves as being not a whit less Aryan than the Parthians, had always been keen on the name. Long before the time of Peroz, the House of Sasan had been making great play with it in their inscriptions, their titles and all their endless bragging. They had even termed their own empire Iranshahr—“the Dominion of the Aryans.” Now, though, under Peroz, the manufacturing of links between the Sasanian monarchy and the fabled Kayanid homeland had become an obsession. As the king gazed into a perilous and uncertain future, so had he sought to influence it by sponsoring an official systematisation of the past. Blatant fabrications had enabled Ardashir to be enshrined once and for all as what Peroz so desperately needed him to be: a descendant of the Kayanids. Meanwhile, in order to buttress the plausibility of this fraud, centuries of history were simply erased. The end result was a lineage that perfectly served the desperate needs of the time. No less than a stockpile of weapons on the great north-eastern trunk road, or a raw new fortress on the red wall beyond the Alburz Mountains, it spoke of both a crisis and an implacable determination to resolve it.

Battle-hardened pragmatist and self-appointed heir to ancient kings who had fought demons: the Shahanshah rode to war as both. That Peroz had resurrected the antique title of Kai; that he had named his eldest son “Kavad,” after the first of the Kayanids; that he had stamped his coins with any number of allusions to the legendary dynasty: here were no mere idle self-indulgences. Rather, they served as potent markers of his utter seriousness of purpose. He had a dual strategy: to win the hearts and minds of his Parthian subjects even as he met the Hephthalites with an iron fist. And it seemed to be working. The decisive adventure had been launched. Peroz and his army had passed through the gates of the great red wall and headed out on to the steppes. Advancing on the nearest Hephthalite stronghold, just beyond the frontier, they had found it abandoned.²¹ Clearly, the terror of the royal name had rendered the savages too terrified to stand and fight. Peroz ordered the settlement razed to the ground. Meanwhile, behind him, in Parthia, everything appeared calm. Now, all that was needed was to track down the enemy, corner them, and wipe them from the face of the earth.

Then the Shahanshah received the news he had been yearning to hear: the Hephthalites were ahead of him. Their outriders had been spotted, and their main army was drawing near. Peroz issued brisk orders, summoning the champions of Iranshahr to battle. At once, the stir of preparation spread across the camp: archers oiled and tested their bows, drivers heaved war-towers onto the backs of their elephants, and footsoldiers dusted down their wicker shields. Most urgent of all, however, was the need to ready the expedition’s ultimate killers: the deadliest strike-force in the world. A one-piece helmet, “skilfully crafted to look exactly like a man’s face”;²² iron plates, greaves and gloves; whips and maces, slung from the belt; a lance so long and heavy that it could be handled only if first secured to the side of a mount: these were the tools of an armoured horseman in the service of the Shahanshah. Barely human such a warrior might appear, when fully furnished: “a moving image wrought by a hammer.”²³ Lifted up into their saddles on the shoulders of attendants, urging forward steeds that were themselves sheathed in mail and plate, forming themselves into a glittering line in the front rank of the army, the heavy cavalry of Iranshahr could know themselves worthy heirs of their ancestors: heroes of steel, just as the Kayanids had been.

And glancing behind them, at the slight rise where their king had stationed himself, as every Shahanshah did prior to a battle, they saw the ultimate reassurance of this. Now, more than ever, Peroz aimed to pose as a figure of epic. Great care had been taken to ensure that his horse was the tallest and most handsome around. Attendants stood poised by the royal mount, to ensure that it would not whinny, nor urinate, nor in any other way lower the heroic tone. The king himself, as ever, was positively ablaze with sumptuous jewellery. Meanwhile, planted behind him, where it could be seen by everyone in the ranks, there fluttered his massive standard: the Derafsh Kaviani, or “Flag of Kava.” An expression of Sasanian power, it was also authentically, and heroically, pan-Iranian. It was no coincidence, for instance, that its name bore witness to the fabled ancestor of the Karin: for once, prior to its adornment with jewels and tassels, it had been a humble leather apron, worn, so it was said, by the demon-slaying blacksmith himself. Now, as Peroz gave the order for his cavalry to advance, it was his aim to emulate the feat of Kava: for he was looking to rout a whole army of demons.

Lumbering forwards, trotting at first, then breaking into a thunderous gallop, the heavily armoured cavalrymen aimed their lances at the more lightly armed Hephthalites. Through the dust clouds kicked up by their horses, it appeared that the enemy was clumping together in a disorganised panic. Then the Hephthalites broke, turned and streamed back across the dead centre of the plain. Raising a cry of triumph, the Persian cavalry immediately fanned out, aiming to encircle their retreating foes. They charged ever faster; the dust rose ever thicker. Arrows, hissing down through the clouds of grit, began to rattle and bounce off their armour; but the men of Iranshahr disdained so much as to flinch. From head to foot, their iron cladding was “proof against any missiles, and a sure defence against all wounds.”²⁴ The arrows of contemptible nomads could do them no harm. They were, to all intents and purposes, invulnerable. Victory, surely, was theirs.

Then, suddenly, they felt their horses’ hooves give way and begin to paw the air. The riders themselves flew forwards and found themselves dropping, through a nightmarish haze of dust and arrows, into the bowels of a massive ditch. Too late, the front ranks of the Persian cavalry realised that the Hephthalites had prepared for their attack with fiendish cunning. They had excavated a great trench, dug across most of the plain, which they had then covered with a thin layer of reeds and earth. They had left only the centre intact, to facilitate their own retreat; meanwhile, the pursuing Persians had blundered directly into the death-trap. “And such was the spirit of fury with which they had launched their pursuit of the enemy that those to the rear of the vanguard failed to notice the catastrophe which had overwhelmed those in the front rank. And so with horse and lance they continued to ride into the trench, and to trample down their own fellows, so that all were destroyed. And among the dead was Peroz himself.”²⁵

As to how precisely the Shahanshah had met his end, various accounts were given. Some said that as he crashed into the Hephthalite trench, he had torn off his own ear, and kept it clenched in his palm: for he had not wanted some savage nomad to lay claim to his famous pearl. Others said that he was left trapped in a cleft in the ground, where he died of hunger; and others yet that he had crawled away from the killing field, “only to be devoured by wild animals.”²⁶

Two things were certain, though. First, neither Peroz’s body nor his great pearl was ever found; second, his farr had abandoned him for good.