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 welclass="underline" 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 walclass="underline" 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