How was it, in the bowels of the world’s most intimidating monarchy, that such a startling movement had come into existence? Clearly, the evils and injustices of the preceding decades had done much to inspire the spirit of revolution, as too had all the many varied currents of belief abroad in Iranshahr, the cults and shadowy heresies that had always plagued the Zoroastrian Church. Subsequent tradition, however, would attribute the unprecedented eruption of the Adherents of Justice to the teachings of a single prophet, the messenger from Ohrmazd long foretold: a one-time priest by the name of Mazdak. Four hundred years on, and historians would still commemorate how he had ringingly “proclaimed that what God had given to man should be distributed equally, and that men had abused this in their injustice to one another.”56 Unfortunately, however, the murk that veils the lives of so many prophets from our gaze has, by and large, served to swallow up Mazdak as well. Although, in histories written a century and more after his lifetime, he is portrayed as a towering figure, no contemporary makes reference to him. Consequently, when attempting to make sense of his career, we are left with more questions than answers. Were his teachings original to him, or did he merely articulate doctrines that had been decades, even centuries, in the making? How much faith can we have in the traditional details of his biography? Did he even exist?57
Amid all the uncertainty, though, two facts are clear. The first is that Iranshahr, by the time of Kavad’s reign, was teetering on the brink of a full-scale social revolution. The second is that Kavad himself, ever the opportunist, had helped to push it over the edge. Monarchs are rarely in the habit of promoting class warfare; but Kavad, “a man who for cunning and energy had no rivals,”58 was desperately negotiating uncharted waters. His support for the revolutionaries had two aims: to ensure that his own estates were left untouched; and to foster assaults on those of the great Parthian dynasts. Yet, it is possible—even likely—that there was more to this strategy than mere cold calculation: perhaps he did genuinely look with sympathy upon the miseries and the demands of the poor. Tradition would recall that Mazdak, brought into the royal presence, had converted the Shahanshah to his infant faith; and tradition might conceivably be correct. Certainly, the sheer audacity of Kavad’s attempt to neutralise the nobility is the best evidence we have that Mazdak did after all exist. It is hard to believe that a Sasanian would ever have identified himself with peasant insurrectionists had he not possessed an inner assurance that he was truly fulfilling the divine purpose. Cynicism fused with religiosity: such was the combination, surely, that made of Kavad a Mazdakite.
Inevitably, though, his conversion stirred up a hornets’ nest. Events now began to move very fast. In 496, an alliance of nobles and mowbeds forced Kavad’s abdication. His brother, a young boy by the name of Zamasp, was proclaimed Shahanshah in his place. Kavad himself was immured in the empire’s most fearsome prison, the aptly named “Castle of Oblivion”—“for the name of anyone cast into its dungeons is forbidden to be mentioned ever again, with death as the penalty for anyone who speaks it.”59 Yet, to Kavad—a king so enterprising that he had toyed with communism—this was never likely to prove a terminal roadblock. Sure enough, he soon procured a complete outfit of women’s clothes, gave his gaolers the slip while disguised as his own wife, and fled to the court of the Hephthalites. There, just as his father had done nearly four decades before, he secured the khan’s backing and returned to Iranshahr at the head of a Hephthalite army. The Parthian dynasts, struggling desperately to keep their heads above the Mazdakite floodtide, found themselves powerless to help their royal cipher; Zamasp was duly toppled without a battle; blinded with burning olive oil, or else with an iron needle, he was banished into oblivion himself.
So it was, by 498, that Kavad was once again the Shahanshah. Nevertheless, the desperate circumstances of his realm still threatened to give the lie to that title. The empire remained racked by religious controversy, social upheaval and dynastic feuding. It was also effectively bankrupt. How, then, was Kavad to pay his Hephthalite backers for their support? A challenge, it might have been thought, fit to defeat even his ingenuity.
But Kavad was, as ever, nothing daunted. Instead, with his entire empire seemingly on the verge of implosion, he opted to go on the attack: to fix his gaze towards the setting of the sun, to cross his western border, and to take the gold he needed from there.
He would go to war with the only empire in the world that could rival his own.
The Twin Eyes of the World
Once, the predecessors of the Sasanians had ruled a dominion so vast that it had reached the shores of the Mediterranean. Egypt, Syria and even a chunk of Europe had been theirs. Memories of this golden age had grown faint, yet there were still monuments to it in Persia itself: enigmatic tombs and reliefs on cliffs of bearded kings. Most haunting of all was a great wilderness of columns, some five miles south of Istakhr: the “Place of a Hundred Pillars.” Here, amid the ruins, priests would carve inscriptions—and noblemen offer sacrifices—to the spirits of the ancient kings who had built it, back in the fabulous reaches of time.
Most Persians had no doubt that these mysterious ancestors were the Kayanids. The sustained rewriting of history that occurred under Peroz had merely cemented the identification. Yet there were other traditions, very different, which endured as well. Far to the west of Iranshahr, the Greeks—a people to whom the Kayanids meant nothing—preserved the memory of a Persian king named Cyrus. He had been, according to their historians, “the best of all rulers,”60 the first man ever to attempt the conquest of the world. A full half a millennium before Christ he had died—but still, among the Greeks, he was commemorated as the very model of a universal monarch. He and his successors had wielded a power more dazzling than that of any dynasty before them. One king had even sought to chain Europe to Asia by means of a bridge of boats, and to conquer Greece itself. He had failed—but only just. As a display of global reach, it had certainly proved a memorable one. Better than the Persians themselves, the Greeks knew precisely who the founders of the first world empire had been. It was not the Kayanids who had inhabited “the Place of a Hundred Pillars,” but the heirs of Cyrus. Indeed, Greek historians even had their own name for the ruin: “the City of the Persians,” or Persepolis.
It is hard to believe that the Persians themselves were wholly ignorant of this alternative history.b Anything that touched on the glory of their ancestors was bound to tickle their fancy. Sure enough, distorted echoes of what the Greeks had recorded about Cyrus and his descendants could sometimes be discerned in the fables of the Kayanids: the majesty of their rule, the vastness of their empire, even, on occasion, their names. Yet ultimately, to the Zoroastrian priests who were responsible for chronicling the past of Iranshahr, history such as the Greeks understood it was of only incidental significance. Far greater issues, and far greater forces, were at play. The rise and fall of earthly empires were the mere shadow-play of something infinitely more cosmic: the clash between Truth and the Lie. Nowhere, in the opinion of the Persians, better illustrated just how violently this battle had reverberated throughout the ages than the Place of a Hundred Pillars. By the time of Kavad’s reign, there was a hardening consensus as to who its architect had been. Jamshid, according to fabulously ancient tradition, had been the greatest monarch of all time: ruler of the entire world, possessed of a farr so potent that it had kept the whole of humanity from death, the chosen one of Ohrmazd, the owner of a flying throne.c Finally, though, after a reign of a thousand years, he had aspired to become a god—and at once his farr had abandoned him. Cornered by Dahag, the demonic necromancer, Jamshid had been hacked to death. Darkness and evil had prevailed. Of the fallen king, and all the manifold glories of his reign, nothing had been preserved, save only the great pillared city of stone.