Kavad faced few such impediments to his own invasion. No natural frontier, no river or chain of mountains, marked the boundary between the empires of East and West. The border itself was little more than a line drawn in the sand. Those who dwelt on either side of it spoke the same language and shared the same way of life, “so that rather than live in dread of one another,” as one Roman commentator observed disapprovingly, “they inter-marry, bringing their produce to the same markets, and even shoulder the labours of farming together.”67 As a result, both the Persian and the Roman authorities were as concerned with policing their own subjects as they were with intimidating the enemy. Indeed, by the terms of a peace treaty signed more than sixty years previously, the construction of new fortresses close to the border had been banned outright. De-militarisation, however, had effectively been a Persian victory by another name: for the Shahanshah, unlike his Roman adversary, already commanded a great city that sat almost directly on the frontier. Nisibis was its name: once the linchpin of the entire Roman defensive system in the East, but secured for Persia back in 363, following the defeat of Julian’s assault on Ctesiphon. Almost a century and a half on, and the Romans still had no rival stronghold from which to coordinate a response to any Persian invasion. For decades, as peace held between the two superpowers, this had scarcely mattered. But now, with Hephthalite mercenaries suddenly erupting across Roman territory, their hoofbeats were sounding a tattoo that generated terror hundreds of miles beyond the frontier.
Kavad’s ambition stretched well beyond stripping the Roman countryside bare: he planned to seize a great city or two. Cities, after all, were where the true wealth was to be found: gold, industry and slaves. Accordingly, the Shahanshah did not follow the lowland roads along which rural refugees were already streaming, but headed north, through the mountains of Armenia. His first target was the city of Theodosiopolis, which he surprised, and took with ease. Then, swinging back south, he made for an even richer prize. Amida, a heavily fortified stronghold some eighty miles beyond the frontier, where its massive basalt walls lowered grimly above the upper reaches of the Tigris, had shrugged off many previous Persian attempts to capture it; nor did it promise Kavad easy pickings now. Even prior to his invasion, the city’s governor had been prompted to stiffen its defences by an unprecedented array of evil portents: “locusts came, the sun was dimmed, there was earthquake, famine, and plague.”68There was certainly no prospect of repeating the trick that had secured Theodosiopolis, and taking Amida by surprise. Upwards of fifty thousand villagers, from all across the region, had fled the approach of the Hephthalite cavalry and taken refuge inside the city, almost doubling its population. Even though this had rendered living conditions within Amida almost unendurable, it had at least ensured there would be no shortage of people to defend its walls. Sure enough, in time, the defence of Amida would become the stuff of ringing legend. Everything the city had in its arsenal was rained down upon the besiegers: from catapult bolts to arrows; from rocks to boiling oil. Even the women and children took to the walls and hurled down stones. Meanwhile, the city’s prostitutes chanted abuse at the Shahanshah and flashed their privates at him whenever he came into view.
After three months, though, it was Kavad who enjoyed the last laugh. A Persian detachment forced its way through a sewer that ran beneath the circuit wall and secured an inner tower. Kavad himself then stood at the base of the walls, sword drawn, to urge on the rest of his army, who raised ladders and swarmed up into Amida at last. Then, in an ecstasy of triumph and greed, they stripped the city bare. Although many of its inhabitants were taken as slaves, with the notables carefully rounded up to serve as hostages, far more were put to the sword. The streets ran with blood. Tens of thousands of bodies, when the killing was finally done, were slung beyond the city’s walls. Great piles of reeking corpses, tangled and gore-smeared, provided the Persians with an intimidating trophy of their victory. Decades later, the terrible slaughter would still haunt the imaginings of all those who lived along Rome’s eastern frontier.
Which, no doubt, had been precisely Kavad’s aim. Although the war he had launched would soon peter out into bloody stalemate, and although Amida itself, besieged in turn by the Romans, would end up being sold back to them, albeit for a tidy profit, the Shahanshah could consider his war aims to have been more than met. A fearsome marker had been laid down. After long years of defeat and decay, the lord of Iranshahr had triumphantly demonstrated to his own subjects, and the rest of the world, that the spiral of his dynasty’s decline was over. There would be no collapse. The House of Sasan had weathered the storm. Nor was that all. It remained the goal of Kavad himself, ever bold, ever ambitious, not merely to redeem the Persian monarchy from the many perils that had been beleaguering it, but to set its power upon firmer foundations than it had ever enjoyed before. Its enemies everywhere were to be hamstrung and taught their place. In 506, he duly signed a treaty with the Romans, which once again obliged Caesar to hand over a payment of gold. Some of this, of course, along with the booty of Theodosiopolis and Amida, could be used to help pay off the Hephthalites—except that even on that front there was at last some promising news. Reports were starting to be brought in by travellers from the distant-most limits of the steppes of the rise to prominence there of a whole new breed of savages: a hitherto unknown people named the Turks. It appeared that the Hephthalites themselves might be suffering from their own nomad problem. Manifold indeed were the blessings of Ohrmazd.
Meanwhile, inside Iranshahr itself, Kavad set about neutering other threats. Although it was his heresy that had seen him toppled in the first place, he seems not, on his return to power, to have tempered his loyalty to the teachings of Mazdak. Just the opposite, in fact. Whether prompted by conviction, or by cynicism, or by a mixture of the two, Kavad remained an enthusiastic partisan of the communist prophet. That the mighty should be humbled; that the great estates of the nobility and the clergy should be dismantled; that privilege should yield to justice: here, in these demands, was scope for reform indeed. The genius of Kavad—or perhaps his wilful blindness—was that for a long while he saw not the slightest contradiction between the two defining policies of his reign: the ring-fencing of royal power and the sponsorship of social revolution. Nothing, perhaps, better exemplified the successes that he was thereby able to obtain than the fate of the family that had threatened, at the start of his reign, to put the whole of Iranshahr in its shade: the Karin. Such was the scale of the onslaught launched by the Mazdakites against the power base of that haughty dynasty that it ended up shattered into pieces. The destruction of their strongholds in Media left them impotent to resist when Kavad, pressing home his advantage, forced them east, into what remained of their fiefdoms, far from the heartbeat of royal power. Revenge was sweet.