Khosrow I Anushirvan

Khosrow I was a king of the Sasanian dynasty, which ruled Iran and Mesopotamia from 224 until the Arab conquests of the seventh century; its last king, Yazdegerd III, died in 651. He came to the throne in 531 on the death of his father Kavad I and reigned for forty-eight years, until 579. His empire reached from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf and, by the end of his reign, from Yemen in the south-west to the borders of Central Asia and Gandhara in the east.

He is known by several names. In Middle Persian he was Husraw; Greek writers called him Chosroes; in Arabic he became Kisra, a name that Arab writers later used for Persian kings in general. His epithet Anushirvan (Anōšag-ruwān) means “of immortal soul”. In later Persian and Arabic literature he is simply Nushirvan the Just.

Historians consider him one of the most important Sasanian rulers because his reign combined administrative reform, military success and cultural patronage. At the same time, much of what we know about him comes from later sources that idealised him, so distinguishing the historical king from the legendary one is an important task.

Khosrow inherited an empire that had come through a difficult half-century. In the late fifth century the Sasanians had suffered defeats by the Hephthalites, a powerful people in Central Asia, and had paid them tribute. At home, the great noble houses and the Zoroastrian priesthood competed with the king for power and land.

Khosrow’s father Kavad I was even deposed for a time (496–498/499) and regained the throne with Hephthalite help. During his reign a religious movement led by a preacher named Mazdak gained followers. The Mazdakites taught a dualist religion of light and darkness and, according to our sources, called for sharing wealth to reduce greed; how radical their social programme really was is debated, because nearly all accounts were written by their enemies. Kavad seems at first to have tolerated or used the movement against the nobility.

Toward the end of Kavad’s reign, or at the very start of Khosrow’s, the Mazdakite leaders were killed and the movement was violently suppressed, with Khosrow himself playing a leading part. The disorder of these years, including disputes over land and property, formed the background to the reforms that followed.

Khosrow’s most famous achievement was a reform of taxation. Previously the land tax had often been a share of each harvest, assessed by officials year by year, which encouraged abuse and made royal income unpredictable. Khosrow had farmland surveyed and set fixed money rates according to the kind of crop: so much per unit of land for grain, vines or clover, and so much per group of date palms. A revised poll tax with rates graded by wealth was also levied, from which the higher classes and people under twenty or over fifty were exempt. Some historians think this work began under Kavad and was completed under Khosrow.

The reforms are associated with the rise of the dehqans, a class of local landowners ranked below the great nobility. Because the term appears mainly in descriptions of late Sasanian times, many scholars think the dehqans emerged as a distinct class through Khosrow’s land reforms. They managed local affairs and collected taxes, and some served in the cavalry. After the Arab conquests the dehqans remained important for centuries and helped preserve Persian historical traditions and stories.

Khosrow also reorganised the army. According to the later sources, he built up a standing force of elite cavalry (asawaran), recruited from young nobles and from the gentry, which was under his direct command and paid, at least on campaign; and he replaced the single commander-in-chief with four commanders (spahbed), each responsible for one quarter of the realm and answerable directly to the king. These changes increased royal control, but they did not end the military power of the great noble houses, and the cost of a paid army proved hard to sustain.

Relations with the Eastern Roman Empire defined much of Khosrow’s reign. When he came to the throne, a war with Rome was in progress. In 532 he and Justinian concluded the so-called Eternal Peace. Justinian paid 110 centenaria of gold (11,000 Roman pounds), money that Procopius links to the defence of the Caspian Gates in the Caucasus against northern nomads, and the Roman commander in Mesopotamia was henceforth to be based at Constantina rather than Dara. Justinian needed peace to launch his reconquest of North Africa and Italy.

The peace lasted eight years. In 540, encouraged by envoys from the Ostrogoths who were fighting Justinian in Italy, Khosrow invaded Roman Syria and captured Antioch, one of the greatest cities of the eastern Mediterranean. The city was sacked, and many of its inhabitants were deported to Mesopotamia, where Khosrow built a new city for them near Ctesiphon called Weh-Andiok-Husraw, “Khosrow’s better Antioch”. The Roman historian Procopius, a contemporary who had served on the staff of the general Belisarius, describes the campaign in detail and with hostility, although he did not witness the fall of Antioch himself.

War followed in Lazica, on the Black Sea coast of today’s Georgia, from 541 to 562. It ended with a Fifty-Year Peace, which again included Roman payments. The peace did not last: war resumed in 572, after a rebellion in Persian Armenia that the Romans supported and the refusal of Justin II, Justinian’s successor, to continue the agreed payments. It was still going on when Khosrow died in 579.

On his north-eastern frontier, Khosrow ended the long Hephthalite threat. Around 557–560 he allied with the newly powerful Turks (the Göktürks) of the steppe, and together they destroyed the Hephthalite state, dividing its territory roughly along the Oxus (Amu Darya). Later Persian and Arabic tradition says he married a Turkish princess, and the alliance brought the Sasanians into direct contact with a new steppe empire that stretched toward China.

In the south-west, around 570, a Persian force under the commander Wahriz sailed to Yemen and drove out the Aksumite (Ethiopian) rulers who had controlled the country. Yemen became a Sasanian dependency. This brought Persia into the politics of the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea trade routes, in the same years in which, according to Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca.

Khosrow also invested in defence and building. Fortifications in the Caucasus, such as those at Derbent, are traditionally associated with him, and he founded or rebuilt towns and palaces. The famous vaulted hall at Ctesiphon, the Taq Kasra, is often attributed to him, although some scholars date it earlier.

Khosrow ruled from Ctesiphon, a cluster of cities on both banks of the Tigris about 35–40 kilometres south-east of modern Baghdad. The Parthians had made it a royal residence, and after the Sasanians took power in the third century they rebuilt it, including a large round city. Mesopotamia’s irrigated farmland made the region the richest part of the empire, and much of the tax revenue that Khosrow’s reforms organised came from here.

The most famous building of Ctesiphon is the Taq Kasra, the “Arch of Khosrow”. Its brick vault, about 37 metres high and 26 metres wide, is often described as the largest brick vault built before modern times. It formed the audience hall of a palace where the king received envoys and sat in state. After Arab forces captured Ctesiphon in 637, the hall was briefly used as a mosque, and the round plan of Baghdad, founded nearby by the Abbasids in 762, is often compared with Sasanian round cities such as the one at Ctesiphon.

The new city built for the deportees from Antioch, Weh-Andiok-Husraw, lay close to Ctesiphon. Sources say it was laid out on the model of Antioch, with baths and a hippodrome, so that the Roman captives would feel at home. The episode shows how war moved not only goods but whole communities, with their skills and religions, from one empire to another.

Khosrow’s court was remembered as a centre of learning where knowledge from several traditions met. According to tradition, he sent the physician Burzoy (Borzuya) to India to obtain a collection of fables and wisdom stories derived from the Sanskrit Panchatantra and to translate it into Middle Persian; the exact date and circumstances are uncertain. The Middle Persian version is lost, but a sixth-century Syriac translation and, above all, the eighth-century Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna of Ibn al-Muqaffa (died about 757) carried it across the Islamic world and later into Europe.

A Middle Persian story places the arrival of chess at Khosrow’s court. The text, the “Explanation of Chess and the Invention of Backgammon”, tells how an Indian king sent the game as a challenge and how Khosrow’s wise minister Wuzurgmihr (Bozorgmehr) solved it and invented backgammon in reply. Chess probably reached Iran from India in the sixth century, but its precise date is uncertain, and the earliest certain evidence for the game in Iran comes from after the Arab conquest. The Middle Persian name chatrang comes from the Sanskrit chaturanga.

Greek learning was valued too. The Byzantine historian Agathias reports that around 531–532 several Neoplatonist philosophers from Athens, including Damascius and Simplicius, travelled to Khosrow’s court, disappointed by conditions under Justinian. Agathias adds that they were in turn disappointed by Persia and returned, and that the peace treaty of 532 protected them. A scholar named Paul the Persian wrote a treatise on Aristotle’s logic for the king. Later sources credit Khosrow with developing Gondishapur in south-western Iran into a centre of medicine, but the earliest report of medical learning there concerns a disputation said to have been held under Khosrow II around 610, and its hospital is first mentioned in accounts of events in 765, so the story of a great academy founded by Khosrow I may be largely legendary.

Khosrow was a Zoroastrian king and presented himself as a defender of the Good Religion. Later Zoroastrian tradition credits his reign with a revision of the Middle Persian (Pahlavi) translation of the scriptures. The Avesta itself, long transmitted orally, was written down under the Sasanians in a special alphabet invented for the purpose; exactly when this happened is debated.

The empire also contained large Christian and Jewish communities. The Church of the East, strong in Mesopotamia, was generally tolerated and could even be useful to the king in relations with Rome, but conversion from Zoroastrianism to Christianity was forbidden and punished, and church leaders who displeased the king could be confined or exiled. Khosrow’s policy combined practical tolerance of minorities with firm control of anything that threatened royal authority, as the suppression of the Mazdakites had shown.

Khosrow and Justinian (r. 527–565) reigned side by side from 531 to 565, and each shaped the other’s policies. The peace of 532 helped Justinian turn west to reconquer North Africa and Italy, in the same years in which his codification of Roman law (529–534) was completed and Hagia Sophia was rebuilt (532–537); Khosrow’s invasion of 540 and the plague that struck the empire in 541–542 strained those ambitions. The same Silk Road trade in silk that the two empires fought to control ran east to China, still divided between northern and southern dynasties until the Sui reunified it in 589, ten years after Khosrow’s death.

On the Korean Peninsula these were the years of King Seong of Baekje, who moved his capital to Sabi in 538 and died fighting Silla in 554, and of King Jinheung of Silla (r. 540–576), who expanded his kingdom into the Han River basin. Baekje’s official transmission of Buddhism to Japan is traditionally dated to 538 or 552. In India, the Gupta Empire had broken up, partly under pressure from Huna rulers such as Toramana and Mihirakula; numismatists class these “Alchon” kings as a separate group of so-called Iranian Huns, though how they were related to the Hephthalites whom Khosrow destroyed with the Turks is uncertain.

In Arabia, Khosrow’s conquest of Yemen around 570 coincided with the traditional birth year of Muhammad. Within about seventy years of Khosrow’s death, Arab Muslim armies inspired by Muhammad’s message had conquered the Sasanian Empire; its last king, Yazdegerd III, died in 651. Khosrow’s descendant Peroz III, son of Yazdegerd III, later found refuge in Tang China and reached Chang’an in 673–674, where the Daming Palace, founded in 634, had been greatly enlarged from 662; Khosrow’s memory, meanwhile, passed into Arabic and Persian literature as the model of a just king.

Few pre-Islamic rulers were remembered as warmly in the Islamic world as Khosrow. Arabic histories such as that of al-Tabari and Persian works such as Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (completed about 1010) give long accounts of his reign, drawing on the lost Middle Persian Book of Kings (Khwaday-namag) and other Sasanian traditions. In the Shahnameh, the dialogues between the king and his minister Bozorgmehr make Khosrow’s court a school of wisdom.

In the “mirrors for princes” literature, which advised rulers how to govern, Nushirvan became the standard example of a just king. Later stories told how he let a poor old woman keep her house even though it spoiled the symmetry of his palace, or hung a chain with a bell that any wronged subject could pull. Both stories are already alluded to by the twelfth-century poet Khaqani. They served mainly as moral lessons, although some scholars argue that a few have a historical core; above all they show what later societies hoped a ruler would be.

His palace at Ctesiphon, the Taq Kasra, became a symbol of vanished greatness. The ninth-century Arabic poet al-Buhturi wrote a famous ode on its ruins, and the twelfth-century Persian poet Khaqani mourned them in verse. The great arch still stands, but parts of its brick vault collapsed in 2019 and 2020, and emergency stabilisation work has been carried out since.

Our knowledge of Khosrow rests on sources that are unevenly distributed. Contemporary Greek historians, Procopius for the early wars, then Agathias and Menander Protector, describe him from the Roman side and are well informed about diplomacy and warfare, less so about Iran’s internal affairs. Syriac church writings add the perspective of Christians inside the empire. The fullest accounts of his reforms come from Arabic and Persian authors of the ninth to eleventh centuries, especially al-Tabari and Ferdowsi, who drew on Sasanian court traditions that had already shaped the king’s image. Material evidence includes coins, seals and inscriptions, and ruins such as the Taq Kasra.

One major debate concerns the chronology and authorship of the reforms. Because later sources credit Khosrow with almost everything good, some historians argue that key changes in taxation and military organisation began under Kavad I, and that Khosrow completed and publicised them. Seals of the four regional commanders and other administrative seals have been used to test what the texts claim.

A second debate concerns how far the reforms really centralised the state. Older scholarship spoke of a decisive victory of the king over a “feudal” aristocracy. More recent work suggests that the great noble houses remained powerful, as their role in the civil wars of the late sixth and seventh centuries shows, and that the reforms reshaped rather than replaced the partnership between crown and nobility.

Attributions of monuments and institutions are also uncertain. Whether the Taq Kasra was built by Khosrow I or earlier, and whether Gondishapur ever had an organised academy and hospital in his time, are questions on which scholars disagree, because the relevant claims come from much later sources.

Seen from Constantinople, Khosrow was a dangerous and faithless enemy. Procopius portrays him as greedy and deceitful, breaking the Eternal Peace for plunder, and Agathias mocks his claims to philosophical learning. These authors wrote for Roman readers during or just after long wars, and their judgements reflect that setting.

Seen from later Iran and the Islamic world, he was the ideal ruler, wise, generous and just, a figure used to teach kings how to behave. This image was shaped first by Sasanian court propaganda and then by Muslim authors who used a pre-Islamic king as a model without endorsing his religion. In modern Iran he is also a symbol of national history and pre-Islamic greatness.

The groups who suffered under him saw him differently again. For the people of Antioch in 540 he was a conqueror who sacked their city and deported them; for the Mazdakites he was the prince who destroyed their movement; for Christians who converted from Zoroastrianism he was a ruler who punished apostasy. Modern historians try to hold these views together: Khosrow was an able reformer and patron of learning, and also a ruler who used force ruthlessly to secure his power.