The Near East before the coming of Islam was dominated, as it had been for the previous half-millennium, by two great empires, the Roman–Byzantine to the west and the Persian to the east. The frontier between these two empires had fluctuated considerably during this time. In the late sixth century, the last period of stability before the upheavals of the seventh century, the frontier had run roughly from north to south, through the wild uplands of eastern Anatolia and bisecting the fertile and well-populated plains of the land between the middle Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the prairie and steppe country which the Byzantines called Mesopotamia and the Arabs were to know as al-Jazīra, “the Island” between the two great rivers. On the Byzantine side of the frontier lay the massively fortified towns of Amida (now Diyarbakır) and Dara, while the Persians held the ancient cultural centre of Nisibis (Niṣībīn). On the Euphrates, the frontier zone was marked by the sixth-century Byzantine fortress of Zenobia. It was in this zone of the frontier that campaigns between the armies of the two empires took place; the heavy, slow-moving forces could not hope to cross the waterless stretches of the Syrian Desert to the south.
South of the Euphrates, there was no firm frontier. During the second half of the sixth century, both Byzantines and Sasanians had reached arrangements with leading clans among the Arab bedouin tribes, the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids, respectively, who provided an element of administration in the frontier areas as well as defence against their opposite numbers on the other side of the desert. This reliance on pastoral peoples for the defence of the empires testifies to their growing importance along the desert margins and the inability of the settled people to provide their own defence.
In the year 600, the Byzantine Empire presented a superficial picture of ageless continuity. The emperor of the day, Maurice, bore the title of Augustus and claimed to be the successor of that first Augustus who had established his personal power in Rome over 600 years before. It is true that the capital had since moved to Constantinople and that Christianity had become the official religion of the empire, but the emperor still ruled with the assistance of the senate, consuls were still appointed, the laws of the empire were based on Justinian’s great codification of classical practice and Latin was still used as an official language, although it was increasingly being replaced by Greek for administrative purposes.
This impression of continuity, however, masked a large number of changes, and the Roman Empire was continually evolving in response to fluid circumstances. Many of the features which had seemed central to the classical empire were no longer in evidence. Until the fourth and fifth centuries, the eastern half of the empire had at least in theory boasted a large number of self-governing towns which managed their own affairs under their own councils and collected taxes from the surrounding countryside. This urban government had brought great prosperity to some cities and resulted in a burst of civic architectural activity which can have had few parallels and which created the great monumental baths, theatres and colonnaded streets whose ruins remain so impressive today. By the sixth century, this picture had substantially changed; the cities had lost their political and financial autonomy; their councils had been superseded by governors appointed by the imperial authorities and their civic revenues had been confiscated for the benefit of the imperial treasury. While churches and monastic buildings continued to be constructed, large-scale civic building effectively came to a halt.
The sixth century saw further blows to the urban culture of late antiquity. In 541, bubonic plague struck the eastern empire for the first but by no means the last time; it was to recur with a horrifying frequency throughout the sixth and early seventh centuries. Mortality is impossible to gauge with any accuracy, but using contemporary accounts and comparing them with the much better documented Black Death of 1348 onwards, it seems probable that at least a third of the population was lost. Furthermore, it is likely that the highest mortality was in densely populated urban areas, while the nomad populations were comparatively unaffected. There certainly seems no evidence that the plague spread into the Arabian Peninsula. This massive loss of population was compounded by a further series of disasters, both natural and man-made. The mid-sixth century saw a number of devastating earthquakes which effectively destroyed Beirut, until then a flourishing intellectual and legal centre, and other cities on the Lebanese coast. At the same time, the Persians launched a series of very destructive invasions of the Syrian provinces, including the sack of the great city of Antioch in 540 and of Apamea in 573. In 582, the major provincial capital of Bostra (now Buṣrā) in the Ḥawrān was sacked by the followers of the Ghassanids, protesting the arrest of their chief by the Byzantine authorities. These incursions were paralleled elsewhere; in Italy, most of the lands which Justinian had painstakingly retaken from the Visigoths were lost to the empire when the Lombards invaded from the north in the second half of the sixth century. Nearer the capital, the Balkan provinces were devastated by the attacks and settlements of Avars and Slavs.
These catastrophes had a fundamental effect on the Byzantine Empire. Most obviously, it was weakened militarily – the loss of population and the constant wars reduced the army greatly; the system of limitanei, frontier guards who performed military service in exchange for land, was largely abandoned, and it seems that by the early seventh century, imperial armies were increasingly composed of people from the fringes of the empire, Armenians and Arabs, rather than the settled inhabitants of the central areas. In addition, the empire was becoming a rural and agrarian society, not just in Italy and the Balkans, but also in the Near East, where urban life was slightly more resilient. There was still Mediterranean trade until the end of the sixth century, notably in grain from Egypt and in pottery, but the cities of the Syrian and Palestinian coasts seem to have lost much of their commercial vitality. In so far as trade was carried on, it was likely to be centred on fairs attached to pilgrimage centres rather than on large urban markets, and it is possible that monasteries and churches had replaced urban notables as the most important landowners. Nor were there any traces left of local self-government. For both administration and defence, the people of the Byzantine Near East were dependent on imperial armies and officials. By the end of the sixth century, the Byzantine Near East had effectively lost its classical aspect and was going through a series of profound economic and social changes not dissimilar to those which occurred in western Europe at the same time. It is against this background that the achievements of the Islamic conquest and Muslim state-building must be measured.
In addition to these general changes, Syria and Egypt had a number of problems which made them rather different from the rest of the empire. The first was one of language and ethnic identities. Both countries were essentially lands of two cultures, the one urban, Greek-speaking and influenced by classical cultural norms and lifestyles. This culture was at its strongest in the great urban centres like Antioch and Alexandria, but also thrived in many lesser coastal and inland towns. The other culture was vernacular, Coptic in Egypt, Aramaic or, increasingly, Arabic-speaking in Syria. This was the culture of the villages and the pastoral peoples, who had no access to the traditions of the classical world and little taste for the amenities of urban life. For almost a millennium, since the conquests of Alexander the Great, these two lifestyles had coexisted in mutual incomprehension. Now, with the relative decline of urban populations and prosperity, the vernacular world was in the ascendant.
These cultural differences were reflected in religious ones. During the sixth century, the bulk of the rural populations of Egypt and Syria (but not, it would seem, of Palestine) became attached to the Monophysite, also known as Miaphysite, faith, in distinction to the official, imperial, Diophysite view. The differences between these two views concerned the nature of Christ. The Diophysites maintained that He had two complete natures, one human, like our humanity, and one divine, miraculously fused in one person. The Monophysites refused to accept this, holding that Christ had one, divine, nature, that His humanity was not as ours, to them a blasphemous idea, but only an aspect of His divine nature. Superficially, the differences may seem to be trivial, but in fact they show a fundamentally different way of looking at the Incarnation, and they stem from different religious traditions: the Diophysite looks back to the Hellenistic tradition of humanizing the divine, whereas the Monophysite looks to aspects of the Jewish tradition with its deep distrust of any representations of divinity.
The differences of theological opinion would probably have remained talking points among theologians if they had not reflected the broader cultural distinctions. The Monophysite church used vernacular languages for liturgy, theological debate and general literature – Syriac (a literary form of the Aramaic dialect of Edessa) in Syria and Coptic in Egypt; both of these languages, incidentally, remain in use as liturgical languages to the present day. The Monophysite church, too, was essentially rural, at least in Syria, where its leaders, although they took the ancient title of patriarch of Antioch, always lived in monasteries far from the city itself. The differences were greatly exacerbated by the fact that the Byzantine authorities, in a struggle to enforce ideological uniformity, began the systematic and often brutal persecution of the Monophysite church, especially in Syria. The Monophysite church had, however, powerful lay supporters in Syria, notably the Ghassanids who controlled the desert frontier and provided both money and refuge for persecuted members of the sect when they were forced to flee from the centres of population. The significance of this for the longer-term history of the Near East was that it meant that a significant proportion of the population was alienated from the ruling class both culturally and because the church they were devoted to was regarded as heretical and subject to dire official sanctions. It is important, at the same time, not to overestimate the significance of this: there is no evidence that either the Copts or the Monophysites of Syria actually cooperated with the Islamic conquests. What can be said is that they felt little enthusiasm for the Byzantine cause. In some parts of Syria, the conquerors were actually welcomed; in no part was there significant and prolonged resistance from the local population, as there was, for example, in the Anatolian highlands, Armenia or the province of Fārs in southern Iran.
The long-term weaknesses of the Byzantine Empire in the Near East were revealed in the series of catastrophes which followed the death of the Emperor Maurice in 602. Maurice, a capable and energetic soldier, if a slightly ham-fisted politician, had devoted his reign to the maintenance of the frontiers of the empire. In doing so, he had been greatly aided by a long-term alliance with the Persian King Khusrau II Parvēz, whom he had previously helped to the throne. This breathing space in the east had allowed Maurice to devote his attentions to securing the frontiers of the state in the Balkans. In 602, he was murdered, along with all his family, by a brutal and incompetent usurper called Phocas. Not only did Phocas prove totally unable to continue his predecessor’s work in the Balkans, but his action gave Khusrau II the pretext to launch a major invasion of the Byzantine Empire to avenge his dead benefactor. The effect was catastrophic: the Persians penetrated much farther than ever before; not only were Antioch (613) and Jerusalem (614) taken, and with them all the provinces of Syria and Palestine, but so was Egypt, and much of the Anatolian uplands were devastated by raids; recently discovered archaeological evidence testifies to the extent of destruction of Anatolian cities at this time. Meanwhile, in 610, Phocas was himself deposed, by a soldier from the Byzantine territories in north Africa, Heraclius. Heraclius was altogether more effective than his predecessor. In 622, the same year that Muḥammad made his Hijra from Mecca to Medina, he set off from the beleaguered capital at Constantinople and led an expedition through the Black Sea to take the Persians from the rear. In a series of brilliant campaigns, he destroyed the Persian army and marched into the heartlands of the Sasanian Empire in Iraq. Khusrau was deposed, and in 628 (the year Muḥammad reached agreement with the people of Mecca), Heraclius entered the Sasanian capital at Ctesiphon. The Persian conquests in Syria and Egypt were restored to Byzantine control and the relic of the True Cross, taken by Khusrau, was restored to Jerusalem.
The appearance of a return to normality was deceptive. The long years of warfare had accelerated and confirmed the tendencies of the previous century towards demographic and urban decline. Many previously settled areas on the fringes of the Syrian Desert were now deserted, their inhabitants being dead, in exile or converted to pastoral lifestyles more easy to sustain in the chaotic conditions. Furthermore, a whole generation had grown up which had no memory or experience of Byzantine rule: those who were adults at the time of Heraclius’ triumphs had been children when the wars began, and they can have had little residual loyalty to the Byzantine state. Heraclius was faced with a multitude of problems, none of which he had time to solve. The military and administrative organization of the recovered provinces had been hardly developed and, apart from Arab tribesmen, taken on as allies, there was no chance to develop the sort of local defence unit, the theme, which was to prove so effective in Anatolia. City walls and fortifications were probably in drastic need of repair. The emperor also failed to resolve the religious issue. In Syria, he attempted to reach a compromise between Diophysite and Monophysite views, putting forward a formula known as Monotheletism. This was to form the intellectual basis of Maronite Christianity, and as such still survives to this day, but at the time it served to please no one, least of all the wild and truculent monks who led the Monophysite party. In Egypt, he was unwise enough to appoint, as both patriarch and governor of Alexandria, a militant Diophysite, Cyrus, bishop of Phasis, in the Caucasus (hence his Arabic name, al-Muqawqis). Cyrus proved to be both incompetent and intolerant, and the restoration of Byzantine rule in Egypt was marked not by the restoration of Christian unity but by the systematic alienation of the majority of the population from the government. If Heraclius and his successors had been able to enjoy the fruits of their triumph for a few decades, it is possible that a new structure would have emerged in the Byzantine Near East. But this was not to be; the Islamic armies arrived when Byzantine rule was recent, shaky and widely resented. The Islamic conquest of Syria and Egypt was as much a product of the decline of Byzantine civilization in the area as the blow which destroyed it.
The Sasanian Empire of Persia of the late sixth century was, like the Roman–Byzantine Empire, heir to an ancient imperial tradition. The great Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes had flourished when Rome was a village, and the Sasanian family were well aware of the fact that the Persian Empire had existed since remotest antiquity. The ruling family had come to power over 300 years before; the first member of the dynasty, Ardashīr Pāpagān, was the sub-king of Fārs, the area of southern Iran which had been the cradle and centre of the Achaemenid dynasty. Even though Achaemenid power had vanished 600 years previously when Alexander the Great took and burned Persepolis, Ardashīr chose to have his achievements commemorated among the great monuments of that vanished supremacy.
Unlike the Byzantine Empire, power in the Sasanian Empire was essentially dynastic. In Byzantium, it was possible for a family, like that of Constantine in the fourth century, to establish control of the empire for several generations, but a dynastic ideology never developed. In Iran, however, by the sixth century, the Sasanian house was held to have a divinely given right to the throne, and when, from the late sixth century, generals of non-dynastic origins challenged and usurped this right, they could not command the necessary prestige to hold the empire together. In Byzantium, a successful usurper like Heraclius could be, and was, accepted as legitimate sovereign. In the Sasanian Empire, rebels like Bahrām Chōbīn (590–591) and Shahrbarāz in 628, although both were of aristocratic descent and proven military ability, failed to win general acceptance because they were not of the ruling dynasty. In the crisis conditions which prevailed in the empire after the deposition and death of Khusrau II Parvēz in 628, this weakness made it difficult for an effective sovereign to emerge; in the years 628–632, there were at least ten different kings or would-be kings, and by the time that Yazdgard III, a scion of the Sasanian house who had been discovered hiding in the ancient capital of Iṣṭakhr in Fārs, had been established on the throne, the Muslim armies were already attacking the empire.
There were other ways in which the Sasanian imperial style differed from the Byzantine. Both claimed to rule by divine pleasure, and the Sasanian sovereigns claimed the support of Ahurā Mazdā, the Good God. But they also claimed divinity for themselves, and the ancient Near Eastern idea of the God-King remained very much part of the imperial ideology. With it went a vastly elaborate court ceremonial, a hierarchy of offices at least as formal as anything devised in Constantinople and a concern to distance the sovereign from even the greatest of his subjects. There was also a different imperial iconography: the Byzantine emperor, like Justinian in the Ravenna mosaics, tends to appear as a formal, distant, immobile figure, almost always in civilian dress. Khusrau II Parvēz, in the rock reliefs he caused to be carved at Ṭāq-i Bustān, had himself portrayed as a mighty hunter, on horseback in pursuit of game; it was an imperial image which dated back to the Assyrian monarchy of the first half of the first millennium BC. In a real sense, the Sasanian was the last of the great monarchies of the ancient Near East.
At the end of the sixth century, the Persian Empire controlled virtually the whole of the Iranian plateau and all of modern Iraq. On the west, its frontiers coincided with the edge of the settled lands, and the Sasanian clients and allies, the Banū Lakhm of Ḥīra, extended this influence over a confederation of bedouin tribes. To the north, the Persians held Nisibis (Niṣībīn) and their influence was preponderant in Armenia. Under Khusrau I Anūshirvān (531–579), the northern frontier had been established in the Araxes valley, at Tblisi in Georgia and at Darband, the great fortress on the Caspian coast which controlled the eastern flanks of the Caucasus; in this area, the Muslims inherited Sasanian political geography, manning the same frontier fortresses and settling in the same cities as their Persian predecessors. The northeastern frontier was always disturbed and far from the heartlands of Iranian power. The lands of the Oxus valley and beyond had been invaded from the fourth century by Hunnic people known as the Hepthalites. In around 560, Khusrau I, in alliance with the Turkish nomads who also inhabited the region, defeated the Hepthalites and their kingdom was broken up. From this time, the Sasanian frontier was established at Marv, where a frontier official called the marzbān was established. Recent archaeological research has revealed remains of the great Gurgan Wall, a well-planned military installation with regular forts along it, which demonstrates the power and efficiency of the Sasanian military machine and rivals any of the systems of fortifications constructed by the Romans. Beyond that, various independent principalities were ruled by Hepthalites or Soghdians, largely settled people of Iranian origin. The steppe lands and deserts of this area were the province of the Turks, pagan, horse-based nomads whose domain stretched as far as the borders of China and who were destined to play an immensely important part in Islamic history. In the southeastern direction, the frontiers of the empire seem to have coincided roughly with those of the eastern frontiers of modern Iran, including Sīstān, where there was a marzbān at the capital Zaranj when the Arabs arrived, and Kirmān.
In the sixth century, Sasanian influence was not confined to Iran and Iraq. Some areas of the Arabian Peninsula, notably Baḥrayn and al-Yamāma and from 572 Yemen in the southwest, were also controlled by the Sasanians or their allies and they encouraged a trade in the Gulf which was to continue after the Muslim conquest.
Despite the impression of great antiquity and the appeals to a great imperial past, the Sasanian Empire, like the Byzantine, was by no means static; during the sixth century, it had gone through remarkable and deep-rooted changes. The history of the Sasanian monarchy can be interpreted as one of constant tensions between the attempts of the dynasty to establish a centralized authority and the determination of the higher aristocracy and local kinglets to maintain their rights and independence. The Parthian monarchy, which had preceded the Sasanians, had been little more than a confederation of minor kingdoms. The early Sasanian monarchs tried to create a more centralized regime, but during the fifth century, this process was largely reversed and there was something of an aristocratic reaction. This, in turn, provoked the Mazdakite uprisings of the late fifth and early sixth centuries. Mazdakism seems to have been a religious movement with strong social overtones. Its enemies, whose accounts are the only ones we have, portray the Mazdakites as campaigning for the abolition of private property and class distinctions and for the holding of women in common; the last is probably in part a malicious slander, but may also reflect opposition to the conventional Iranian aristocratic view of marriage as vital for the transfer of property and the production of heirs. At first perhaps surprisingly, the movement had the backing of the then king, Kavād I (488–531), who saw it as a way of reestablishing royal control over the fractious aristocracy. However, he was temporarily deposed and on his return to power, with the help of the Hepthalites he began to distance himself from these revolutionaries.
During the last part of his reign, he came increasingly under the influence of his son and heir, Khusrau, who persuaded him to take serious measures against the Mazdakites, who were outlawed and many of them massacred. The movement is of great interest, however, partly because of its avowedly egalitarian ideology but also because it gives an all too rare insight into the social discontents of Iran. It is worth, perhaps, noting in this context that the Western Roman Empire had been disturbed by a series of peasant revolts during the fifth century but that these do not seem to have had any counterparts in Syria, Anatolia or Egypt. The Mazdakite movement also left an ideological legacy. In Umayyad and early ‘Abbasid times, there were a number of revolts – the most famous of which was led by Bābak in Āzarbayjān at the beginning of the third/ninth century – which are usually referred to by the name of Khurramiyya or Khurramdīniyya and which seem to have been influenced by radical Mazdakite ideas.
Khusrau I Anūshirvān (The Immortal Soul), who came to the throne in his own right on the death of his father in 531, was essentially the architect of the Sasanian state as it existed in the second half of the sixth century. He was determined to crush the Mazdakites without allowing the aristocracy to take over again. In order to do this, he introduced a series of administrative reforms which seem to have been, ultimately, dependent on the reforms Diocletian had introduced into the Roman Empire in the late third century and which were reflected in contemporary Byzantine practice. Basically, this consisted in a systematization of the land tax, which had probably existed before. This was now collected, not as a proportion of the harvest, but at a fixed rate depending on the area. With the money, he began to institute a paid army of horsemen and foot in place of the unreliable feudal levies which had existed before. The details of the reforms are vague, but it seems clear that the system of taxation paying for a regular army now became a central feature of Sasanian administration and as such was to have a profound effect on early Islamic practice.
Much of the land, especially in Iraq, however, was state land on which the cultivators paid up to a third of their produce, since this was both rent and taxes, a forerunner of the ṣawāfī of the early Islamic state. In addition, Khusrau organized the payment of a poll tax which was to be levied on all members of society according to their wealth, except the aristocracy and the priests of the official religion. In this way, paying the poll tax acquired a social stigma which seems to have remained after the Muslim conquest, when the basis for paying the poll tax became religious (that is to say that only non-Muslims paid) rather than social.
At the same time, he regularized the system of provincial administration. The whole empire was divided into four quarters – north, east, west and south – under supreme military commanders. These quarters disappeared at the time of the Muslim conquest, with the exception of the eastern quarter, known as Khurāsān, which remained virtually intact under early Islamic rule and was consequently larger and more powerful than the other provinces of Iran. Below the quarters were some thirty-seven provinces, known as ōstāns or, in Iraq, kūras, and these units tended to survive the Muslim conquest, with modifications, and became the basis of the new Muslim provincial organization. He also extended the system of appointing marzbāns along the frontiers and of settling populations of marginal people as peasant soldiers in vulnerable areas, again a reflection of Byzantine practice.
Urban life and institutions probably played a smaller part in the life of the Sasanian Empire than of the Byzantine. Before the coming of the Sasanians, some towns had had some administrative autonomy, inherited from Seleucid days when Greek urban institutions had been spread in the Macedonian colonies of Asia. By the sixth century, however, such institutions had long since vanished. In the Sasanian Empire, as in Byzantium, the cities were centres of local government and sometimes of upper-class social life, but they had no self-governing institutions. In contrast to the Byzantine Empire, the main religious institutions, including the great fire temple at Shiz (Takhti Sulayman), where the Sasanian kings were inaugurated, were situated in mountainous areas, well away from the main urban centres. It is perhaps necessary to stress this because it is often suggested that Islam is somehow hostile to the development of local councils and urban autonomy, but before accepting such assertions, it is worth noticing that no such institutions existed in the cities the Muslims conquered. Khusrau I took pains to develop towns, notably the Iraqi capital at Ctesiphon (Ar. al-Madā’in), which became the effective capital of the empire, a fact still witnessed by the surviving ruins of the great palace at the Ṭāq-i Kisrā. He did this at least in part by settling prisoners taken from the Byzantine Empire when he conquered Antioch in 540, and it would seem that they brought not just increased population and no doubt industrial skills, but also ideas of urban life, including public bath-houses, which had not until then been widely known in the Persian Empire but were, of course, an important part of urban life in both the Roman and Muslim worlds. By and large, Sasanian cities seem to have been small country towns rather than great metropolises, and it is indicative that for nearly a quarter of a century, Khusrau II Parvēz did not live in his capital but at a rural palace at Dastagird in the Zagros Mountains; it would have been unthinkable for a Byzantine emperor to leave the city of Constantinople in that way. As far as we can tell, the aristocracy was based in their rural estates, and the main fire temples were on hills in the country or remote mountain sites rather than in the heart of cities like the cathedrals of the Byzantine towns of Syria.
If the towns were not especially important, the aristocracy was. The Sasanian aristocracy was divided into many different classes, but apart from the royal family it can be divided into two distinct groups. The first was the upper aristocracy, composed of a few great families, some of whom claimed that they were descended from the Parthian kings and could claim the title of sub-kings. Among these were the Suren family based in Sīstān, the Kāren family of Media and the Mihrān family from the Rayy area. It was against these families that the sixth-century rulers had to be on their guard, and it was one of them, Bahrām Chōbīn from the Mihrān family, who temporarily deposed Khusrau II at the start of his reign. This suspicion of the great magnates may account for Khusrau’s subsequent, and very ill-advised, decision in 602 to abolish the Lakhmid buffer kingdom of Ḥīra which guarded the desert frontier of Iraq. The second group were the lesser aristocracy of dihqāns, a word which can almost be translated as gentry. Some of these were urban, absentee landlords, but many others lived in villages and formed a link between them and the government. Unlike the higher aristocracy, some of them, especially in Iraq, were not Persian at all but Aramaean or even Arab. They seem to have provided a counterweight to the higher aristocracy, and it was they who formed the foundation of Sasanian power. It was also the dihqāns who were the main mediators of Persian culture and administrative systems to the Arabs, since, unlike the higher aristocracy and the royal family, they retained much of their power after the Islamic conquest. Many administrators as late as the third/ninth century were drawn from dihqān families of Iraq.
Like the Byzantine Empire, the Sasanian had a state religion, Zoroastrianism, which was administered by a caste of priests called Magi, from which the followers of the religion are sometimes called Magians. Worship and ritual concentrated on the fire temples, fire being a pure and sacred element, and were much concerned with ritual purity and formal practice. The Magi themselves administered vast estates which were attached to the fire temples and on which they were responsible for justice in these areas as well as the collection of rents and revenues. The Magian religion was attached to a number of practices, especially the exposure of the dead to be picked clean by birds and beasts, and the encouragement of incestuous marriages, which were deeply repugnant to members of other faiths. The religion seems to have had only limited popular support; somewhat like the paganism of imperial Rome, it was more concerned with the proper performance of ceremony and the administration of its properties than it was with the more personal needs of the worshippers. Hence, again like the religion of Rome, it was increasingly challenged by other faiths, notably Christianity, and it would seem likely that, in Iraq at least, practising Magians were in a minority by the sixth century.
Of the religions which challenged the Magian state organization, the most widespread was the Church of the East (sometimes referred to, misleadingly, as the Nestorian Church), especially strong in Iraq but also active as far east as Sīstān and the eastern frontiers of the empire. By the sixth century, the Church of the East had developed an organized hierarchy of bishoprics and a network of monasteries and religious schools. In the main, the Sasanian rulers tolerated the Church of the East, and while none of them were themselves converted, they married Christian wives. Christian bishops were in some ways incorporated into the Sasanian administrative hierarchy, being entrusted with tax-collecting and other aspects of the governance of their followers. Evidence suggests that by the end of the sixth century, Christianity was making converts from Zoroastrianism in Iraq even from those, the Persian upper class, who might have been expected to remain loyal to the imperial faith. These conversions, along with the fear that the followers of the Church of the East were secret sympathizers of the Byzantines (unlikely in reality, for “Nestorianism” was a heresy even more severely proscribed than Monophysitism in Byzantium), led to intermittent outbreaks of persecution and martyrdom which culminated in a more general attack during the long struggle with Byzantium between 602 and 628. The Church of the East was also challenged, at least in northern Iraq, by the rival Monophysite church, which began making numerous converts during the sixth century but does not seem to have spread widely elsewhere in the empire.
Along with the Christians, there was a well-established Jewish community which seems to have been in existence since the time of the exile and which produced the great commentary on Jewish law known as the Babylonian Talmud. It would seem that Jews formed a majority of the population around the ancient city of Babylon, in the lands later known as the Sawād of Kūfa. Like the Christians, their relations with the Sasanian authorities in the sixth century were not always easy. There had been intermittent persecutions in the fifth century, which were renewed from 581 onwards by Hormizd IV. This led Jewish leaders to join the revolt of Bahrām Chōbīn in 590–591, and when this failed, they were subject to more violent attacks from the triumphant Khusrau II.
Other religious communities consisted of pagans and Manichaeans who had survived the persecutions of their dualist faith. Christianity had almost entirely eliminated paganism in the Byzantine Empire by the sixth century, but it is likely that ancient beliefs lingered on in Iraq and many areas of upland Iran. In their great struggle with the Muslims after the loss of Syria and Egypt, the Byzantines were sustained by the possession of a common faith; no such shared beliefs inspired the Sasanian resistance.
This mixture of religious beliefs was paralleled by an ethnic and linguistic diversity more widespread than anything in the Byzantine world. The Persians formed the ruling class but they were almost certainly a minority in the empire. Even today, there are large numbers of non-Persian-speaking people within the borders of Iran and there can be no doubt that this was the case under the Sasanians; we know that there were Kurds in the Zagros Mountains and Daylamites in the north of Iran, and no doubt there were Lurs and Baluchis as well as other ethnic minorities in rural areas. In Iraq, the position is much better documented. Here, most of the settled population were Aramaic-speaking, including most of those who were Jewish and Christian. There were also considerable numbers of Arabs, in the Lakhmid-controlled kingdom of Ḥīra and in the pastoral lands of al-Jazīra. In Iraq, the Persians seem to have been confined to the cities and to certain frontier areas like Niṣībīn in northern Iraq, where they were settled as garrisons against the Byzantines.
For most of the people in Iraq, and for many of those in Iran, the Sasanian Empire with its attendant religion was alien and often oppressive and hostile. Many, if not most, of the people shared neither language nor religion nor custom with their political masters. It is unsurprising therefore that few of them, except in areas like Fārs where the Persian element was dominant, were prepared to struggle to preserve the old order once the imperial armies had been defeated.
As in Byzantium, these long-term weaknesses had been exacerbated by short-term problems, notably the violent and unpredictable policies of Khusrau II Parvēz and the struggle for his succession. Khusrau II Parvēz, unlike his great namesake Khusrau Anūshirvān, was not a great administrator or politician. His attempts to assert the power of the central monarchy led to the alienation of much of the upper class; even after the suppression of the rebellion of Bahrām Chōbīn at the outset of his reign, he faced a ten-year rebellion in Khurāsān and later executed the governor of Nimruz (Nēmrōz), the southern quarter of the empire, so making an enemy of his family. Most damaging of all, his determination to assert his authority led to the arrest and eventual execution of al-Nu‘mān, the last of the Lakhmid kings of Ḥīra, and his replacement by a Persian governor. It was perhaps to deflect attention from these internal problems that Khusrau in 602 began the great war with the Byzantines, which was to prove so catastrophic for both empires. The initial stages of the war saw the extension of Persian power to Syria, Palestine and Egypt, but after 622 the tide began to turn. In 627–628, Heraclius advanced through Iraq. Unlike his great rival, Khusrau was not himself a distinguished general and he failed to lead any effective resistance to the enemy, who took the capital at Ctesiphon. There were other problems too, such as extensive floods in the irrigated area of southern Iraq, and it is possible that the resistance of the empire had been weakened by the plague which caused so much devastation in Byzantium. As if flood, plague and foreign invasion were not enough, a murderous rivalry for succession began between the ailing king’s sons. The details are obscure, but it seems that Khusrau’s failings as a military commander eventually led to his deposition and the proclamation of the ten different kings already mentioned. Ten years previously, the Persian Empire had seemed stronger than at any time since the Achaemenids 1,000 years before, now it was ruined and bitterly divided. In the circumstances, it is perhaps surprising not that the Persian armies were defeated but that they fought as well as they did.
In the territories it inherited from the Sasanians, as in those it took over from Byzantium, Islam came into contact with a rapidly changing society. Despite the superficial continuity of empire and monarchy, both Byzantine and Sasanian states had undergone far-reaching and fundamental changes in the century before the coming of the Muslims. Many of the social, economic and structural developments, like the increased importance of pastoral peoples and the absence of civic autonomy, which are usually associated with the development of Islamic society, were in fact already under way in the sixth century if not before. The idea that the Muslim conquest broke up an age-old, changeless, deeply conservative world order is far from the truth; it would be more accurate to say that it entered an already changing world and shaped and accelerated some of the existing trends. The dynamic development of the Islamic world can only be understood against this background.