3

Christian Law Making and Iranian Political Practice

The Reforms of Mar Aba

At the court of the king of kings Husraw I (r. 531–79), the leader of the Church of the East, the patriarch Mar Aba, found himself subject to an inquest only a year after his elevation to the bishopric of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 540. The “great nobles of the Magians,” a number of provincial Zoroastrian judicial officials, and the empire’s highest judge, the mowbedān mowbed, had detained the bishop for allegedly harming the Good Religion. They brought him to an interrogating council that included Christian and Zoroastrian courtly elites. What had attracted the court’s attention were the reforms of East Syrian Christian communities that Mar Aba had sought to enact since his appointment. Historians have generally claimed that the patriarch was prosecuted because of his youthful conversion from Zoroastrianism to Christianity and his encouragement of other wehdēn to follow suit.1 But although accusations of apostasy and of seeking to convert Zoroastrians were, as we saw in chapter 1, serious charges, the aristocrats’ reasons for calling the patriarch to account were more complex.² Mar Aba had inspired strenuous opposition for his interventions in the lives of the faithful through the making of new laws regulating the behavior of worldly, or more familiarly “lay,” Christians. Zoroastrian judges were concerned that a Christian leader was infringing on their authority, interfering in judicial cases over which they had the privilege of presiding.³ The incautious talk of peculiarly Christian laws that pervades the patriarch’s surviving writings caused some imperial authorities to question the political ambitions of the bishops in their midst. In addition to feeling a general anxiety concerning the episcopal courts, the interrogators were distressed over two restrictions that Mar Aba had placed on the Christian faithful. The first concerned marital practice. The mowbed of southern Mesopotamia demanded that the bishop withdraw his proscription of marriage with the wife of one’s father, the wife of one’s uncle, or a daughter-in-law, referring to marriages that established substitute successors for men who died without a male heir.4 The second concerned alimentary practice. A judge in Fars complained that the patriarch had “compelled many Christians in Fars who eat the flesh of murmur with his own restraints not to eat.”⁵ The flesh in question was meat subject to Zoroastrian rites that was consumed at banquets and festivals. On account of his refusal to compromise on these practices, Mar Aba was exiled to Azerbaijan and spent the remaining days of his life under house arrest.

The reforms of Mar Aba reveal the controversies and conflicts that attended the integration of Christians into Iranian imperial institutions and the ranks of their elites. The practices that the bishop aimed to regulate through laws—substitute successorship and the commensal consumption of meat—were fundamental institutions through which Iranian aristocrats reproduced themselves and constructed social networks.⁶ In the attempt to constrain Christians from participating in these institutions, Mar Aba betrayed their importance for East Syrian elites who were forming aristocratic houses and entering imperial networks. His legal writings, together with the hagiographical texts that his circle produced, bring to light the otherwise inaccessible world of East Syrian Christian political practice, the embodied actions through which these elites positioned themselves in the institutions of the empire and forged collaborative relationships with their superiors, subordinates, and peers. In the previous chapter, we saw how religious polemics could create a political imaginary that Christians and Zoroastrians could share. This study of sixth-century East Syrian law making focuses less on the productive capacities of Christian texts than on their ability to unveil the underlying social world that Mar Aba sought to discipline. As we will see, the ambitions of the bishop to reform Christian communities that accepted the legitimacy of practices he deemed deviant remained unrealized until after the Islamic conquests. The Christians to be reformed were officeholders and landowners, dependent on working relations with their Zoroastrian counterparts for their authority and wealth. The practices through which they attained and augmented their positions in Iranian society appear, however refracted, for the first time in the laws of Mar Aba. To examine the social strategies of upwardly mobile East Syrian elites is to contribute not merely to the history of Christianity in Iran but also to the social history of the empire. The introduction notes the overwhelming focus of Iranian political history on the personal interactions of kings of kings and aristocrats, without due regard for the institutions that framed political action or for the provincial elites on whose support imperial rule depended. Historians have, moreover, considered Christians and other non-Zoroastrians institutionally discrete communities whose histories were determined by their religious leaders’ personal relations with kings of kings. This chapter and its corollary, chapter 4, seek to transcend these historiographical impasses with studies of the authoritative roles of worldly Christians vis-à-vis their religious leaders within Christian communities and the practices through which they constructed noble families and interaristocratic relationships. The shared practices that bound elites of different religions into stable, empire-wide networks will take center stage in Iranian political history, revealing the dynamic processes through which Iran was made and remade.

In order to consider East Syrian laws as evidence for political practice, we have to situate their production in the political context of a Church of the East whose fifth-century aspirations to ecclesiastical unity had given way to fragmentation. Modern scholarship continues to depict the Christian communities of the Iranian world as sharing uniform doctrines, an ecclesiastical hierarchy culminating in the patriarchate of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, ethical norms, and even social identities. They are also believed to have represented themselves to the Iranian court and to have accessed political power through their ecclesiastical leaders, primarily the patriarch. The events of the sixth century surrounding the tenure of Mar Aba, however, disclosed the contested nature of Christian norms, the frailty of the ties that bound bishoprics, and the vulnerable position of the patriarch, the putative leader of the empire’s Christians. Worldly Christians rather than bishops emerged, moreover, as the most powerful intermediaries with the court and even as the leading organizers of Christian communities. The evidence for the activities of the ambitious bishop and his allies in reform provides greater insight into the internal politics of Christian communities than the sources available for the fifth century, revealing the unruly relations among bishops, East Syrian elites, and imperial authorities that hagiographical and canonical texts had hitherto suppressed in favor of idealized representations of ecclesiastical unity. To interpret East Syrian laws, in other words, a foray into the realm of ecclesiastical politics is necessary. Against the backdrop of fragmented, conflict-ridden Christian communities, the law making of Mar Aba appears as aspirational as the synodal proclamations of a united church.

DISCIPLINING THE BISHOPS

In 540, the court of Husraw I dispatched messengers to the School of Nisibis, the emergent center of East Syrian learning, to summon one of its scholars to Seleucia-Ctesiphon to be appointed as its bishop.7 Mar Aba was reportedly selected to lead the Church of the East on account of his reputation for learning in both Christian and Greco-Roman traditions. The late Sasanian court convened philosophers, physicians, and religious specialists from the neighboring civilizations of Rome and India with a view to re-collecting the corpora of human knowledge that Zoroastrians believed ultimately derived from Iran.⁸ In the eyes of cosmopolitan courtly elites, the scholar from Nisibis possessed an impressive background.⁹ He had traveled throughout the Roman Empire, studying in the cities of Edessa, Alexandria, and Athens—at least according to the representations of his contemporaries—which sixth-century Iranian elites recognized as authoritative centers of learning.10 What the court could not have known was that he had also once been an accomplished student of the Avesta and its exegesis. He had been born in a Zoroastrian house and educated in “Persian literature,” attaining honors for his learning and a position in the office of the āmārgar, fiscal administrator, of Beit Aramaye.¹¹ Mar Aba was, in short, an example of the lower-level elites who gained administrative offices in the expanding empire of Kawad I, Husraw I, and their successors.¹² Whatever knowledge he acquired in the hērbedestān and the intellectual circles of Roman cities, however, was harnessed to the goals of an ascetic scholar. Established in the late fifth century, the School of Nisibis combined the study of Antiochene Christian theology, heuristically useful philosophical texts, and some more practical subjects such as medicine with a rigid regime of self-regulation, renunciation, and prayer that transformed its scholars into men as Christlike as the solitaries, ih.idaye or bnai qyama, of the early Syriac-writing ascetic tradition.¹³ Mar Aba became particularly conversant in the thought of Theodore of Mopsuestia, taking his conception of the productive capacity of law in shaping Christian communities as an instrument of reform.¹⁴ In Nisibis, Mar Aba adapted his worldly learning to the spiritual life, becoming an ascetic scholar in the East Syrian sense of the word eskolaya.¹⁵

But unlike the solitaries who withdrew from the world into either domestic or deserted places, the scholars of Nisibis entered the world, with a pan-Mediterranean intellectual formation, rhetorical techniques, and textual instruments to create strictly Dyophysite and asceticized Christian communities. Mar Aba played an important role in this process, as a figure around whom aspiring ascetic leaders and their supporters rallied. The selection of an ascetic scholar as the patriarch was a departure from the common practice of choosing ecclesiastical leaders with expertise in domains useful to the court, such as medicine or astrology, and ties with imperial elites.¹⁶ Frequently married and moneyed, the bishops of Seleucia-Ctesiphon—and other major cities—tended to lead from within, rather than without, the networks of Iranian society. As an ascetic scholar, Mar Aba stood apart from the relations of kin, commerce, and patronage in which the East Syrian bishoprics were typically embedded. His elevation marked the first time that an ascetic scholar attained the most authoritative ecclesiastical office, the beginning of a gradual and contested shift toward the preferment of ascetic candidates for the episcopate that continued into the early Islamic period. Scholars from Nisibis and related schools in particular began to take control of bishoprics from the mid-sixth century.¹⁷ Mar Aba was, therefore, in the vanguard of a new generation of ascetic bishops who sought to gain leadership in Christian communities at the expense of leaders whom scholars considered too worldly. Ironically, the School of Nisibis owed its foundation to just such a married and moneyed bishop: Barsauma of Nisibis, a paradigmatically worldly leader, against whom the ascetics defined themselves, endowed the school with its sources of revenue in the 470s.18 Ecclesiastical leaders with competing visions for the church were more interdependent than the sources admit.

The Iranian court had elevated the patriarch to the see of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in order to discipline the bishops of the empire, who had been embroiled in factionalism for nearly two decades. In 523, the catholicos Shila designated his son-in-law Elisha as his successor, in keeping with a tradition of maintaining episcopates within familial networks. A rival group of bishops, however, elected their own candidate for Seleucia-Ctesiphon and proceeded to make appointments to a parallel episcopal hierarchy in cities throughout the empire.¹⁹ Mar Aba described this ecclesiastical factionalism as “the duality of leadership,” the bifurcation of the Christian communities in a particular city into competing factions with their own bishops.²⁰ In the cities of Mesopotamia, Khuzestan, and Fars, bishops and their constituencies sparred for control of ecclesiastical institutions. The scholar from Nisibis was an outsider whose ascetic and intellectual accomplishments Christians of disparate factions could recognize, and thus he seemed well placed to provide unifying leadership on behalf of a court with an interest in ensuring that Christian communities remained manageable and stable. But the court underestimated how disruptive this new brand of ascetic, scholarly leadership could be. The School of Nisibis transformed individuals of diverse backgrounds into scholars who continually refashioned themselves in accordance with the scriptures and who, in episcopal office, brought their scriptural standards to bear on the Christian communities under their authority. Training at the school also equipped scholars with modes of exegesis, theologies, and, most important, notions of Christian law that were novel in East Syrian Christian communities. The approach of the patriarch Mar Aba toward the Christians and Zoroastrians whom he encountered was more characteristic of an uncompromising ascetic than of a pragmatic bishop.

Although invited to Seleucia-Ctesiphon to unify the Christians of Iran, Mar Aba generated new, equally intractable conflicts through his efforts to reform the church in line with scholarly ideals. Among the most contested of his goals was the establishment of a pyramidal structure of authority. The notion of an empire-wide church with homogenous structures, canons, and beliefs and a hierarchy culminating in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, which the scholars took for granted, was not universally shared. If we are accustomed to describe the Christians of late Sasanian Iran as members of a single “Church of the East,” the fifth and sixth centuries witnessed ceaseless controversy over the shape that ecclesiastical unity—or disunity—should take.²¹ From at least the mid-fourth century, the bishopric of Seleucia-Ctesiphon endeavored to establish its superiority over its counterparts, with only modest success.²² It was only through royal patronage and the introduction of Roman concepts and canons that a pyramidal ecclesiastical structure took shape. The Synod of Isaac in 410 fixed the position of the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon at the top of an ecclesiastical hierarchy and required subordinate bishops to obtain his confirmation before assuming office and, ambitiously, to obey his every command.23 The frequent reiteration of the canons outlining and regulating this monarchical structure throughout the late Sasanian period suggests that their implementation was gradual, inconsistent, and ultimately incomplete. Although Mar Aba and his successors stylized themselves patriarchs on par with those of the ancient Mediterranean sees, their authority over the bishops of Iran was highly contingent and even ignored.²⁴

Alternative conceptions of ecclesiastical unity generally prevailed over the centralizing model in the organization of Christian communities. The self-conceptions of most bishoprics have not survived the medieval processes of redaction, but those that appear in the hagiographical sources are uniformly condescending or hostile toward the claims of the capital. The colorful account of a highly mythologized third-century bishop, Mar Miles, who literally bruised a bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon for his high-handedness gives a sense of how resistant many ecclesiastical leaders were to a pyramidal vision of the church.²⁵ This narrative of antagonism toward the patriarchate was among the most influential East Syrian hagiographical texts, included in the History of Mar Awgen and read in a Sogdian version even in the monasteries of the Turfan Oasis.²⁶ Barsauma, the aforementioned bishop of Nisibis, put alternative principles into action at the Synod of Beit Lapat in 484, which restricted the authority of the catholicos to his own metropolitanate and liberated the bishops of the empire to govern themselves.²⁷ These bishops frequently claimed apostolic traditions superior to those of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. Because of a surfeit of apostolicity in the Iranian world, even the most minor of bishoprics could produce narratives of origins no less apostolic than those of Mar Mari, which the patriarchate began to propagate in earnest in the sixth century.²⁸ One of the bishops of Arbela claimed to have consecrated the first bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon and to have been the source of the apostolic authority of his successors, an argument that many other, undocumented bishoprics might have made.²⁹ Even bishops who recognized their dependency on a patriarchal superior could turn to Antioch, outside the empire, as the source of episcopal power that flowed ultimately from the apostles.³⁰

The patriarch thus made recourse to state power to establish a hierarchical ordering of bishops subject to his authority, to accomplish in practice what the roughly contemporaneous History of Mar Mari articulates as aspiration. He initially enjoyed the patronage of the king of kings, whom he lauded as a “new Cyrus, who overcame all kings,” surpassing even the Achaemenian in his magnanimity.³¹ Immediately upon his elevation, Mar Aba undertook a journey to the episcopal sees whose communities had fractured. He first traveled to Peroz Shapur in northern Mesopotamia and then returned southward to Kashkar, Maishan, Khuzestan, and Fars. In each of these provinces, he either secured the loyalty of an existing bishop or ousted the bishop (or bishops) of a city in favor of a candidate supportive of the patriarch.32 To achieve such a feat, he depended on the imperial authorities’ powers of coercion, as the detailed description of the case of a recalcitrant bishop of Beit Lapat, Abraham bar Audmihr, makes plain. When Abraham created a faction against the patriarch, the rad, āmārgar, ōstāndār (fiscal administrator), mowbed, and other provincial officials—a litany of all the known regional imperial officials, designed to underline the comprehensiveness of Mar Aba’s support—brought the bishop to obedience.³³ An ecclesiastical hierarchy loyal to the patriarch of Seleucia-Ctesiphon was the creation of imperial authorities, much as the initial conception of the hierarchy in 410 depended on the personal intervention of Yazdgird I. The patriarch prominently invoked the name of Husraw I throughout the canonical letters that he composed during his sojourn in Khuzestan and Fars.³⁴ More strikingly, he highlighted the support of mowbed for his project of ecclesiastical reform. When we turn to his polemics, we should keep in mind the collaboration of Zoroastrians and Christians in the establishment and maintenance of a supraregional church with an authoritative patriarchal bishop at its head.

The ecclesiastical pyramid nevertheless remained precarious. The Iranian court withdrew its support for the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon almost as soon as he returned to the capital from Khuzestan. To interrogate him on aspects of his reforms, a party of aristocrats at court summoned him to the aforementioned council. According to the author of the History of Mar Aba, who was eager to present the king of kings as a patron of Christians, the initial interrogation of the patriarch took place while Husraw I was on campaign against the Turks in the Caucasus.³⁵ The courtly opponents of Mar Aba included not only the mowbedān mowbed and other leading Zoroastrian officials but also Christian secular elites opposed to the reforms.³⁶ On account of his unwillingness both to refrain from rebuking Christians who married the wives of male relatives or consumed the meat of Zoroastrians and to stop actively converting members of the Good Religion to Christianity, the court kept the patriarch confined for the remainder of his tenure. Mar Aba was exiled to Azerbaijan for several years after the interrogations and thereafter remained in the custody of the court in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, during which time he briefly returned to Azerbaijan in 550 while the king of kings was on campaign.³⁷ Imperial support for his vision of ecclesiastical unity was withdrawn as soon as his reforms were identified as a threat to the interests of the Zoroastrian religious authorities and the empire’s aristocracies. Allowed to remain the titular head of the Church of the East, he was deprived of access to both imperial and ecclesiastical institutions. He was thus forced to address and to try to overcome the limits of his power. Law making emerged as the primary instrument at his disposal for binding bishops and their constituencies across an empire of pronounced regionalisms into an enduring structure.

While in Azerbaijan, the patriarch had his earlier canons redacted and disseminated and probably also authored a polemical treatise on Christian laws of marriage, the Regulations of Marriage.38 He creatively developed the canon as the main source of authority available to an ambitious patriarch without access to the state. Starting with the Synod of 410, collections of canons regulating ecclesiastical life, which only a gathering of bishops under the leadership of the patriarch could sanction, were systematically distributed among Christian communities. Even so strident an opponent of Seleucia-Ctesiphon as Barsauma of Nisibis came to regret his decision to call a synod without a catholicos, acknowledging at least the supervisory and organizing role of the empire’s primary bishop in the formulation of canons.³⁹ If imperial authority could unite the church momentarily, adherence to a shared set of principles, processes, and practices could encourage bishops to act in concert, or at least enable patriarchs to hold them accountable to canonical terms. Canons could not easily coerce bishops or lesser clergy who did not consider their own sacerdotal power to flow from a patriarchal center with the authority to excommunicate. But bishops or lesser clergy could nevertheless be persuaded to adopt canonical stipulations as their own and to assume the authoritative position as regulators of Christian communities that canonical texts envision. Canons provided a shared language for authoritative action that ultimately derived from the patriarchate and therefore acknowledged and reinforced its superordinate authority.

It is on account of Mar Aba’s law making that he has loomed so large in the history of Christianity in the Iranian Empire. He was not only prodigious but also innovative in producing canons (qanone) and laws (namose) that created new opportunities for patriarchs and bishops to regulate both clergy and laity.⁴⁰ While in the provinces, in the company of allied clerics and imperial authorities, Mar Aba issued canons for the organization of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and for the discipline of lay men and women. These letters and canons have been preserved mostly intact. The letters propagated his original canonical work, while the canons constitute a bricolage of Roman canons from Nicaea to Chalcedon, previously issued East Syrian canons, and citations from his letters.⁴¹ Drawing on rhetorical techniques and theological arguments acquired at the School of Nisibis, the patriarch expanded upon conventional synodal canon making to produce the Regulations of Marriage, misleadingly known as his lawbook (Rechtsbuch). In any examination of the legal writings of the patriarch, his precarious, even marginal position in the empire’s ecclesiastical institutions must remain in the foreground. It was through the production and distribution of canonical texts that he sought to augment episcopal power, for himself and his subordinates, with a novel variety of spiritual authority, dependent less on the state and aristocratic networks than on the moral superiority of ecclesiastical leaders over the worldly men and women of their flocks. The patriarch grounded this spiritual power in the demarcation of specifically ecclesiastical and worldly spheres of authority, the espousal of Dyophysite Antiochene theology, and, most important for this chapter, the active rejection of practices deemed Zoroastrian. The Iranian political practices at issue in his works need to be considered in light of his efforts to create a separate, ecclesiastical space, in which only holders of churchly office could lead Christians and in which the authority of the worldly was constrained.

DISCIPLINING THE WORLDLY

What compelled Christians to support one bishop over another during the decades of factionalism? Ethnic and linguistic differences have often been cited, as some churches maintained distinct liturgies in Greek and Syriac.42 But ethnic and linguistic loyalties are absent from contemporary accounts of “the duality of leadership,” and the argument for separate groups of “Nazarenes” and “Christians” has now been definitively undermined.⁴³ Mar Aba’s proposals for reforming communities at Beit Lapat in Khuzestan in 540 provide a different starting point for considering the dynamics of ecclesiastical fragmentation. The patriarch regarded factionalism as the result of inappropriate relationships between lay and clerical leaders. The primary objective of his reforms was to disentangle ecclesiastical officeholders from the network of worldly men who subordinated ecclesiastical institutions to their own sectional interests: “The clergy of the city or country should not make factions, make connections, use words or writings to struggle against their leaders or against one another, nor appeal to the patronage [prostasia] of the faithful, whose consciences they trouble with their slanders. It is not permitted to the faithful, for their part, as they have done in the time of trouble, to stir up schisms and disputes.”⁴⁴ It was the involvement of bishops and lesser clergy in an altogether too worldly web of social obligations, rather than ethnic or linguistic loyalties, that, in Mar Aba’s view, prevented Christian communities from cohering around leaders united in their obedience to Seleucia-Ctesiphon. The secular faithful with the power to offer patronage had caused competing factions to emerge, and East Syrian conflicts arose from the misalignment of spiritual and worldly authorities that such relationships entailed.

This was a demarcation of spheres of authority that most East Syrian Christians would not have recognized as readily as ascetic scholars would have. Worldly men occupied particularly powerful positions in the Church of the East. Candidates for the episcopate were, of course, subject to the scrutiny of their constituencies as a condition of their elevation, as in the Roman world. But East Syrian communities institutionalized the role of Christian secular elites in the office of the “head of the believers” (reš d-mhaymne), which has gone unmentioned in discussions of ecclesiastical structure.⁴⁵ The most famous head of the believers was the great aristocrat Yazdin, who was extolled as the leader of all the Christians in the empire.⁴⁶ However rhetorical, this boast signals that the authority of worldly men over ecclesiastical structures was widely recognized. The supremacy of the patriarch over the most powerful Christian aristocrat was not self-evident in the early seventh century, and the position of the former was, as we have seen, no stronger in the sixth. In a letter of Ishoyahb III, the case of a more humble bearer of the title appears, with an indication of its formal as opposed to its rhetorical function. The patriarch wrote to confer with the reš d-mhaymne of the city of Arbela regarding candidates for the episcopal see, showing that his assent was required for the election of a bishop.47 The office of the head of the believers here invested the traditional popular declamation in a single worldly man from the ranks of the provincial aristocracy of the region, which features in the following chapter. If the head of the believers played a legitimate role in governing the church in the correspondence of a patriarch as strident an advocate of patriarchal power as Mar Aba, more-permissive bishops recognized the authority of the worldly in a wide range of affairs. The reformist Synod of Joseph, for example, complained in 554 of worldly men who assumed positions “in the first place” during ecclesiastical councils and judged the actions of clerics.⁴⁸

The church was far from independent of the ties of kinship that bound together the powerful in the empire. Episcopal office was very much a familial affair. The prosopographical evidence for individual bishops is limited, but we know of several instances of an episcopal office passing from relative to relative, and until the rise of the ascetic episcopate—of which Mar Aba was an early representative—such family monopolies seem to have been the norm. The successor of the martyred fourth-century bishop Simeon, Barbashmin, was his kinsman, and the pattern recurs in other known episcopal genealogies.⁴⁹ At the Synod of 410, the bishopric became not only a position of Christian leadership but also an imperial office that could, under certain circumstances, gain its holder alliances with the highest officials or even access to the court. Although Christian aristocrats do not seem to have pursued episcopal careers on a large scale until after the Islamic conquests, they were keen to keep bishoprics within allied families and loath to relinquish control of the appointment of their representatives to either a metropolitan or a patriarch.⁵⁰ The marriage of bishops and lower clergy facilitated the integration of both into local social networks and the intergenerational transmission of their offices. Despite the Encratite tendencies of Syriac-writing Christian communities, East Syrian bishops continued the apostolic practice of marrying and creating families.⁵¹ The Synod of Aqaq in 486 and the Synod of Babai in 497 reaffirmed the permissibility of marriage for every ecclesiastical officeholder, even the patriarch, against ascetic critiques.⁵² Bishoprics, like relics and shrines, were the possessions more of particular families and factions than of a supraregional church.⁵³

A clear distinction between the ecclesiastical and the worldly was thus not easily achieved. The scholar-patriarch did not impose his ascetic conception of ecclesiastical leadership on the bishops, although his creation of clear procedures for electing the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon aimed to ensure the elevation of like-minded leaders.54 Nor did he exclude worldly Christian officials from ecclesiastical decision-making processes. The council that convened to condemn Abraham of Beit Lapat included a “master of the artisans” (kirrōgbed), a “military commander” (artēštārānsālār), and the chiefs of guilds for merchants, goldsmiths, and tinsmiths.⁵⁵ Instead of seeking the complete asceticization of the episcopate or the marginalization of the worldly, Mar Aba endeavored to construct a space of distinctively ecclesiastical authority that would allow bishops to place ecclesiastical interests ahead of sectional ones. Nevertheless, apart from several unspecific condemnations of worldly men who unjustly intervened in ecclesiastical affairs, the patriarch issued only one canon that directly separates clerics from seculars. In it, Mar Aba prohibits ecclesiastical leaders from associating themselves intimately with the worldly, declaring that they should “not go around among the houses or be foster fathers [mrabyana] or guardians for the worldly, to shame the priesthood and bring sins upon the worldly faithful.”⁵⁶ In addition to introducing a general restriction on informal sociability, which might refer to the pleasures of the banquet, the patriarch proscribed the clerical practice of fosterage, an important Iranian institution, as we saw in the previous chapter, for establishing relations of kinship between those related by neither blood nor affinity. This canon is the earliest indication that East Syrian elites practiced fosterage to tie their ecclesiastical leaders intimately to themselves through the placement of sons in their care. For Mar Aba, the practice generated precisely the personal loyalties and sectional interests that prevented bishops and lesser clergy from acting in concert with their superiors as representatives of an empire-wide universal church. To disentangle ecclesiastical and secular networks, however, he relied as much on polemics against the practices of the worldly as on the regulation of the clergy.

BISHOPS AND IRANIAN LAW

At Beit Lapat in 540, Mar Aba employed a rather different strategy than canon making through synods for augmenting ecclesiastical authority, one that he refined in subsequent years: censuring the worldly for engaging in Iranian political practices that could, because of their origin and cosmological significance, be deemed Zoroastrian. He generally referred to the regulations that he crafted to discipline the worldly as namose, a Syrian term that, we will see, in the context of episcopal law making in the sixth century designates customary rather than authoritative, enforceable laws. But before we turn to the content and significance of these laws, the question of their authority needs to be raised. For more than a century, scholars have interpreted the legal writings of bishops as evidence of a distinctive Christian legal system that regulated conflicts and policed behavior in East Syrian communities, which experienced neither the interference of Zoroastrian mowbed nor the influence of Iranian law. Studies of Iranian law and East Syrian canon law alike agree that Christians constituted an autonomous, self-governing community within the empire, in which bishops made laws, presided over courts, and enforced their decisions with ecclesiastical bans.57 This reading of the legal evidence has contributed in no small measure to the prevailing representation of Iranian society in late antiquity, discussed in the introduction, as one of separate religious communities insulated from one another: Compilations of Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian laws provided clear frontiers for believers, and mowbed, rabbis, and bishops were empowered to correct the wayward and to preserve the integrity of their communal boundaries. Only in exceptional cases, such as apostasy, would Zoroastrian judges interfere in the affairs of autonomous communities. The sources surrounding Mar Aba’s judicial activities, however, suggest that the relationship between law and society in the Iranian Empire was hardly so straightforward. The patriarch’s laws brought him into direct conflict with Zoroastrian judges, and the resulting debate concerning the nature of episcopal judicial authority in the empire provides rare insight into the relationship between Zoroastrian and East Syrian legal cultures.

If his laws have normally been regarded as evidence of Christian legal autonomy, Mar Aba made plain that he considered his community subject to, not independent of, the authority of Zoroastrian judges. His regulations, laws, and canons operated at a level beneath the courts of the mowbed and in no way rivaled their authority. This was in keeping with Zoroastrian expectations, according to the History of Mar Aba and Zoroastrian sources. During the aforementioned interrogation at court in 541, a mowbed accused Mar Aba of luring Christians away from Zoroastrian courts and of violating Zoroastrian judgments: “He summoned away from the house of judgment [beit dina] many Christians who had judicial disputes [dine] with one another [resolved by] a bōxtnāmag with the seal of the mowbedān mowbed, and he broke the bōxtnāmag. He judges all the judicial disputes we should judge, and we suffer much violence from him.”⁵⁸ If the principal charge was that the bishop had broken the seal of a mowbed’s declaration of innocence (bōxtnāmag), the Zoroastrian judge also expressed anxiety about bishops as possible competitors for judicial disputants. The mowbed were concerned both to maintain their authority over Christians, who could turn to alternative sources of judicial authority for the settlement of lawsuits, and to attract as many disputants as possible. Since justice was a service for which fees were expected, Zoroastrian courts also had an economic interest in extending their remit to Christian elites.⁵⁹

“The law of the kingdom is the law,” declares one of the best-known passages of the Babylonian Talmud, which enjoins Jews to adhere to the law of the Iranian Empire.⁶⁰ This law was the jurisprudence of Zoroastrian religious professionals. Although a wide variety of judicial authorities flourished in late antique Iran, ranging from informal mediators to rabbis and bishops trained in their own legal traditions, Zoroastrian judges occupied a uniquely authoritative position. From the beginning of the Sasanian dynasty, the kings of kings invested judicial authority in Zoroastrian priest-exegetes, such as the great third-century mowbed Kerdir. He boasted in his inscriptions of the power to sanction “contracts, treaties, and judgments,” to hold a judicial office, and to authenticate documents with seals.61 Both the sigillographic evidence and the early seventh-century Hazār Dādestān—our only collection of late antique Iranian legal decisions—demonstrate that subsequent mowbed and other Zoroastrian religious professionals continued to enjoy royally sanctioned judicial authority in addition to their control of religious institutions such as fire temples.⁶² The judges, known as dādwar, rad, and mowbed or mowbed-dādwar like Kerdir, drew heavily on Avestan literature and cosmological thought to create an increasingly sophisticated body of legal knowledge and specialist vocabulary over the course of the empire’s history.⁶³ By the sixth century at the latest, Zoroastrian judges had come to distinguish between decisions reached pad čāštag, on the basis of religious doctrine, and those reached pad kardag, on the basis of norms arising from judicial practice and custom.⁶⁴

Despite the religious nature of their office, Sasanian judges restricted neither their authority nor their services to coreligionists. The Hazār Dādestān presumes the presence of unbelievers (agdēn) in Zoroastrian courts.⁶⁵ According to one judgment, the same set of principles and regulations that governed Zoroastrians applied in cases involving agdēn, with one exception: “Although no substitute successor [stūr] is to be appointed for [unbelievers] . . . other laws apply for them just as for the members of the Good Religion.”⁶⁶ This exception was important, for, as we will see from Mar Aba’s discussion of the practice, substitute successorship, or stūrīh, was a basic strategy of elite reproduction in Iranian society. Because stūrīh was closely linked with Zoroastrian doctrines of fertility, unbelievers could not establish substitute successors in a Zoroastrian court. But otherwise, Christians, Jews, and others could appeal to the same principles as Zoroastrians to settle their disputes, transfer properties, contract marriages, or make arrangements for inheritance. The high degree of familiarity with Iranian law evident in contemporaneous East Syrian and Talmudic literatures and especially in East Syrian legal writings from after the Islamic conquests implies that unbelievers frequently took advantage of the expertise and authority of Zoroastrian judges.⁶⁷ A seventh-century treatise of Simeon, the bishop of Revardashir, who freely drew on Zoroastrian jurisprudence, gives the impression that East Syrian Christians in the region of Fars considered Iranian law their own.⁶⁸ Indeed, so complete was the Christian appropriation of Iranian law after the Islamic conquests that the legal compendium of the East Syrian bishop Ishobokht, composed circa 775–79 in Fars, serves as a source for the laws of the Iranian Empire alongside the Hazār Dādestān.⁶⁹ Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians occupied overlapping, not separate, juridical communities.

Even as he issued regulations for Christian behavior that provoked the concern of imperial religious authorities, Mar Aba clearly distinguished between the authority of Zoroastrian judges and the authority of bishops. The latter was not commensurate with the former. The author of the History of Mar Aba highlighted the difference between the two in the literary representation of the accusation against the patriarch quoted above. A mowbed claims that the bishop broke the seal not merely of a judge but of the empire’s supreme judge, the mowbedān mowbed. Because the mowbedān mowbed served as the ultimate source of law and his decisions were considered infallible, the allegation was self-evidently implausible.70 A bishop would no more break the seal of a local mowbed than that of the mowbedān mowbed, for his office was of an entirely different nature. In response to the rad of Fars’s accusation that he had misused “restraints,” the patriarch elaborated on the limits of episcopal coercive powers: “I am not commanded by the divine scriptures to restrain or strike anyone or to confiscate anything of his, but rather we pray and beseech God concerning those who err to return to true knowledge.”⁷¹ Where a mowbed had the power to imprison, disenfranchise, or inflict corporeal punishment to enforce his decisions, the bishop had the capacity only to rebuke or excommunicate. Mar Aba prescribed purely liturgical punishments for those who transgressed his canons, ranging from donations to the poor to outright excommunication, depending on the severity of the offense.⁷²

The contrast with Armenia, where fourth-century Christian kings and powerful aristocratic houses had allowed bishops to displace Zoroastrian religious specialists as a judicial elite, is telling. At the Synod of Shahapivan in 444, the Armenian bishops adopted the coercive powers of their Zoroastrian predecessors. Thereafter, they administered harsh corporeal and financial punishments to those who disobeyed their canons.⁷³ For contracting consanguineous marriages, nobles were fined up to three hundred drachms and female commoners were imprisoned for ten years in a leprosarium. For other offenses, precise numbers of lashings were specified as punishments. Apostates were to be executed by stoning. Fines, lashes, and execution were punishments that Zoroastrian judges inflicted. In Zoroastrian jurisprudence, precisely enumerated fines and/or lashes could expiate the crimes of an offender, with the exception of the margarzān offenses, such as apostasy, that we encountered in chapter 1. In explicitly renouncing any right to inflict corporeal punishment or to confiscate goods, Mar Aba recognized the authority of Zoroastrian judges over East Syrian Christians. Unlike their Armenian counterparts, East Syrian bishops were enjoined to remain subject to the mowbedān mowbed and his subordinates in matters of justice. If Zoroastrian judges worried that bishops were infringing on their authority, Mar Aba—and his associates who produced the History of Mar Aba—carefully demarcated a sphere of episcopal judicial authority that precluded episcopal judges from interfering with a mowbed’s powers of coercion or authentication. The East Syrian episcopal court was to operate in a distinct domain beneath the uniquely authoritative Zoroastrian courts.

The episcopal judges, who gained prominence in Iran beginning in the sixth century, were, Mar Aba insisted, complementary rather than inimical to their Zoroastrian superiors. Bishops such as Sabrisho, who provided the inhabitants of Lashom with “correct laws and just judgments,” might have attracted disputants who would otherwise have sought out the mediation of a Zoroastrian judge, precisely as the mowbed had feared.74 But as recent work on the Roman Empire has shown, ancient societies had systemic shortages of justice, which episcopal courts served to alleviate.⁷⁵ The focus of historians of Roman legal culture has shifted from the jurists of the Justinianic Code to the masses of disputants who sought judicial expertise and authority from local aristocrats, village headmen, military officers, monks, and bishops as well as those with formal legal training.⁷⁶ Their demand for dispute settlement far outpaced the capacities of the Roman bureaucracy. The episcopal courts that took shape in the fourth century were just one element of a society with multiple sources of judicial authority, not competitors of state-sanctioned judges.⁷⁷ In their capacity as mediators of Christian conflicts, bishops necessarily became familiar with the Roman civil laws and procedures that structured the disputes of their flocks. This model of bishops participating in a broader legal culture rather than creating autonomous, rival courts fits well with the East Syrian evidence. Although the surviving East Syrian sources preserve only laws considered distinctively Christian, the judges who consulted these texts, like their rabbinic counterparts, will have engaged with a wide range of contracts, judgments, principles, and laws relevant to the property and personal status of the disputants before them, including both Iranian law and largely invisible local traditions. It was only after the Islamic conquests that bishops forbade Christians from using the courts of “outsiders,” extending to the entire Christian community a canon that from 484 had applied only to clerics and monks.⁷⁸

Instead of providing evidence for a comprehensive, peculiarly Christian system of family law, the writings of Mar Aba on marriage show, as the following section demonstrates, how similarly Christians and Zoroastrians arranged their marriages and inheritances. As bishops more enthusiastically embraced their informal and unofficial role as mediators of disputes, they found themselves implicated in the worldly business of contested marriages and inheritances formulated in terms of Iranian law. Into the existing mixture of legal traditions, the patriarch introduced regulations for marriage that expressly opposed Iranian principles without challenging the authoritative seals of official judges or demanding that Christians refrain from availing themselves of Zoroastrian courts. His regulations, laws, and canons did not preclude the use of Iranian judicial principles, authorities, or institutions in other domains of social life. Indeed, the creation of distinctive Christian laws might have facilitated the incorporation of Iranian law into the episcopal court. For bishops uncomfortable with the cosmological language of Iranian contracts and judicial decisions, the militant rejection of incestuous marriage might have helped to assuage anxieties over the Christian adaptation of Iranian law. Yet aristocratic Christians could not straightforwardly abandon the practices that the patriarch sought to restrict with his laws. Behind the horrors of incest, Mar Aba obscured a complex system of marriage and inheritance law that gave solidity and stability to the aristocratic networks that underpinned Iranian imperial power. Given their lack of binding force, his laws could equally be characterized as polemics, directed against worldly Christians unable or unwilling to conform to the expectations of an emergent ascetic episcopate.

INCEST AND INHERITANCE

In a compilation redacted in 544 during his exile in Azerbaijan, Mar Aba included a canon—probably first issued in 540 in Khuzestan—defining the forbidden forms of marriage. A Christian man could not marry the wife of his father or uncle, his aunt, his sister, his daughter, or his granddaughter, “like the Magians.” Nor could a believer marry the wife of his brother, “like the Jews.”79 The union of a Christian man and an unbelieving woman was also proscribed. Although the synod that Barsauma of Nisibis convened in 484 had condemned Christians who “imitated the Magians through impure marriage,” Mar Aba was the first canonically to specify which unions were forbidden to Christians.⁸⁰ He drew the greatest attention to the incestuous union known as xwēdōdah, which Zoroastrian texts advocate as cosmologically beneficial.⁸¹ Xwēdōdah refers to the marriage of brother and sister, of father and daughter, or of other equally proximate kin, an exceptional practice in ancient Eurasian societies, which were generally observant of the incest taboo that modern anthropologists have made the basis for their analyses of kinship.⁸² But the patriarch equated an entirely customary practice with incest: marrying the wives of one’s patrilineal relatives. Christianity, Jack Goody famously argued, introduced prohibitions on the marriage of close kin that were without precedent either in ancient societies or in the Christians’ sacred scriptures. Such marriages were above all “strategies of heirship” that secured the transmission of names and properties, so ecclesiastical laws against incest could disrupt traditional flows of wealth across generations.⁸³ In the case of Iran, the principal strategy of heirship was stūrīh, or substitute successorship, the instituting of a man in the place of a man who had died without sons to produce a male heir on his behalf. Despite his rhetorical emphasis on Zoroastrian incest, the patriarch intended to regulate the inheritance strategies of East Syrian Christians.

Mar Aba developed laws on marriage into a strategy for remodeling Christian communities and redefining the authoritative position of their ecclesiastical leaders vis-à-vis secular Christian elites in his treatise the Regulations of Marriage, composed during his exile in Azerbaijan. If the canon states the collective decision of a synod, the regulations (th.ume) and laws (namose) of the treatise are the product of Mar Aba’s exegetical scholarship. It is an example of the Antiochene school’s historical exegetical method of evaluating the implications of the scriptures in light of the specific historical contexts of contemporary Christians.84 The treatise is an interpretation of the Book of Leviticus’s categories of deviant sexuality, which the patriarch compared to and contrasted with practices in the Iranian world of his time.⁸⁵ In the Book of Leviticus, he found a model for creating a close-knit community of believers through the proclamation of common laws, an appealing possibility for a leader who had been deprived of access to the institutional structures of his office.⁸⁶ The authors of the Martyrdom of Simeon and the History of Simeon had already deployed Israelite history as a model for a Christian “people of God,” with bishops as its Levites.⁸⁷ Building on such foundations in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, Mar Aba composed “distinguishing laws” on marriage that set Christians apart from their neighbors and subordinated them to their priestly leaders, much as the Israelites had cohered around the laws of the Levites.⁸⁸ It was their role as lawgivers that separated the priestly Levites from the remainder of the Israelites and authorized the former to command the latter.

In polemicizing against incestuous Zoroastrians, Mar Aba joined a chorus from across Eurasia, ranging from Buddhist monks and Chinese envoys to Roman historians, that condemned Iranian sexual deviance.⁸⁹ But his treatise is distinct both for its scriptural sources and for its familiarity with the Zoroastrian doctrine of xwēdōdah. The Book of Leviticus treats incest as one form of unnatural sex among others, including homosexuality and bestiality.⁹⁰ The treatise thus describes regulations against homosexual and bestial relations as well as the incest condemned at Beit Lapat, an equating of varieties of sex that Iranian society understood as very different from one another. Mar Aba presented men who married their brother’s wife, married their daughter, had sexual relations with another man, or violated an animal as practitioners of equally unnatural forms of deviance. If the canon of Beit Lapat permitted a bishop or a priest to rebuke a Christian for incest, this treatise equipped ecclesiastical leaders with a more colorful palette of rhetorical options for persuading the uncooperative to recognize their Levite-like authority. As a polemic against Zoroastrianism, his Levitical account allowed Mar Aba the convert to draw on his knowledge of the Good Religion to present its tenets as perversions of its own cosmological order. The patriarch rightly recognized that the purpose of xwēdōdah was to maximize human social and political goods.⁹¹ In Zoroastrian thought, close-kin marriage served to re-create the world in the pristine state of Ohrmazd’s primordial creation. Although the prevalence of incestuous marriages in late antique Iran is unclear, belief in the cosmological benefits of the practice—in particular its capacity to increase knowledge, as the patriarch suggested—was unambiguous.⁹² Mar Aba, however, equated incest with sodomy, its diametrical opposite in Zoroastrian cosmology. If Ohrmazd brought creation into being through xwēdōdah, Ahreman created deceit through homosexual sex, kūnmarz.93 But sex that imitates Ohrmazd’s act and sex that imitates Ahreman’s are identically unnatural in the Book of Leviticus. According to the Regulations of Marriage, Iranians who practiced incest were, moreover, equivalent to Arabs and Hephthalites—the empire’s nomadic, Ahremanic enemies—who all practiced homosexuality.⁹⁴ The patriarch described outlandish cases of men marrying their daughters, taking boys as wives, and reclining with cattle, all acts of these nomadic civilizational inferiors, perhaps meant to recall polyandry, widespread in Hephthalite-controlled Bactria.⁹⁵ These are not, however, the underlying concern of the treatise. Amid examples of deviance that few Christians would have countenanced, the treatise discusses forms of marriage that East Syrian Christians typically accepted: marrying the wife of a deceased paternal uncle and marrying the wife of a deceased brother (levirate marriage), practices of substitute successorship in general, if not stūrīh in particular, that were indispensable for the reproduction of patrilineages in Iranian political culture. Framed as a polemic against close-kin, homosexual, and bestial sex, the treatise targets a fundamental political institution, to whose background we now turn.

The Zoroastrian injunction to practice xwēdōdah was only the starting point for the development of a complex system of marriage and inheritance law. Once elevated to authoritative positions in the early Sasanian period, Zoroastrian religious specialists elaborated on Avestan passages and principles to create legal institutions that maximized fertility and ensured the continuity of patrilineages, fundamental obligations for practitioners of the Good Religion. Close-kin marriage was an extreme manifestation of a more general emphasis on human reproduction as the most cosmologically beneficial of acts. A man was to seek as many opportunities as possible to reproduce himself without doing harm to a social order that acts of adultery or abandonment could undercut. The potentially contradictory requirements to reproduce oneself and one’s patrilineage were harmonized through institutions of marriage that aimed to enable elite men to make full use of their capacities, while safeguarding the status of women and guaranteeing the unambiguous transmission of lineages. In the pursuit of maximum fertility, elite males could not only practice polygamy but also contract a union for a predetermined period, a so-called temporary marriage.⁹⁶ Whether permanent or temporary, different kinds of contract produced different reproductive strategies. In addition to the familiar pādixšāy marriage, in which a wife was entitled to a portion of the inheritance and the children were legitimate, there was the option of čagar marriage, which permitted a man to contract a union whose progeny were not considered his own.⁹⁷ The wife in a čagar marriage remained a member of her natal lineage and did not enter the husband’s clan. She was thus without access to its patrimony. Seemingly counterproductive in a patrilineal society, the čagar marriage in fact resolved its contradictions.

In a society where social status derived from the blood of one’s father and one’s father’s father, sonlessness was the most acute problem that a man—often along with his agnates—could face.98 As studies of ancient demography have demonstrated, delayed marriage and premature male death combined to make the production of a male heir within a man’s lifetime the exception rather than the rule.⁹⁹ In Zoroastrian cosmological thought, moreover, sonlessness was the greatest of evils. If the prospect of the return of his patrimony (theoretically—and often in practice—first collectively inherited from the father) to agnates and the loss of his name and fame were not sufficient motivation, the Good Religion denied men who failed to produce a male heir access to Chinwad Bridge, the path to paradise. But Zoroastrian jurists tried to guarantee that such a calamity would never befall an elite male. Every man who possessed a patrimony worth at least sixty staters (two hundred drachms) of silver would be provided with a substitute successor if he were to die sonless. This institution maximized the reproductive capacities of men and women and ensured the continuity of patrilineages. If the deceased were to leave a wife, unmarried daughter, or unmarried sister, she was to serve as his ayōkēn, a natural stūr, which entailed contracting a čagar marriage with another man and producing sons who would be considered—legally and spiritually—the heirs of the deceased.¹⁰⁰ As an alternative, a man could appoint a man or a woman as a proxy stūr, who would fulfill the same obligations. In the event that a man failed either to leave an ayōkēn or to make arrangements for a proxy, judges in concert with the king of kings would appoint a substitute successor. Women serving as stūr in čagar marriages were compelled to satisfy the demands of Zoroastrian ideology for fertility, which required them to subject themselves frequently to the hazards of childbirth. Through their labors, men who failed to produce a son on account of either infertility or ill fortune were able to satisfy the Good Religion’s demand for the transmission of lineages.

The innovation of stūrīh was an essential feature of the aristocratic politics of the empire. For members of aristocratic houses, whose wealth resided in patrimonies and whose lineages earned them office, stūrīh ensured the validity of their names as political currency across generations. As an unusually flexible form of substitute successorship, the institution was far more important politically and economically than incest.¹⁰¹ Despite the representations of Mar Aba and the later jurist Ishobokht, the economic benefits of incestuous unions were meager, especially as close-kin marriages tended to be temporary.¹⁰² For those who wished to acquire and retain wealth and social status in the Iranian Empire, securing the intergenerational transfer of patrilineages and patrimonies, which took time to build, was a paramount concern. If discussions of Sasanian society tend to depict an aristocratic social order with stable hierarchies, the realities of male death introduced a high degree of instability into the lives of elite men who could not call upon the services of Zoroastrian judges. Even a man with sons could leave his fatherless heirs subject to the predations of outsiders, including agnates, eager to appropriate their lands. The situation was all the more precarious for men who left no males to succeed them. Women without husbands were equally vulnerable. Those with patrilineages and patrimonies to protect and perpetuate stood to benefit from the services of judges who provided guardians and, when necessary, established substitute successors.

Some Zoroastrian judges refused to institute a stūr for agdēn. As we have seen, the Hazār Dādestān singles out stūrīh as a service available exclusively to Zoroastrians, an unsurprising restriction given its cosmological context. That a jurist needed to compose a judgment on this question nevertheless suggests that at least some Christians, Jews, or others appealed to Zoroastrian judges to establish stūr. Some likely complied. But those who considered the Hebrew Bible a source of law did not require stūrīh to arrange for substitute successors. The Book of Deuteronomy 25:5–6 enjoins a man to marry the wife of his brother if the latter dies without an heir, the institution of levirate marriage. A son born from such a union would carry the name of the deceased brother. The practice had fallen into desuetude in the late Roman Palestine of the Yerushalmi, but the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud customarily continued to require the brothers of men who died sonless to contract levirate marriages in fourth- through sixth-century Iranian Mesopotamia.103 Although Christians were familiar with the practice from their sacred texts and possibly their Jewish neighbors, there was no corresponding religious obligation for them to produce an heir. The need to transmit land and lineage across generations in order to participate in Iranian aristocratic politics, however, was sufficient motivation to develop cognate practices.

Mar Aba included levirate marriage in his list of incestuous, homosexual, and bestial acts. Historically, he argued, the practice had satisfied the Israelites’ desire to provide heirs for sonless men and found justification in Genesis 38:8’s injunction to approach the wife of one’s brother. Christians, however, “consider establishing the seed of those who have died superfluous, insofar as many have chosen even of their own will to forgo marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Christians whom the patriarch styled as “spiritual” held the transmission of their seed in slight regard, unlike the “worldly” Israelites, “on account of the weakness of their faith in the resurrection.”¹⁰⁴ Given the exceptional nature of the ascetic life even in the highest ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, this passage reminded its readers that not all Christians are equally spiritual. The label worldly, moreover, was the same term that Mar Aba had employed in his early canonical works for the secular Christian elites whose powers he sought to constrain. In another section of this treatise, we find an explicit acknowledgment of the value that East Syrian Christians ascribed to their seed and its transmission. After a litany of quotations from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament proscribing the marriage of a man with the wife of his paternal uncle, the patriarch reported this practice as common among Christians in Iran. Although he deemed such a union forbidden and held that it should be nonexistent, “the deeds performed among us are the opposite.”105 What is more, earlier ecclesiastical leaders did not consider marrying the wife of one’s uncle a sin worthy of comment or censure. The patriarch frankly admitted that Christians normally married the wives of their paternal uncles, self-evidently with a view to perpetuating their patrilineages and preserving their patrimonies. Christians were as interested in the transmission of their seed as Israelites and practiced a form of substitute successorship similar to, albeit less flexible than, stūrīh. This is the earliest indication of Christian patrilineal practices that are well documented and described in later East Syrian judicial compilations, which help to reveal the political significance of Mar Aba’s polemic against men marrying the wives of agnates.

In the first two Islamic centuries, East Syrian bishops compiled collections of judgments to consolidate their judicial authority. Once Zoroastrian judges lost the support of the state, ambitious bishops sought to occupy their positions and authoritatively to regulate matters of marriage and inheritance.¹⁰⁶ Their compilations reveal the diversity of East Syrian legal principles and institutions at the time of the Iranian Empire’s collapse. In contrast with Mar Aba’s pretension to have promulgated a single set of laws for all Christians, even at the beginning of the ninth century—after a century and a half of compilation and codification—Ishobokht reported that just judgments “are left to the knowledge and examination of the leaders of the church, and the manner of judgment differs and contrasts in accordance with the difference and divergence in the knowledge and will of each one of them.”¹⁰⁷ This range of judgments—some permitting varieties of substitute successorship, others condemning such unions as consanguineous—is characteristic of post-Sasanian legal texts, and there cannot have been greater harmony in the preceding century. The opposite was clearly the case, as bishops worked without written sources and under the shadow of Zoroastrian courts. The situational decision making of individual East Syrian bishops, who drew on different bodies of legal knowledge depending on both their immediate environment and the details of the case at hand, forms the backdrop to Mar Aba’s treatise on marriage.

The East Syrian episcopal judges agreed on one important principle: patriliny.¹⁰⁸ In the formulation of their judgments, these bishops aimed to ensure that sons succeeded to their fathers’ estates. At the most basic level, this entailed maintaining the Iranian law of inheritance, which privileged sons in the partition of a father’s estate, in contrast with the Roman law, according to which sons and daughters inherited equally.¹⁰⁹ Although the Roman law of inheritance was known among East Syrian Christians, Iranian judges writing in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic conquests resolutely insisted on the prevailing Iranian law. Simeon of Revardashir, the port city of Fars, wrote in the 650s that “everywhere sons are the holders of the inheritance of their fathers and not daughters, because a greater portion of the property of their father comes to them in inheritance. Therefore, a complete share is given to a son, while a half share [is given] to a daughter, for her maintenance, nourishment, and clothing.”110 In Mesopotamia, the patriarch Henanisho made an identical judgment three decades later.¹¹¹ The principles that Simeon, Henanisho, and later Ishobokht enunciated correspond perfectly with the laws of the Hazār Dādestān. In Iranian law, unmarried daughters each received half a share of the inheritance (bahr ī duxt), whereas legitimate sons were each entitled to a full share (bahr ī pus).¹¹² As married daughters had already obtained a dowry, a share of the inheritance given in advance (pēšigān wāspuhragān), their exclusion from the estate was absolute. While insisting on Iranian law as normative, the bishops also attested to Christians who desired to endow their daughters with greater shares, perhaps an indication of the declining importance of patriliny in an Islamic society.¹¹³ Even in these cases, however, the bishops required the daughters to receive only their half shares, demonstrating that the preservation of patrimonies had been elevated to a foundational principle of East Syrian inheritance law. Ishobokht explained that a daughter could receive only half a share because she did not contribute to the continuation of her family’s male lineage.¹¹⁴ Patrilineages and patrimonies were inextricably intertwined in the thought of East Syrian bishops.

If East Syrians were no less interested in patriliny than their Zoroastrian peers, we would expect them to have labored over the problem of sonlessness equally energetically. The controversial question on this topic that animated East Syrian judicial writings was whether a wife, the nearest agnates, or other relatives should inherit a sonless man. There is thus a symmetry between the Hazār Dādestān and the East Syrian lawbooks. There was a strong tendency among Christians to permit the wife to inherit, a practice that contradicts patrilineal principles only apparently. The patriarch Ishoyahb III described a case that lasted from 650 to 658 and reveals the parameters of the debate. The bishop of an unspecified province had condemned a marriage between a man and the wife of his dead maternal uncle, which was intended to provide the deceased man with heirs. As there was no agnatic relationship between the husband and the deceased, we are dealing here not with a levirate marriage but rather with either a čagar marriage contracted for the purpose of stūrīh or an informal arrangement of a substitute successor in imitation of stūrīh. But Ishoyahb III framed the question solely in terms of a wife’s inheriting, to present this practice as contradicting both Christian and Iranian law. The inheritance of wives was “foreign to the will of the divine book and to the teaching according to which this kingdom was ruled until now.”¹¹⁵ This is a misrepresentation of Iranian law, as in cases of sonlessness a wife would temporarily inherit her husband before transferring his estate to his substitute successor. Where we find the inheritance of a wife in East Syrian law, an institution of substitute successorship was available to the sonless.

“From where is it known that when a man dies and has a wife and brother and no children, his property is due to his wife, not his brother?”116 Writing contemporaneously with Ishoyahb III, Simeon of Revardashir judged that the wife was always to inherit the sonless husband. In the only judgment of his treatise in which he invoked Christian language, the bishop argued that the wife inherited because she and her husband had formed “one flesh,” contradicting a statement more characteristic of Iranian law that “a Christian wife becomes foreign to the family of her husband” after his death.¹¹⁷ In different circumstances, each principle could apply. If her husband left male heirs, any future children of the wife would need to be excluded from his patrimony. If the man died sonless, the wife would contract a marriage with a substitute successor through the formal institution of stūrīh or, more probably, through customary practice. According to Ishobokht, who presided over the same episcopal court as Simeon a century and a quarter later, substitute successorship was the norm:

The Christians who are in our land, because they reside among Magians, who give the inheritance of a childless man in the way that we have described above, also give the inheritance of a childless dead man to his wife, because they do not recall that they ruled thus for the sake of levirate marriage [yabmuta], in which the father and brothers of a man are permitted to marry his wife or someone else who is related to him from among the members of his family. When children are born, they are considered to belong to the dead man. The property is his and does not belong to the one who married his wife.¹¹⁸

Despite misinterpreting flexible forms of substitute successorship as levirate marriage, Ishobokht recognized the connection between the wife’s inheritance and the continuation of the patrilineage through an institution similar to stūrīh. He, like his associate the patriarch Timothy, condemned the practice but freely admitted its prevalence among the Christians of Fars and its acceptance by episcopal judges.¹¹⁹ There were bishops in the Fars of Simeon and Ishobokht and the Mesopotamia of Ishoyahb who worked to secure the inheritance of the wife in cases of sonlessness in order for a substitute successor to be produced.

East Syrian episcopal judges thus placed themselves in the service of Iranian political institutions, allowing elite households to reproduce themselves through a form of substitute successorship. Although aristocratic houses with common ancestors formed the ruling classes of the empire, these clans were segmented into individual households. The household rather than the clan was the site of the transmission of wealth and status. Men of imperial office could expect advancement for their sons, not their brothers. The currency of aristocratic names, moreover, was of uneven exchange value. The reversal of a man’s wealth to his brothers negated his accomplishments and his name, even if their ancestral lineage continued. The rapacity of brothers who sought to profit from the deaths of sonless men or men with puerile heirs was legendary, particularly in the East Syrian hagiographies that emerged from the milieu of lesser or middling noble houses, more vulnerable than their grander counterparts.120 The alternative to substitute successorship was a stark one in this context. Henanisho both described and recommended a very different solution to the problem of sonlessness: the return of the dead man’s land to his surviving agnates.¹²¹ Sitting upon the same episcopal throne that Mar Aba and Ishoyahb III had occupied, this patriarch opposed substitute successorship while supporting the preservation of patrimonies. His straightforward solution was doubtless a customary one, always an option in Iranian society. The Zoroastrian architects of stūrīh may even have been reacting to such a practice that secured the integrity of ancestral properties but not the continuous transmission of patrilineages. For landowning Christians in an early Islamic political system that did not distribute power according to lineage, Henanisho’s solution may have been adequate. But for ambitious late Sasanian Christians busily constructing the patrilineages that were the prerequisite for status and office in the Iranian Empire, the topic of the next chapter, some form of substitute successorship was indispensable to address the inevitable eventuality of sonlessness.

Mar Aba therefore proscribed a fundamental Iranian social practice that East Syrian Christians had generally regarded as permissible. In referring merely to the marriage of a woman with her paternal uncle, the patriarch addressed the most common form of substitute successorship, which we know from Ishobokht could involve a wider range of agnates standing in the place of the sonless deceased. Ishobokht’s description of this practice as widespread and even accepted among East Syrian bishops demonstrates that the institution, which Simeon advocated in the early seventh century, already prevailed in the sixth. Even if Zoroastrian judges restricted stūrīh to wehdēn, Christians also ensured the successful transmission of their names and lands through the institution of substitute successors, sometimes even under the judicial authority of bishops such as Simeon. East Syrian Christians could not participate in the patrilineal politics of the empire as effectively as Zoroastrians, who had access to the more flexible institution of stūrīh, which guaranteed a male heir regardless of circumstances. But the use of a wider range of paternal male relatives as substitute successors than traditional levirate marriage allowed provided most sonless men with heirs. If the passages of Mar Aba’s treatise concerning substitute successorship stood on their own, we would be under the impression that this practice was comparatively unproblematic. But the patriarch juxtaposed a defensible and accepted form of marriage to acts that were inconceivably loathsome either to Christians (sex with one’s daughter or mother) or to Christians and Zoroastrians alike (bestial or homosexual sex). Of the marital and sexual practices that he condemned in his treatise, only substitute successorship was common, and indeed necessary for the reproduction of aristocratic Christians.

The case of substitute successorship reveals the method of the patriarch. He regulated with canons and laws a practice that he recognized as widespread and legitimate within Christian communities. A generally accepted form of marriage thus became incest. If the treatise on marriage defines no punitive measures for illicit sex, the canon from Beit Lapat requires the excommunication of those guilty of contracting incestuous marriages, a punishment that entailed the public rebuking of the offender. Canons and laws possessed the same authority, residing in the performative speech acts of individual bishops. The highly rhetorical nature of the Regulations of Marriage alerts us to the ways in which canons were applied and served to consolidate the episcopal position in decidedly multipolar Christian communities. Laws on marriage empowered bishops not simply to excommunicate, a drastic measure corrosive to communal cohesion, but also to censure and rebuke, to call the sinful to account. Polemics and laws were of a piece. Acknowledging the ubiquity of substitute successorship, the patriarch did not expect Christians uniformly to obey his proscriptions. He rather deployed laws as instruments to distinguish the worldly from the spiritual and to subordinate the former to the latter in ecclesiastical institutions. It was on account of the indispensability of the practice to aristocratic Christians that the patriarch could identify substitute successorship—now labeled a variety of incest—as the defining mark of their worldliness. The laws on marriage therefore offer an ideal point of departure for the practice with which the History of Mar Aba pairs them: the consumption of Magian meat.

MAGIAN MEAT

In the polemical literature emanating from the circle of Mar Aba, incest was paired with the consumption of meat subjected to Zoroastrian rites as the two abhorrent Zoroastrian practices that Christians were obliged to reject. Although a canon concerning the consumption of “meat of murmur” has not survived, the History of Mar Aba reports its condemnation as a fundamental feature of the patriarch’s reforms.122 His courtly interrogators, we should recall, offered to close their inquest if Mar Aba would refrain from condemning Christians who contracted marriages according to Iranian laws or consumed Magian meat, as well as stop converting Zoroastrians to Christianity.¹²³ This is an important indication of the interest of Zoroastrian religious professionals in securing the participation of Christians in their festive meals. If Zoroastrians opened their feasts and banquets to unbelievers, a vocal body of ecclesiastical leaders in the sixth and early seventh centuries polemicized, in canonical and hagiographical texts, against Christians who joined them. And if this controversy was reported to have emerged first in the course of Yazdgird II’s conflicts with the Armenian aristocracy in the middle of the fifth century, polemics against the consumption of Zoroastrian meat began to appear only in the sixth, when East Syrian and Armenian authors came stridently to equate the practice with apostasy.124 Drawing on the Roman martyrologies that were increasingly available in Syriac and Armenian translations, these authors presented commensality with Zoroastrians as an act of idolatry that Christians worthy of the name could not perform. In East Syrian communities, Mar Aba’s associates were the first to propagate polemics against Christians who partook of Zoroastrian meals, as part of the program to circumscribe the powers of worldly Christians. In the patriarch’s vision of the church, Magian meat and incest served as the linchpins of a distinctively Christian habitus. Neither of these practices was, however, as peculiarly Zoroastrian as Christian authors represented them. To comprehend the significance of these novel Christian polemics, we need to consider the role of meat consumption in Iranian imperial institutions.

Eating was an unavoidably religious activity in Iran. Before consuming food, Zoroastrians were to recite a brief prayer, the wāz, which rendered the act of eating a part of the system of rituals that culminated in the Yasna.¹²⁵ The consumption of meat in particular was highly ritualized in a religion whose foundational texts, the Gathas of Zoroaster, malign the cruelties of animal slaughter and constitute a bloodless sacrificial liturgy in the Yasna. Animals were only to be slain in a sacrificial rite that entailed the stunning of the victim with a wooden club before its slaughter, the offering of its head to the god Haoma, and the communal distribution of its meat.¹²⁶ In a debate with a Christian preserved in the fifth book of the Dēnkard, an early ninth-century mowbed explained that the ritual was compassionate in intention, designed to minimize the fear and pain of the animal.¹²⁷ One should not slaughter an animal lightly, he added, whenever or wherever a desire for the taste of meat arose. Animal sacrifice was rather an occasion for communal consumption. In the Middle Persian translation of the Hōm Yašt, a cow curses the sacrificer who failed to share his flesh: “Thus may you be childless and likewise may dishonor be with you, who do not distribute wealth for my sake to the worthy but . . . withhold me for your wives, sons, and your own belly.”¹²⁸ Cattle who forfeited their bodies for the welfare of a human community expected collective recognition of their sacrifice. Ancient Zoroastrianism’s concern for the well-being of beneficent animals gave rise to rituals of collective feasting, which Iranians developed into political institutions for the creation and reorganization of communities through the consumption of cosmically significant meat.

The late Sasanian translator of the Hōm Yašt modified the original Young Avestan text with the qualification that the cow’s wealth should be distributed “to the worthy” (ō arzānīgān). Who was worthy to partake of an animal’s sacrificed meat? Although some scholars forbade the offering of meat to unbelievers, in Iranian society neither sacrificed meats nor the feasts at which they were consumed were restricted to Zoroastrians. Nor was the consumption of sacrificial meat ever taken as evidence of one’s status as wehdēn, as Christian martyrs were forced to partake during the Roman persecutions of the third century—at least according to the martyrologies to which East Syrian hagiographers so often turned for their models. The report of the History of Mar Aba that a council of Zoroastrian religious authorities insisted on the liberty of Christians to partake of their communal meat accords well with the evidence for Zoroastrian festivals, which were broadly inclusive affairs.129 The most important occasions for commensality were the pan-imperial festivals of Nowruz and Mihragan, which structured the experience of time and space in the empire and convened its diverse populations in a common celebration of the political and social order of Iran.¹³⁰ In the sixth century, however, East Syrian leaders sought to restrict Christian participation in Iranian feasts. The Synod of Ishoyahb I in 585 forbade believers from attending non-Christian feasts, as part of its continuation of Mar Aba’s reforms.¹³¹ Hagiographers writing in Mesopotamia, Iberia, and Armenia described the celebration of these festivals in the provinces and dramatized the potential contradictions that Christians participants could experience. The History of Gregory the Commander, the Martyrdom of Eustathius of Mtskheta, and the Martyrdom of Yazdbozid recount stories of Zoroastrians who publicly apostatized at festivals, with a view to condemning Christians who partook of Zoroastrian meat. The History of Gregory was composed in Mar Aba’s immediate circle as another vehicle for the propagation of his polemics.¹³² Even as the authors of these texts railed against the evils of commensality with Zoroastrians, their intimate familiarity with the customs and religious, political, and economic significance of Nowruz in particular suggests that Christians were active participants in these festivities. Their earnestness equally implies a reluctance of Christians to abandon the communal pleasures of the New Year. Despite the protestations of bishops, the feasts of Nowruz and Mihragan were such fundamental occasions for the Christian population of Iran that the Church of the East modeled its own calendar after the schedule of Zoroastrian festivals.¹³³

The great feasts had begun at court. The kings of kings were believed to have instituted the festivals and served on these occasions as the hosts of all their subjects.¹³⁴ Although the New Year’s celebration derived ultimately from ancient Mesopotamian rites, the Iranian mythical-historical tradition understood Nowruz and Mihragan as the institutions of the primordial kings Jamshid and Fereydun intended to mark moments of cosmic restoration. On these days, the kings of kings stood in the place of their mythical predecessors to perform their role as cosmologically beneficent rulers. The principal cosmological action that the kings of kings undertook on Nowruz was giving hierarchical order to the population of the empire, arranging persons great and small in appropriate positions of service. Courtly historiographers and Christian hagiographers emphasized the importance of the day for the reordering of imperial ranks. The royal table was the preeminent site for the according and withdrawal of privileges. The Middle Persian treatise Sūr ī Saxwan has preserved a speech delivered in the course of the blessing, the wāz, at the royal banquet, in which a king of kings enumerated in a normative order the titles of the grand officials invited to the royal table, including the wuzurg framādār (chief administrative commander), the four head military commanders, and the greatest Zoroastrian ritual and judicial authorities. This document has recently been described as Iran’s nearest surviving equivalent to the Roman Notitia Dignitatum, the emperors’ handbook for comprehending their bureaucracy.135 Similar announcements and arrangements placed holders of titles and offices beneath the exalted ranks of those entitled to dine at the royal table in a precise order that authoritatively fixed each man’s status in relation to his peers. Through the offering of gifts, moreover, a king of kings indebted to his magnanimous self political subordinates, who in the course of the year would repay their debt through imperial service. Royal gifts, such as robes of honor, could also equip men with the means to display and to authenticate the ranks that they received. Through the orchestration of the celebration of Nowruz, Iranian kings of kings demonstrated that wealth and power were products of the cosmologically appropriate ordering of persons, which only they could achieve. So closely linked were these festivals with the functions of Iranian rulership that kings of kings were normally crowned on either Nowruz or Mihragan, and the former marked the beginning of the fiscal year.¹³⁶

Microcosms of the courtly feast were performed, the Christian hagiographers reveal, throughout the empire. Their works provide precious insight into the unfolding of the feasts in the provincial societies that great nobles, middling officeholders, and their collaborators would have experienced. In the History of Gregory, we have an account of the celebration of Nowruz in a military context in the Caucasus in 529. Pirangushnasp, a great noble of the house of Mihran, was expected to preside over the festivities for the field army that he commanded. His soldiers appealed to him in eager expectation of the pleasures of the feast, “The eyes of all of us are directed toward you. Rise and perform the yašt. We have one day for eating and drinking. Honor us with great honors from the great wealth that Ohrmazd has given you. Make yourself the head and leader of us all.”¹³⁷ Opening with a recitation of the Avesta, this festival of Nowruz entailed banqueting, the distribution of gifts, and the hierarchical ordering of the soldiers beneath their “head and leader.” The royal ceremony was here reduplicated at the level of a field army, with a military commander as the symposiarch who convened, reorganized, and rewarded his forces, which would have included aristocrats and their retinues. Such rehearsals of the royal feast took place in every imperial institution. Officials commemorated Nowruz as a collective subordinate to their chief, the āmārgar in the case of the sixth-century Armenian Martyrdom of Yazdbozid.¹³⁸ Even the masters of comparatively humble guilds were expected to orchestrate festivities, as the feast of the Iranian sandal and other shoe makers of Mtskheta in the Georgian Martyrdom of Eustathius of Mtskheta attests.¹³⁹ For the empire’s fundamental institutions—the military, the fiscal administration, and artisanal workshops—feasting linked their mundane work to the cosmological purpose of Iran, demonstrated the essential benevolence of imperial hierarchies, and ensured the effective collaboration of men of very different social classes and cultural backgrounds. A flow of gifts and mutual obligations extended from the courtly banquet to the most humble of provincial workshops, entangling persons great and small in a pan-imperial web of reciprocities.

Feasts displayed and demanded popular recognition of a social hierarchy that, as we shall see in the following chapter, was far from static. Congregants at a festival constituted an audience that expected a performance of status from men who claimed to be worthy of wielding authority over others. In its description of soldiers eyeing their commander, the History of Gregory gives expression to the status anxieties that a feast could occasion. On the one hand, the organizer of the feast had to reestablish precious bonds of reciprocity with his subordinates, the generally nameless infantry, scribes, artisans, and other laborers who provided the manpower for the operation of imperial institutions. On the other hand, each man had to impress his peers. Whether at court or at an artisanal workshop, men of rank gathered together not only to enjoy but also to evaluate one another. Feasts were the preeminent occasions for aristocratic sociability, as congregants—many of whom will have traveled from a distance—boasted of their exploits and vied for positions and prestige while sharing meat. Alliances could be formed, others abandoned. The emphasis on hierarchy in Christian accounts of provincial feasts suggests that the normative listing and positioning of men according to their rank was characteristic of banquets beneath the court. If a man gained or lost rank, he did so in the sight of his peers. Participation in the banquets of Iranian festivals was a prerequisite not only of maintaining a position in imperial institutions but also of earning the recognition of one’s name that was needed to attain an office and to move up in the imperial hierarchy.

To demand that a Christian forgo feasting was to demand that he extricate himself from Iranian political institutions and networks. This is precisely what the authors of the Christian hagiographies and Mar Aba proposed. The History of Gregory plainly equates the rejection of festivals with the rejection of social status and power. Declaring Nowruz a “feast of Satan,” Pirangushnasp frames his conversion to Christianity as a repudiation of the social and political structures that the feast represented: “I renounce Ohrmazd, wealth, and leadership because he has neither wealth nor power. I am a Christian and I worship our lord Jesus Christ, and I do not serve demons.”140 The author of this hagiography was eager to demonstrate that refusing the wealth and leadership that derived from service to Ohrmazd did not imply disloyalty to the king of kings. As we saw in chapter 1, this aristocrat—now named Gregory—served Husraw I as the commander of a campaign against the Romans even after his abandonment of both the feast and the Good Religion. But the personal relationship with the king of kings that a member of the Mihranid house enjoyed was not available to the middling aristocrats who constituted the audience for antifestive polemics. The secular authorities targeted by Mar Aba’s polemics—the inspiration of the author of the History of Gregory—included the masters of artisanal workshops and military commanders operating at the provincial level, officials in command of precisely those imperial institutions in which feasting played so important an organizing role. These men needed to navigate imperial aristocratic networks that cohered in space and time at feasts that did not reaffirm so much as reposition aristocrats in relation to their peers. For Christian officeholders, participation in festive banquets was an inevitable and indispensable component of their political practice, and a failure to partake of Magian meat would have insulted their peers, disappointed their inferiors, and caused irreparable damage to their status.

Not all Christians were willing to renounce wealth and leadership as readily as Pirangushnasp, Yazdbozid, or Eustathius. The proliferation of Christian aristocrats suggests, to the contrary, their increased involvement in imperial institutions. Ecclesiastical leaders thus strenuously condemned the eating of Magian meat in canonical and hagiographical polemics throughout the sixth century and into the seventh. In the absence of an offering to idols or a profession of loyalty to Zoroastrian deities at these feasts, the equation of meat consumption with pagan worship that these polemicists made on the basis of Roman martyrologies did not persuade holders of fiscal, military, artisanal, or courtly office to abandon commensality with members of the Good Religion. The efforts of these authors, moreover, demonstrate how routinely Zoroastrians included agdēn in their festive banquets. The great festivals of Nowruz and Mihragan were occasions for classifying men in imperial hierarchies according to status, not religious identity. Despite their polemics, these sixth-century hagiographies reveal the importance of feasting in the aristocratic politics of the empire, in which Christians sought to participate more actively. Like the exilarch, the leader of the Jewish community at court, Christian elites adopted the practices of the Iranian aristocracies, regardless of episcopal criticism.141 Condemnations of commensality constitute evidence of its prevalence and its centrality to political life. Consumption of Magian meat was thus of a piece with Zoroastrian practices of marriage and inheritance.

THE RECEPTION OF CHRISTIAN LAWS

At the interrogation of Mar Aba, two worldly elite Christians were present, according to the History of Mar Aba. If one openly supported the patriarch, the other opposed him and “conspired together with the Magians.”¹⁴² Even in portraying these two as only superficially Christian, the hagiographer acknowledged that not only Zoroastrians but also worldly Christians opposed the bishop’s reforms and appealed to the court to have him constrained. It was, in the representation of a contemporary associate of Mar Aba’s, the combined interests of Christians and Zoroastrians that caused the patriarch’s imprisonment and exile. The History of Mar Aba thus suggests that his reforms precipitated dissent rather than consensus, conflict rather than coherence, in the ranks of the East Syrian faithful. The worldly appear to have continued to contract marriages and join feasts according to Iranian customs. The ongoing participation of Christians in courtly life and banquets, the enduring importance in East Syrian communities of Zoroastrian festivals such as Nowruz, and the recurrence of polemics against commensality throughout the late Sasanian period imply that the patriarch’s ban on Magian meat failed to discipline Christian aristocrats. Likewise, the writings of the post-Sasanian episcopal judges that describe the ubiquity—and even permissibility—of forms of marriage that Mar Aba deemed incestuous demonstrate that the Regulations of Marriage did not become normative. But the laws of the patriarch were not therefore without influence. Ecclesiastical leaders increasingly embraced his canons as ways of articulating their distinctively spiritual authority vis-à-vis their worldly counterparts. Even if surviving sources cannot be taken as representative of ecclesiastical views, the prevalence of Mar Aba’s laws in hagiographical texts and synodal decisions of the late sixth and early seventh centuries document their impact on the thought and practice of a significant—and highly influential—segment of East Syrian bishops. Ascetic ecclesiastical leaders such as Ishoyahb III invoked the model of the Levites in moments of tension between spiritual and worldly authorities in the Church of the East.143 They repeated Mar Aba’s laws without any pretense concerning the enforceability of their strictures, respecting the suzerain authority of the Iranian court and its judges that the patriarch had outlined. The worldly who accepted the laws did so voluntarily.

The ninth-century legal treatise of Gabriel of Basra has preserved a rare testimony to the self-regulation of a worldly Christian community. This document contains the statutes of an association of artisans in a city, unfortunately unnamed, which were compiled at some point between the middle of the sixth and the end of the seventh century.¹⁴⁴ These statutes reproduce the canons of Mar Aba in the context of an artisanal workshop, identifying the rejection of incest as the distinguishing characteristic of a Christian collectivity: “We abstain from adultery, fornication, sorcery, murder, and the abominable marriage of two women, from the impure union with a mother, daughter, daughter-in-law, mother-in-law, the wife of a brother, and the wife of an uncle [or] with the other [relations] that are despised, abhorred, and rejected in the law of Christianity. We abstain from giving our daughters, sisters, kin, and daughters of our family to pagans, unless they have converted beforehand. We consent to and observe all the holy laws that were established by the leaders of the church, without compulsion.”¹⁴⁵ The artisans’ espousal of a “law of Christianity” is more characteristic of the first Islamic century than of the Sasanian period, but some artisanal workshops—which unlike fiscal and military institutions could have been entirely Christian in composition—might have recorded the canons of the patriarch in their books during his sojourn in Khuzestan. What is significant for the question of the reception of these canons is the phrase “without compulsion.” This artisanal community voluntarily incorporated them into its statutes. Laws, in the understanding of its members, were the distinguishing marks of the pious, the symbolic boundaries of a particular vision of Christian unity that separated them not only from Zoroastrians who practiced close-kin marriage but also from worldly Christians who practiced substitute successorship.

CONCLUSION

Writings that purport to constitute impassible boundaries between Christians and Zoroastrians reveal, on closer inspection, the East Syrian faithful in profoundly mixed states. The canons, regulations, and laws that Mar Aba promulgated in the sixth century served not as the foundations of a distinctive legal system that separated Christians from Zoroastrians but rather as interventions in debates concerning the extent to which Christians could involve themselves in Iranian political institutions. The subordination of East Syrians to the authority of Zoroastrian judges went unquestioned, and the services of Zoroastrian courts were available to agdēn and wehdēn alike, albeit on somewhat different terms. As a consequence, these Christians participated simultaneously in two legal cultures that shared much more than the polemics of the patriarch immediately suggest. The formal, state-sanctioned jurisprudence of the Zoroastrian religious professionals regulated the transmission of patrilineages and patrimonies. The informal jurisprudence of the bishops regulated the spiritual states of the faithful, a remit that came to include mediating conflicts between Christians in which Iranian laws of inheritance, among other topics, played a prominent role. Mar Aba sought not to remove Christians from the judicial authority of the Zoroastrian officials, whose powers he recognized, but to persuade his flock to reject particular practices that he deemed unworthy of Christians. He significantly identified practices that the powerful Christians whose authoritative roles within the church he aimed to circumscribe could not abandon without also abandoning their political positions. With a view to endowing allied bishops and lesser clergy with greater room for maneuver within their respective constituencies, the patriarch composed and disseminated new norms for the marital and dining practices of Christians, according to which their moral and spiritual states could be measured. Their marrying the wives of agnates or partaking of Zoroastrian meats implicated the Christian aristocrats of the Iranian Empire in the defilements of a sinful world that had not yet accepted the redeeming teachings of Christ, from which ecclesiastical leaders—even those undisciplined by the ascetic life—kept themselves pure. These aristocrats’ practices rendered them unmistakably worldly and, in the eyes of reformist clerics, unworthy of leading Christian communities.

It is their worldliness that is of greatest interest for the history of the Iranian Empire. In the polemics of Mar Aba, as in the hagiographical works of northern Mesopotamia discussed in the following chapter, we have a rare glimpse of what has hitherto been a highly elusive phenomenon: the participation of the lower and middling aristocrats of the provinces in the political life of the empire. Here institutions and their corresponding practices, not identities, were the conduits of power. If the importance of Iranian family law for the reproduction of the greatest aristocratic houses has been recognized, the patriarch’s writings on marriage suggest that marital and inheritance strategies were of equal consequence for Christian aristocrats. Even without access to the specifically Zoroastrian institution of stūrīh, Christians worked to transmit their patrilineages and patrimonies across generations, through a simplified version of substitute successorship. If accounts of courtly life attest to the importance of the feast for kings of kings and their greatest aristocratic officials, the antifestive polemics of Mar Aba and his circle show the involvement of even the humblest provincial aristocrats in an empire-wide festive economy. The feast, like the court of a Zoroastrian judge, was inclusive of persons irrespective of their religion. These institutions nevertheless required compromises from the Christian faithful. A pious Christian may have bristled at the Avestan recitation that inaugurated the festival, but the ensuing banquet was an occasion for the commensal celebration of an empire held in common. Knowledge of the cosmological underpinnings of Iranian family law may have given some pause over the conceptual links between substitute successorship and incest. Such considerations, however, did not prevent Christians from adapting stūrīh’s principles to their own purposes. Despite their shrill tone, the legal writings of Mar Aba demonstrate the importance of the shared practices that allowed Christian and Zoroastrian aristocrats alike to create, maintain, and reproduce powerful houses in the late Sasanian period.

It was, after all, during the tenure of Mar Aba that Christian elites came to participate most visibly in Iranian aristocratic politics. In 551, one of Husraw I’s sons, Anushzad, launched a campaign to seize the throne from his father, an example of the intradynastic contestation that characterized the Iranian court throughout its history.146 What was unprecedented in Anushzad’s revolt was the source of his economic and political support: the cities of Khuzestan, with their prominent Christian elites, rather than the great aristocratic houses.¹⁴⁷ The right of rebellion against a Sasanian deemed ineffective in favor of another member of the dynasty was a privilege of Iran’s leading houses, such as those of Mihran and Suren.¹⁴⁸ In the sixth century the urban Christians of Khuzestan considered themselves powerful enough to lay claim to this aristocratic privilege and supported the efforts of their own Sasanian candidate for the throne. Anushzad reportedly converted to Christianity, or at least presented himself as a Christian to gain the confidence of the inhabitants of towns and cities such as Beit Lapat/Jundishapur. The Christians of Khuzestan, however, miscalculated their political capital. With the support of the great houses and Mar Aba himself, Husraw I quickly suppressed the rebellion, putting a definitive end to the ambitions of these East Syrians if not to their hopes for a Christian Sasanian.149 The courtly response to the political aspirations of the Christians of Khuzestan sought to deny them any claim to authority in the empire. They were of ambiguous origins and hence unable to command others, unlike the great aristocrats, whose noble lineages endowed them with power and legitimate political authority.¹⁵⁰ Christians, the opponents of Anushzad contended, could not be nobles. In converting, the rebellious Sasanian departed from “the religion of his ancestors” (dīn-e niyāgān) and exhibited his “bad seed” (bad nižād).¹⁵¹ As we have seen, East Syrian elites were already attempting to construct the lineages and houses that were the foundations of political power and authority in the Iranian Empire. If the abrupt attempt to appropriate so exalted an aristocratic privilege as the right of rebellion failed catastrophically in Khuzestan, more gradual processes of accumulating economic and cultural capital were at work in East Syrian communities, especially in urban contexts. In the following chapter, we turn to the East Syrian elites in the towns and cities of northern Mesopotamia, who were more successful than the Christians of Khuzestan at creating aristocratic houses worthy of the recognition of the court.