5

The Christian Symbolics of Power in a Zoroastrian Empire

CHRISTIAN KINGS OF KINGS?

In the eyes of Christians in both the Iranian and the Roman Empire, Zoroastrian kings of kings became Christian in the late Sasanian period. The arrival of Husraw II Aparwez at the court of the Roman emperor Maurice in Constantinople in 590 as a refugee from the rebellion of Wahram Chobin inspired reports of the conversion of the Sasanian that were not easily put to rest.1 To cement an alliance between their two dynasties, Maurice adopted Husraw II as his son through a rite of adoptio per arma that normally presumed the Christian identity of its participants.² At the time, Pope Gregory the Great accurately assessed the situation: “I lament that the emperor [imperatorem] of the Persians was not converted” despite the best efforts of the leading Roman bishops.³ But seventh-century historiographers from Iranian Armenia to post-Roman Frankia preserved accounts of the king of kings’ conversion to Christianity, showing how widely narratives of the Christianized Sasanian dynasty circulated during his reign.⁴ He was, moreover, not the first Sasanian to convert, according to Christian writers. In the History of Pseudo-Sebeos, a compilation of a late seventh-century Armenian historiographer, Husraw I Anushirvan recognizes the truth of the Christian faith, accepts baptism, and partakes of Holy Communion immediately before his death.⁵ In a parallel strain of Roman historiography, the seventh-century Egyptian chronicler John of Nikiu preserved an account of the baptism of Husraw I that is modeled on Christian narratives of the conversion of Constantine the Great, suggesting that some Romans believed a Sasanian could occupy the position of legitimate Christian ruler, once the exclusive preserve of the emperors.⁶ Building on accounts of the Magi of the New Testament, who brought the good news of Christ to the East, Christian authors in the Iranian world claimed—with notable indifference to chronology—that these wise men had converted the founder of the Sasanian dynasty, Ardashir I.7 In the imaginations of Christians from across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the Sasanians came to constitute a dynasty of believers.

Such accounts were historically baseless. The late Sasanians were unwavering advocates of the religion that provided the ideological and infrastructural foundations of their empire. In the media that the Iranian court produced to articulate its rule—coins, silver plates, mythical histories—the Sasanian commitment to Zoroastrianism, which Ardashir had established, remained consistent until the fall of the dynasty. The silver coinage constitutes the best contemporaneous evidence for courtly ideological developments, as drachms produced at regional mints with centrally controlled, royally designed dies communicated a uniform message to the kings of kings’ subjects who handled silver. Shifts in their symbolism or rhetoric attest to innovations in imperial ideology of consequence for aristocrats of all strata and of all regions. The modifications that the court of Husraw II made to the silver coinage only emphasize the empire’s dependence on Zoroastrian deities, in particular Wahram, the deliverer of victory, placed on coins after the 591 defeat of Wahram Chobin, and the court’s possession of xwarrah, the supernatural force that accompanied legitimate rulers.⁸ There are signs of Christianity’s heightened significance for the court in a small collection of silver drachms with crosses engraved on their fringes.⁹ But these were merely additions to the prevailing Zoroastrian imagery, perhaps the modifications of provincial mints with or without courtly permission. The examples are few and their chronological frame is narrow, suggesting that either these issues were unpopular or the court forbade their production. Along with the coinage, the literary texts that the court produced, principally histories and advice literature, and the stone sculptures of Husraw II at Taq-e Bustan (see chapter 2) make the supremacy of the Zoroastrian ideology of empire unambiguous.¹⁰ The primary modalities of self-representation that the late Sasanians deployed, in the tradition of their predecessors, drew exclusively on the Zoroastrian framework of cosmological kingship. This is entirely in keeping with what both Iranian and Roman sources—apart from the abovementioned accounts—report of the kings of kings. The regime of Husraw II was no less Zoroastrian than those of his predecessors.

Narratives of the Christianization of the Sasanians nevertheless gained traction among Christians who experienced the favors of the king of kings. Husraw II associated himself with Christian powers—both worldly and supernatural—and their institutions to an unprecedented degree. He depended, in the first instance, on Roman Christian forces to take the throne. Crowned suddenly as an alternative to his father, Ohrmazd IV, in 590, he fled the army of the usurper Wahram Chobin, which would have overwhelmed him at Seleucia-Ctesiphon.¹¹ Romans lent the king of kings forces, which allowed him to defeat the rebel and to restore the Sasanian dynasty. An intimate relationship between Christian Rome and Husraw II ensued, leading the king of kings, in the first decades of the seventh century, to consider himself capable of conquering the Roman Empire and incorporating its lands into Iran. The provinces of the Christian Roman Near East were indeed, for anywhere from a decade to a quarter of a century, components of the Iranian Empire, until the deposition and execution of the king of kings in 628 in the face of the successful campaigns of the emperor Heraclius (r. 610–41) against Iran.12 But Husraw II’s interactions with Christianity went well beyond his relations with the Roman emperors and their subjects. He married two Christian wives, one a Roman, Maria, and another a Mesopotamian, Shirin.¹³ He constructed several prominent churches and contributed to the erection of many more.¹⁴ Along the royal road on the way to the monuments commemorating his victories, including Taq-e Bustan at Bisutun, he had a monastery built at Qasr-e Shirin.¹⁵ And as we will examine in detail, he allied himself with a Christian saint and a living holy man, took the True Cross into the Iranian court’s possession, and performed according to the expectations of a Christian ruler in the conquered Roman territories. On account of these acts, Christians of different sectarian affiliations in both the Roman and the Iranian Empire came to regard him as a Christian king of kings. At the same time, his court insisted on the inseparability of the Zoroastrian religion and Iranian kingship.

This chapter first traces Husraw II’s innovative use of Christian symbols to represent his rule, then turns to the acts through which the king of kings and his court communicated the supremacy of an imperial Zoroastrianism undiminished by the admixture of Christian saints and crosses and the empire’s ideological apparatus. The same king of kings who cultivated a personal relationship with Christ and his saints also wished to be known for policing with the sword the boundary between the Good Religion and an inferior religion, Christianity. The apparent paradox of a ruler simultaneously elevating and suppressing Christianity is the main topic of this chapter. Both actions, it argues, worked to stabilize relations between the elites of the different religions in ways that allowed Husraw II to realize his expansionist ambitions. To return to a theme of chapter 1, a hierarchical conception of humans and their religions provided the basis for cross-cultural symbolic experimentation and its counterpart, cross-cultural collaboration in an imperial political project.

THE THRONE OF OHRMAZD IV

During the reign of Ohrmazd IV (579–90), the court began to innovate models for the relationship between Zoroastrianism and Christianity. In a narrative preserved in al-Ṭabarī’s History of Prophets and Kings (Taʼrīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk) and the Chronicle of Seert, both of which draw upon the traditions of the Book of Kings (Xwadāy-nāmag; see chapter 4), the king of kings articulates a vision of political community in which Christians provide indispensable supports for Sasanian rule. When certain Zoroastrian priests petitioned Ohrmazd IV to do some unspecified harm to Christians, he reportedly appealed to them to recognize the contributions of these unbelievers to the realization of Zoroastrian empire:

Just as our royal throne cannot stand on its two front legs without the two back ones, our kingdom cannot stand or endure firmly if we cause the Christians and adherents of other faiths, who differ in belief from ourselves, to become hostile to us. So refrain from harming the Christians and become assiduous in good works, so that the Christians and the adherents of other faiths may see this, praise you for it, and feel themselves drawn toward your religion.16

The metaphor of the throne rendered Christianity one foundation of the empire, one of the four legs, without which the kingdom could not stand, of the royal throne.¹⁷ In the Christian recension of al-Ṭabarī’s tale, the Chronicle of Seert interprets the metaphor as stipulating the counterbalancing of religions that were, from the king of kings’ perspective, of comparable status: “A throne has four legs and cannot stand on two inner legs without the two outside. Thus the Zoroastrian religion [dīn al-majūs] will not stand without an opponent [maqāwim].”¹⁸ The term opponent corresponds with the Middle Persian hamēmār, whose semantic range encompasses positive and negative stances, from associate to antagonist.¹⁹ The author of the East Syrian account of Ohrmazd’s throne developed the metaphor to represent the upward mobility of his religion at court, from a subordinate position in relation to the Good Religion to one of parity as its—sometimes cooperative, sometimes competitive—counterpart.

There is, however, no question of an equivalence between Christianity and Zoroastrianism in the version of al-Ṭabarī, who, unlike al-Dīnawarī and some other early Islamic historiographers, disregarded Christian reworkings of the Book of Kings. Not only do the two front legs stand in a superior position, but the body of the king of kings on top of the throne was believed to join religion and kingship, to embody this twinship that was at the heart of the idea of Iran. Christians, in this political metaphor, could contribute to the operation of the empire without jeopardizing its Zoroastrian framework. The passage in al-Ṭabarī enjoins Zoroastrians to attend to the essential tasks that the Good Religion imposes on them, their good work, or xwēškārīh, rather than harm human resources crucial for the maintenance and extension of Sasanian structures of rule. If the report of Zoroastrians seeking to harm Christians betrays the anxieties of some religious specialists concerning increasingly powerful Christians and ecclesiastical institutions, the courtly authors of the throne metaphor articulated a new model of collaboration on the basis of the Zoroastrian conceptions of human difference and hierarchy discussed in chapter 1. Political life in anticipation of the cosmic restoration of the world would of necessity entail the coexistence and cooperation of humans who attained different measures of goodness. Even those unpracticed in the arts of the Good Religion were not entirely devoid of the capacity to do good work, and any viable political system would have to harness their efforts. What Ohrmazd IV’s court formulated for the first time was a metaphor for such a state of mixture that recognized the vital importance of the activities of inferior humans, which also underpinned the authority of the throne, while pointing to the ultimate cosmic function of Zoroastrian kingship. The good work of the kings of kings and their subjects would, in time, bring all humans to the Good Religion. In the interim, all subjects, Christians included, should attend to their xwēškārīh.

The throne metaphor accurately represents the political situation of the late Sasanian period. In chapter 4 we saw how Christian elites became increasingly crucial components of the imperial administration. The reign of Husraw II was the apex of Christian aristocratic fortunes under the Sasanians, and Christian elites were ubiquitous in military and fiscal contexts during the age of the Islamic conquests.20 Christian Armenian noble houses occupied some of the most strategic—and prestigious—military commands in the empire. During the rebellion of Wahram Chobin, a leading Armenian nakharar, Musheł Mamikonean, rejected the blandishments of the usurper, remaining loyal to the king of kings. His service earned him a place in the Book of Kings for abandoning his native land to campaign diligently on behalf of Husraw II, the first and only Christian aristocrat whom courtly historiographers commemorated.²¹ Another Armenian, Smbat Bagratuni, rose to occupy the frontier commandery of Gorgan, perhaps the most contested and militarily important region of the empire. For his successes in the East, Husraw II appointed him the chief of the military administration in the Caucasus and established his noble house, the Bagratunids, as a cornerstone of Sasanian rule in the region.²² Its fiscal administration reportedly came under the authority of the noble Yazdin whose northern Mesopotamian background we examined in the previous chapter. Even if Christian sources exaggerate the scope of his authority and activities, there can be no doubt that this East Syrian Christian was instrumental in organizing imperial revenues at a time when grandiose military campaigns put the fisc under enormous strain. Yazdin was important enough to be executed for political reasons in the late 620s. And after 609, in addition to the Christian aristocrats of the Iranian world, the Christian elites of the conquered Roman territories needed to be co-opted, to extend the empire’s fiscal and military structures into lands that the Sasanians had never previously attempted to govern. The throne metaphor was as much a project to be realized as a reflection of late Sasanian circumstances.

The Christians whose authority to organize soldiers, scribes, and fellow aristocrats on their behalf the late Sasanians in general and Husraw II in particular depended on placed their confidence not only in the court but also in an assemblage of objects that channeled supernatural powers. In the course of the sixth century, Christ, the saints, and their relics came to participate more directly in political life in the Mediterranean world. Christian Roman emperors had long consulted holy men, patronized saints and their shrines, and regarded Christian supernatural forces as agents of empire. These unseen actors made themselves palpable through relics—either the bodies of saints or materials with which they had come into contact—and images. These objects were believed not merely to represent Christ or his saints but to make them physically present in the world. Relics and images came, not without controversy, to translate supernatural forces into mundane affairs.23 The Mandylion of Edessa, a cloth on which Christ purportedly imprinted his face, provides a paradigmatic case of how a relic could act politically. During the campaign of Husraw I, this image of Christ prevented the Iranians from taking the city of Edessa, at least in late sixth-century reports.²⁴ In the following decades, Roman elites experimented with ways of enlisting the powers of relics and images, especially to motivate soldiers, a trend that culminated with the procession of an icon of the mother of God around Constantinople in 626 while the Iranians and Avars were besieging the city.²⁵ As we have seen repeatedly, the Christian communities of Iran tended rapidly to adopt the cultural innovations of their Mediterranean counterparts, and relics came to loom large in the political life of the Iranian Empire at the provincial level before reaching the imperial stage. Chapters 2 and 4 show how the presence of the saints, in their shrines and their bodies, contributed to the reshaping of Christian communities that facilitated their integration into the empire. But Christian sources of supernatural power could contribute more directly to Iranian imperialism.

Relics of the True Cross came to play a role in Iranian armies almost as soon as the Roman emperor Maurice dispatched an example to Sabrisho—then the bishop of Lashom in the region of Beit Garmai, before his 596 elevation to the patriarchate—as a sign of Roman-Iranian collaboration.²⁶ The gift marked a departure from Roman imperial efforts to monopolize the cult of the cross in Jerusalem and Constantinople, and thereafter the locus of Christian imperial power was increasingly detached from the Roman Empire.²⁷ At the beginning of the seventh century, an Armenian was reported to have uncovered a fragment of the True Cross on the body of a soldier on a battlefield in Gorgan.²⁸ Christians serving in Iranian armies, in this episode, drew strength from Christ by means of a relic of his cross, much as Roman soldiers did. This fragment, moreover, was granted to Smbat Bagratuni and his house. The aristocrat who secured some of Husraw II’s most consequential victories did so with a relic of Christ’s cross in his possession, an instrument of unparalleled potential for a military commander rallying Armenian Christian nakharars in defense of Iran. The idea that Christ would intervene through his cross on behalf of the Iranian Empire also appeared in contemporaneous northern Mesopotamian. Mar Qardagh, the legendary saint who features in chapter 4, is reported in the History of Mar Qardagh to have defended the city of Arbela and the surrounding region from an invasion of—Christian—Romans and Arabs by means of the cross. When he resumed the role of military commander, which he had abandoned together with the Good Religion, the noble saint sprinkled h.nana—dust that had come into contact with saintly relics—on his horse and soldiers and “hung on his neck a cross of gold in which was fastened the Holy Wood of the Crucifixion of our Savior.”29 Thus equipped, Mar Qardagh decisively defeated the Romans and Arabs and expelled them from Iranian territory. To reinforce the origins of the power whereby the victory was obtained, the hagiographer had a holy man display “the glorious sign of the cross” before Mar Qardagh while saying, “Behold, my son, the great sign of your victory. Be strong and powerful because the Lord has handed over your enemies into your hands.”³⁰ The sign by which Constantine—and his successors—had conquered now secured the victory of Iran over Rome, in the eyes of the Christian provincial elites of the Iranian Empire.

But if the historical Smbat Bagratuni was a loyal servant to the Sasanians in every respect, the legendary Mar Qardagh took his military victory on Iran’s behalf as an opportunity to demolish the fire temples of his region. The Christian cross was, in his late Sasanian hagiographer’s view, a symbol of his religion’s triumph over the falsehoods of Zoroastrianism. Even if the True Cross could bring about an Iranian triumph over the Romans, Christians could continue to see their faith as defined in opposition to the Good Religion, which East Syrian Christians—unlike Zoroastrians including the Sasanians—sought to disassociate from an ideally secular royal power. Even if Zoroastrians recognized the fundamental place of Christianity in the empire, the vocal militancy of ecclesiastical leaders who employed saint’s cults and their associated media as vehicles for anti-Zoroastrian polemics will have led even those Zoroastrians most favorably inclined toward Christians to question whether Christianity’s symbols could help to rally elites in the service of the Iranian Empire. The vision of a Christianity allied with albeit subordinate to imperial Zoroastrianism, which the throne metaphor outlines, overestimates the ease with which Christian institutions could be made to complement the court’s primary religious foundations. But with saints and relics beyond the state’s control organizing human collectivities with or without Sasanian participation, the ideological work that the courtly authors of the throne metaphor undertook was indispensable.

The court could not render Christianity a foundation of the empire without also harnessing the supernatural powers to which its institutions offered access, and those forces were identified more often with Roman than with Iranian rulers. The symbols of Christianity—holy men, saints, and relics—were storehouses of supernatural potency that served a variety of political actors simultaneously: the architects of orthodox Christian communities, irrespective of their worldly sovereigns; Roman emperors; and, farther afield, the Christian monarchs of Ethiopia and the Caucasus.31 Rather than allow East Syrian leaders to retain a monopoly on the powers of Christ and his saints, Husraw II sought to channel their forces into the service of the Iranian Empire, to place the Sasanian throne on a more solid footing. Unlike his contemporaries who employed similar assemblages of sacred bodies and objects, this Zoroastrian ruler was vulnerable to opposition, from both Zoroastrians and Christians, to the use of the same institutions that the most militant advocates of Christian orthodoxy, such as the author of the History of Mar Qardagh, employed to articulate Christian supremacy over Zoroastrianism. Courtly literary specialists would have to overcome, through arguments akin to those embodied in the throne metaphor, the apparent contradictions in the manipulation of holy men, saints, and crosses by a Zoroastrian king of kings . It is this ambivalence of Christian symbols in Iranian political culture during the reign of Husraw II that the following sections explore.

HUSRAW II AND THE SAINTS

The earliest account of a king of kings working in concert with Christ and his saints concerns Kawad I’s conquest of the Roman city of Amida in 502. The Chronicle of Pseudo–Zachariah of Mytilene, which a West Syrian monk composed in the vicinity of Amida in 569, recounts how the Sasanian had a vision of Christ during the siege of the city.³² The Christian God encouraged Kawad, who had begun to doubt the ability of his army to triumph over the Romans, to remain steadfast.³³ Christ promised to deliver Amida into his hands within three days, and after this happened, the Iranian army sacked the city and plundered its wealth. But as a sign of the connection between Christ and the king of kings, Kawad spared the city’s Great Church of the Forty Martyrs and the Amidenes who had taken refuge within its walls. He was even believed to have honored an icon of Christ.³⁴ This narrative developed in northern Mesopotamian Syriac literary circles, which crisscrossed the imperial frontiers, and survives in an East Syrian version in the Chronicle of Seert that further emphasizes the personal relationship between the ruler and Christ.³⁵ Its importance resides less in its possible historicity than in its revelation of a thoroughgoing reconception of the relationship between Sasanians and Christianity in the Fertile Crescent in the course of the sixth century. Sasanians, once regarded as persecutors of Christians, could now be considered, in Roman and Iranian sources alike, believers in the power of Christ and his saints, if not in Christianity as a whole. Even if Kawad did not confess the Christian faith, a step which subsequent Christian historiographers claimed that some of his successors took, he was regarded as capable of finding support in Christ for a victory over the most Christian of empires. Christ had hitherto been the exclusive protector of the Romans. In the near contemporaneous Chronicle of Pseudo–Joshua the Stylite, for example, supernatural Christian powers are frequently invoked to defend the Romans against the campaigns of Kawad, especially at Edessa, where the Mandylion of Christ rendered the city invincible.36 By 569, however, the Christian God had become more promiscuous in the eyes of Christians on both sides of the frontier, ultimately leading to his yielding even of Edessa to an Iranian king of kings in 609.

The saint most closely associated with the Sasanians was Sergius. A military saint whose cult proliferated widely across political and cultural frontiers in the fifth through seventh centuries, Sergius became a key participant in interimperial politics with Justinian I’s reconstruction of the city of Rusafa in a liminal zone where Romans and Ghassanid Arabs coruled, near the borderlands of Iran.³⁷ A shrine city whose churches overwhelmed its civic structures thus took shape in the steppe, attracting Roman, Arab, and Iranian devotees of a saint believed to bring military strength. Among the patrons of the saint and his shrine was Husraw II.³⁸ He made recourse to the saint on two occasions, through grand gestures directed not only toward Sergius but also toward the Sasanian court and army and the Roman allies who brought the king of kings to power. The first invocation of the saint took place during the joint Roman and Iranian campaign against the rebel Wahram Chobin in 591. Before confronting the forces of the usurper, Husraw II “supplicated Sergius . . . [and] solemnly promised to offer as first fruits of victory the famous symbol of the Lord’s Passion (this is designated a cross), to fashion it from beaten gold and to cover it with pearls and radiant Indian stones.”³⁹ After his triumph over Wahram, the king of kings returned to the shrine of Sergius the gem-encrusted cross that his father, Husraw I, had appropriated from Sergiopolis (Rusafa) in 542. Husraw II made his second petition to Sergius in 593/94, after his marriage with the Christian queen Shirin, when he appealed to the saint to grant him a son. As recompense for the ensuing birth of a son to Shirin, the king of kings again dispatched gifts to the shrine. In place of the cross that Shirin wore, which he had promised to send, Husraw II delivered five thousand silver drachms. He wanted to retain the cross in the possession of the royal household, he stated in a letter to the saint, an indication of his interest in the cross as a Sasanian symbol.⁴⁰

Two letters of dedication accompanied these royal gifts. The king of kings addressed the first to the ministers of the shrine, the second to the saint. The Roman historians Theophylact Simocatta and Evagrius Scholasticus recorded versions of these letters which modern commentators agree are precise transcriptions of the original messages, providing precious insight into the self-presentation of the Sasanian.⁴¹ In these letters, Husraw II emphasizes the personal nature of his relationship with the saint. Having heard of “the fortune of the most holy and renowned St. Sergius,” he had requested the latter’s support against a particular enemy, the rebellious military commander Zadesprates, the delivery of whose head he regarded as a sign of the saint’s favor.⁴² An even more intimate experience of Sergius attended the conception of the king of kings’ son:

And from the time when I had the said petition [that Sergius help Shirin to conceive] in my mind . . . ten more days did not elapse and you, holy one, not because I am worthy but because of your goodness, you appeared to me in a dream at night and thrice declared to me that Shirin had conceived in her womb. And in the dream itself, I thrice answered you in return and said, “Thank you, thank you.” And because of your holiness and charity, and because of your most holy name, and because you are the grantor of petition, from that day Shirin did not know what is customary for women.43

These professions of faith in the power of a Christian saint could not have been more public, associated as they were with trains of extravagant gifts on par with those of the grandest diplomatic exchanges between Rome and Iran. The king of kings did not discreetly supplicate Sergius—either to please Iranian or Roman Christians in his army or out of personal piety—but rather vaunted the peculiarly intimate relationship between Sasanian and saint, suggesting that the former had displaced the Roman emperor as the preeminent ally of the Near East’s most influential Christian cult figure. He was the privileged recipient of Sergius’s invisible assistance in battle and prophetic dreams sent by the saint. Husraw II adopted Sergius as a supernatural partner in rulership.⁴⁴

The king of kings simultaneously brought a living holy man into the royal entourage as an intermediary between himself and Christian supernatural powers: the patriarch Sabrisho I.⁴⁵ This particular bishop came to the episcopal throne of Seleucia-Ctesiphon as the protégé of Husraw II and Shirin. In the course of the sixth century, the prayers that the patriarchs had promised to utter on behalf of their rulers since the Synod of 410 became more potent in the eyes of the Sasanians. When he returned to the throne of Iran, Husraw II was openly hostile toward the patriarch Ishoyahb I (r. 581–85), for having failed to join him in flight and for having supplicated the Christian God on behalf of the wrong ruler, the usurper Wahram.⁴⁶ While his predecessors had frequently called upon bishops to render a variety of administrative, diplomatic, and even economic services, Husraw II was equally interested in their capacities of intercession with Christian forces. An ascetic graduate of the School of Nisibis (see chapter 3), Sabrisho is believed to have been elevated to the patriarchate only after having helped Husraw II to secure a military victory.⁴⁷ While on campaign against the rebel Wistahm in 594, the king of kings had a vision of a monk, the Chronicle of Seert reports, who encouraged him to join battle, leading to a Sasanian triumph. The monk revealed himself as Sabrisho in a dream, and the king of kings brought him from the humble bishopric of Lashom to the imperial capital.⁴⁸ In another version of the narrative, the Chronicle of Khuzestan places Sabrisho’s intercession on behalf of the Sasanian during his confrontation with Wahram rather than Wistahm.⁴⁹

Regardless of their differences, these narratives reveal a common understanding among Christians of the late Sasanian period of the king of kings’ interest in Sabrisho’s supernatural powers. Given his recognition of Sergius’s assistance in battle and appearance in a dream, the claim of Christian authors that Husraw II attributed a victory to the ascetic bishop Sabrisho should not be disregarded. The holy man played, after all, a leading role in the next major campaign. When the king of kings gathered his forces for an invasion of the Roman Empire in 604, he included Sabrisho, mounted on an ass, in the train of men who marched northward to Nisibis.50 The patriarch on campaign with Husraw II attracted the attention of Christian communities for the implicit or explicit approval of imperial warfare that his presence signaled. For East Syrian authors, this episode elicited tensions over the possibility of a saint sanctifying violence. According to the Chronicle of Seert, Husraw II embarked upon the campaign only because he believed that the prayers of Sabrisho would ensure an Iranian victory. After declaring that the king of kings would triumph, the patriarch tempered his prophecy with injunctions to treat the Roman Christians moderately and justly.⁵¹ For Husraw II, the presence of a living holy man in his retinue was a sign that Christian powers could be placed in the service of his empire, designed to persuade both conquerors and conquered of the feasibility of incorporating the Christian Roman Empire into Iran.

THE CONQUEST OF CHRISTIAN ROME

In 615, with the formidable army of the Iranian commander Shahin encamped outside Constantinople, the Roman Senate dispatched three envoys to the court of Husraw II. They offered nothing less than the full submission of the Roman emperor, Heraclius, to the king of kings, in terms that James Howard-Johnston has described as “grovelling”: “We beg too of your clemency to consider Heraclius, our most pious emperor, as a true son, one who is eager to perform the service of your serenity in all things. . . . And hereafter we shall be in enjoyment of tranquillity, through your gifts, which will be remembered forever, receiving an opportunity to offer prayers to God for your long-lasting prosperity.”⁵² A Roman emperor, who occupied the role of Christ’s representative on earth, now recognized, in the name of the same God, his subordination to an Iranian ruler. For the first time in their nearly four centuries of interaction—sometimes conflictual, sometimes peaceable—the Roman state recognized Iran’s claim to universal dominion and accepted a subject position. The reasons for this humiliating about-face were plain. From 603, Iranian forces had campaigned against the Romans with the startlingly novel ambition of conquering their empire.⁵³ Iranian forces had previously targeted individual Roman cities, only to withdraw upon the rendering of tribute. The early seventh-century Iranian campaigns, by contrast, incorporated entire provinces into Iran.⁵⁴ After crossing the Euphrates in 610, the Iranians entered Syria, Anatolia, and Palestine, seizing Antioch and Caesarea in 611 and Damascus in 613.⁵⁵ With the Iranian conquest of Egypt in 619, the Romans forfeited more than 30 percent of their fiscal revenues, together with the great bulk of their agriculturally productive lands.56 But they yielded more than merely material resources to Iran. After the Iranian conquest of Jerusalem in 614, the True Cross—the most potent sign of Roman sovereignty—was in the hands of a ruler whom the Christian Romans regarded as a pagan. The God in whose name the emperor ruled had turned against the Romans for their sins, as a monk of the Palestinian monastery of Choziba had foretold: “Lord God of mercies and lord of pity . . . take up your staff and strike this people, because they walk in ignorance.”⁵⁷ Even the most dedicated advocates of Christian Romanitas began to lose faith in the empire. As the imperial court considered the Iranian army assembled across the Bosporus at Chalcedon in 615, the loss not only of the revenues, resources, and infrastructures necessary for organizing resistance but also of all of the signs of forthcoming divine assistance was self-evident. The Romans thus turned to the ruler God whom seemed to favor.

Husraw II spurned their offer of submission. The envoys were imprisoned, their proposal ignored. This response marked a shift in the Iranian understanding of Rome’s place within its world order, which was no less dramatic an ideological innovation than the Senate’s acceptance of subordination. Until the beginning of the seventh century, the Iranian court had considered the Roman Empire a tributary state. If the early Sasanians had demonstrated Rome’s subject status through military victories over emperors, fifth- and sixth-century kings of kings had used Roman tributary payments secured either diplomatically or militarily as key symbols of Iranian universal sovereignty.⁵⁸ A mythical-historical account of Rome’s relationship with Iran began to circulate from at least the fifth century according to which Roman rulers descended from the Kayanian king Fereydun’s son Salm.⁵⁹ Roman and Iranian monarchs were, from the Sasanian perspective, genealogically related, a paradigm that could be deployed selectively in the service of either cooperation or conflict, depending on the circumstances. It is not accidental that Husraw II was the king of kings with both the most intimate and the most antagonistic relationships with Roman emperors. The amiable relationship between him and Maurice abruptly gave way to conflict in 602 when a military officer, Phocas, usurped the Roman throne and eliminated the reigning emperor and his house.⁶⁰ In response to the destruction of this lineage—whose members Husraw II, with his limited knowledge of Roman history, regarded as the legitimate rulers of Rome, genealogically intertwined with the Sasanians—the king of kings initiated the campaigns that culminated in the arrival of his forces at Chalcedon.⁶¹ Given the opportunity in 615 to accept Rome as a tributary power on Iranian terms with the Roman emperor as a client, the Iranian court fatefully decided to incorporate the Roman Empire directly in an enlarged Iran, which would momentarily reachieve its extent under the Achaemenians, extending from the Nile to the Oxus.⁶²

The conquerors accordingly aimed to subordinate rather than to devastate Roman infrastructures. Roman literary accounts describe the destruction of churches, monasteries, and cities, including, most shockingly, the torching of the holy city of Jerusalem: “The Lord’s tomb was burned and the far-famed temples of God, and, in short, all the precious things were destroyed.”63 The conquests were, of course, violent, entailing assaults on defensive architecture and resistant populations and punitive measures of appalling scope.⁶⁴ Excavations around Jerusalem have uncovered mass burials, in which women and children outnumber adult males, that can be firmly dated to the decade of the city’s capture; the account of Strategius, a Greek-writing Palestinian monk, graphically describes the massacre of Christian captives at one such site, Mamilla.⁶⁵ But the archaeology of the Levant more generally has revealed more continuity than discontinuity during the era of Iranian rule. Throughout this period, although the cities of Anatolia that were contested began to devolve into fortified towns, the fully conquered urban structures of Syria and Palestine remained intact.⁶⁶ The rapidity with which a Roman city could rebound is clearest at Jerusalem. The famed burning of the city that captured the Roman imagination appears to have occurred only at a section of the northern wall.⁶⁷ If the new rulers put churches or other buildings to the torch, as the literary sources claim, they immediately repaired any damage that the holy places sustained, leaving no trace of a destructive conquest.⁶⁸ Beyond the holy city, in Transjordan, inscriptions from sites in the Hawran and elsewhere show that church construction, rather than destruction, continued apace.⁶⁹ Narratives of the conquerors as slayers of Christians and torchers of churches were responses to Iranian actions that were a greater danger to Christian Roman ideology—namely, the appropriation of the symbolic foundations of Christianity in its holiest places.

If the loss of the empire’s most productive lands drained the Roman fisc, the fall of Jerusalem called the very idea of a Christian Roman Empire into question. To rally the Romans in defense of what remained of their empire, the emperor Heraclius and his associates mobilized objects and texts in novel ways to reaffirm their Christian mission and to demonstrate the ongoing intervention of God and the saints on their behalf. The war against Iran was cast as a war on behalf of the Christian faith, to a much greater extent than earlier Roman-Iranian confrontations had been.⁷⁰ Heraclius had arrived in Constantinople to seize power from Phocas in 610 on “ships that had on their masts reliquaries [of the saints] and icons of the Mother of God,” announcing the intensified participation of supernatural agents in imperial politics that was characteristic of his reign.⁷¹ When the Iranians joined forces with the Avars to besiege Constantinople in 626, the icon of the Mother of God of Blachernai, which was paraded around the city, was believed to have repulsed the invaders.⁷² With the True Cross in Iran, alternative objects such as icons were deployed to channel divine power in the service of Rome. The procession of the icon of Blachernai constituted a performance of the narrative simultaneously disseminated in sermons, poems, and hagiographies according to which the Iranians were the enemies of the Christian God, whose identification with the Roman Empire was inviolate. The Heraclian reaction thus entailed the demonization of an empire that sixth-century Romans had often regarded as a partner and even a civilization worthy of admiration.73

Roman poets, historians, and hagiographers transformed Iran into God’s enemy in the aftermath of 614. Contemporary witnesses, as noted above, considered Roman defeat a consequence of Christian sin, a collective failure to fulfill the obligations that God demanded of them. The Romans, in this view, merited the conquests as punishment, and the Iranians were mere pedagogical instruments of divine will. As Phil Booth has recently shown, Jerusalem’s fall caused some prominent ascetics to work to purify Christian communities to appease a malcontent deity, while others placed responsibility on the Iranians and their paganism, which necessarily rendered them barbarians. In his poems recounting the conquest, Sophronius of Jerusalem, a leading ascetic thinker of the age and a future patriarch of Jerusalem, depicted the Iranians as murderous, demonically inspired barbarians seeking the destruction of Christianity.⁷⁴ This was the representation around which Heraclius rallied what remained of his empire. In an echo of this kind of rhetoric, the eighth- and ninth-century chronicler Theophanes Confessor reported that, on receiving envoys in 615, Husraw II had demanded that Heraclius renounce Christ and worship the sun.⁷⁵ It was not merely the survival of the empire but also its religion that was at stake. To propagate this message in elite circles, the court poet George of Pisidia produced poems for the emperor that present him as God’s representative waging war against a wicked reincarnation of Exodus’s Pharaoh.⁷⁶ The destruction in 628 of Zoroastrianism’s most sacred site, the fire of Adur Gushnasp at Takht-e Suleyman, was celebrated as a pious act. Because of the Iranians’ enmity toward Christianity, Heraclius could promise his troops eternal life in exchange for death in battle, eliding the distinct categories of soldier and martyr: “When God wills it, one man will rout a thousand. So let us sacrifice ourselves to God for the salvation of our brothers. May we win the crown of martyrdom so that we may be praised in the future and receive our recompense from God.”⁷⁷ The emperor’s appeals to Christ and the saints were intended not only to unite what remained of the Romans but also to counter perceptions that the Christian God had abandoned Rome in favor of Iran. The object that embodied the bond between empire and religion was, after all, now at the court of the king of kings.

THE TRUE CROSS IN IRAN

The True Cross was the sign by which Constantine the Great had conquered, and since its purported discovery by his mother, Helena, and its installation in Jerusalem, its wood had embodied the soteriological purpose of the Roman Empire in the divine economy.78 If the breaking of the bond between the cross and Roman victory led some to question God’s identification with the Roman emperor, Heraclius’s advocates emphasized the taking of the cross as the clearest indication of the Iranian intention to destroy the Christian religion, not merely its Roman, sacred-historical repository. The cross loomed large in the aforementioned authors’ reactions to 614. Writing in the 630s, after the cross had been returned to Jerusalem, Strategius composed the most detailed account of Iranian treatment of the relic, known as the Capture of Jerusalem, which has survived in an Arabic and a more reliable Georgian translation. Strategius aimed to commemorate the events of the previous decades in terms that would place the renewed pact between Christianity and Roman imperialism, represented in Heraclius’s restoration of the cross in 630, on a solid historical footing.⁷⁹ In his representation, the Iranians had captured the cross to prove the falsehood of Christianity and to drain the object of its supernatural, empire-sustaining power. The Christians who had been exiled from Jerusalem to Mesopotamia were required, Strategius reported, to trample upon the cross as they departed the city.⁸⁰ The Iranians had presided over its ritual humiliation, whereas the emperor Heraclius had introduced, by the time of the text’s composition, the feast of the exaltation of the cross.

But even as he depicted the conquerors as wicked enemies of the faith who had sullied the cross, Strategius intimated that the Iranian court had made rather creative use of the object’s potency. The relic, he reported, was installed at court when Zachariah, the exiled patriarch of Jerusalem, was brought there for questioning. The Capture of Jerusalem thus reveals that Husraw II placed the earthly manifestation of Christ’s religiopolitical power in intimate proximity to himself for an audience of Roman Christians, a narrative in keeping with what other East Syrian sources have reported concerning the ruler’s manipulation of the cross. Strategius acknowledged that Iranians honored the cross in ways that the East Syrian Chronicle of Khuzestan, to be discussed momentarily, has documented. To explain the court’s recognition of its power, Strategius described the seemingly miraculous exploits of Zachariah during a disputation with a mowbed, after which “no one dared to approach the Lord’s cross and the wood of our Savior, for fear seized all of them on account of this sign.”⁸¹ Because of Zachariah’s demonstration of its capacity to triumph over Zoroastrianism, the king of kings entrusted the holy cross to Shirin, who reverently safeguarded it in a royal palace. There is a hint here of what Roman authors generally either ignored or suppressed: the translation to Iran not only of the symbols of Christian Roman power but also of the supernatural support of the Christian God and his saints, which relics, holy men, and holy places now in Iranian hands were believed to mediate. Strategius had to demonstrate that the power of the cross resided with the holy man Zachariah, not with the “evil king.” He expressly stated for his uncertain readers that Husraw II was “not a Christian king” but the “king of Persia.”⁸² The bishops, monks, and poets who worked to communicate God’s unfailing support of Heraclius in the face of the loss of hitherto reliable signs of divine favor were also addressing a greater challenge to the continued existence of the Christian Roman Empire. In his efforts to reinforce the position of the Christian churches and to mobilize Christian powers both heavenly and earthly, Husraw II built on a long tradition of Sasanian patronage of Christianity to incorporate previously Roman Christian institutions into Iran. There was truth, from the Iranian perspective, in the Roman anxiety that the Christian God had abandoned Rome and chosen a Zoroastrian king of kings as the executor of his will.

Acquiring the True Cross, the sign of divine favor, was a clear objective of the conquering forces. According to accounts of Jerusalem’s capture, the elites of the city buried the relic in a vegetable garden in an attempt to prevent the Iranians from plundering it.83 But the conquerors were not content to despoil the Jerusalemites of only the gold, silver, and other high-value goods discovered in their churches. An object of singularly immaterial value was their chief interest. Shahrwaraz, the commander of the conquerors in the Levant, had Jerusalem’s bishop and notables tortured until they revealed its location. Brought from the garden to the victorious general, Christianity’s most sacred relic entered Zoroastrian hands. For an early seventh-century East Syrian historiographer whose work came to be included in the Chronicle of Khuzestan, the revelation of the cross to Shahrwaraz was the clearest sign of divine favor for the Sasanians, more significant even than their unprecedented victories: “Because divine power had crushed the Romans before the Persians because they had shed the innocent blood of Maurice and his sons, God left no place unknown that the Romans did not reveal to them.”⁸⁴ So supportive was the Christian God of Husraw II, the historiographer contended, that he allowed his cross to be revealed to the Iranians, to be translated from Rome to Iran.

In Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capture of the cross was also taken a sign of the Christian God’s support for Iran. While Roman narratives portray its humiliation and violent seizure, the East Syrian historiographical tradition represents the translation as the deliberate, cautious installation of the relic at the symbolic center of the Iranian Empire. The Chronicle of Khuzestan recounts the respectful delivery of the cross from Jerusalem to the Iranian court: “[The conquerors] prepared a number of chests and sent [the True Cross] together with countless vessels and precious objects to Husraw. When [the convoy] reached Yazdin, he organized a great feast. With the permission of the king, he took a piece of [the cross] and then sent it to the king. [The king] placed it in a position of honor with the sacred vessels in the new treasury that he had built at Ctesiphon.”⁸⁵ It was the task of the administrator of the fisc, Yazdin, to receive plunder from the conquered territories, including the cross. But the relic was not regarded as conventional plunder. If the Christian aristocrat organized a feast for its arrival on his own authority, the king of kings honored the cross before a courtly audience, according to the chronicler. The Chronicle of Khuzestan has preserved an East Syrian perspective on the translation of the cross to Seleucia-Ctesiphon which considers this act the legitimate transfer of the symbol of Christian political power to Husraw II.86 Some East Syrians, such as the author of the History of Mar Qardagh, might have seen in their newfound access to relics of the True Cross a sign of divine favor for the joining of Christianity and empire in Iran. East Syrian ecclesiastical and secular elites were both now able to participate in the distribution of fragments of the cross, a process that gathered pace in the Roman world in the latter half of the sixth century.⁸⁷

The most important aspect of the above passage, however, is its mention of the installation of the cross in a “new treasury” at Ctesiphon. Victorious Sasanians typically celebrated their triumphs over Rome with elaborate architectural projects. The early Sasanians constructed complexes around rock reliefs in Fars. Husraw I erected the storied palace known as Ayvan-e Kisra to the south of Ctesiphon, which likely included mosaics and stuccos depicting his victories. Husraw II commissioned an extraordinarily ambitious interlinked set of palaces and monumental rock reliefs along the royal road in Walashfarr, not least the masterful representation of the triumphant ruler at Taq-e Bustan (see chapter 2). But the architectural projects of this king of kings in the royal cities remain undocumented, both textually and archaeologically.⁸⁸ The reference to the construction of a new treasury raises the still unanswerable question of how the ruler transformed the capital to reflect the enlarged horizons of the Iranian Empire.⁸⁹ The unfinished excavations of Ctesiphon and its environs have revealed considerable development in the areas immediately surrounding the palace of Husraw I, where this treasury would have been constructed. Archaeologists without knowledge of the Chronicle of Khuzestan’s account have long suggested that the complex at Tell Dhahab was a treasury, but any such precise connections will remain speculative until excavations resume.⁹⁰ What is certain is that the treasury was in the expansive complex of palaces, paradises, and hunting grounds that constituted the locus of royal authority. This was the space where kings of kings performed for their various constituencies of aristocrats and religious specialists. One instrument for the performances that a king of kings who ruled from the Oxus to the Nile would wish to undertake was the object most sacred to the Christians who now formed a major component of the imperial elite. Once transferred to Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the True Cross became an indispensable part of the court’s ideological tool kit, an incontrovertible sign that the Christian God and his saints were advocates of Ērānšahr. In an empire whose western provinces were overwhelmingly Christian, the cross as a symbol that all Christians could recognize as endowing legitimacy and supernaturally sanctioned authority was a resource full of potentiality for a king of kings anxious to consolidate his power over recently conquered territories and East Syrian and Armenian elites.

IRANIANS AND ROMANS: A SASANIAN EMPEROR

For anywhere from ten to upward of twenty years, the provinces of the Roman Near East were territories of Iran. This is commonly known as an era of occupation, but the inhabitants of the conquered regions could not have known that Iranian rule would be temporary. The facts on the ground pointed in a rather different direction. If historians have focused on the damage done to Roman political institutions in advance of the Islamic conquests, the ways in which the Iranians consolidated their rule have received less attention. There are two fundamental methods that the new rulers used to integrate conquered territories and populations into the empire: the installment of an Iranian governing elite and the cultivation of an indigenous elite loyal to Iran. Alongside the great generals, marzbān were stationed in cities that had previously served as the centers for the Roman administration, such as Caesarea Maritima, Edessa, and Alexandria.91 The corpus of Middle Persian papyri documents the presence throughout Egypt circa 619–29 of cavalry forces, together with their commanders and ancillary officials, who policed traffic on the Nile and supervised the extraction of the region’s resources.⁹² A certain Shahralanyozan, the so-called steward of the court (kār-framān ī dar), directed the coordination of the already existing network of Roman officials and a team of Iranian scribes and officials to collect taxes in gold in Egypt.⁹³ Although Iranians displaced the highest levels of the Roman administration in the conquered territories, they depended on the collaboration of myriad intermediaries between themselves and provincial populations. They thus turned to already authoritative Roman elites who had remained in their cities during the course of the conquests and were willing to place themselves in the service of the king of kings. If the Egyptian papyri reveal the results of such collaboration, the pro-Roman historiographical literature tends to obscure the forging of alliances between conquerors and conquered. The one exception is the West Syrian historiographical tradition, which, as we will see, could regard Husraw II favorably. At Edessa, the well-known house of the Rusafoye, major patrons of the West Syrians, remained in power. Husraw II was reported to have dined in the palace of Johannes Rusafoyo while on his way to Constantinople in 580, and after the conquest, Johannes’s son Sergius was brought to court to become “one of the companions of his table” before returning to power as an agent of Iran in Edessa.⁹⁴ There were doubtless many such Roman elites invited to the banquets of the king of kings, military commanders, and other Iranian aristocrats, who have gone undocumented.

The Iranian regime in the West sought to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the conquered populations on the basis of its patronage of Christians and their institutions.⁹⁵ In contrast with Roman narratives of the anti-Christian violence of the Iranians, they presented themselves, at least through particular actions, as no less supportive of the Christian faith than their Roman predecessors, much as Husraw I represented himself as a patron of the Roman people.96 Historians have downplayed the possibility of Roman Christians’ adapting to Iranian political structures or recognizing the king of kings as the rightful successor of the Christian Roman emperor.⁹⁷ But the systematic appropriation of the accoutrements of Christian supernatural power—the selfsame saints and relics that Heraclius so ostentatiously deployed—permitted the new rulers to attempt to overcome the obvious religious distinctiveness of the invading empire, with a view to cultivating constituencies of Christian Romans. The elites of Iran, Christian or otherwise, were no longer the only audience for Husraw II’s communicative acts. The overwhelmingly Christian elites of previously Roman territories needed to be integrated into the imperial network, and courtly symbolic innovations addressed the aristocratic houses of Edessa, the urbane citizens of Alexandria, and the diligent officials of Upper Egypt, among countless others. The relationship with Christianity that Husraw II had constructed enabled him to be so audacious as to seek to rule the Roman Empire. With the legitimacy of the Christian Roman head imperial office vitiated in the aftermath of the conquest, the king of kings, who was a friend of the saints and a kinsman of the house of Maurice, was well placed to stand in the line of the successors of Constantine. Developing the strategies that their ruler had deployed during the first decades of his reign, the Iranian governing elites worked to communicate their support for Christianity and, vice versa, the unfailing sanction of the Christian God for Iran’s expansion into Roman lands, as the Christian historiographical traditions discussed below make plain. To include the Roman Near East in Ērānšahr in the sixth century, the king of kings and his representatives in the provinces acted in the manner of Roman rulers, consolidating their authority through the construction of churches, the oppression of Jews and other unbelievers, and the negotiation of conflicts over Christian orthodoxy.

Though known for causing the destruction of Jerusalem, Husraw II cast himself as the restorer of the holy city. Roman Christian texts describe the efforts of an abbot, Modestos, whom Iranian authorities brought to power as the vicar of the exiled patriarch Zachariah in 616, to rebuild the city’s ecclesiastical monuments in the wake of 614.⁹⁸ Although the archaeological reports discussed above show Roman accounts of the razing of Jerusalem to be exaggerated, the violent seizing and plundering of the city left considerable damage. There was grassroots fundraising among the conquered to make repairs. John the Almsgiver, the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, dedicated vast amounts of Egyptian wealth to the project. The extent of Modestos’s mobilization of the network of bishops crisscrossing the Iranian Empire is clear from the letter he sent appealing for financial assistance from Komitas, the Armenian catholicos—whom the patriarch of Jerusalem regarded as a Miaphysite heretic.⁹⁹ Within several years of the conquest, the bulk of the churches in Jerusalem were once again in use, even if the Church of the Anastasis remained in disrepair.100 What the emphasis on the patriarchal vicar’s activities has ignored is Sasanian support for the renovation of the holy city. The reported restorations of Modestos would have taken place under the auspices of the Iranian authorities. Husraw II, moreover, ordered and funded Jerusalem’s reconstruction, according to Pseudo-Sebeos and the Chronicle of Khuzestan.¹⁰¹ The latter reports that Yazdin dispatched large sums of silver to Jerusalem at the order of the king of kings and presided over the renewal of its sanctuaries and the construction of new monasteries and churches. Emerging from Iranian contexts, these two histories are more aware of courtly acts and representations than are Roman accounts, and they have preserved an important aspect of Husraw II’s policies in the conquered territories. The king of kings positioned himself as the rebuilder of a Jerusalem whose monuments embodied Roman Christian imperial power, implicitly to continue the tradition of Christian rulers patronizing the holy city. Modestos might well have cooperated with the Iranian authorities, but given his subsequent renown, Roman authors could not include this aspect of his tenure.¹⁰² Like Constantine and Justinian, Husraw II aimed to leave his mark on the city, whose imperial symbolism he had harnessed to Ērānšahr.

For Roman emperors, the construction of ecclesiastical buildings at Jerusalem entailed the suppression of Jews, through the erasure of the Jewish past or more direct forms of violence.¹⁰³ In tandem with the increasing dependence of the emperors on Christ and the saints for legitimacy, Jews were ever more forcefully excluded from the political community of Roman Christians. In the seventh century, Roman anti-Judaism culminated in forced conversions and expulsions during the reigns of Phocas and Heraclius.¹⁰⁴ The latter forbade Jews from residing within three miles of Jerusalem when he restored the cross to the city in 630. As Gilbert Dagron has observed, “the logic of the victory of the cross” precipitated this reissuing of a decree that the emperors Hadrian and Constantine had once promulgated.¹⁰⁵ But when Husraw II had restored Jerusalem, he had expelled the Jews from its confines, according to Pseudo-Sebeos.¹⁰⁶ In applying a traditionally Roman edict of expulsion to communicate the divinely sanctioned nature of a victory, the king of kings had preempted Heraclius. The Roman returned to a Jerusalem that, Dagron has suggested, had been emptied of Jews more than a decade before.¹⁰⁷ This marked a sea change in Iranian policies toward Jewish communities in the conquered territories. Jewish elites in the cities of the Levant tended readily to accept Iranian rule as a welcome respite from Roman persecution.¹⁰⁸ Roman authors developed episodes of Jews collaborating with the new regime into polemical accounts of their inveterate hostility toward Christians and the Roman Empire, but Jewish sources represent the conquests as a new beginning. When Shahrwaraz took Jerusalem, the era of Christian domination came to an end. Contemporaneous piyyutim, Jewish liturgical poems, celebrate the Iranian victory as a liberation from Edom, the biblical archetype of a persecutory state, and as a portent of the Messiah’s imminent arrival.109 But within three years such hopes were dashed. The Temple, which had reopened in 614, was closed and the recently empowered leader of the Jewish community slain.¹¹⁰ The Sasanians, according to one contemporaneous piyyut, came to suppress Jews just as their Roman predecessors had.

If Roman authors overlooked Iranian measures against the Jews in Jerusalem, the accounts of the piyyutim find confirmation in the works of Christian chroniclers of the Iranian world. The Chronicle of Khuzestan recounts how the Jews, in league with the resident Iranian commander, plundered the shrines and reliquaries of Jerusalem in the aftermath of the conquest, until Yazdin—ever the leading patron of the Christians in the eyes of this work’s historiographer—reported their deeds to the king of kings. Husraw II then commanded that the Jews of the city be dispossessed and crucified.¹¹¹ But the History of Pseudo-Sebeos describes their expulsion rather than execution. Its Armenian historian, moreover, connected the sudden reversal of Jewish fortunes with the restoration of Jerusalem’s Christians to a position of dominance: “Then a command arrived from the king to have mercy on those who had fallen prisoner, to rebuild the city, and to reestablish [its inhabitants] there in each one’s rank. He ordered the Jews to be expelled from the city. And they promptly carried out the king’s command with great alacrity. They appointed a certain archpriest over the city by the name of Modestos.”¹¹² Together with the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s ecclesiastical structures and the elevation of its Christian elite, the Iranian court undertook an operation unprecedented in its history: the forcible expulsion of an entire community on the basis of its religious identity. This was a departure from the court’s long-standing collaboration with Jewish religious leaders, from the established exilarch of Babylonia to the rabbis of conquered Roman cities. Husraw II’s command recalls the measures of Hadrian and Constantine. Expelling the Jews of Jerusalem rendered the king of kings a more Christian ruler than the emperors who had immediately preceded him. In proclaiming his edict of 630, issued on behalf of the Christian leaders who came to power under the Sasanian, Heraclius was imitating Husraw II as much as Constantine.

The Iranian regime’s actions in Jerusalem reveal some of the self-conscious ways in which the conquerors cultivated the loyalty of Roman Christians. The conquered populations, however, hardly formed uniform or unified Christian communities, as the Christian Roman emperors had come to realize. The sectarian landscape of the Roman Near East was decidedly more complex than the familiar mix of East Syrian, Caucasian, and West Syrian communities in Iran. Controversies over the definition of Christ’s nature at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 had divided Christians throughout the eastern half of the empire, leading to the formation of institutionalized communities—West Syrian or Syrian Orthodox and Coptic churches—that had their own bishops and monasteries but were united in their rejection of Chalcedon and the Roman emperors who sought to enforce its Dyophysite language as the touchstone of orthodoxy.113 The Iranian court had had knowledge of the West Syrian church as an entity distinct from the Church of the East since Simeon of Beit Arsham, a propagandist of Miaphysite orthodoxy, had brought the former’s beliefs to the attention of Kawad I in the early sixth century.¹¹⁴ The West Syrian movement gained ground in Iranian Mesopotamia throughout the Sasanian era, but its religious leaders did not attain political prominence until the Roman conquests, at which point they rivaled the Church of the East.¹¹⁵ Once vast numbers of Chalcedonian, West Syrian, and Coptic Christians entered the Iranian Empire, the king of kings came face to face with the same dilemma that the Roman emperors had encountered of how to unify Christian communities prone to centrifugal controversies.

With firsthand experience of Roman society and political culture, a Christian spouse as an intermediary, and intimate relationships with ecclesiastical leaders, Husraw II was better placed than his predecessors to comprehend and to transcend the differences of his Christian subjects. Kawad had reportedly solicited statements of divergent Christian doctrines in the first quarter of the sixth century, and the question of Christ’s nature became ever more urgent at the synods that the Church of the East held at the behest of the court in Seleucia-Ctesiphon.¹¹⁶ But Iranians directly intervened in Christian controversies only in the course of the conquests. The conquerors were particularly concerned with the relationship between the East Syrian Church and the West Syrian Church, which were in the process of dividing some of the most strategic populations of the empire, including the inhabitants of northern Mesopotamian and the Arabian frontier. The West Syrians’ prevalence in Syria and alliance with the Egyptian Church made their variety of orthodoxy particularly interesting to the king of kings. His wife Shirin was known to have favored their leaders, in addition to the East Syrian hierarchy traditionally associated with the Sasanian dynasty.¹¹⁷ If Iranian elites gained knowledge of the nuances of intra-Christian conflicts on an informal basis, through conversations and negotiations with ecclesiastical leaders in the cities they conquered, the court quickly adapted instruments for regulating doctrinal controversies characteristic of Justinian and other effective emperors as the conquests gathered pace. Ultimately, at least one formal discussion and disputation was convened in the presence of Husraw II, in the 610s, to which leading representatives of both Syrian Churches and an Armenian contingent aligned with the West Syrians presented their distinctive versions of orthodoxy. It was not only in Constantinople that a ruler sought to undo the divisions that Chalcedon had generated.

The conquerors carefully distinguished between Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians as they established structures of rule in formerly Roman cities. Ecclesiastical leaders who adhered to the creed of the emperor were frequently displaced in favor of bishops whom Roman authorities considered heretical.¹¹⁸ In Edessa, the Iranians initially placed an East Syrian on the episcopal throne, the same strategy that the court had deployed to discipline the Christian communities of Armenia in the fifth century. But once the potential of garnering the loyalty of the Syrian Orthodox Church became evident, a West Syrian was elevated as the bishop of the city, where Christological controversies had incited violent contestations of ecclesiastical power throughout the preceding century.119 The transfer of ecclesiastical leadership from Chalcedonian to West Syrian bishops took place throughout Syria, even in the great see of Antioch. West Syrian leaders had already laid the foundations for a rapprochement with Iran. In response to the Romans’ systematic repression of the opponents of Chalcedon, they began to imagine a world without a Roman Empire decades before the conquest, effectively disassociating Christianity from Romanitas.¹²⁰ The hagiographer, historian, and bishop John of Ephesus, for example, had come to regard the Sasanian dynasty as a possible ally of the West Syrian Church in the mid-sixth century.¹²¹ The communities of this church, moreover, spanned the Fertile Crescent, their networks easily crisscrossing the boundaries of the Roman and Iranian Empires. The conquerors thus viewed the leaders of these communities, which were not closely identified with the Roman Empire, as worthy of their confidence. Chalcedonians were not, however, uniformly displaced. In strongholds of Roman orthodoxy, such as Jerusalem, they remained in power. In Alexandria, John the Almsgiver continued to represent the Constantinopolitan Church, even as the Egyptian Orthodox gained greater room for maneuver. Iranian patronage of West Syrians nevertheless marked the beginning of a period of ecclesiastical institution building for the non-Chalcedonians, of a kind not seen since Theodora, the wife of Justinian, extended her support to them. It was in the first decade after the conquest that the Syrian Orthodox and Egyptian Churches first articulated a common, Miaphysite doctrine, which became the basis for institutional cooperation. In 616 Athanasius of Antioch sailed to Egypt to unite the two churches, which the Roman state had kept separate: “The truth has appeared from the land of Egypt, and righteousness has arisen from the East. Egypt and Syria have become one in doctrine.”¹²² The Iranian regime inaugurated an era of triumph for Miaphysite orthodoxy.

Apart from simply suppressing Chalcedonians in the way that Maurice and Phocas had suppressed West Syrians, the Iranian regime addressed the debates over doctrine that caused Christian communities to fracture. At the outset of the conquests, the court recognized that its privileging of the patriarch of the Church of the East could hinder its efforts to cultivate the loyalty of Christians in Roman territory. Husraw II therefore refused to appoint a successor to the patriarch Gregory after the latter’s death in 609. For the first time since 410, the Iranian court did not identify with one particular church, giving it greater flexibility in its negotiations with Christian communities.¹²³ The Church of the East remained without a suzerain bishop for the next eighteen years, during which the aristocrat Yazdin was among its most powerful representatives, together with some leading clerics such as the abbot Babai the Great.124 Also in this period, the most influential Christian leaders in the Iranian Empire came to stand at opposite ends of the doctrinal spectrum, as the East and West Syrians were diametrically opposed on the question of Christ’s nature. An inadvertent consequence of the expansion of the empire was the accelerated fracturing of Christian communities that had, from the court’s perspective, seemed solid. Antagonistic relations between the East and West Syrians only intensified in the 610s, leading the court to intervene more directly in Christian controversies just a few years after suspending the East Syrian patriarchate. Neither East nor West Syrians were content to leave the position of the supreme bishop vacant, and rival sectarians attempted to persuade Husraw II to appoint someone from their ranks as patriarch. When the court physician Gabriel of Sinjar, whom the West Syrians considered their Constantine, recommended that a Miaphysite be appointed to the see, the East Syrian bishops dispatched a mission of scholars to Seleucia-Ctesiphon to keep the position in Dyophysite hands.¹²⁵ The result was a formal disputation, a synod on a modest scale, organized under the auspices of the court in 612.¹²⁶

According to the History of George the Priest, which the contemporary Babai the Great composed, the king of kings invited representatives of the sects to present their competing doctrines in writing, in translation from Syriac to Middle Persian.¹²⁷ He then supervised the ensuing Christological debates, requiring the disputants to articulate their understandings of the nature of Christ and his relationship with the Mother of God, as well as the historical development of their respective doctrines. Babai, an eyewitness to these events, reported that Husraw II sought out potential middle ground between Miaphysite and Dyophysite doctrines, demanding, for example, that the East Syrians avoid invoking the highly controversial theologian Nestorius (386–451).¹²⁸ The king of kings acted in a manner that recalls the efforts of a theologically engaged emperor such as Justinian to design a Christological compromise. He even allowed his wife Shirin to favor the West Syrians while he himself attempted to achieve a transcendent equilibrium, much as Theodora had patronized the anti-Chalcedonians on behalf of her avowedly Chalcedonian husband. Unlike his Roman counterparts, however, Husraw II recognized that the intransigence of the most militant members of these communities was insurmountable. Neither doctrine was endorsed, nor was a third Christology innovated. The seat of the patriarch at Seleucia-Ctesiphon remained vacant until the end of the king of kings’ reign. Instead of crafting a compromise, such as the Monothelete doctrine of Heraclius, he seems to have enjoined theological moderation upon the Christians at court. A few years after the debate of 612, the learned, ascetic, militantly Miaphysite Maruta found East and West Syrians at court partaking of the same Communion, the preeminent expression of Christian unity.¹²⁹ The studied ambiguity of a court that invited definitions of orthodoxy without approving a single normative formula of Christian belief allowed the empire’s various Christian sects to claim royal sanction for their peculiar doctrine. Nonetheless, the king of kings positioned himself as the arbiter of Christian orthodoxy, taking from the Roman emperors the authority to validate theological truth.

In the aftermath of the conquests, Husraw II appropriated the sacred-historical sacred role of the Christian emperors, fulfilling the obligations that accompanied the possession of the True Cross: to restore Jerusalem, to subordinate the Jews, and to regulate Christian doctrine. The effects of this package of measures on the populations of the conquered territories are difficult to discern, as the bulk of the surviving literary evidence was composed from a pro-Roman perspective, in the service of Heraclius’s project of reconquest. Nevertheless, the West Syrian historiographical tradition views the Iranian conquest of the Near East as precipitating the victory of orthodoxy. The Iranians were the instruments with which God banished the memory of Chalcedon from the region, according to the twelfth-century compiler Michael the Syrian.130 And the rapid dissemination of the account of Husraw II’s conversion, which emanated from Roman Chalcedonian milieux in Syria, in both Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian communities in the early seventh century suggests that many Christians, even literary elites, could consider the Sasanian a Christian ruler. Through the exercise of the functions of a Christian emperor, he gained support as a legitimate ruler over Christians even among those who did not regard him as a convert, part of a long Christian tradition of accepting the overlordship of unbelievers in anticipation of the completion of the religion’s universalizing mission. At the level of quotidian practice, a Coptic papyrus well illustrates the ease with which Christian and Iranian ideologies of rulership could be married. Fourteen villagers promised an Iranian official that they would provide him with the merchandise they owed “by God and the good fortune of the king of kings.” Their statement, Andrea Gariboldi has observed, “curiously seems to mix Christian elements with the mythical Persian concept of the king’s xwarrah.”¹³¹ The Iranians appropriated not only the infrastructures of the conquered empire but also its religious ideology.

HUSRAW’S CROSSES IN THE BOOK OF KINGS

Thus far this chapter has primarily been concerned with the evolving role of the Iranian court vis-à-vis its Christian subjects. How did Zoroastrians, especially the great nobles and religious specialists who formed the most powerful actors in the governing elite, perceive the manipulation of Christian symbols? Did they accept the metaphor of a throne that legs of different religions upheld as a viable vision of a Zoroastrian empire? As chapter 1 emphasizes, the wehdēn were hardly unanimous in their attitudes toward the adherents and institutions of other religions. Reconstructing the full range of responses to the mixing of Zoroastrian and Christian symbols is impossible, given the parlous state of our evidence for the late Sasanian aristocratic and priestly classes. What remains are the narratives of political history that early Islamic historiographers preserved, reflecting the ways in which the royal court, or an aristocratic faction, purposefully reshaped the past. In the various recensions of the Book of Kings, courtly literary specialists trained in the Avesta and its interpretation endeavored to recount events in a manner that demonstrates the kings of kings’ successful exercise of cosmological kingship in their historical circumstances but in the writers’ terms. Among their counterparts were the aristocratic authors of a literature of rebellion—such as the Book of Wahram Chobin, which recounts the 590–91 rebellion of its namesake—which survives only in fragments.132 The Book of Wahram Chobin was composed in opposition to the Book of Kings—that is, in order to demonstrate that Ohrmazd IV, Husraw II, and indeed the entire Sasanian dynasty had failed to practice kingship properly and had thereby forfeited their claim to the throne. Both of these historiographical traditions address Husraw II’s relationship with Christianity, indicating that his ideological innovations in this domain were a central feature of his reign for Christian and Zoroastrian elites.

As part of its assault on Sasanian kingship, the Book of Wahram Chobin makes use of an account of the conversion to Christianity of Ardashir I that had begun to circulate in the sixth century. Its East Syrian author, Alexander Schilling has shown, modeled Ardashir’s conversion on Zoroastrian accounts of the turn of the Kayanian king Wishtasp to the teaching of Zoroaster, with the aim of demonstrating that the Christian faith could provide a source of legitimizing xwarrah for the dynasty.¹³³ The appearance of this story, which originated in Christian circles, in a narrative that emerged from an aristocratic milieu attests to its remarkably wide diffusion. Aristocratic communities that supported the rebellion of Wahram Chobin against the dynasty, however, found in the account an example of the Sasanian abrogation of the obligations of legitimate kingship.¹³⁴ According to al-Dīnawarī, who based his work on the Book of Wahram Chobin, aristocratic rebels evoked Ardashir’s conversion to raise the specter of the Sasanians and their court abandoning Zoroastrianism for Christianity. In Iranian political culture, the aristocratic houses possessed the authority legitimately to displace a ruler who failed to fulfill his obligations, which included the maintenance of the Good Religion.¹³⁵ If earlier rebellions had sought to replace one Sasanian with another, Wahram Chobin and his allies were the first to try to eliminate the dynasty and to place the Mihranid house on the throne.¹³⁶ For such a purpose, the story of the founder of the Sasanian dynasty converting to Christianity was highly convenient. The court’s very public use of Christian symbols in the decades of the Book of Wahram Chobin’s composition, moreover, would have lent credibility to the claims of anti-Sasanian aristocrats that Husraw II was a closet Christian.

Courtly historiographers responded to criticisms of the Sasanian embrace of Christian symbols. Because of the catastrophic nature of Husraw II’s defeat at the hands of Heraclius, narratives of the Roman conquests were either suppressed or only selectively included in surviving versions of the royal histories.137 There are no traces of the campaigns in Firdawsī, and only skeletal accounts in al-Ṭabarī and al-Dīnawarī. We thus lack a courtly perspective on the translation of the True Cross or the behavior of the king of kings and his agents in the conquered territories. In accounts of Roman-Iranian relations in the decades preceding the conquests, however, Husraw II’s controversial engagement with Christian materials is a leading theme. The alliance with Maurice put him in possession of potentially authoritative Roman regalia, gifts that the emperor had sent to mark the definitive defeat of Wahram Chobin. Among the precious goods that the Romans dispatched were a bejeweled cross and brocade robes decorated with crosses, according to the Šāhnāme.¹³⁸ In an account that well captures the ideological conundrum of his reign, the king of kings reportedly sought the guidance of Zoroastrian advisers as to what should be done with such overtly Christian objects. The wearing of “garments of patriarchs,” Husraw II stated frankly, was not a custom of Iranian nobles but rather “a custom of Christians” (āyīn-ī tarsā). If the king of kings refused to don them, the emperor would take this as a rejection of a diplomatic gift and would suspect him of disloyalty. But if Husraw II were to wear the crosses, the nobles at court would take this as evidence of his conversion to Christianity. Displaying the cross would help to forge an alliance with the emperor—or any Christian whose cooperation was needed—at the risk of the Iranian nobles raising precisely the objections that the Book of Wahram Chobin makes to Sasanian rule. The guidance of a Zoroastrian counselor provided a resolution. Religion does not reside in garments, he insisted: “You remain in the religion of the prophet Zoroaster even if you are allied with Caesar.” The symbols of Christianity could be displayed without compromising the dynasty’s adherence to the Good Religion. The king of kings, according to Firdawsī, donned the vestments for audiences of Iranians and Romans alike. Yet doubts about the innovation lingered. Some realized that he wore the garments to satisfy his Christian audiences. Others wondered aloud “whether the ruler of the world has become a Christian in secret.”

An account of the fate of a fragment of the True Cross further reveals anxieties concerning the court’s use of Christian symbols. In the course of the diplomatic correspondence between the emperor and the king of kings that followed their alliance, Maurice requested one gift in exchange for the convoys of gold, embroidery, and jewels that the Romans had sent, “the wood of Christ [dār-ī masīhā] that is in your treasury.”¹³⁹ The origins and nature of this wood went unspecified. The redactors of the Book of Kings appear to have confused the requested object with the True Cross—seized after Maurice’s death—in the new treasury of Husraw II or to have deliberately rendered this wood a representative of the complete relic whose recapture the historiographers had to ignore. The episode, in either case, provided an occasion to articulate the court’s justifications for possessing a cross in its treasury that were directed to the great aristocrats, the primary audience for royal narratives. In his imagined response to Maurice, Husraw II insists on his loyalty to the “pure [pākīzeh] religion” and “the religion of Hushang,” one of the primordial ancestors of the Sasanians.140 He was nevertheless unwilling to release the relic. In his view, it was merely a piece of wood, not worthy of its position in the royal treasury in the first place, still less of serving as a diplomatic gift.¹⁴¹ The king of kings thus refused the emperor’s request. What this narrative proclaiming “the wood of Christ” worthless obscures is the reason for its preservation in the royal treasury. But the inherent contradictions of the account did not concern the courtly historiographers, who were interested in explaining how a king of kings could keep a Christian cross. The purpose of their narration was to silence detractors of the royal policy of holding the True Cross—whether a mere fragment or the relic in its entirety—in honor at court. In a manner characteristic of Iranian historiography, courtly literati could include criticism of the king of kings in their texts even as they insisted on the legitimacy of his actions within a Zoroastrian framework.

An account in the Šāhnāme of Husraw II’s encounter with a Roman envoy most clearly communicates the terms on which a Sasanian could employ Christian symbols. At a banquet to which he had invited the Romans at court, the king of kings wore the gold-embroidered, cross-emblazoned garments that Maurice had given him. While Husraw II intoned the wāz prayer before the meal, an envoy known as Neiathous threw his bread in annoyance, proclaiming that “[mixing] the wāz and the cross is to insult Christ through Caesar.”¹⁴² The wearing of the cross was, in an accurate representation of Roman Christian ideology, incompatible with the saying of Zoroastrian prayers. To this objection to the royal mixing of religious practices, Husraw II replied unequivocally, “No one should conceal the religion of the gods. From Gayomard to Jamshid to Kay Kawad, no one has recalled Christ.”¹⁴³ Abstention from the saying of the wāz would have constituted an unthinkable act of apostasy for a king of kings. Husraw II encharged his wife Maria with persuading Neiathous to recognize that the king of kings would never abandon the Good Religion and to refrain from impetuously propagating Christianity. Accepting these terms of participation in courtly affairs, Neiathous responded, “Continue in the religion of your ancestors; a wise man does not turn from religion [kīš].”¹⁴⁴ Here we find encapsulated two principles that, the next section shows, were generally normative in late Sasanian political culture and provided the necessary foundations for Husraw II’s experimentation with Christian institutions: imperial Zoroastrianism was to be unquestioned and inviolate, and conversion from Zoroastrianism to Christianity was accordingly impermissible. The imagined figure of a Roman envoy assailing a Zoroastrian practice provided an opportunity for courtly historiographers to articulate the conditions under which an unambiguously Zoroastrian king of kings could wear crosses on his person. Christianity had a legitimate place at court only as long as the superior position of Zoroastrianism was secure.

CONVERSION, BOUNDARIES, AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE

In East Syrian literature, in contrast with courtly historiography, the late Sasanian period was an age of Zoroastrian decline. With kings of kings so actively supportive of Christianity, more and more Zoroastrians were supposed to have abandoned the Good Religion to become Christians. The History of Rabban Mar Saba, composed during the reign of Husraw II, recounts how the namesake saint converted village after village, town after town, to Christianity from Zoroastrianism, with only sporadic interventions from Iranian authorities.145 But even the highest levels of the Sasanian elite were reported to have drawn closer to the Christian faith, on the example of the kings of kings Husraw I and Ardashir I, whom late Sasanian Christian authors claimed to have been covert converts. A work of hagiography written in the most powerful East Syrian circles in the first quarter of the seventh century, the History of Sabrisho, expressly equates the court’s support for Christian institutions with an increased rate of conversion under Husraw II:

A merciful command was given by the king that whoever wishes to become Christian from any religion [deḥlta], or wishes to build a monastery [daira] wherever he wish, was allowed to do so according to his will, without anyone interfering. For this reason, many of the members of the house [of the king] abandoned their previous error and became Christians. The notables of his kingdom built many churches and monasteries, and even the king built a monastery and named it in the name of the faithful queen Shirin. . . . In every royal house and every noble house the name of Christ triumphed on account of [Sabrisho], and all took refuge in his prayers.¹⁴⁶

This account is a misrepresentation of the policies of Husraw II that nevertheless captures some of the ambitions to which his reign gave rise among ecclesiastical leaders.

According to triumphalist hagiographers, the empire stood on the brink of total conversion. A number of modern studies have accepted this claim to varying degrees. One recent study speaks of “dwindling numbers of Zoroastrians” in the late Sasanian era.¹⁴⁷ Geo Widengren and Gernot Wiessner went so far as to argue counterfactually that the Iranian Empire would have become Christian had the early Islamic conquests not brought its ruling house to a premature end.¹⁴⁸ There were, however, few documented converts from Zoroastrianism to Christianity in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. As chapter 2 discusses, in Middle Persian sources, converts joined the Good Religion as commonly as they departed it, and acts of apostasy were not always definitive. Only the Christian hagiographical literature records cases of unambiguous conversion, and if we accept its accounts as historical, the number of Zoroastrian apostates was paltry. In the fifth century, East Syrian hagiographers, such as the author of the Martyrdom of Pethion, Adurohrmazd, and Anahid, turned toward narrating the martyrdom of converts, developing works of increasingly complex style and theology. These texts shared the aim of defining the truth of Christianity in relation to the falsehood of Zoroastrianism, with each author attuned to the intellectual and political concerns of his particular environment. Despite what their polemical purposes might suggest, the late Sasanian hagiographical works tended to be composed in the immediate aftermath of the martyrdoms in question and in ecclesiastical circles whose members were familiar with the circumstances. Their authors thus retained historicity even as they reframed events to suit their narrative goals, allowing for the reconstruction of cases of conversion. If we disregard reports of generalized, large-scale conversion that lack substantive details such as names, dates, and places, there were scarcely a dozen converts in the sixth and early seventh centuries whose cases hagiographers documented.149 This was hardly the swelling tide of elite conversions that the author of the History of Sabrisho described. There were doubtless other individuals who joined the Christian churches, perhaps a great many. The ways in which hagiographers made the social and cultural dilemmas of converts—how to extricate oneself from a disapproving family, what to do with one’s Zoroastrian spouse, whether to continue observing Zoroastrian regulations of purity—central themes of their works suggest that these predicaments were not uncommon.¹⁵⁰ But there may have been as many Christians who apostatized in favor of the Good Religion, like the famous philosopher Paul the Persian during the reign of Husraw I.¹⁵¹ The martyrological narratives should not, therefore, be regarded as paradigms of the experiences of untold thousands of Zoroastrian apostates. They may nevertheless be paradigmatic of a particular kind of convert: those who were prosecuted and executed by Iranian authorities for their conversion to Christianity.

The same court that so actively embraced the institutions of the Christians also orchestrated the killing of prominent members of their ranks for apostasy from Zoroastrianism.¹⁵² The new Cyrus, Husraw I, and the partner of Sergius, Husraw II, are thus known, in both ancient Christian and modern historiographies, as persecutors of the very Christians they patronized. Even though some of the most famous converts of the era, such as Mar Aba and the legendary Rabban Mar Saba, escaped execution, the bulk of the documented converts found themselves subject to violence at the hands of Zoroastrian authorities. Some of these were historical figures, such as Gregory the Commander, Yazdpaneh, George the Priest (d. 615), Ishosabran (d. 620/21), and Anastasios the Persian (d. 628).¹⁵³ Others were legendary, such as Mar Qardagh, Sultan Mahduk, and Mar Saba. As we saw in chapter 1, historians have taken narratives of prosecuted apostates as evidence for the systematic enforcement of the law of apostasy, according to which those who abandoned the Good Religion merited death. But the question of whether such a law was applied can be addressed only on the basis of the hagiographical works that document particular, historical—as opposed to legendary—cases of execution for apostasy. Given the importance of martyrs and their commemoration to Christians, the late Sasanian hagiographical works can be regarded as reliable sources for the frequency of execution for apostasy. Had more Christians been slain for converting, accounts of their martyrdom would have been composed. Therefore, very few apostates were executed. If the principle that apostates from Zoroastrianism should be slain was applied only exceptionally, the precise circumstances of its invocation bear examining.

Aristocratic anxieties about the effects of conversion on their patrilineages and patrimonies were an important impetus behind violence against converts. The bulk of known martyrs in the late Sasanian era were members of aristocratic houses, whose patrilineal relatives initiated the proceedings against them. There were two ways that conversion could endanger the integrity of a house. Abandoning the Good Religion rendered aristocratic men and women ineligible for marriage—whether endogamous or with allied houses—that would ensure the reproduction of a Zoroastrian clan and its properties. As aristocratic houses understood their political authority to derive from their mythical-historical roles, moreover, the rejection of religion was an affront to the power of the entire clan and a threat to its reputation in the highly competitive politics of the period. Houses ranging from provincial clans in northern Mesopotamian to the great family of the Mihranids demanded that the court intervene to punish converts in their ranks in the sixth and early seventh centuries. However rare such episodes of execution were, their political resonance extended well beyond the Christian communities that commemorated the martyrs, to the great houses that, as the Book of Kings suggests, were concerned that the court’s embrace of Christian symbols might undercut the foundations of their own authority. Such anxieties appear to have been unwarranted, in light of the limited number of identifiable aristocratic converts. The high-profile presence at court of Christian symbols and leaders—including some apostates from Zoroastrianism—who boasted of their expansionist ambitions nevertheless gave Iranian elites cause for concern about the state of their patrimonies in the early seventh century.

Conversions attracted the attention of the court only if they challenged the foundations of imperial order, such as the aristocratic houses or the ideology of Ērānšahr, publicly—that is, in the presence of decision-making elites. The story of Rabban Mar Saba freely converting villages in the Zagros Mountains is plausible, as there were countless settlements in the empire that only rarely encountered imperial elites. Acts of apostasy that took place in an aristocratic household were necessarily public, because the houses were effectively the arms, indeed the very constituents, of the state. Among the other spaces where conversions could be made public were the institutions of the military, the religious administration, and the court. It is in these locations that the two best-known cases of execution for apostasy during the reign of Husraw II occurred, namely those of Anastasios the Persian and George the Priest. Originally a Zoroastrian from the region of Rayy, Anastasios was enlisted in the conquering armies, and the sight of the True Cross attracted him to Christianity and, ultimately, inspired him to convert.154 He withdrew from his fellow conquerors unmolested but returned to the site of the Iranian administration in Caesarea Maritima to humiliate Zoroastrianism publicly. He found a group of Zoroastrian priests and interrupted their performance of the Yasna to ridicule their religion and to enjoin them to convert to Christianity. The marzbān in the city accordingly intervened, discovered Anastasios’s apostasy, and dispatched him to Seleucia-Ctesiphon for prosecution and punishment.¹⁵⁵ Anastasios was executed at the command of the king of kings in 628.

The apostasy of George the Priest, born a Zoroastrian noble, similarly only became consequential politically when the facts of his conversion became known to elites. Invited to represent the East Syrians at the disputation of 612, discussed above, George became a victim of the machinations of Gabriel of Sinjar, the secular leader of the West Syrians.¹⁵⁶ Gabriel exposed George as a convert before the entire court in an effort to discredit his East Syrian rivals. The ensuing investigation produced a document that proved incontrovertibly that the monk had been a Zoroastrian, and the court took action in a case whose details had become widely known in elite circles of Seleucia-Ctesiphon.¹⁵⁷ The execution of George in 615 communicated clearly to elites across the empire that the court would preserve the Good Religion inviolate and police its boundaries with violence if necessary.

The site of George’s martyrdom underlines the communicative dimension of the act. Unusual among martyrs under Iranian rule, his death took place as publicly as his apostasy had been revealed, at a symbolic center of the royal cities. The killing was orchestrated at the hay market of Weh-Ardashir, known as Kokhe in Syriac, one of the constituent cities of Seleucia-Ctesiphon.¹⁵⁸ Weh-Ardashir was, legendarily since the arrival of the apostle Mari, the seat of the bishop of the royal cities and thus the patriarchate. It was unambiguously the center of Christianity in the empire. In selecting a market, a crossroads of the city, as the site for George’s execution, the court aimed to reach as wide an audience of Christians as possible. The advocates of conversion from Zoroastrian, such as the author of the History of Sabrisho, were to understand that however much the king of kings supported the churches, Christians would not be permitted to expand their ranks at the expense of the Good Religion. Husraw II’s unprecedented embrace of Christian symbols was not to be mistaken for an increase in the flexibility of the boundaries of the imperial religion. At the same time, the case of George would have been known throughout Seleucia-Ctesiphon, since Weh-Ardashir housed the heart of its commerce. The significance of this execution becomes clear only in its temporal and spatial relation to the arrival of the True Cross in the city. The installation of the cross in the new royal treasury just across the Tigris from Weh-Ardashir occurred within months of George’s death in January 615. The convert was, moreover, crucified at the market, an unusual and possibly unprecedented form of capital punishment in Iran. References to the use of crucifixion by Iranian officials prior to the era of Roman conquest are, according to Christelle Jullien, ambiguous.159 The decision to execute the convert on a cross appears to have been intended to put the death in dialogue with the True Cross in the treasury. Husraw II simultaneously disciplined and honored the Christians of Iran by means of the cross.

While refraining from pursuing converts, the court systematically punished, sometimes spectacularly, their acts. There was a concerted effort by the regime to prevent the attrition of the Zoroastrian ranks and, more productively, to communicate the peculiar, unquestionably superior status of the Good Religion through the violent policing of its boundaries at the very moment when Christian institutions were giving expression to imperial rule. The kings of kings of the fourth and fifth centuries occasionally had apostates executed, on an apparently ad hoc basis. Their late Sasanian counterparts, however, developed the normative judicial procedures for disciplining apostates that we examined in chapter 1. The courtly political advice literature that enjoins kings of kings to preserve the position of Zoroastrianism and to ensure that apostates are brought to justice is difficult to date precisely but reflects the conditions of the reign of Husraw II quite as much as those of Husraw I. The inquests into the conversions of Anastasios, George, and Ishosabran followed the procedures in the Letter of Tansar (see chapter 1), suggesting that the court aimed to enact the principles that its Zoroastrian religious authorities had articulated in matters of religious boundaries.¹⁶⁰ The Armenian History of Pseudo-Sebeos indeed reports that Husraw II issued an empire-wide decree against conversion: “Let none of the impious dare to convert to Christianity, and none of the Christians to impiety, but let each one remain firm in his own ancestral tradition.”¹⁶¹ We encountered a distorted echo of such a proclamation in the History of Sabrisho, according to which the king of kings had issued an edict permitting anyone to convert to Christianity.¹⁶² What is significant is not that the hagiographer misrepresented the decree but rather that Christian authors both Armenian and East Syrian could regard the pronouncement of a legal principle forbidding conversion as an act of benevolence.¹⁶³ The reported decree recognized the legitimate position of Christianity in the empire, with institutions and boundaries that were to be respected as much as those of the Good Religion. At the same time, the king of kings insisted on the inviolability of Zoroastrianism, and the actions of his court in the early seventh century exhibited his commitment to the supremacy of this religion. The execution of George in Weh-Ardashir’s market was a logical consequence of the decree that the Armenian chronicler recorded.

CONCLUSION

After the death of Husraw II in 628, even an observer with firsthand knowledge of the Iranian court, Babai the Great, hoped for an end to Zoroastrian kingship.164 The Roman emperor Heraclius took a more optimistic view of the place in the Christian oikoumene of Iran, which the Roman court had depicted as inveterately evil, in the immediate aftermath of his victory over it. Having become acquainted with Iranian elites, practices, and institutions, the emperor, Cyril Mango has argued, embarked upon the project of Christianizing Iran’s ruling dynasty and Iran as a whole.¹⁶⁵ In 629 he arranged a meeting with the commander Shahrwaraz, the famous conqueror of Rome, who had apparently developed affinities with Christianity in the course of his career. His son bore a Christian name, Niketas.¹⁶⁶ Heraclius agreed to provide Shahrwaraz with a Roman army to seize power from Ardashir III (r. 628–29), the grandson of Husraw II, to replace the Sasanian house with a royal dynasty that would be Christian rather than Zoroastrian. Had this occurred, Iran would have become another satellite state subordinate to the most Christian emperor, its king of kings on par with the Ethiopian negus or the Christian kings of the Caucasus.¹⁶⁷ Shahrwaraz did indeed triumph over the Sasanian, momentarily establishing a new house, which was closely allied with Rome, on the Iranian throne. Before gaining the throne in 630, he had returned the True Cross to the Romans.¹⁶⁸ But the aristocracies of Iran refused to accept him, deposed him, and restored to the throne a Sasanian house that, at this stage, had only daughters to offer. Boran (r. 630–31), the daughter of Husraw II, proclaimed herself “the restorer of the lineage of the gods.”¹⁶⁹ The attempts of ecclesiastical leaders, however tentative, to Christianize the fundamental institutions of the empire lasted only as long as the aristocratic houses required to organize their martial forces. A reassertion of the supremacy of Zoroastrianism that had pertained under Husraw II followed. Until the death of Yazdgird III in 651, and even beyond, the rulers of Iran sought to realize Ērānšahr in self-conscious imitation of Husraw II.¹⁷⁰ Despite the embarrassment of his defeat in 628, that king of kings left a legacy as the embodiment of the ideals of Iranian, Zoroastrian kingship. The alliance of Heraclius with Shahrwaraz thus reveals striking contradictions in the perceptions of Christians and Zoroastrians of the relationship between religion and empire in Iran in the early seventh century. Among Christians across the Near East and the Mediterranean, the association of Husraw II with Christ and his saints had given rise to reports of his clandestine conversion, to the extent that even the Roman emperor could imagine a Christian Iranian state. For Zoroastrians, the possibility of a Christian king of kings was as unimaginable as at any point in the history of the dynasty, and Husraw II’s use of Christian symbols in no way undermined his position as an ideal Iranian ruler.

The apparent paradoxes of Husraw II’s reign were the result of Christian misinterpretations of Iranian symbolic actions. Christian religious specialists, as we have seen throughout the preceding chapters, regarded the adoption of the practices of another religion as a self-evident sign of apostasy. They brought the same understanding of identity to bear on the adherents of other religions. A king of kings who petitioned a saint, invited a holy man into his entourage, honored the True Cross, expelled Jews from Jerusalem, and organized an inquiry into Christian orthodoxy appeared obviously to be a Christian. But Zoroastrians did not share this exclusive understanding of religious identity. The question for wehdēn was not whether one participated in the institutions of another religion but whether such participation contradicted or complemented Zoroastrian institutions. As long as one worked to realize the cosmological project of the Good Religion, one could adapt the practices and institutions of another religion in one’s practical, everyday social and political life. Christianity’s proselytizing tendencies did pose a challenge to this cosmological project, at least theoretically. The Iranian court accordingly took decisive action to contain this aspect of the religion while remaining supportive of its leaders and their institutions.