Episode 124: The Last Great War of Antiquity

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 124, The Last Great War of Antiquity. Before we get into the greatest war story that most people have never heard of, I have a very special announcement. Your host, Doug Metzger, is publishing a book. About six months ago, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster reached out to me to write an illustrated guide to Homer's Odyssey. I've always thought that the Odyssey is one of the great gateways into antiquity and literature more generally, so I said yes. Last autumn, I wrote the book and worked with a great editing team and illustrator named Charlie Vince, and it's going to be published on June 23, 2026, just about a month before the new movie version of the Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan, comes out. The name of my book is The Odyssey, an illustrated guide. The book is organized into 40 entries on the Homeric epic's most prominent characters, and you meet the characters roughly in the order that they appear in Homer's story. While major characters are covered thoroughly, the book is also a really rich introduction to the Odyssey's minor characters, too. The whole second half of the Odyssey is set on the island of Ithaca, and in the book I wrote, the illustrator and I tried to draw attention to the poem's full cast and its portraits of daily life in palaces and crop fields, rather than just focusing on the seafaring adventures and sword and sorcery stuff. But we certainly do that, too. The Odyssey, an illustrated guide, goes into more detail on the Homeric epic than I had time for in our podcast, and there's an audiobook version as well. If you're interested in the notes of this episode, I've linked to the book's page on the Simon and Schuster website, where you can pre-order it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Hudson, Target, and other retailers. Some of you already support the podcast in various ways, most do not, but for everyone, it would be wonderful for the success of literature and history, and my career if this book got a lot of pre-orders and early sales. Pre-orders, as I've been told, help brick-and-mortar booksellers decide whether they want to stock hard copies, which can help avalanche sales of books, and so pre-orders are very helpful. I've always wanted to publish a book, and this one is wonderfully in line with what I've been doing with the podcast, and being able to write a detailed volume on the most famous story from ancient Greece was a real treat, so please check it out, whether for yourself or as a gift for someone else. And on that note, I'm actually publishing two books on June 23, 2026. As I mentioned, The Odyssey and Illustrated Guide has more than 40 full-color illustrations done just for this book. We actually illustrated some Homeric characters and scenes that, to my knowledge, have never been illustrated before. The second book I mentioned is a coloring book of all the illustrations from The Odyssey and Illustrated Guide, with some other ones as well, and it's called The Odyssey Coloring Book. If you or your kids or some kids you know want to color pictures of Odysseus, Athena, the Cyclops, Helen of Troy, Bronze Age ships, or my favorite, you may as the swine herd, The Odyssey Coloring Book should be a wonderful present, and again, it comes out just a few weeks before the new Odyssey movie does this summer. I wrote captions for all the images in the second book, again the coloring book version, so whoever is coloring can follow the story along too. I get royalties for both of these books, so again, please help me out at this crucial moment of my career. Pick up a copy and tell your friends. I've released millions of words of episodes in literature and history, but these are the first books I've ever published, so I'm excited, scared, and really hoping that the books do well. Now, let me do my usual thing. I think you're going to love this episode of the podcast. This program will explore the late history of the Persian-Sassanian Empire, up to and including the Byzantine-Sassanian War of 602-628. The war, which took place during the life of the Prophet Muhammad, was a massive generational conflict, one in which the two most powerful empires in Central Eurasia pummeled one another for 26 years, only to result in the status quo antebellum, or the state existing before the war. It's just that when the smoke cleared, neither empire was the same as it had been before the war. The war's end in 628 indeed resulted in the general resumption of territorial boundaries that had been there in the late 500s. But by 628, the Sassanians and the Byzantines were broke and exhausted, and more vulnerable than ever to divisions from within and military aggressors along their vast borderlands. The most famous of these aggressors were the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate, which between about 630 and 650 reduced the Byzantine Empire to a fraction of its former size and ended the Sassanian dynasty's ascendancy for good. The Byzantine-Sassanian War of 602-628 is often called the last great war of antiquity, hence the name of this episode. It was the last time that the Persian East fought the Mediterranean West, and the last time present-day Syria and Iraq lay at the edges between two worlds before this region became the center of a new world. It was the war that more than any other war ended antiquity and heralded the beginning of the Middle Ages. In the Anglophone world, we don't talk about this war much. We seem to like our Greeks and Persians to be from the 400s BCE rather than a thousand years later. We seem to like our Romans speaking Latin in Rome during the Julio-Claudian period, and not Greek in Constantinople 600 years after that. The Byzantine-Sassanian War of 602-628, to medieval histories focused on Western Europe, is a far-off nebulous conflict. To Arab Muslim historians of the Middle Ages, the war was a jahili prequel to an Islamic blockbuster, the story of two old blasphemous bullies pummeling each other for so long that a righteous youngster was able to show up and dispatch both of them pretty quickly. When the war of 602-628 is covered in modern academic or popular history, the coverage generally focuses on the Roman side of the story, or in Islamic studies departments, how the war's aftermath enabled the conquests of the Rashidun Caliphate. And within the already obscure saga of the Byzantine-Sassanian War of 602-628, the Sassanian side of the story is especially obscure, the saga of a vast ancient empire home to regions whose names are only faintly familiar, Sogdiania, Tehran, Macron, and Pars. The last Persian Empire of antiquity was gigantic, but who were the later Sassanians? Were they a unified, tightly-knit empire like the Romans under Trajan, or something else? What did they believe? What did the immense swath of territory that they inhabited, which stretched from Iraq to Pakistan, look like from region to region? As historian Parvane Pursiari put it in a recent book, The resultant story that we have been left with is one in which the Arabs who conquered the Sassanian Empire fought a host of ghosts in Iranian territories. And as ghosts cannot be active participants in any history, it is not clear whom precisely the Arabs fought in their War of Conquest in the Sassanian Territories. Close quote. In this episode, we will discuss those ghosts and focusing on the Sassanian side of antiquity's last great war. Explore the last half century of the Sassanian Empire's history. If you've been listening to this sequence of programs on early Islamic history, you'll notice that we're going backwards in time for a moment with this episode. With Muhammad and the Quran now covered, why would we now make a hairpin turn to discuss the twilight of a central Eurasian Empire that had little to do with Islam? Isn't it time to talk about the great cultural history of the Abbasid Caliphate? Also, when are we going to get to Dante? Let me answer those questions. Speaking of Dante, the Persian poet Abul Qasem Ferdosi, who has the stature of Dante in much of the world today, wrote an epic called the Shahnameh, around 1000 CE. We'll get to it soon. Today the Shahnameh is the national epic of Iran. Commissioned by the Sultan Mahmoud of Ghazni, at a time when a Turkic dynasty of Persian Muslims ruled over Iran, the Shahnameh contains a number of withering remarks about Arabs, such as when a Sasanian general in the epic boasts, quote, My heart has no fear of Arabs. It hurts the eyes just to look at them. They eat snakes and lizards, and they have no skill at fighting, close quote. What's important to remember for those of us new to Arabic and Persian literary history is the Persian perspective that we see in these famous lines of poetry. After the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628, from about 632-651, the Rashidun Caliphate conquered the Sasanian-Persian Empire. Then, for the next two centuries with varying degrees of success, Arab Caliphs and administrators ruled over Persia. Persians, from the Euphrates to the Oxis, in spite of being conquered, still remembered that theirs was a very ancient and advanced civilization, and some of the earliest Persian poetry reflects reservations and condescension toward Arab leaders and settlers with their sometimes rustic roots and unpolished ways. Islam, following the conquests of the Caliphs, sunk in almost everywhere, but in spite of the religion's emphasis on an Oma equal before God, there were still Berbers and Cops, Armenians and Turks, and most importantly of all, at the beginning at least, Arabs and Persians, and Arabs and Persians, and Arabs and Persians. The Arabs, from the Persian perspective, were militarily indestructible barbarians who had scythed up from the Arabian Peninsula and brought with them an appealing new religion. The Persians, from the Arab perspective, were at once effete and intimidating, the scions of a ridiculously ancient empire whose decadent splendor the Arab invaders disdained even as they speedily emulated it. This story of brawny colonizer and elegant colonized is one we've heard before. The Romans, during the republican period back in 146 BCE, had also conquered a vast and ancient civilization to their east. This conquered civilization also remembered its considerable cultural history. Just as the Greeks superceliously served the Romans for centuries, Persians of the defunct Sasanian Empire ministered to the needs of an Arab Islamic regime for two centuries, making themselves indispensable as ethnarchs, bureaucrats, viziers, tax collectors, fixers, and king-makers, and in particular, taking care of the leaky right side of the empire for caliphs willing to delegate sovereignty of the east. The Islamic Golden Age, with all of its scientific, philosophical, and literary achievements, resulted from a civilizational confluence. Like all cultural renaissance, it had different phases and geographical centers. It happened in Baghdad and Cordoba, but also in Shiraz, Isfahan, and Nishapur. Like all cultural renaissance, it had a lot of different groups contributing to it, from Sephardic Jews to Seljuk Turks, from Nestorian Christians to Indian and Chinese travelers, so taken with the splendor of the aforementioned cities that they stuck around there and put down roots. The Islamic Golden Age had a lot of regions, phases, and people who made it shine, but at its heart, decade after decade, and phase after phase, there were Arabs and Persians, and Arabs and Persians, two parent groups whose commingling in and after the 600s changed the world forever. The episode that you're listening to then to repeat is about the final century of the Persian-Sassanian Empire and the Byzantine-Sassanian War of 602-628, again often called the Last Great War of Antiquity. The story of this war is operatic in its scope and its reversals of fortune. After centuries of back and forth fisticuffs and tribute payments, suddenly the Sassanian Empire goes for the Byzantine jugular, only just as the Romans are about to perish forever, they show their ancient teeth, and on the story goes campaign season after campaign season in a drama that spans decades and continents. And while we'll know the main story of this war by this program's end, the story of how Heraclius fought Kosovo II, again I hope to focus on the eastern side of the story just a bit more than is usually done in Anglophone works of history. Due to some very recent scholarship, we know much more about the late Sassanian Empire at present than we ever have before. Archaeological survey work on coins and seals and inscriptions, together with studies of surviving literary materials, have begun to paint a picture of the last Persian Empire as something far less monolithic than was previously understood. The Sassanian Emperor's title, Shahansha, or King of Kings, conjures up the picture of a rigidly hierarchical society in which an autocrat reigns over all. However, an increasing body of evidence suggests that the Sassanian monarchy actually leaned on the consensus of a cadre of extremely powerful patrician families scattered all over present-day Iran and beyond, families that, following the Islamic conquests later, shrugged, dutifully jotted down each new Caliph's name and converted to Islam with varying degrees of devoutness and continued what they had been doing before. The story of Islam's roots and its principal text is a West Arabian story as we've learned in this season of the podcast so far. The story of the Caliphates, however, is a global one and it necessarily involves some Persian history. From 602 to 628, as the Prophet Muhammad went from about age 32 to age 58, north of the sparsely populated Arabian Peninsula, two gigantic empires almost completely destroyed one another. The saga of how they did so is one of the great war stories in human history and it will also introduce us to many of the key regions and populations relevant to the Islamic Golden Age to come. Music By the year 600 CE, Rome and Persia were thoroughly addicted to war with one another. They had been fighting on and off since the late Republican period. By 600, the passes of Anatolia and the highlands of Armenia, the cities of Syria and the desert roads of Mesopotamia, had seen many generations of Roman and Persian wars. A recurrent cycle had been established over the course of the 500s. Rome, in order to campaign in the west, had begun offering the Persians huge tribute payments. Persia needed Roman gold and Rome wanted a quiet eastern front and so over the course of the late 500s, the empires settled into a cadence. Hostilities would cease with Roman gold shipped to Persia, then some years of armistice would ensue, and then due to Sasanian greed or disquiet in the Armenian borderland, due to Arab client kings scuffling with one another or successions or coups, east would invade west, or less often west would invade east, and war, sometimes non-committal and sometimes deadly serious, would begin anew. The Byzantine Empire, whose inhabitants called themselves Romans, and which is often simply just called Rome in contemporary scholarship, had had a taxing, but ultimately very successful sixth century. Under the reign of Justinian I, the Byzantines had nearly succeeded in reconquering the Mediterranean basin. North Africa was theirs once again. Much of Italy was, too, and a stretch of the Spanish coast, and these territories were won in part by the expedient of hasty bargains made with the Sasanian Persians. If wars of conquest were going successfully in the west, then the Byzantine emperor could send some of the spoils to the east to pacify its main nemesis. This was the pattern of the middle part of the 500s in central Eurasia. The Byzantines paid gold for peace with the east, and in the east the Sasanians took the money, and conscious that the Byzantines were doing awfully well over there in the Mediterranean, sometimes made war on them anyway. The Byzantine and Sasanian empires called themselves the Twin Eyes of the World, and with some justification. By 602, their territorial holdings were gargantuan, and each empire had its tendrils into smaller adjacent kingdoms and larger far off territories, too, from Visigothic Spain to China. But as large as they were, the so-called Eyes of the World were also at the center of a tricontinental junction, where population migrations and population growth, in spite of the previous centuries' black plague, were changing the rules of how Eurasia had always worked. The Asian side of Eurasia, decade after decade, had sent hordes of barbarians southwest. The Romans, back during the 300s, had met the Huns, who had galloped down into Europe from the distant steppes of Kazakhstan and Mongolia. The 500s saw Eurasia's two central empires encountering new invaders from the north and east. Khazars, Avars, and Slavs scourged Constantinople from the 500s onward, just as the Sasanians crossed swords with the Heptalites and Gokturks. Again and again, during the 300s, 400s, and 500s, barbarian populations mounted on horseback were coming down from the upper right of Eurasia to the lower left, and these migrations drove the motor of the supercontinent's history toward the end of late antiquity. The old central Eurasian hegemony of Romans and Persians then, by the year 600 when the last great war of antiquity began, was giving way to a new period of history when a more crowded supercontinent would be ruled more by transient kingdoms than by enduring empires. When the Romans and the Persians unsheathed their swords for a final time in 602, though they couldn't have known it, empires of their scale were living on borrowed time. The roots of the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628 lay in earlier wars between the two powers and political maneuvering at the highest level. In the year 591, a Sasanian emperor named Kostro II had taken the throne of the empire. Kostro II, essentially the driving force of the last great war of antiquity, will be one of our two main characters for today. So let's meet Kostro II, without whom the last great war of antiquity would never have taken place. Shrewd, cruel, tactically brilliant, and ambitious beyond belief, Kostro II rose to power in the murk of his father's assassination during a coup, taking the Sasanian throne only with the aid of Roman collaboration. The story of Kostro II's succession to the throne is at once appalling and ordinary. Reduced to desperation and brutality by the military coup of a general who had served his father and grandfather, Kostro II was buoyed to power by two uncles. Kostro II also partnered with the Romans, and he used every tool at his disposal to smash his political foe. In 591, with Roman backing, Kostro II won a civil war in the Sasanian empire. He would ultimately rule from 591 to 628, and he remembered the name of the unlikely Roman ally who had helped him to power. The unlikely Roman ally who had brought Kostro II to power was the Byzantine emperor Maurice. Maurice, who ruled from 582 to 602, was a reasonably talented and capable Roman emperor as they came, given the difficult task of holding together a newly ballooned Byzantine empire that seemed plagued with a rolodex of enemies old and new. There were lombards, burbars, avars, slavs, casars, and the usual round of provincial revolts, as well as a treasury exhausted by an overextended military and the bubonic plague. When the Byzantine emperor Maurice helped the Sasanian emperor Kostro II to the throne in 591, Maurice probably saw the young man as an expedient to quiet the eastern front more than anything else. Facilitating Kostro II's rise meant that Maurice's Persian counterpart was an untested, pasty-faced 20-year-old heir, rather than the cracker jack Persian general who had seized power. Maurice could not have known just how dangerous a threat Kostro II would ultimately prove. The unusual partnership between the pair, in charge of two enemy empires lasted until the emperor Maurice's death in 602. Maurice, as I said a moment ago, came to the throne at an unlucky time, inheriting expensive wars in all directions, a citizenry depleted by the black plague, and a cadre of armies as experienced as they were fed up with campaigning around the clock and not being very handsomely compensated for it. One of these armies had been left out to pasture between 601 and 602 in the Balkans to fend for itself because Maurice couldn't scratch together enough money to pay it. And of course, unpaid armies led by ambitious generals are not a good thing to have marching around in the interior of your empire. In the year 602, old Maurice's Balkan army rebelled, under the leadership of a usurper named Fokus, a regular soldier in the Byzantine's Balkan division, Fokus looked at the financial disarray of the empire and he saw a path to the throne for himself. When he and his forces reached Constantinople that same year, enough citizens there were tired of the rule of the stingy barracks emperor Maurice that in November of 602, the rebels murdered Maurice and all of his eligible heirs. Thus fell the Justinian dynasty, one of the most successful dynasties in Roman history and thus began the eight-year reign of Fokus during which all hell would break loose. The all hell in question would come from Kosovo II. The Sasanian king who had spent the first decade of his Roman-backed rule clinging to power with his teeth, shaking off major domos who tried to control him and consolidating his rule through a combination of luck, and far-sighted viciousness, once again remembered who had put him on the throne in the year 591. When, in 602, the usurper Fokus killed Maurice, Kosovo II spoke of the dead Byzantine emperor as his father and benefactor. Kosovo II vowed vengeance against the usurper Fokus. Sasanian emissaries arrived in Constantinople and they informed the newcomer Fokus that Kosovo II was coming for him, that the blood on Fokus's hands would only be washed away by the rivers of blood that were to come. This colorful rhetoric may be a fiction. The real Kosovo II might have cared very little for parsimonious and unlucky old Maurice and simply used the emperor's murder as an excuse to get the ancient Roman and Persian slugfest going again. Whatever Kosovo II's real motivations were, perhaps no one, neither Byzantines nor Sasanians, could have predicted how far Kosovo II intended to take things. The previous centuries perennial tug of war over Syria and Armenia would, as the last great war of antiquity began, turn into something more dire. Because in spite of the fact that it had never been done before, and in spite of the fact that the whole supercontinent was more than ever full of dangerous new tribes and kingdoms, Kosovo II intended to destroy the Byzantine Empire and retake the vast western territories once held by the Achaemenid Persian monarchs of old. Kosovo II, as he prepared to avenge his Byzantine benefactor Maurice, had some good fortune and then some more good fortune. The Sasanian Empire's enormous eastern borderlands were quiet. A group called the Koch Turks had increasingly been harrying the Persians in this region over the course of the previous century, but in the opening months of 602 the Turks were in the middle of a long civil war. Kosovo II thus went westward to make war on the Romans with few reservations. The King of Kings also had good luck in that the Byzantines, over the opening years of the war, had to deal with a series of overlapping catastrophes. Just as the Persians invaded their eastern front, an eastern Byzantine general seated in the upper Syrian city of Idessa defected to the Persian side. At the same time, the northern Avar barbarians demanded a higher tribute payment from the new emperor Fokus. Though the rebellion in Idessa was put down, by the year 603 Kosovo II was on the war path, intending what appeared to be a conquest of Anatolia and a direct attack on Constantinople. The Sasanian emperor, like other Persian kings before him, rode among a unit of battle elephants, which grouped together in a defensive formation and were themselves protected by infantry and cavalry. The Sasanian mixture of elephants, cavalry, and infantry wasn't just for show. When Byzantine cavalrymen squared off against squadrons with elephants, the mounted troops found that their horses weren't too keen about galloping in to potentially be smushed by Pachyderms ten times their size. And when the Byzantine cavalry faltered, so too did the Byzantine army. The Sasanians, by late 603, were concentrating their efforts on the Roman fortress town of Dara in between the northern Tigris and Euphrates, and they punctured this crucial Byzantine defensive line in the summer of 604. Several campaign seasons deepened the punctures through the Byzantine defensive line in eastern Anatolia, and by 608 the populous flatlands of Asia Minor lay open to further Persian attacks. This was all grim news for the usurper emperor Fokus, who was six years into his reign and perhaps wishing that he hadn't usurped anything. Unfortunately for the soldier turned to Byzantine emperor, things were about to go from bad to terrible. Because down in the balmy and generally secure Roman bread basket of North Africa, a major rebellion rose up. An exarch in Africa, along with his capable son, knowing that their money-making province was a linchpin of the Byzantine economy, decided to remove that linchpin and attack Constantinople. Just as the North African rebels moved on Constantinople, down closer to the Byzantine Sasanian hot zone, the Byzantine city of Antioch exploded into anarchy with the city's perennially oppressed Jewish population expressing their support of the rampaging Sasanians. As the North African rebels closed on Constantinople and the Sasanians seized more Byzantine territory, it was starting to become clear that Kostros' military intentions were different than those of his predecessors. The Sasanians, between 602 and 628, were not just intent on smashing and grabbing, nor imposing tribute payments and then carrying the cash back home to Iran after exchanging high fives. They were setting up garrisons. They were corraling Byzantine citizens and deporting them back to the Sasanian heartland to resettle them where they could no longer be a threat. Sometimes, as with the deportations and resettlements of Nestorian Christians who had been oppressed under Byzantine rule, certain Byzantine populations were perfectly happy to be conquered. Kostros II took advantage of all of it. As the Byzantine emperor Focus turned west to deal with the North African usurpers who had come for his head, Kostros II assumed control of large swaths of Byzantine Syria, having taken control of the city of Edessa by 609. With this and other victories, the Sasanians held the pivot point between Anatolia and the Levant, and Persia could advance in either direction as needed. On the Roman side of the war, in 610, things went from worse to positively grim. The usurper emperor Focus, who had now ruled for eight terrible catastrophic years, received news that the North African rebels had seized control of Egypt, another linchpin of the Byzantine economy. The Romans, now in a full-scale civil war, could no longer defend themselves, and Persian armies seized cities along the upper Euphrates like kids in a candy store. They had held northern Syria before. Now they really had a hold of it. And the question arises, then, that if, in the year 610, the Byzantines were in such a tailspin, and the Sasanians were pummeling them so successfully, why did the war continue for another 18 years? And the answer to this question lies in two main characters we have yet to meet. We've already met Kostro II, the Sasanian king of kings, who would be the commander-in-chief of the Persian troops for the entire duration of the war. Kostro II had in his stable of military war chiefs, an especially able general named Sharbaraz, whose name means, bore of the empire. To Sasanians, his name meant that he smashed through everything, and always won. Sharbaraz often took point on the Persian side during the Byzantine-Sasanian war of 602-628. Kostro II then, and his eminently capable general, Sharbaraz, led the effort to destroy the Byzantine Empire for good. And as to the final main character in this great conflict, let's get acquainted with him. In October of 610, in Constantinople, the Usurper Emperor Focus, after a miserable eight years on the throne, was deposed by another Usurper Emperor. This other Usurper Emperor was Heraclius. And in spite of the fact that Heraclius ascended to the throne of an empire coming apart at the seams, he would hold those seams together and rule for the next 31 years. Heraclius, the high-born son of the Exarch of Africa, like so many other Byzantine and Sasanian emperors at the dusk of late antiquity, came to the throne at a very difficult time. But over the course of nearly his entire reign, he would prove capable of working under pressure and the threat of catastrophe, performing triage after triage of an ailing empire, giving the vaunting Sasanians a run for their money, and ultimately being one of the most talented Roman emperors in history. In our story for today, the ranks have formed, with Rome as always on the left, and Persia as always on the right, with Heraclius in charge of the Byzantines and Kostro II leading the Sasanians. What's perhaps most fascinating to keep in mind as we go through the remainder of this war is that the fate of a lot of the world hung on every battle, every chance barbarian invasion, every siege, and every back channel negotiation. Because if Kostro II had won, or if something else had interrupted the war, or if diplomatic settlements had ended the conflict earlier, the Rashadun Caliphate in the 630s CE would have faced the full might of the Sasanian and Byzantine empires, and would likely not have expanded the way that it did. Had the last great war of antiquity not played out precisely as it did, Islam would not have been the religion of an intercontinental ruling caste of Arabs by the end of the 600s, and the world as we know it would be a very different and likely far more Zoroastrian place. That makes this story worth knowing. So moving forward, in 610, settling in in Constantinople, Heraclius decided on a time-tested maneuver with the Persian battle axe now wedged into the Byzantine Empire's east side. Heraclius sent Kostro II gifts and peace emissaries, proposing an armistice. The Persians didn't actually want to destroy Rome, did they? They were rivals, but there had been intermittent respect between the two empires from time to time. Wouldn't Kostro accept tribute payments as his predecessors had? Kostro II said he would not, and he had the Byzantine peace emissaries decapitated. Kostro II didn't want Byzantine money. He wanted the Byzantine Empire. On this cataclysmic note, the campaign season of 611 began. Kostro II used his territorial gains and tactical advantages to attack Asia Minor. One general assailed a stronghold in Cappadocia to the northeast. Another went to Anatolia's underbelly, digging more deeply into Syria before angling south toward Palestine. As the Sasanians set their sights on the prized cities of the Levant, finally the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius managed to organize a counterattack, forcing the southern wing of the Sasanian assault out of the Levant and up toward the northern Sasanian faction. This counterattack, by the summer of 612, began the next phase of the war. The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, whose rise to power had been rocky, had no right-hand man in the way that Kostro II had charbarasse, nor even any set of battle-tested generals with recent experience. Heraclius scraped together what he had, an assortment of the Berber tribesmen who had backed his revolt in North Africa, together with a field escort that protected the Emperor himself and units left over from the Byzantine east. And with this motley army, Heraclius did something rather unusual for a Roman Emperor. Heraclius led the army himself. A Roman Emperor hadn't done this since 378, way back when the Emperor Valens had been killed by Goths at the Battle of Adrianople. With Heraclius at its helm, over the later months of 612, Roman survivors of the Sasanian Blitz of Syria and Armenia trickled in to join what was now the main Byzantine army. Heraclius was hardly in an advantageous position. His first four years on the throne had been bleak and unpromising, and as he commanded his new slapdash army against the assailing Persians, it could hardly have been with a sense of imminent victory. Still, when the weather grew warm and the campaign season of 613 began, Heraclius had a chance. He had an untested army, a severely wounded empire, and a dearth of qualified senior officers. But again, he had a chance. In the summer of 613, the main Persian and Roman forces converged near Antioch in a battle with heavy losses on both sides. The Persians ultimately defeated Heraclius. It was an inauspicious beginning to the emperor's already inauspicious career on the throne. Persian control of Antioch completed an important Sasanian strategic maneuver. The Sasanians had encircled Asia Minor from the east, cutting the Byzantine Empire in half, and the Sasanians had also secured control of the eastern Mediterranean seaports. For the first time in a millennium, in the autumn of 613, the prowess of Persian ships cut through the Mediterranean Sea, and in 614, the great Persian general Shar Baraz tore into the urban centers of present-day Lebanon and Israel, taking Caesarea, the small towns of Galilee, and the highlands of Golan before turning their attention on Jerusalem. The Sasanians understood well enough the significance of Jerusalem for the Romans, and when they appeared at the city's walls, the citizens surrendered, capitulated, and let the Persians into town where the Sasanians installed a governor. Within a week, however, rebels within Jerusalem murdered the newly appointed governor, and with help from soldiers stationed along the nearby Roman frontier, the citizens of Jerusalem joined ranks to defend the city. A short, 19-day siege ensued. The Sasanians had siege equipment, and they used it. Once the walls were down, the Persians massacred the city's citizens, took others captive, and seized a relic known as the True Cross, believed by the Romans to be the very cross on which Jesus had died. The loss of Jerusalem, and the True Cross, was catastrophic for Byzantine morale. The Romans were quickly losing the war, and both sides knew it. Kosozro II in 615 decided it was time to finish the job. The Roman east had been shattered. The old Roman sovereignty over the Mediterranean was no longer secure. The Romans could no longer defend Anatolia from the east. Kosozro II ordered his forces into the giant heartland of the Byzantine Empire. His goal was Constantinople. Over the campaign season of 615, the Sasanians marched westward across Asia Minor. They reached the Bosporus shore across from Constantinople, and they made camp. The Roman emperor Heraclius met the Sasanian general in charge of the westward march, again trying to purchase peace. The Persian general was cordial but firm. The king of kings Kosozro II was not interested in peace. The Roman citizens of Constantinople, with Persians visible from the golden horn, heard more and more dreadful news over the course of 615 and 616. The Sasanians were seizing Anatolian cities. Smyrna, Pergamum, Ephesus, and Myelides fell. Rivers of money flowed into the Sasanian treasure chests. The mid-610s were among the most dire years in all Roman history, but they also marked a turning point. For the entire duration of the war, the Sasanians had been riding on a cushion of good luck. Their eastern and northeastern extremities had been quiet for a long time due to a civil war among their enemies across the border. Around 614 and 615, though, just as the Persians stomped into Anatolia, a rebellion roared to life in Curasan. The Hephthalites, or the White Huns, were Sasanian subjects ruled over by a king in what is today northern Afghanistan, a group of them having been subjugated the previous century on the south side of the Oksus River. Backed by powerful Turkish allies to the northeast, the Hephthalites began a large assault on the Persian cities of Curasan, giving Kosovo II a harsh reminder that emperors almost always have to do many things at once. The Sasanians were lucky with the Hephthalite uprising of 615, putting it down relatively quickly, even as they chopped deeper into Asia Minor, but the trouble south of the Oksus River reminded the Sasanians that there were other powers out there than the Byzantines that they were going to have to deal with sooner or later. Still, in the second half of the 610s, the Byzantine conquest remained Kosovo II's primary focus. Kosovo II knew that Constantinople, with its giant walls, natural water supply, and tricky ocean currents, was a tough nut to crack. And so rather than going for the head of the Byzantine Empire, he made a strategic decision in 618. With the seizure of Syria, Persians had already chopped off the Roman Empire's arm. Now it was time to take one of its legs. Sasanian armies converged in 618, and rather than hurling themselves against Constantinople, they turned south toward Egypt. The subsequent conquest was shocking and swift. Egypt had been under Roman power for more than 600 years. But by the summer of 619, the Persian general Sharbaraz had conquered Alexandria, the population center, and defensive engine of Roman Egypt. As always in ancient history, the lands of the Nile, flat and with a predictable concentration of cities along the river, was a straightforward conquest. In three years, Egypt was under Persian control. And after Egypt fell, the Byzantine territorial and military losses incredibly continued to pile up. Anatolia was a large land mass with plenty of territory and loot to capture. And in the first two years of the 620s, Persian armies took towns and cities of all sizes in Asia Minor, carting off private and ecclesiastical wealth alike to power the Sasanian war machine. In the Aegean in 622, the Persians disembarked on the island of Rhodes, conquered it, and claimed it as their own. And Persians weren't the only assailants who had turned the Byzantine empire into a punching bag. Lombard attackers were chopping away at Byzantine Italy. Avars and Slavs sawed into the Byzantine north along the old Roman frontier of the Danube. The Emperor Heraclius, with his cobbled together army, had lost his only major engagement with the Sasanians 10 years earlier, and he must have felt more hopeless than ever after an utterly dismal 12 years on the throne. 622 CE, where we currently are in our review of the last great war of antiquity, marked the Byzantine empire's darkest hour. It was also, as you may remember, the year of the Hijrah of the Prophet Muhammad and history's first Muslims, the year that Muhammad and Abu Bakr snuck out of Mecca, hid in a cave covered with spider webs, and eventually made their way up north to join the other Mumenun in Medina, where they hoped to find refuge from the Meccan traditionalists opposed to them. In 622 CE, anyone paying attention would have concluded that Central Eurasia's future was going to be thoroughly Persian, that Shah and Shahs would rule the middle supercontinent and that Zoroastrian fire temples would replace a lot of Christian churches. Because speaking of Christian churches, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius was in 622 scrounging around in what was left of Byzantine Asia Minor for any gold and silver that could be found in order to get an army going. One small benefit of the Persians being busy amputating Egypt from the Byzantine Empire was that poor Heraclius could at least muster and train troops in Anatolia and recruit mercenaries from Central and Western Europe. By 622, he had done this enough to begin some counter-strikes in modern-day Turkey. The first was in the region of Cappadocia, where Heraclius outmaneuvered the Persian general Sharbaraz. Just as the Byzantines showed a spark of life, however, they were soundly struck again, only this time from another direction. This strike came from the Avars. The Avars, a group from the northeastern Caucasus region who had been attacking the Byzantine Empire for about 50 years, saw that the Romans were vulnerable and they took advantage of it. In June of 623, the Emperor Heraclius met with them in person to negotiate, although in disguise. The disguise was fortunate because when the Avars abruptly attacked Heraclius' party and attempted to kidnap the Emperor, Heraclius was able to escape, leaving the Avars to pillage the outlying regions of Constantinople. The Avars, having shown their might, were dutifully paid off, the latest humiliation that the Byzantines had to endure in a long round of them. As with other groups that the Byzantines paid off in the 500s and 600s, the Avars would be back soon. As far as Heraclius was concerned, though, he had more pressing matters to attend to than the northern barbarians, even though the Avars had just tried to abduct him. It was time the Roman Emperor decided to fight back. Kostro II in 624 was surprised to hear that a large Byzantine army was on the loose and that it was smashing through newly built Sasanian defenses, that the Romans were now in control of a major fortress city in Cappadocia in the Anatolian northeast. Kostro II amassed his forces in the far northwest of what is today Iraq, expecting Heraclius to turn southeast from Cappadocia and fight him down there. Instead, Heraclius turned northeast, tearing into the Persians' newly acquired territories around Armenia and ignoring the Persian military altogether. Heraclius' maneuver in the summer of 625 was as surprising as it was effective. The Persian defenses up north were thin, and the borderlands with Armenia were full of soldiers of fortune, happy to join the Byzantine cause for a price. No one had expected an assault up north, and Kostro II, hearing of the sudden dispoliation of Persian Armenia, understood that the swelling Byzantine army might invade Mesopotamia if not stopped. The King of Kings amassed three armies southwest of the Caspian Sea to wall off Persia from any direct Byzantine assault, a force that numbered somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 troops. The plan was simple. Constrict the throat of the Anatolian peninsula, eradicate the Byzantine resurgence, and win the war. This Heraclius fellow, Kostro II thought, had been floundering for his entire time on the throne, and in spite of whatever he'd been doing up in the Armenian borderlands, Heraclius would soon be put in his place. Heraclius, however, had different ideas. Heraclius thus faced three sizable armies in the spring of 625, and because he was positioned to do so, he struck fiercely at the northernmost Persian army, gouging and stabbing away at it until the northern army fled to join the central army, which was led by the famous general Sharbaraz. Sharbaraz received false intel that the Byzantines were fleeing and fleeing in a state of disarray. The central Persian army pursued Heraclius, intending to take advantage of the Byzantine's alleged disorder. Instead, the Persian attack force found the Byzantines ready for them, and when Sharbaraz attacked, the Byzantines found the Persians hasty and overextended and were able to fight them off. One of the three Persian generals was severely wounded. When a third Sasanian army arrived to reinforce the other two, the Byzantines, warmed up and in a battle-tested position, defeated this one as well, looting their supplies and chasing them along a river valley on the border of modern-day Iran and Armenia. Heraclius then, as the weather cooled and the campaign season of 625 wound down, had used slipperiness and discipline to fend off a huge trio of Persian armies. Heraclius, even once the two sides had gone to their winter camps, blitzed Sharbaraz's center of operations, plundering the Persian camp and sending the famous Persian general, dashing off to save his skin. Kosozro II, after the significant and unanticipated losses of 625, spent the winter thinking and planning. Guarding the exit routes of Anatolia to protect Persia had not worked very well. The Byzantine emperor, who should have never been a problem, was becoming a serious inconvenience. Thus, Kosozro II reverted to a strategy the Sasanians had already attempted. The Persians would defend by attacking and march for Constantinople. The Sasanians at this juncture of the war continued to have the upper hand. Their numbers were higher, their war chests were battened from a decade and a half of victories, their generals had more experience and Kosozro II, of course, was still one of the most determined, crafty, relentless, talented adversaries Rome had ever faced. As a case in point in 626, Kosozro II sent envoys up to the Avars in present-day Hungary. The Avars and Persians struck a bargain. Persians would attack Anatolia. Avars would attack Constantinople. When it was all over, the Avar Cogon would rule the European half of what had been the Byzantine empire, and the Persians would rule the Asian half. Rome was in for a very, very hard year. The Persian military strategy in Asia Minor in 626 was pretty simple. Heraclius' army was way over on the Armenian borderland, positioned to attack Iran. The Sasanians, attacking Anatolia, would draw Heraclius in and take chunks out of his army as he hurried back to Constantinople to defend it. If the Sasanians succeeded, Heraclius would never get there at all. Heraclius, however, was already on the move before the winter's end. He went southwest rather than west through the mountainous territory of eastern Anatolia, using rivers and crossing points to great strategic advantage, evading Sharbaras until the leading Persian general gave up. Sharbaras knew where Heraclius was going, and Sharbaras planned to intercept Heraclius using another Persian army inbound from the north to smash Heraclius in a pincher attack. Heraclius, however, did not plan on being attacked. He was not dashing toward Constantinople, but instead, hurrying to assail the northern Sasanian army. Over the early summer of 626, Heraclius' army collided with the northern Persian army, and over the course of two weeks of fighting, the Sasanians suffered a major defeat, retreating eastward with their general, the second Sasanian war chief, retiring from future war efforts. Still, Constantinople was in trouble. The Persian general Sharbaras moved his army to the east side of the Bosporus and heard with satisfaction that his new Avar allies had made good on their side of the recent deal. The Avar's joined with Slav auxiliaries, numbered somewhere around 80,000 and were amassed on the west side of Constantinople. On July 31, 626, the Avar's assaulted the fortifications of the city's European side, a 3.7 mile expanse of gigantic triple walls helmed with defenders. Constantinople, famously defensible, was ready for this assault. The initial Avar offensive failed. A naval assault on the part of the Avar's the next day also and during the first week of August of 626, the Avar and Slav Confederacy again and again, by land and sea, broke against the walls of Constantinople. The waters that rush through the Bosporus between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea are notoriously swift and difficult to navigate, and Byzantine naval defenders used their knowledge of the unique waterway together with naval defenses to roam an advantage again and again over this intense week of fighting. Afterward, the morale of the Avar's collapsed. They retreated, burning the siege equipment that they had brought with them. On the other side of the Bosporus, perhaps, the Persians saw the glow of the fires that signaled the Avar defeat. The war, which Persia had been winning for more than 20 years, from which an entire generation of Sasanians had enjoyed the spoils, suddenly seemed to be anyone's game. Music Between 622 and 626, the Byzantines had gone from hammeraging territories to defending territories and occasionally reclaiming them. Anatolia and Constantinople had proved to be far more resilient than the Persians could have imagined. The Persian-Avar alliance had failed, the Sasanians had lost significant regions of Asia Minor, and Heraclius was fast becoming a heroic figure to the beleaguered citizens of the exhausted Empire. As the year 627 opened, the war entered its penultimate year, having been raging for a full quarter century. During this quarter century, the Persians had done the unthinkable, seizing Byzantine Syria, the Levant, and Egypt and other territories besides these. Taking advantage of an uncharacteristically long peace along their eastern front, the Persians had shattered the old homeostasis that had existed between the two regions. What happened over the course of the final two years of the war was that, put briefly, the luck that had helped Kosovo the Second win so much territory ran out, Heraclius continued to be wildly and adaptable, and seemingly every single force that had not been attacking the Sasanian Empire for the past 25 years began making up for lost time. The last two years of the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628 are fascinating not only because they held the dramatic reversal of fortune for each side, they're also fascinating because what happened in 627 and 628 would be more of a rule than an exception for the Central Eurasian Middle Ages when a constant cataract of outside invaders would deflate novel empires almost as soon as they managed to form. Arab, Persian, Turk, or Caucasian you could conquer land and cordon off your caliphate or empire, but there were always seemingly some new dudes on horseback galloping down from present-day Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Xinjiang, Mongolia, or Russia, and the moment that your empire got soft and your eastern and northern ethnarchs and client kings became opportunistic, your dominions days were numbered. Let's not jump ahead too far though. The dudes on horseback in 627 were the Western Turks, a group that had been relatively quiet during the entire Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628. The Western Turkic Cognate, or Gok Turk Cognate, lay above the Sasanian Empire, an ocean of stepland and grass at that point ruled over by a leader known as Tang, Yabru, who had at his command tens of thousands of nomads. In 627, Heraclius contacted the Western Turkic Cognate at that point centered in present-day Kazakhstan. Byzantine gold and potential military advantage over the Persians convinced the Western Turks to get involved in the long war. This alliance changed the entire dynamic of the Great War and changed it very quickly. The Roman Turkic alliance was catastrophic news for Kosovo II. Over the course of the entire war, Kosovo II had faced West and fought the Romans, but for a brief heptalight uprising in 615. With the new Byzantine Turkic alliance in place, the Sasanians faced a colossal semicircle of foes to its west and north. And in addition to the sudden and gigantic alliance of enemies suddenly bearing down on them from multiple directions at once, the Sasanians faced another problem. This problem was essentially a lack of empire-wide unity coupled with low morale as a result of the war's extraordinarily long duration. Had Kosovo II actually managed to crack the knot of Constantinople in 626, the coalition of alliances and arrangements that at that point made up the Sasanian empire might have held together. However, with Kosovo's failure in 626, Sasanian leadership began to appear more like what it actually was, a thin veneer of political conformity that had never been very strong even in the Persian epicenter of Iran. The Persian empire, as we'll learn in a moment, was happy enough to follow Kosovo II when he was winning in the west. When his victorious streak started to come to an end, though, old fissures in the empire appeared once more, and an entire generation of soldiers confronted with the specter of an unending war no longer drew their swords with very much enthusiasm. The most obvious sign of the Persian empire's internal divisions was that the leading Sasanian general, Sharbaraz, left the hot zone up north, and he headed down to Egypt. Sharbaraz, part of an old Persian dynasty that had never felt much fealty to Sasanian leadership, figured that Kosovo II would blame him for the failed siege of 626, and so the great general went down to Alexandria to hedge his bets. And just as Sharbaraz left the war, in the spring of 627, the Gokturks entered it, fresh from the steppe, and not at all enervated by decades of campaigning. The Gokturk leader offered Kosovo II a very clear ultimatum. Give the Byzantine empire back, Syria and Egypt, or they were coming for Ctesiphon, both the Gokturks and the Romans. Kosovo II, scratching together what forces he could to defend Mesopotamia, did not comply. The Roman and Gokturk armies, just as they had said they would, marched their way toward the Tigris-Euphrates flood plain and into the panicked capitals of the western Sasanian empire, knowing that if they sacked Ctesiphon, there was no need for a decade spent retaking all the Roman regions lost earlier during the war. They were still on the move late in the campaign season of 627 in October and then November, and still in December until on December 12th, 627, the Romans and their allies met the Persians in a decisive battle on a flat land near the ancient city of Nineveh. Surviving sources describe the mourning of the battle as foggy, so much so that it was difficult to spy enemy maneuvers. Once the fog cleared and the battle was over, the Persians had lost. No Sasanian army remained to fight off the enemy forces massed in the empire's Mesopotamian heart. Kosovo II, the king of kings, fled to the south. The Romans attacked Kosovo's palace and temple complex at Dastigard, stealing everything they could get from the great king's winter headquarters. Kosovo II, reeling from the sudden and overwhelming defeat he'd suffered over the past several years, also knew that the coalition of Persian power brokers who had supported him during his successful years were no longer behind him. Perhaps even the king of kings didn't know how far he had fallen, because Kosovo II's son, Kavad II, aided by one of the seven great houses of Iran and the Byzantines, arranged for an insurrection to rest control of Ctesiphon. Kosovo II fled the city. He was caught and beheaded, and Kavad II's lieutenants murdered all of Kosovo II's eighteen brothers. Just as Kosovo II had butchered his father in politically desperate circumstances, so Kosovo II was killed at the behest of his son in politically desperate circumstances. The new Sasanian king, Kavad II, following his ignominious rise to power, then reached out to Heraclius in order to end the war. Heraclius was as exhausted as everyone else by years of blood and strife. He received Kavad II's messengers and the long, bloody clash finally ground to a stop. The peace agreement settled on was fairly simple. The Sasanians would cede all territories taken after 591 back to the Byzantines and return the true cross. The two empires would go back to the way that they'd been for a long time. The Byzantines and Gukturks would go home. There were just two hiccups with this settlement. First, the new Sasanian king died, likely of the plague, before 628 was out, passing the throne to his son Artaxir III. Second, and more problematically, the great Sasanian general Sharbaraz occupied Egypt. Sharbaraz was a more formidable negotiator than the cowed Sasanian kings had been, and Sharbaraz demanded that the new Byzantine-Sasanian border be to the east of the Euphrates. To this new settlement, Heraclius agreed. It wasn't quite what he had wanted, but considering that just six years before, Heraclius had been running scared and fulching gold plate from Byzantine churches to keep the empire on life support, the victory settlement was still a palatable arrangement. To seal the bargain, Heraclius and Sharbaraz met in the war-torn lands of Cappadocia, and Heraclius' son married Sharbaraz's daughter. And if it sounds like Sharbaraz was acting quite a bit like a Persian king during these negotiations of 628, you won't be surprised to hear that Sharbaraz thought so too. The great general seized control of the Persian capital in 630, had the young king Artaxir III killed, and then took control of the empire. Sharbaraz would rule for the modest duration of about two months before being murdered on June 9, 630. Over the next year and a half, as the Persian empire rumbled with internal dissent, a stunning number of Sasanian monarchs, more than ten of them, would lay claim to the throne, even as regions and internal polities of the empire proclaimed that they were done with Sasanian leadership altogether. When the slideshow of would-be Shahanshahs finally stopped, in 632, a monarch named Yazdegerd III took the throne. In order to enjoy the dubious honor of being the very last Persian king of antiquity, Yazdegerd III's ancestors had crossed swords with the Byzantines, Turks, Huns, Bactrians, and others. Yazdegerd III, however, from the first year of his rule in 632 to the year of his death in 651, would fight the Arab Muslims, and as you probably know, Yazdegerd III would lose. So that completes a basic summary of the Byzantine Sasanian war of 602 to 628. It is, in my opinion, one of the greatest war stories in history, which is why I wanted to retell it in this program. Here we have Kosovo II swearing vengeance against Fokas, there Persian armies gobbling up Syria and Armenia in a sudden fuselage of campaigning at the wars beginning, here we have Constantinople again and again assaulted on all sides, but again and again refusing to go down and there, Ctesiphon, drowsy and overstuffed with Roman treasure up until shockingly at the 11th hour, the Romans and their allies arrive to take back every penny of it with interest. European historiography has presented this long conflict as a come from behind victory, the moralistic tale of a prideful Persian Goliath and a brave Byzantine David, a late antique Christian version of the old Herodotus story of the Greco-Persian wars in which Western brawn beats Eastern despotism. In the pages of modern historians, although the last great war of antiquity is no longer offered up as a tale of righteous west versus orientalized east, the story can still feel strangely artificial. Its ending, as you just heard, is jerky and awkward. How could the Persians win a war for 21 years only to lose it in five? No, seriously, how could the Byzantine Empire lose Syria and Egypt and more and over the course of the final few years of the war, running on fumes, chase the Persians all the way from Constantinople back to Ctesiphon? We all like dramatic reversals of fortune and underdog victories, but what the Byzantines did in the 620s seems considering what led up to it completely crazy. The answer to this puzzle, why the Byzantines were able to win so suddenly and decisively, ultimately lies neither in the righteousness of Heraclius nor the hachure of Kosoor the second, nor of course in anything intrinsic to Christianity or Zoroastrianism, but instead in the nature of the Sasanian Empire itself and what was happening there over the first quarter of the 600s. First of all, as I have emphasized a couple of times in this program, the Persians were able to blitz the Byzantines because for two decades the Persian east was unusually calm and quiet. That alone, if you remember nothing else about the Byzantine Sasanian War of 602 to 628, is a good takeaway from this story. The cyclones that would drive Central Eurasian history during and after the Abbasid Caliphate would come from the Iranian plateau and what was to the north and east of it, and when this storm front became quiet due to a civil war between Turkic nomads around 600, Kosoor the second, unusually ambitious and aggressive as Sasanian kings went, was able to focus all his power and will on the Byzantines. Even victorious wars however come with immense costs and as major Sasanian campaigns stretched into a second decade and then a third, the fissures that already existed in the Persian Empire widened. It is to these fissures that I now want to turn, the political and social structure of the last Persian Empire of antiquity. Within the story of the late Sasanian Empire's composition and internal weaknesses are the keys to a lot of subsequent Central Eurasian history. The Sasanian Empire was the third and final great Persian Empire of antiquity and in the story of its formation in 224 CE lies the ultimate roots of Kosoor the second's military failures exactly 400 years later. Before the Sasanian dynasty controlled Persia, the Parthian dynasty did. The Parthian Persian Empire which endured from 247 BCE to 224 CE was ruled over by a dynasty called the Araskids. The Araskids who ruled for more than 450 years actually endured longer than the Achaemenids who had come before them and the Sasanians who came after them and Romans understood the Parthians and their Araskid rulers as barbarian but equal. The 450 year story of the Araskids is a long one. Initially a military dynasty that rested control of western Iran from the Ailing Salukids, the Araskids gradually began to claim themselves as the heirs of the long ago Achaemenids. They likely did so in the face of competing political pressure from within the Persian Empire. This pressure came from the primacy of seven families most often called the seven great houses of Iran, the house of Ispabudan, the house of Karan, the house of Miran, the house of Varaz, the house of Surin, the house of Zik and the house of Spandiyad. These seven families in the first century BCE considered themselves on par with the ruling Araskid dynasty consenting to Araskid rule as long as it was overall beneficial to them. The roots and history of these seven noble houses of Iran are semi-legendary and a lot of the history of the Parthian period was written during the later Sasanian period. What's important for our purposes is simply that the rule of the later Parthian period was both monarchic and oligarchic. Powerful and wealthy houses backed Araskid kings but they did so conditionally and strategically such that the Parthian Empire was a kingdom made up of smaller kingdoms. These internal kingdoms are a signature feature of ancient Persian history. The modern historian Parvane Poshoriati describes them as agnatic families or agnatic groups, agnatic meaning kinship traced through patrilineage. The agnatic families of late antique Persia were genetically, economically, politically and territorially linked groups wherein members associated with one region had access to both generational wealth as well as political appointments with the king of kings. These political appointments themselves could and did become inherited. In other words, a member of the house of Miran whose territory lay along the southwestern Caspian shore and Armenia might inherit both the prestige of direct lineage to a familial ancestor as well as a governmental post associated with the Shahansha and in such a way, agnatic groups in late antique Persia were both a hereditary aristocracy as well as a hereditary bureaucracy. The agnatic families of ancient Persia have some resemblances to the tribes of Arabia during the Parthian and Sasanian periods. Like Arabian tribes, Persian vassal kingdoms were regionally rooted, genetically linked clan groups whose primary fidelity lay in family and kin rather than state or empire. Unlike Arabian tribes though, Persian vassal kingdoms were property owners who passed estates down through prima genature and vowed fealty to a central Persian king. Arabs, before the Caliphates at least, elected tribal leaders through councils, but monarchy and vassal kingdoms seemed to have been the rule in Persia from the common era onward. Thus, and the bottom line here is that Parthian and Sasanian Persia, civilizations which have long been understood as tantamount to the Roman Empire to their west, in fact already resembled the feudal confederations of the European middle ages more than they did Rome under, say, the Nerva Antonine dynasty. Sasanian Persia was medieval before being medieval was cool. To turn to historiography for a moment, from ancient times to the present there has been considerable inertia against acknowledging the pluralistic power of Sasanian leadership. Ever since Herodotus portrayed Achaemenid kings as decadent despots, historians past and present have more often than not imagined ancient Persian empires as quote, absolutist governments, close quote, to use the phrase of the influential Danish scholar Arthur Christensen. Political histories written during Sasanian times were equally reluctant to acknowledge the limitations of Sasanian monarchical power. History, up until very recently, has generally understood Sasanian kings as Latter-day Xerxes and Cyrus, and although this was certainly the way that Sasanian kings marketed themselves, the real politics of the late Sasanian Empire were far messier and more complex. The evidence for this complexity has always been there. Pliny the elder back during the first century wrote that quote, the kingdoms of Parthia are 18 in all, close quote, with 11 being in the north and seven more in the south. But in the Anglophone world we have tended to imagine that Rome thought its own mirror image from the other side of Mesopotamia, when in reality ancient Persia was something else. In this episode so far we've covered the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628 and then I've paused to emphasize that the Sasanians, while this war was being fought, were less of an empire and more of a conglomeration of aristocratic subgroups consensually united under a single commander. Before and after the so-called Last Great War of Antiquity, different groups within the Sasanian Empire were struggling for primacy. Getting to know these groups and the hidden story behind this terminal war is intrinsically fascinating as well as excellent preparation for understanding medieval Islamic history. So let's go back in time one generation and for a little while get late antique Iran firmly in our minds. As we learned earlier in this program, the great Sasanian King Kosooroh II whose epithet was Parvis or Victorious rose to power in a bloody political welter. Kosoor II came to power at a time when the Sasanian dynasty was under significant threat from competing aristocratic families in Iran. It happened as follows. Kosoor II's father was Hormoz'd IV. Hormoz'd IV on the throne from 579 to 590 instituted a purge of some of his father's leading dignitaries as well as a significant quantity of Zoroastrian clergymen and courtiers. There was a pattern to Hormoz'd killings. Prominent victims tended to be high noblemen of old Parthian stock, in other words noblemen from aristocratic families with potential claims to the Sasanian throne. Earlier I mentioned seven noble houses of Iran. During Hormoz'd IV's purges he decisively alienated two of these houses, the Ispabudans and the Mirans, and it was from the Miran family that a major rebellion arose. The rebellion arose in the person of a general named Baram Chobin. Baram Chobin was the Sasanian Empire's fixer in the northeast. Among his many achievements was fending off a massive invasion by Turks and white Huns in the late 580s just before Hormoz'd IV came to power. To Hormoz'd IV, as his reign lengthened, everything about Baram Chobin was dangerous. A celebrity general from an opposing political clan, Baram Chobin was emblematic of the fragility of Sasanian claims to power. Thus threatened by the general, Hormoz'd IV had Baram Chobin demoted from his governorship in the east, and in the year 590, Hormoz'd IV's luck ran out. Koshrotha II's father memorably faced two different coups at once, from two of the different noble houses of Iran. I've already mentioned Baram Chobin's rebellion, the archetypal military coup rebellion that plagued so many ancient empires, but as Baram Chobin prepared his bid for power, Hormoz'd IV also faced a palace coup. This palace coup was led by Hormoz'd IV's brothers-in-law, men from the Ispabudan dynasty. And once these two brothers had done away with Hormoz'd IV, they put Koshrotha II on the throne. Thus, Koshrotha II, who would eventually be called the Victorious, and nearly destroy the entire Byzantine Empire, began his reign as a political pawn. His uncles, the Ispabudan brothers, saw him as a vehicle for their dynastic ambitions. The problem for these Ispabudan brothers was that a general from the house of Miran, again Baram Chobin, saw the Sasanian Empire as his for the taking after he rebelled in the east in 589. Young Koshrotha II and his uncles fled Ctesiphon in 590, and Baram Chobin took over. Of old Parthian blood, Baram Chobin, to some Persians, represented the renewal of a Parthian kingdom that should never have been interrupted by Sasanian usurpers in the first place. The historical events that I've just recounted are, at first glance, pretty strange. We can all understand military coups, and palace coups, and competing aristocratic dynasties. But weren't the Parthians left by the wayside way back in 224 CE when the Sasanian dynasty began? Were there really Parthian dynasts still around in 590 when the Sasanian line of kings was almost 400 years old? And the answer is yes, absolutely. The Agnatic family was an incredibly durable institution in late antique Persia, just as it would be in medieval Persia. What did it matter if 400 years of Sasanian kings had come and gone when Parthian houses still flourished in the empire, ready to take up the mantle of leadership in Persia once more and usher the empire into an unprecedented golden age? Zoroastrian prophecies, like their Abrahamic counterparts, were full of legends about coming periods of prosperity, and these religious ideas undergirded the political ambitions of various Parthian clans. Baram Chobin, the Parthian who broke with the Sasanian line of kings, did not break the Sasanian line of kings for long. There was certainly some momentum in the empire to enthrone a Parthian king. At the same time, the Sasanians had been in charge for a long time, and for many, keeping the Sasanians in charge was easier and simpler than any potential alternative. To return to history we've already learned in this program, young Kosrow II, then the pawn of his powerful uncles, also became the pawn of the Byzantine emperor Maurice, who backed Kosrow II's claims over those of the usurper general Baram Chobin. Facing the juggernaut of the Byzantine empire, Baram Chobin understood that he was not the king of kings that many Persians sought, and he fled east, being forced to fight the Sions of another of the seven houses of Iran on his way through the empire. Baram Chobin found temporary solace with the Kagan of the Turks, but having proven a threat to the Sasanian regime, his days were numbered, and Kosrow II had him assassinated. This assassination marked the true beginning of the career of Kosrow II, and while Kosrow II was able to eliminate the Parthian usurper, the coup that Baram Chobin successfully instigated widened a gulf in Iranian civilization. It was an old gulf, the gulf between Parthava, or northeastern Iran, and Persis, or southwestern Iran. These two sectors of the Sasanian empire, and the noble houses based there, had never been a very unified polity, and though they temporarily lined up behind young Kosrow II in 591, the disunity between Persia's northeast and southwest would prove a critical problem for the empire in decades to come. Kosrow II's ascension to power, as I mentioned before, came at the behest of two aristocratic king-makers, his uncles on his mother's side, who hailed from the Ispabudan house. These uncles had probably assassinated Kosrow II's father, Hormuz IV, not out of opposition to Sasanian kingship in general, but due to the previous monarch's volatility. Yet the uncles, if they expected the young king to reward them, received quite the opposite. Kosrow II, like his father, Hormuz IV, was suspicious of noblemen who wielded immense political power. Though Kosrow II first rewarded one uncle with the position of royal treasurer, and the other with a major military command to the east, Kosrow II soon turned against both of them. He could not, after all, be too closely associated with relatives who had murdered his father, and enabled his rise, however much he himself had countenanced that murder in order to enable that rise. Kosrow II had his treasurer uncle killed. The other uncle rose in rebellion, claiming that, like Baram Chobin, he was eligible to be king since he was a Parthian. The rebellion was a serious affair, although our historical sources on it are a little thin, but eventually, at some point in the 590s, Kosrow II was able to have second uncle murdered as well. In spite of the rebellious uncle's death, Kosrow II saw the rebellion in the north continue, a rebellion in which a northeastern Parthian political coalition fought off Kosrow II's army, which itself was led by an Armenian prince named Sambat Bagratuni, until as late as 602. Sambat Bagratuni, who put down the rebellion, was rewarded handsomely after fighting with the governorship of the northeastern quarter of the Sasanian Empire, where both of the Parthian rebellions had originated. Putting an Armenian overlord in charge of the fractious northeast was a stopgap. On the one hand, the Armenian Sambat Bagratuni was loyal to Kosrow II and served him successfully. On the other hand, the appointment of an Armenian governor in the region was Kosrow II's admission that the Sasanians were no longer willing to let some of the seven noble houses of Iran rule their ancestral territories. It's easy to get lost in this period of Persian political history, so let me sum up the implications of what you just heard. The Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628, when we first read about it, seems to be the story of an eastern horde united soundly behind a king of kings bearing down on Rome. But just a few minutes of basic political history from late antique Iran teaches us a very different lesson. Kosrow II in the 590s was trying to herd cats, and some of these cats were very old and very dangerous. The first 10 years of the Shahanshah's reign were spent in civil wars, wars with the Parthian general Baram Chobin, and then with Kosrow II's kingmaker uncle. Kosrow II was able to survive partly by empowering an Armenian military strongman from the north to act on his behalf as an outside agent in the Persian game of thrones. In short, by 602, when Kosrow II appears in European history books as a titan from the east, all was not well in the state of Persia where seven noble houses were beginning to more openly line up between Sasanian and Parthian leadership and where an increasing chasm was widening between the northeast and the southwest. All of this took place again before the Byzantine Sasanian War of 602-628 and something else did as well. In the year 600, Kosrow II dissolved the Lakhmed client kingdom. This client kingdom, if you'll remember from earlier episodes, was an Arab client kingdom based in modern-day Iraq and anchored there to act as a buffer state between Persia to the east and then the Arabian interior and Syria to the west. The Lakhmeds had served the Sasanians as a buffer state for a long time. When Kosrow II had the last Lakhmed king killed in 600, allegedly due to a squabble related to a royal marriage, Kosrow II removed a barrier between the Sasanian Empire and the Marchland to its southwest. This was exactly where the Arab Islamic invasions would come from three decades later, though of course the last successful Persian king of antiquity could never have known this. A nearly exact contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad, Kosrow II was perhaps the second most impactful person of his generation. Had Kosrow II spent his energy from 602 to 628 on domestic affairs, mending Persia's divergent tendencies and bringing the seven great houses of Iran into greater accord with one another, the Muslim armies that invaded in the 630s and 640s would have encountered a far stauncher resistance in Iraq and Iran. Instead though, Kosrow looked west and made war on the Byzantines for a generation and the Persian Empire quietly hardened into different power blocks ready to go their own way when the time came. All of this late Sasanian history should give you a better sense of what the Rashidun Caliphate invaded when they attacked the old Persian Empire beginning in the 630s. And I'd like to tell you here toward the close of this episode just a bit more about the Persian side of the last great war of antiquity. Between 602 and 628, a devastating war ravaged the Byzantine Empire's eastern front. Syria, the Levant, Egypt, and Anatolia were the main theaters of this war and thus histories of the war like the one I offered earlier in this episode have traditionally concentrated on battles fought and territory lost and gained. However, behind the Sasanian Empire's formidable front lines, even as it won territory, the Empire was seething. Kosrow II's most famous general was Shabaraz, the boar of the Empire. And while Shabaraz rendered great services to the Sasanian King, Shabaraz also eventually betrayed Kosrow II. As we learned earlier, following the failed siege of Constantinople in 626, Shabaraz and his army marched southward to Egypt, where thereafter Shabaraz acted independently, negotiating with the Byzantine Empire at the war's end and briefly holding the Persian throne himself. Shabaraz, like all Persian power players of the era, was from one of the seven noble houses of Iran. In Shabaraz's case, the Miranids, a Parthian house. And also, like all Persian power players of the early 600s, Shabaraz was a deft politician. His controversial mutiny against the King of Kings was in all likelihood not undertaken in a vacuum. A combination of literary sources, numismatics, and sigilography, or the study of seals amassed together as evidence, has led some modern scholars to reconsider the war's final years. In 625, as we heard earlier, Heraclius beat three different Sasanian armies massed against him. And then in 626, the Byzantines fended off a massive siege, as Avars and Persians alike fell upon Constantinople. 625 and 626 were certainly years of Byzantine courage and military competence, but this courage and military competence was likely aided by systemic chaos among the Persian leadership. We've already learned that as Kosovo II directed killing blows against Rome, his most decorated General Shabaraz abandoned the Shahanshah and set up shop in Egypt in 627. Prior to and contemporary with this high-profile mutiny, however, there may have been similar ones. A mysterious figure named the Prince of the Meads, or Thorec Hormuzd, along with his two sons in the pages of the Armenian historian Sebios and the later Persian poet Ferdowsi, is also said to have withdrawn his support for Kosovo II. This second military defection happened not in Egypt, but up north, precisely in the area where Heraclius concentrated military pressure soon thereafter, meaning that the second mutiny in 626 or 627 was likely undertaken in concert with Byzantine help. Everything about the end of the last great war of antiquity, in fact, points to the political disintegration of the late Sasanian Empire. Between 531 and 628, just three Sasanian kings, Kosovo I, Hormuzd IV, and Kosovo II, led the empire for nearly an entire century, but increasingly over the course of this final century of effective Sasanian leadership, each king had to reckon with noble houses and entire regions of Iran asserting themselves against the monarchy. By the time our main character for today Kosovo II seated himself on a throne already bloodstained with internecine Persian squabbling, the empire's days were numbered, though his achievements were enough to make him a folkloric figure in later Persian literature, and though his conquests nearly matched those of the ancient Achaemenids, a maelstrom of political intrigue brought him down in just two years between 626 and 628. The seven noble houses of Iran, with their ultimately agnatic loyalties to family and clan, together with powerful forces among them, seeking to revive the Parthian line of kings set by the wayside 400 years earlier, did what Byzantines and their allies couldn't have done alone. In the final phase of the last great war of antiquity, Kosovo II faced truly impossible odds, an ungovernable empire, a talented Byzantine adversary, and a massive and resurgent barbarian menace to the north. When he died, Persia spun like a centrifuge, and although the crippled Sasanian monarchy sputtered onward, there would be no more Shahanshahs like those of old. The feudal palaces and estates of Persia's old land-owning families had had various glazes of paint brushed over them, and when the colors of dynasties and empires wore away, this old aristocracy still stood. So too would it stand over the next century, as Arabian and Islamic colors joined those painted onto the seven noble houses of Iran. So now you know the history of the Byzantine Sasanian war of 602-628, along with a bit about the structure of Persian society during the late pre-Islamic period. In subsequent programs dealing with Islamic caliphates, we'll remember what we learned in this show, that the Iranian world was vast, deeply rooted, and resilient against change, that although leaders like Kosovo II could conquer walled cities and entire provinces, they still had trouble with the management of Persia itself. Later, when Arab Islamic armies arrived, they marched into an essentially feudal, rather than imperial, civilization, brokered agreements piecemeal with various regions of that civilization, and a great deal of Persia's social and political life continued onward with surprisingly little modification. Earlier in this program, we heard a character from the poet Ferdowsi expressing condescension toward the Arab invaders of Iran. By the time Ferdowsi's Shana-meh was written, around 1000 CE, a cultural rivalry between Arabs and Persians had been part of the Islamic world for 250 years. Out of this rivalry rose the Shorubiyah controversy, essentially a multifaceted debate about the primacy of Arabs and Arabic within Islamic culture. On one side of it, proud Arabs touted the great conquests of their forefathers, and of course the Arabian origins of Islam and the Arabic language of the Quran. They had critics, though. As time passed during the early period of the Caliphates, enough Berbers, Copts, Greek speakers, and above all other Persians, demonstrated tremendous fluency with the Arabic language. The early Abbasid poet Abu Nawaz of mixed Persian and Arab heritage around the year 800 declared that, quote, the Arabs in God's sight are nothing, close quote. While Abu Nawaz's polemic statement represents an extreme perspective in the Long Shorubiyah controversy, Arabic literature certainly soaked up a great deal of Persian influence. As historian Robert Irwin writes, quote, the impact of Persian literature on Arabic prose, nonfiction, and fiction was, if anything, even more important than that of Greek, close quote. Early Arabic prose literature initially developed as something called adab, or what we might call literature of refined manners, and it was typically aimed at an adressee, in other words a Caliph, or other high-born correspondent, real or imaginary. The Persian author Ibn al-Mukhafa, at work in the second half of the 700s, wrote works that we might call mirrors of princes. In other words, didactic prose intended to instruct the ruling class on how to be gracious and gentile leaders, and we'll read one of those soon. While today the Arabic word adab simply means literature, during the late eighth century under the pens of al-Mukhafa and others, the genre probably evolved out of Persian didactic literature, aimed at deacons, or country gentlemen who were landowners, like the patriarchs of those seven noble houses of Iran. Thus, even with the Sasanian empire gone, and the Abbasids in control, old Persian noble families were still arbiters of taste and culture. Just as Persian noblemen had quietly been power brokers behind Kosoor the Second and the Sasanian kings before him, Persian aristocrats achieved positions of great administrative power in the Abbasid Caliphate, most notably when the vizier Yahya Ibn Khalid served Harun al-Rashid, perhaps the most famous Caliph ever to sit on the throne. At the end of the 700s, Yahya Ibn Khalid hosted majales, essentially literary salons, where people of culture enjoyed recitations and erudite discussions. In fact, as the 800s wore onward, writers brought many Persian traditions over into Arabic literature. Another was the Munadhara, essentially a dialectic genre in which two personified things extoll their respective merits. The writer Al-Jahiz wrote paired speeches in which, for instance, boys extolled their qualities and then girls did, and another in which shepherds and goat herds did the same thing, and these kinds of literary recreations, which are very charming and imaginative, as we'll see in later episodes, had roots in pre-Islamic Persian writings. As the ancient world of Persian gentility suffused the early Caliphates within the new hybrid aristocracy, the norms of the old Arabic Qasida gave way to new ones. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry had often featured gritty speakers fresh from melancholy deserts' landscapes, praising their camels or horses or tribes or martial prowess. Such grave protagonists during the 800s gave way to figures called Zarifes, more light-hearted men of taste, culture, and fashion, more likely to wield verbal riposte than spears and more schooled in wit than war, and yet at the same time not immune to the pangs of unrequited love. As Zarifes waltzed through Abbasid poems and stories in the 800s, a literary work was underway that would eventually become the most famous piece of Arabic literature in the West, and this was the 1001 Knights, often called the Arabian Knights. This collection, notwithstanding its name, actually came from a Persian miscellany of stories called the Hazar of Sana, stories with roots in the sprawling and pluralistic world of the old Sasanian gentility. The first few centuries of Arabic literature were also thoroughly Arabic in their origins. Earlier in this season of episodes, we learned about the Abbasid period fascination with Jahili literature, and throughout the 800s, just as writers of Arabic poetry became entranced with old Persian traditions, they also collected and curated the pure old Arabic of the peninsula from the period during and prior to the time of the Prophet Muhammad. But against these nostalgic traditions, there were also more progressive ones. The Persian poet Bashar ibn Burd, before the 800s even began, was an unapologetic votary of grand old Persian culture. Although he wrote in Arabic during the 770s and 780s, Bashar derided the old archetypes of Arabic poetry, pioneering a new style in which desert wanderers and deserted camps gave way to cityscapes portrayed in the Arabic of cosmopolitan metropolises. The poet Abu Nawaz, who lived from about 756 to 814, is among the most famous in all classical Arabic literature, although his heritage was partially Persian. Abu Nawaz wrote many Qamriya poems or poems that extolled drinking and wine. These wine poems had Persian rather than Arabian roots. Sassanian courts had long been associated with heavy drinking, and the pre-Islamic Arabic poems having to do with wine, fittingly, were composed in the Lakhmed court, in other words the court of a Persian client king. Some Abbasid period Muslims found their way around Quranic prohibitions of wine, many of them Persians, who had always had a tradition with the beverage. Mawking the dusty old form of the Qasida, which traditionally began with a lamentation for an abandoned desert camp, Abu Nawaz wrote a parody that lamented an abandoned tavern. His entire uvra, in fact, with its wide-ranging celebrations of wine, women hunting, boys and beautiful flowers, was in some ways a reaction against the grave, solemn, ponderous genre of the traditional Arabic Qasida. In Abu Nawaz, the splendor and libertinism of the old Sassanian aristocracy lived on. The poets I've just named, every single one of them holy or partially Persian in his extraction, were among the foremost founders of classical Arabic literature prior to the year 850, and though most of us don't encounter them in the Anglophone world, Ibn al-Mukhafah, Bashar ibn Burd, and Abu Nawaz are on bookshelves across a lot of the world today. The last Sassanian Shahanshah had perished back in 651, but while some cultures do not survive imperial and military takeovers, others flourish beneath imperial and military takeovers, and this was what Persian culture did after the death of the last King of Kings. Way back in the 30s BCE, the Roman poet Horus, contemplating the profound fascination Romans had with Greek culture, wrote that, quote, captive Greece took her captor captive, close quote. Something similar happened during the early Islamic caliphates. Just as they occupied nearly every other governmental post, men and women with Persian roots were a formative part of what made the Islamic Golden Age so golden. Islam was there to stay. Arab culture was too, but to these, the descendants of the seven noble houses of Iran added the cultural richness of a very old and complex civilization, one that conquered Arab Islamic leadership, even as it had been conquered. To return to the subject of the Byzantine Sassanian War of 602-628, the Arab poet Al-Buturi wrote about this war, perhaps 250 years later, in a poem that sadly reflected on the bygone empire's glory days and pictured it as something beyond the scope and scale of Jahili Arabia. The poet Al-Buturi wrote about how, quote, the house of Sassan had ruled recumbent in a towering shade, baffling the eye with its starry hub, its gateway closed on the distant line from Grand Caucasia to deep Lake Van, worlds removed from gazelles abode that driving sands obliterate, ambition beyond the ambition of tribes. Manifest still is the glory of men whose record dispels all shadow of doubt. At the sight of Sassanians at war, you would start as one irrevocably thrusts his lance and another flashes his shield at the blade and alive to the eye indeed they come, and, enwrapped in contemplation, I find my fingers tracing out their forms to drink on the battlefield wine like a star that in moonless night illumines the dark, or a beam of the sun that sends a glow through pulsing veins at every draft, a bringer of peace and with a ray from every heart distilled in the glass unites all men in love that I fancied Kostro II himself keeping me company. Then the hall of presence in immensity stands like a cave high arched in the face of a cliff. In these stunningly beautiful lines, Albuterri imagines the bygone world of Persia at its apex, fittingly under the influence of a little bit of wine. He pictures the Sassanians at high tide, and his assessment is thoroughly reverent. The Persians of yesteryear, Albuterri concludes, had ambitions greater than tribes could have had. They were not some jahili profligates thwacked to the side by the righteous ascent of Islam. They had been majestic, and they were majestic still, hanging in the imagination of Arab and Persian alike. The last great war of antiquity had been a tragedy. Kostro II had slammed armies westward and failed due to Byzantine brawn, barbarian attacks, and dissension among his own subjects. And yet, those subjects had survived and adapted within subsequent history, and they were flourishing. And if the 700s and 800s were any indication, ancient Persian culture had never lost any wars at all. Over the course of this program, we have learned two overarching lessons. The first is that the Sassanian Empire in 602 was at once mighty and a ramshackle, a consortium more than an empire. The second is that the regional dynasties within the Sassanian Empire were each distinctive hubs of culture, culture that would survive the Islamic conquests and continue to flourish thereafter. But there is a third overarching lesson as well that we can take away, and this third lesson has to do with human migration patterns during the early Middle Ages. The rise and ascendancy of the Islamic caliphates, specifically the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid caliphates, took place between 632 and 861. Headquartered at the seam between Europe and Asia, these three empires centered in Medina and then Damascus and then Baghdad, controlled staggering amounts of territory. But almost as soon as the Umayyad caliphate spread its wings from the Atlantic Spanish coast to the Indus Valley, it began to contract again. After 750, modern-day Andalusia went its own way into then Morocco, and then Tunisia and the distant northeastern region known as Quraçan, eastern Iran and western Afghanistan was volatile for generations. By the mid-800s, various kingdoms more properly called Emirates ruled what had been under unified Arab leadership a century before. These kingdoms continued the cultural efflorescence that had begun unfolding under the Abbasid caliphate by 800. But Islamic history by the 800s was no longer just Arab history. As the vast population migrations that Romans had weathered during the 300s continued, Muslim populations in modern-day Iraq and Iran over the 600s, 700s, and 800s absorbed immigrants from present-day Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, China, and more. From the Huns to the Mongols, a thousand years of Eurasian history saw a general migration pattern of eastward raider and settler groups coming westward. This was the case at the most crucial moment of the last great war of antiquity in the year 627, when the western Turkic cognate allied with the Byzantines and then began chainsawing its way into the Sasanian north and east. The same westward migration was at work on a smaller scale during the twilight of Roman Britannia as Saxons and other groups crossed the North Sea to settle along the east coast of Britain. At a macro and micro scale throughout the medieval period, what we can superficially call barbarian population migrations from the north and east to the south and west were immense drivers of history and culture up until the Mongol invasions of the early 1200s. The last great war of antiquity broke the might of the ancient worlds left and right fists. For two centuries afterward, the early caliphates were an astounding anachronism, holding sway over a land mass too large, too populous, and too heterogeneous to be ruled by one power. Because beneath the tides of whatever empire or barbarian population showed up to assert control, West Eurasia's cultural history had become too ingrained and indelible to be effaced by any regime. Persian and Roman kingships, accepting in their heartlands, had always been hubristic affairs. Beneath them, noble houses, businesses, tribes, trade systems, languages, and more weathered the high tides and low tides of various empires. The history of the Middle Ages then is the history of a strange tension, on one hand, two multuous westward migrations from the Saxons to the Mongols, and on the other hand, the emergence of stable and durable vernacular cultures onto the historical record that sprung up from the rubble of old empires. In some cases, though, culture itself was targeted during a regime change. This was the case with Zoroastrianism during the first three caliphates of Islam, which, in spite of a literary renaissance over the course of the late 800s, was a fading presence in the Islamic East. Zoroastrians still lived and worked throughout Abbasid Iran for a long time. But as generations passed, between genuine conversions, conversions based on pragmatism and ambition, and less often religious prejudice, Zoroastrians were finding life in certain places within the Islamic world challenging by the year 900, and late Sasanian Zoroastrianism will be the subject of our next show. Zoroastrianism is a tricky subject for a lot of reasons, not the least of which are the Zoroastrian scriptures. Though the religion was definitely around by the Achaemenid period, the mid-500s BCE, some sources placed the birth of the prophet Zarathustra all the way back toward the 1500s BCE. Zoroastrianism, always a silent partner to the Abrahamic religions, was slower to write down and codify a canon. And so although Zoroastrianism is probably about as old as Judaism, astonishingly many works that are part of Zoroastrian sacred tradition today were not written down until after the 800s CE. In the next program, we're going to look at one of those sacred works. The Bundahitian is the Zoroastrian creation story. While it's objectively fascinating as a piece of theology, the Bundahitian is also a window into a changing world. Set down during the 800s, the Bundahitian shows a population of Persian traditionalists trying to make sense of an unintelligible present. To Christians living in the Islamic world, a new religion had come into being, but Constantinople still stood strong, and to the west, the Papacy in Rome was an outpost for Christendom too. For Zoroastrians though, things had fallen apart and the center had not held. Fire temples were giving way to mosques, and Ahura Mazda, or Mazda as he was known in later centuries, saw fewer and fewer devotees in his congregations. So in the next show, we're going to learn about later Zoroastrian history, building on what we've learned about the religion throughout our podcast. And I can tell you ahead of time that just as the theology of the Middle Ages often gets really weird really quickly, the Zoroastrian Bundahitian has some passages, some ideas, and some images that are not for an age, but for all time. Thanks for listening to literature and history. Please check out my new book on Homer's Odyssey. I have a quiz on this program in the notes section of your podcasting app if you want to review all the eventful history we've gone through. And for everyone, I have a song, so stick around if you want to hear it. Still here? So I got to thinking about that true cross so central to the Byzantine war efforts during the war story that we heard today. It wasn't the true cross. There are no material remnants of Christianity from the first century. And as people during late antiquity and the Middle Ages knew, a lot of relics were fake. Of course, relics that are illegitimate can still be very special and sacred. And there are thousands of legitimate relics from saints and martyrs of the early Christian period that deserve the shrines and pilgrimages devoted to them. However, again, the relic industry was also a thousand year hustle in which charlatans and snake oil salesmen of all stamps sold anything under the sun that they could pass off as sacred. So I decided to write a tune about relic sales in which a friendly salesman offers you a choice of all sorts of wonderful relics from the life of Jesus, all of them entirely genuine. This one's called Buy Some Relics. I hope you like it and I'll be back next time with a Zoroastrian Bundahitian. Buy Some Relics, oh man. Would you like a true cross fragment? We have four hundred and three enough for dozens of true crosses or make your own. We'll sell you that tree. Would you like this crown of thorns? There's a sombrero of thorns too, a visor of thorns, a breathalyzer of thorns. You can repent while they arrest you. How about the loaves and fishes? He gave to the hungry to feed them. Yes, they're old sure there's a bit of mold, but their authenticity is guaranteed. And in terms of holy grails, we're having a holy sale. Cheaply priced for Jesus Christ, a cup for your holy cocktails. Buy Some Relics, oh man. Please buy the actual sandals in which Jesus preached. They come in different sizes. They're a great choice for the beach. You can get the actual water. That heat turned to wine. Or purchase one of the demons. Our Lord turned into swine. You can go We interrupt this literature and history song for a public service announcement. Oh, yeah. Slavery and the purchase of any intelligent life form, including demons, is wrong and heinous. Good and evil, angel and demon, we've had our differences. But we need to put our best foot forward and lead by example. No demon should be shackled. We shouldn't put demons in chains, and they shouldn't put us into bondage either. That's right, unless we like bondage. Yeah, unless the demons in the people like being tied up. Maybe we like the idea of a big, strong demon offering us a little tenderness. Maybe we're tired of working long shifts at the lumber mill, and our wife hasn't been that attentive. Maybe we just need a bit of punishment in our lives. Just a little bit of... We interrupt this interruption to resume the song. Our intentions were all wholesome, but then it all went wrong. The actual Jesus was a person everyone should love. He preached kindness and equality, and watches down on us from above. And while you're looking up at him, you should buy these sunglasses. They're the ones he wore while on the shore of Galilee. Yes, he preached to the masses. You can get the Spear of Destiny. We've got all kinds of stuff of destiny. The Watts of Destiny, the Scots of Destiny, the actual commemorative socks of destiny, the rug of destiny, the drugs of destiny, the wig of destiny, these twigs of destiny, the vest of destiny, only the best. You see this limited edition toothbrush of destiny. Yeah, I'm still here. Now that that stupid song about relics is over, we can get back to what you're really interested in. I'm talking about six or seven demons, their eyes filled with desire for tender justice, their loin...