Michael J. Decker - The Sasanian Empire at War: Persia, Rome, and the Rise of Islam, 224–651

Despite the longevity and success of the Sasanian Empire over the course of its existence from the third through seventh centuries AD, there has not been a great deal written about the empire or its armies. The present volume grew out of my more than twenty years of teaching ancient and medieval military history at universities around the world. With it I aim to fill this gap and to make more accessible the history of an enigmatic and challenging period. Certainly, the success of the Sasanians through most of their history in the face of great challenges to their hegemony, from settled and nomadic powers alike, demands our attention and much further study beyond that possible in an introductory volume like this one.

The Sasanians are named after an obscure figure named Sasan who was probably the father-in-law of Papak, whose son Ardashir (224242) united the Iranian peoples under his banner and established the Sasanian dynasty. It is possible that Sasan was a mythical figure or even a minor god worshipped during the Parthian era of Iranian history (247 BCAD 224). Whatever the nature of Sasan, the dynasty named for him would prove to be one of the most important in world history, as the state dominated much of the Middle East for well over four centuries.

Sasanian ideology imbued the House of Sasan with a divine aura of kingship that provided legitimacy in the face of many challengers. Despite being surrounded by numerous rival families whose pedigrees were held more ancient and illustrious than their own, the Sasanian kings managed to craft ideologies and execute propaganda that served them through nearly a halfmillennium of tumult. The effectiveness with which the Sasanian family had cast themselves as the cement which kept the foundation blocks of the state in place can be viewed in the infrequency of challengers to royal rule from outside the family. Most non-Sasanian claimants to the throne enjoyed only brief success until the nobility and, in later times, the gentry class known as the dehqans once more rallied to a Sasanian candidate.

Despite their success in statecraft, which in those days relied heavily on the necessity of military force, the armies of the empire are relatively poorly known. In large part this is due to a lack of surviving documents. Extraordinarily little textual evidence in the language in which Sasanian-era people spoke, Pahlavi, also known as Middle Persian, regarding the dynasty survive. A small corpus of (mostly later) religious, judicial, and miscellaneous texts survive in the form of documents, seals, and inscriptions. Most of our information comes from later sources, predominantly Armenian, Syriac, Latin, Greek, and Arabic. In many instances the authors of these histories are only tangentially informed of the nature and inner workings of Sasanian society, and in more than a few cases, they are openly hostile and prone to suppression, distortion, and other manifestations of cultural bias. These facts make it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in the cases where valid historical information is transmitted, we often have frustratingly little detail, particularly of the kinds that military historians crave. For example, the numbers of troops, their tactical movements, and precise description of strategy and weapons are treated only anecdotally and are rare.

So why attempt to write a history of the Sasanian great king at war? The Sasanian Persians were one of the great powers of antiquity. Their empire occupied a crucial place in world history and was home to a splendid culture. The Sasanians were the last of the Persian dynasties of antiquity and one that played a significant and vital role in the history of Eurasia for well over a millennium, beginning with the Achaemenid Empire that comprised the largest land empire in history when it peaked under King Darius I (522486 BC), an era that ended with the fall of the Sasanians in 651 AD. While the Sasanians apparently only had faint knowledge of the Achaemenid kings, they did draw links between their own kings and those of the Achaemenids as well as the remote, mythical realm of Iranian prehistory and mythology. Since the great western rival of the Sasanians was the Roman Empire, we are informed enough from Greek and Roman authors to discern the shape of conflict, at least at the campaign level. As noted, we also possess some information from eastern sources which is vital and allows us to talk further about the military successes and failures of the Sasanians.

In part, this book offers a corrective to what has traditionally been a subject approached from a Western perspective, usually by people whose interests lay principally in the Roman world. While I share in this tradition of Mediterranean studies, my training as an historian and archaeologist in the broader history of the Levant and Middle East has made me more agnostic to many of the readings currently in place within the Western tradition. As will be seen throughout the chapters which follow, whereas some historians have rather blindly accepted the word of Graeco-Roman authors at face value, I am at the least more skeptical of these claims. In the main, a careful reading of history impels us to take an ax to cherished props of ancient history: namely that the Sasanians were a second-rate power to Rome, that their army was unprofessional or even feudal, a mass of barbarians who came together for war in some ancient violent antecedent to Burning Man, and then dispersed just as quickly.