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I’ve been playing a little CK again for the first time in a long time and started to get that itch to write again and on something new. Iranian history is an area that has always fascinated me, and I’ve wanted to do a proper Zoroastrian playthrough probably since they first added in those early bookmarks all those years ago! I will be starting as the Ziyarids in the Iron Century bookmark (the best start date of them all IMO) and will be following the story of Zoroastrian Persia. We’ll kick off with a short prelude update before getting into the gameplay. I hope you all enjoy!
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The End of an Old Song – The Fall of Zoroastrian Persia
The End of an Old Song – The Fall of Zoroastrian Persia
Iran is one of the most ancient and magnificent of all the earth’s lands. For millenia Persian culture and the Zoroastrian faith intertwinned to produce one of the greatest civilisational forces in world history. The religion had emerged centuries before the rise of the first great Persian empires out of the teaching of the prophet Zoroaster or Zarathustra – a priest of the indigenous polytheist faith. It stressed the wisdom of one great god – Ahura Mazda – and a dualistic worldview that viewed the world in terms of good and evil. It soon became a focal point of Iranian culture. The mighty armies of the Achaemenid, Parthian and Sassanid empires spread this civilisation and all its trappings far beyond its heartland on the Iranian plateau to the Caucuses, the Fertile Crescent, Central Asia and far beyond. It produced incredible advances in art, architecture, science, forms of government and warfare.
This long history of Zoroastrian Persia was seemingly brought to a close in the space of a single generation in the mid-seventh century. Following three decades of gruelling warfare with the Roman Empire during which Persian arms had seized Egypt and Syria and reached the gates of Constantinople before being driven back to its homeland and a subsequent civil war, the exhausted Sassanian empire was overrun by the invincible conquerors of the Muslim Rashidun Caliphate. The last Sassanid Shah, Yazdegered III was deposed in 651, with his death marking the end of ancient Zoroastrian-Persian power in Iran.
Under the Muslim rule of the Arab Caliphate, Iran remained a predominantly Zoroastrian land for generations, with its firmest roots in the territories furtherest from the centres of Arab power in Central Asia and along the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. Indeed, this Caspian region of Tabaristan maintained indigenous Zoroastrian political leadership for a century after the Muslim conquest of the rest of Persia under the Dayubid dynasty.
The Zoroastrians were treated as ‘people of the book’ by their new overlords, granted protection from their masters in exchange for paying the jizya. However theit status was new as secure as their Christian and Jewish counterparts, frequently attracted unwanted attention from Islamic clerics and authorities.
Over time repression, temporal advantage, cultural prestige and further Muslim expansion across the traditionally Persianate world began to shift Iran’s religious character. This process accelerated following the overthrow of the Arabist Umayyad dynasty by the more ethnically inclusive and Persian-sympathetic Abbassids in 750. Through the eighth and ninth centuries the Zoroastrians would fall into a minority in their own land as Islam became Persia’s majority religion, with the Zoroastrians maintaining their strength primarily in its heartlands of Central Asia and the Caspain region.
By the tenth century, more than two and a half centuries on from the conquest there appeared little prospect the old religion ever returning to prominence or political power in the Iranian world. In the early 900s, one Zoroastrian priest famously lamented that “no period in history, not even that of Alexander, has been more greivious and troublesome for the faithful than these present time ruled by the demon of Wrath”. Yet just at this moment of despair, two brothers from the old believing tribes of the Caspian were preparing to step forward onto the stage of world history to fundamentally change its course and relight the fires of Zoroastrian Persia.
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Thus spoke Zarathustra - I suppose recurrence will be a theme. Looking forward to the story.
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Always on board for a Zoroastrian revival. I'll be keeping an eye on this one
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It’s been awhile since I’ve seen a Zoroastrian AAR On this site so you have peaked my interest
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Same here!Always on board for a Zoroastrian revival. I'll be keeping an eye on this one
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The Brothers Zarathustra – 913-956
The Brothers Zarathustra – 913-956
The two men who would change the course of Iranian history and reverse Persia’s seemingly inevitable drift towards Islam were the two Ziyarid brothers – Mardavij and Vushmgir. Although they claimed royal heritage, they emerged out of the violent tribes of Gilan – one of the provinces on the shores of the Caspian Sea in which the old religion of Zoroastrianism remained widespread into the tenth century.
The tenth century was an unstable time in Persian history. As the authority of the Abbasids had retreated in the preceding century, indigenous dynasties had gained power throughout the Iranian world and proceeded to squabble endlessly over the Caliphate’s old lands. It was into this chaotic and uneven power struggle that the Ziyarids emerged.
The eldest of the brothers, Mardavij, entered military service around 913 and was shortly followed by Vushmgir. The sovereign they served was the Alid Emirate – a Zaydi Shia state that ruled over the southern shore of the Caspian. As the Alid state collapsed in the late 920s, the Ziyarid brothers joined their liege lord Asfar ibn Shiruya in a takeover of most of the Emirate’s old lands in Tabaristan. As a close ally of Asfar, Mardavij was rewarded with governorships and a role as a key general. However, Mardavij had ambitions much greater than this and in 930 turned against his lord, overthrowing Asfar and sending him into exile while establishing himself as ruler of Tabaristan.
Mardavij was neither content to accommodate himself to the Muslims powers of the region nor even limit himself to his newly acquired lands. Openly Zoroastrian, he was fiercely hostile to Islamic dominance and attracted popular support with promises to restore Persian tradition. From 930 he struck southwards into the Persian heartland and quickly won a string of victories – conquering the crucial central-Iranian city of Isfahan, where he established his capital, and having his authority recognised as far away as Ahvaz in Khozistan and Shiraz in Fars. As his authority grew, Mardavij had himself coronated in Isfahan with a crown designed to mimic that of the Sassanian Shahs of old and openly spoke of marching on Baghdad to topple the ailing Abassid Caliphate and restore the old imperial capital of Ctesiphon.
From this moment of great power, things soon fell away. In 935 Mardavij was murdered by his own Turkic slave soldiers, while his Muslim neighbours struck upon his young realm as vultures. As Vushmgir attempted to hold together his brother’s inheritance, he was forced to fall back to his core territories along the Elburz mountains in Tabaristan, south of the Caspian. The Ziyarid state appeared to have been reduced once more to a minor player in Persian politics, isolated by the Shia Emirates to its south and west, the powerful Saminids in the east and the prestigious Abassid Caliph in Iraq.
Perhaps more significant than the loss of land, the transition from Mardavij to Vushmgir threatened the Zoroastrian character of the Ziyarid state. In contrast to his brother, Vushmgir was no zealot and had shown a strong willingness to ingratiate himself to Islam. For much of his life he had maintained ambiguous religious loyalties, posing as a Muslim to some and a Zoroastrian to others. However, after his brother’s deaths and his retreat back to Tabaristan, Vushmgir Ziyarid would make the fateful decision to embrace the faith of his ancestors. Gathering his camp followers, he swore an oath to take up his brother’s legacy and liberate the Persian people from Muslim rule and relight the flames of Zarathustra throughout the land.
The Ziyarid position in the mid-930s remained very insecure, with the Zoroastrian state surrounded on all sides by hostile Muslim powers. Vushmgir was fortunate that during this period a war between the Abassid Caliph in Baghdad and a coalition of Persian Shia Emirs drew attention to the south. Indeed, through a series of short border excursions he successfully expanded westward into Gilan and Daylam, his clan’s ancestral homeland.
The would-be Persian liberator would be forced to look to the west for an ally against the Muslims – to the lands of the Armenians. King Abas of Armenia saw in a valuable potential weapon with which to strike against the Muslim foes that had long threatened his people’s independence. At the close of the 930s the two powers entered into an alliance that saw them jointly invade the Yazdid Emirate of Azerbaijan and divide the land between themselves, with the Ziyarids capturing the important city of Baku and its large Zoroastrian population. The Armenians would continue to sponsor Vushmgir for the next decade with the support of mercenaries that made his armies almost unstoppable.
Victory in the north gave Vushmgir the confidence to launch into a holy war of Persian liberation to the south, striking against the rich Emirate of Jibal in 942. Crushing the Muslim army at Khourabad, he proceeded to capture the great cities of Hamadan and Qom, as well as the jewel of central Persia – Isfahan, briefly his brother’s royal capital. These Zoroastrian conquests were deeply alarming to forces of Islam, and the Abassid Caliphate rallied a degree of unity among the Islamic community as it sent an army over the Zagros to push Vushmgir back into the north in 945. The Arabs won a string of battlefield victories that sent the Ziyarids scattering to their fortresses. It was at this moment that good fortune and Ahura Mazda shone upon the Persians, as an outbreak of cholera in the Caliph’s army during his siege of Isfahan forced him to fall back. A truce was agreed in 946 than saw the Arabs take the mountainous passes of Luristan, but leave the rich cities to the east in Ziyarid hands. Not content to rest on their laurels, the Ziyarid thirst for land led to a further short war in 947-948 against the Kurdish Sallarid Emirate that saw the Zoroastrian zealots capture southern Kurdistan and its sacred Fire Temple.
The Zoroastrian conquests of the mid-tenth century left an incredible trauma on the psyche of Islamic Iran. The social order had already been rocked by the retreat of the stable order the Caliphate had once brought with it and the descent of the region into strife and war. Yet the Zoroastrian resurgence had been a far greater threat. Throughout the wider Iranian world, Zoroastrians remained a sizeable minority, and openly celebrated the conquests of Mardavij and Vushmgir while professing an ideology that presented the brothers as liberators of not just their fellow Mazdans but of the Persian nation from Arabic and Muslim domination. Casting out the old Muslim clerical and landed elite wherever they went – they presented a very real challenge to the social order as well as the religious one.
As panic swept Iran, revolutionary apocalypticism began to take hold. The most influential of these eschatological sects were the Garakani. Claiming that Allah had condemned Islamic society for straying from the truth of Muhammed, this violent movement took hold in the southern province of Fars, home to the Buyid Emirate. The Garakani claimed that all who opposed the teachings of their Iman, Mirza Garakan, were no longer Muslim and were therefore enemies of the true faith. In the early 950s they destroyed the Buyid state, but quickly found themselves incapable of assuming power over the entire region – seeing the former Emirate splinter into half a dozen competing statelets. Taking advantage of the chaos, Vushmgir launched an invasion of the region in 954.
Having conquered the south, Vushmgir would triumphantly be crowned Shah of Persia in Isfahan 956, completing the work set out by his brother. Yet this victory was far from complete. The Islamic world had been stunned by the rebirth of a Zoroastrian Persian state in the space of a single generation, but by the time of Vushmgir’s coronation the armies of Allah were already preparing themselves for retribution.
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Glad to have you on board - I will try to keep the number of chapter titles riffing on that line limited to the single digits
. Some good ol' incest aar
There may be an occasional divine marriage
. Always on board for a Zoroastrian revival. I'll be keeping an eye on this one
A good Zoroastrian playthrough is something that I've tried a good few times since they added in the earlier date ranges (now a very long time ago), its such an interesting setting. And I always love seeing OTL's losers thriving in these alternate worlds AARs produce. Let's hope it lives up to expectations!
Glad to have you on board once more!
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Will Zoroastrians try to spread religion to pagans like Christians and Muslim did?
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A very good start. Smart to establish alliances. Will you ally with the Byzantines?
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Impressive gains for the Zoroastrians, but their state is still only medium sized and many heathens remain within her borders.
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The flame has been relit, for sure … but must now be kept alight. The growth has been impressive, but has resulted in a rather elongated territory that could prove hard to defend. Some lateral east or west (or both) expansion may be needed to round things out a bit.
But it sounds like the Muslim powers will be challenging that, and soon.
But it sounds like the Muslim powers will be challenging that, and soon.
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Return of the Ghazi – 956-986
Return of the Ghazi – 956-986
The Ziyarid conquest of Persia in the second quarter of the tenth century had come at a striking pace and, to the mutual surprise of Zoroastrian and Muslim alike, been met with shockingly little resistance. In the second half of the century this would change. From the late 950s the fledging Ziyarid Shahdom would stand fast against an onslaught of pious Ghazi, determined to restore Muslim rule to Persia.
Beginning in 957, Zoroastrian Persia was beset by an array of threats to its very existence. Between 957 and 963 the Shahdom was invaded by three separate Muslim armies. From the far west, a Shia army allied from Egypt and Syria crossed into Persia, using the Sallarid Emirate based around Tabriz as a based to attack the northwesterly provinces of the Shahdom. To the south west, the Abbasid Caliphs crossed the mountain passes of the Zagros to menace Fars and the royal capital as Isfahan. Meanwhile, in the east the Persianate Saminids of Central Asia crossed the border.
The response of the great conqueror, Vushmgir, to these threats was remarkable – joining brilliant generalship, near-revolutionary nationalism, religious holy war and diplomatic cunning he moved mountains to defend his newly liberated homeland. Drawing upon earlier alliance, the Shah convinced the Armenians to join him in his fight – supporting them in seizing the great city of Tabriz, and in doing so robbing the Shia army of the focal point of their operations, in exchange for their aid. In Persia itself the ideology of the Zoroastrian reconquest was taken to greater extremes in a successful effort to turn the war into a popular mobilisation. At its core, the Ziyarids posed a dualistic dialectic between Iran and Aneran – the national, represented by Zoroastrianism, Persian culture and the new Ziyarid state, and the anti-national represented by Islam, the Arabs and the invaders. This drew the mass support of Zoroastrians, but also attracted many Muslim Persians and those seeking to upturn the old order.
On the field of battle, Vushmgir spent these years darting from one corner of his kingdom to another, always holding the Muslims at bay but always held back from a decisive triumph by the emergence of another crisis. Nonetheless, the wars gradually turned in the Persians’ favour. With the help of the Armenians, the Shia had largely been defeated by 960, while the Abbasids suffered heavy losses during an unsuccessful siege of Isfahan from which they never truly recovered. Indeed, the greatest threat was posed by the powerful Saminids, who successfully occupied much of Tabaristan as well as the key city of Rayy before Vushmgir finally turned the tide against them as well. By 963 the last of the invaders had been ejected from Persia, the Ziyarid state had survived its gravest test.
Shah Vushmgir died shortly after the conclusions of these conflicts, succeeded by his son Basutun the Loyal, known as a devoted lieutenant of his father. Basutun would only rule for four years before an untimely but peaceful death took him. His short reign was defined by a large popular insurrection that threatened to do what the Caliphs and princes of the Muslim world had failed to do. Responding to the anguish of the failed Islamic reconquest and the triumphalism of victorious proselytising Zoroastrian clergy, a large popular revolt broke out in the Kurdish provinces south of Tabriz shortly before the ascension of Basutun. With the royal army unable to control the situation, these territories were quickly overrun and the Muslim rebels crossed into the Zagros. There they were able to besiege a number of important cities and ravage much of the landscape. Only after a decisive Ziyarid victory, won with the substantial contribution of Turkic mercenaries, at Hamadan were they forced into retreat before being trapped in the mountain passed and slaughtered.
The Zoroastrian reconquest of Persia had at times appeared to present itself as a revolution of national, religious and social liberation. Certainly it had made drastic changes to the composition of the Persian elite. In truth, this represented a reshuffling of the existing order and the replacement of one ruling class with another rather that a genuine change to the social structure as Zoroastrian clerics and nobles replaced their Islamic predecessors. Notably, the highest echelons of the new elite were drawn from the northern provinces along the Caspian Sea, long the strongest redoubt against Iran’s Islamificaiton. From here were drawn most of the highest ranking members of the Zoroastrian priestly caste and the Satraps, feudal lords of entire provinces, of the Shahdom. Only among the lower ranking lords and clergy did locals from central and souther Persia achieve new position of their own – with those who had cooperated with the Ziyarid conquest and their descendants securing their positions. For the great mass of the population, outside of the north predominantly Muslim, the clearest change was the abandonment of the jizya, the old tax on non-Muslims, and the reversal of the old lines of patronage that had favoured Muslims at the expense of others.
After his death in 968, Bisutun was succeeded by his seven year old son Vushmgir II. The young Shah’s government would be administered for the next decade by a cabal of grizzled veterans and of his grandfather’s wars who held the realm together while the young Shah spent his days under the pious tutelage of Mobads in the capital. During the 970s these regents were faced by yet another major military threat as the Abbasids launched another invasions. Targetting Kurdistan, origin of the great revolt of the previous decade, the Arabs found easy popular support and ejected the Persians from the area. Crossing into the Persian heartland their progress naturally slowed in the harsh terrain,. Following a year long siege at Hamadan, the Persians deployed a great army to relieve the city and sent the Arabs into headlong retreat back into the Mesopotamia.
By the end of the 970s, having held the invaders at bay for two decades, elites within Persia once again started to turn their attention towards expansion. With the Shah reaching his maturity, the sovereign's personal ambitions met this wider mood well. For years many in north-western Persia, the source of the Ziyarids’ Gilaki and Daylamite tribal roots, had looked jealously to the west where the region’s greatest city – Tabriz – lay under foreign rule. The Armenians were believed to be unpopular among the city’s Iranian inhabitants and overstretched in its occupation. Moreover, with the Armenian-Persian alliance having held strongly for a generation, the Christian Kingdom’s defences were clearly stronger on its other frontiers. Eyeing a quick and easy victory, Vushmgir II would betray his grandfather’s pact of friendship with the mountain kingdom and invade Armenia in 980. It was a decision that would have great consequences for region for a generation.
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Oooh. Just noticed this one. Absolutely onboard for some Zoroastrian restoration antics!
Also, I was amused to see this...
This is one of the images that I used in the header image of my AAR. Obviously, in a less serious manner than you. I think I googled "Armenia" and "Medieval" and thought "Oooh. I could write a funny caption for that!"
Also, I was amused to see this...
This is one of the images that I used in the header image of my AAR. Obviously, in a less serious manner than you. I think I googled "Armenia" and "Medieval" and thought "Oooh. I could write a funny caption for that!"
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For now, the priority has to be to try to re-convert the Persians themselves - who remain predominantly Muslims outside of the northern provinces. We currently rule a semi-circle of Zoroastrian provinces from Baku and snaking around the Caspian with only one other in Fars. The rest are either Sunni or Shia.
The Byzantines are still fairly distant from our borders, but once they get closer they will start to play a larger role in our geopolitical affairs.
Indeed, we are at the size to attract negative attention but not larger enough to dissuade it. Over the past period we've seen the Muslims coming for us in great numbers. What shall happen now that we have betrayed the only clear alliance we had is yet to be seen!
There's been no progression in expansion in this last period where we've just been struggling to survive. Time will tell if Vushmgir II's gambit of striking against the Armenians will pay off, winning some new land and getting us on the path to expansion again.
The Muslims have come calling in the mid-900s. I will be spoiling little to note that they are not quite done with us just yet ...
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Hopefully, those expansionist elites don't overextend. Or they don't turn on each other and the regime...
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The Ziyarids have weathered the first great storm. Hopefully their Armenian adventure won't end as disastrously as those of their Iranian forebears.
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