The Lion of Zoroaster 1172-1197
The Zoroastrian religion had been going through a period of deep seated reforms since the Bavandid takeover of Persia in the 1130s. These came in reaction to the travails of the Mazdaki Wars and were focussed around establishing a clear Orthodoxy that would be resistant to the rise of heterodox movements like the Tulid Mazdaks in the future. This involved a greater codification of the creed. Alongside the central texts of the faith in the Avesta, a new library of religious law and commentary sprouted up during this period that significantly narrowed the confines of acceptable views within Zoroastrianism. Indeed, there had been careful attention paid to which texts and ideas were excluded from the official canon.
In order to accomplish this task, the previously diffuse structures of Zoroastrianism – prior to the twelfth century largely based upon the interpretations of local Mobads – gave way to hierarchy and church structure. During the middle of the century the nucleus of this structure was based around a series of gatherings of senior Mobads in Isfahan – who possessed the authority to make decisions over religious doctrine and enforce them on a local level. Indeed, by the 1170s a hierarchy was already in place in which senior clerics held regional responsibility for both enforcement of good practice and the appointment of replacement Mobads within their given territories.
Resplendent in the prestige won from his conquest of Iraq and assumption of the status of Shahanshah, Gholam sought to take a more active role in the religious affairs of the state than his predecessors. Assembling the council of Mobads that had previously met at the old capital in Isfahan in Baghdad in 1174, where they were more isolated and clearly under the sovereign’s influence, Gholam pushed them to accept sweeping change to the Zoroastrian religion. Central to this would be the re-establishment of the High Priesthood – an institution that had not existed since the Sassanian era.
This new Moabadan-Moabad, a Priest of Priests for the King of Kings, would take on the role of a Patriarch of Zoroastrianism. Like his Byzantine equivalent, the Moabadan-Moabad and his successors was to be selected by the Shahanshah himself – giving the emperor both immense control over the church and an important religious beyond his previously largely secular role. Furthermore, the High Priest was to be based within the same wider palace complex as the Shah in New Ctesiphon, near Baghdad. Henceforth, all authority in the Zoroastrian church, from appointments to statements of doctrine, would flow downwards from the High Priest, and by extension the Shah.
These religious changes were highly controversial among many quarters – most of all in the historically Mazdaki lands of Kurdistan and western Persia. Outwardly, Tulid Mazdakism had been suppressed during the harsh repression at the end of the Mazdaki Wars, yet in the old heartlands of the faith, Mazdaki tendencies remained rife and had survived the loss of religious leadership. Gholam’s reforms, the culmination of decades of disheartening change, were anathema to these groups. They promised to further tighten restrictions over their local ways of worship and impose beliefs, structures and leadership that were in diametric opposition to their own egalitarian and decentralist philosophy. In 1176, a large Kurdish army – some 30,000 strong – rose up from these lands and marched on Hamadan, where they were greeted as liberators. As the Kurds took on an increasingly ostentatiously Mazdaki identity, calling themselves the new Sorkh Jamagan and adopting their historical red dress, the Persian established was gripped by the fear that the nation might slip back into the chaos of the Mazdaki Wars. Instead, Gholam rallied an enormous army from every corner of his empire and secured a great victory at the Battle of Saveh – midway between Hamadan and Tehran. It would take another two years before the uprising was finally quashed, Gholam adopting the same brutal tactics as his forebears decades before, but after Saveh the revolt had ceased to be a genuine threat.
While the High Priesthood had originally been envisioned as an inward looking institution that would grant internal stability to the faith and empire alike, and strengthen the emperor, its first incumbent, Amin, regarded himself as a more universalist figure with responsibility for all Zoroastrians around the world and, for that matter, the dialectical conflict between good and evil that sat at the heart of Zoroastrian philosophy. To the north, he eyed the lands of Transoxiania – home to the largest communities of Zoroastrians still living beyond Persia’s borders and a number of great cities of the Persian world in the likes of Samarqand, Bukhara and Khiva. Having seen the power of religious warfare unleashed by the Byzantines and Bulgarians in the Levant, Amin hoped to capture the same energies to unify the Mazdan world once and for all. Testing the limits of the authority of his new position, in early 1179 Moabadan-Moabad Amin would issue a proclamation calling upon all pious Zoroastrians to join a great expedition to liberate their kin beyond the Oxus. In an elaborate ceremony in New Ctesiphon, Amin declared Gholam to be the leader of the Gond-i Ahura Mazda – the Army of God – and set out alongside his Shah across Persia to wards the boundaries of the Saminid state.
While the Shahanshah was able to bring together a vast host for this campaign, the Gond-i Ahura Mazda failed to capture the imagination of the faithful, with few joining its banner who were not obligated to by their feudal bonds. Nonetheless, Gholam arrived at the Oxus late in the year had secured significant initial success – capturing Samarqand and Khiva and forcing the Saminid army into an eastward retreat. Persian hopes of an imminent victory, as their Muslim enemies regrouped and returned to the region. Still holding a clear numerical advantage, the Persians engaged their enemies and fell to a horrific defeat at Khokand in 1181 that saw them lose half their invasion force in a single battle. In the following months the Shah found the Persian position in Transoxiania unsustainable, with the Saminids regaining their lost cities and sending the Zoroastrian army back from whence it came.
It was from this low moment that the war in Transoxiania evolved into the sort of holy war that the Moabadan-Moabad had orginally envisioned. As the Shahanshah’s tattered army limped back towards Persia and Muslim raiders struck freely throughout Khorosan and Bactria, pious fervour griped the empire. As Mobads across the land called upon their flocks to rally to the imperial banner of the Gond-i Ahura Mazda, thousands took up the journey into the north east. In 1183, Gholam was able to cross over to Saminid territory once more, this time at the head of a sprawling army of the faithful. Over the course of the next four years battles and sieges raged across the rich lands along the Oxus, with the Muslim grip over the region steadily loosening until the Saminid Shahs finally agreed to peace in 1187 – ceding all their lands from the Caspian to the Hindu Kush to Persia.
Even as the Shahanshah approached his sixties, he was far from finished. Indeed, his hand was partly forced by ferocious energies that had been unleashed by the holy war in Transoxiania, as a fixation on religious-civilisational conflict gripped both elites and commoners alike in Zoroastrian Persia. Having won a series of crushing victories over the Muslims during his long reign, the Lionheart Shah turned his attention to the Christians in the west as he invaded Byzantine Assyria in 1188. The resulting war was short, but incredibly bloody. The two mighty empires were both able to field tremendously large armies, but the Persians, with their conviction in their own glorious destiny, appeared guided by a higher power. At the two largest battles of the war, the Gond-i Ahura Mazda won impressive victories slaughtering more than two Romans for every Persian fallen. Having suffered such terrible losses in such a short time, and with fears that the Persians might emulate their ancestors and continue to push onwards to the Mediterranean, the Byzantines agreed a truce in 1090 that saw them surrender Mosul.
Through the 1190s, the borders of Persia continued to slowly expand as local Satraps – some now as powerful as kings in their own right – waged border wars along the empire’s frontiers, continuing to make use of the pious energies of the common folk for holy war. This led to the capture of new lands in the deserts of Arabia and, more significantly, the city of Kashgar far to the north east, beyond the Fergana Valley. Having still been a regional force at Gholam’s ascension to the throne four decades previously, Persia was now the premier power west of China and the focal point of western Asia. Further to this, with the victories of the Christians in the Levant and Arabia and Gholam’s own conquests in Iraq and Central Asia, the perennial threat of Muslim power than had loomed over Zoroastrian Persia for half a millennium had been definitely extinguished. Persia appeared more secure than she had been since the height of Sassanian glory.
The final years of Gholam’s reign were overshadowed by a familiar drama between the ageing emperor and his eldest son Naveed. The Crown Prince had spent many years serving his father as a skilled commander – fighting against the Kurdish Mazdaki rebellion of the 1070s, in the Transoxianian War of the 1080s and then rising to become his father’s closest lieutenant in the Assyrian War with the Romans. In the aftermath of the conquest of Mosul, Naveed had clashed with his father over the spoils of war, continuing to bicker over his role in the imperial administration and the frustration of his ambitions to take on more of the responsibilities of governance as his father grew older.
Events reached a head in 1094 when Gholam demanded that his son surrender his military command, believing him to be conspiring against him. In an unusual fit of chivalric pique, Naveed challenged his father to a duel to restore his honour. With age on his side, the younger man bested his father with relative ease, and left him badly injured in the process. Gholam’s injuries from the duel quickly deteriorated in the weeks ahead, and by the end of the year he had grown so weak that he had been forced to relinquish his authority to a regency council headed by Naveed. He would finally pass away in 1097, not far shy of his seventieth birthday.
The death of the Lionheart marked the close of one of the most glorious epochs in Persian history. At his ascension, nearly half a century before, the nation was still recovering from the travails of the Mazdaki Wars, while by his death he bestrode a colossus, dominating the heart of Asia. Through his reign he had conquered Iraq, Bactria, Transoxiania and much of Assyria - surpassing the accomplishments of all but the greatest of ancient Persian conquerors. It was near impossible to imagine a force that could challenge this power.
