The Prince of Fire 1288-1312
In the late thirteenth century the authorities of the Zoroastrian Church were growing increasingly concerned by the weakening of centralised power within the faith. Across the land a revived wave of Mazdakism was seeping its way into the lay folk and clergy alike, while in Mazandaran the strange heresy of Khurmatza flourished. It was in response to this crisis of authority that the Moabadan-Moabad Djamasp, alongside the emperor Mehrzad, sought to reinvigorate the religious unity of the Zoroastrians by reviving the idea of holy war. In 1288, Djamasp called upon the faithful to join together to form a new Gond-i-Ahura Mazda and march against the Christians of the west, just as their ancestors had done more than half a century before. The empire’s crown prince, the talented warrior Sina, would lead the enormous host assembled for this sacred war into the west to invade the Seplid Kingdom of Syria.
The Syrians had little hope of resisting the Persians on their own, and sent out a call to their Orthodox Christian brethren for aid. This would be answered by the two most powerful Orthodox states in the region – Bulgaria and Kozar. The fighting would be fierce, bloody and long. Sina made initial quick progress, skilfully crossing the Syrian Desert at unexpectedly great speed by hoping from oasis to oasis and destroying much of the Syrian army before any aid could arrive. Victory appeared in hand. However, the imposing fortifications of Aleppo, Antioch and Bulgarian ruled Damascus prevented any quick triumph and forced the Persians to settle into lengthy sieges. This opened the way for Kozarian and Bulgarian armies to reach the battlefield – leading to a series of large and costly battles throughout the region.
The conflict would remain in the balance, with both sides growing ever more weary as losses mounted, until the Kozarians withdrew their forces from the fighting in 1294 due to a rebellion at home. Even without one of the major players in the Christian alliance, the Zoroastrians were not victorious until 1296 – when the Bulgarians finally agreed a truce surrendering all Syria, including Damascus, over to the Persians. Sina had sealed his status as a heroic figure among the faithful.
Contemporary to the Syrian War in the west, a final great wave of nomadic conquerors made their way to Central Asia. The successor Khanates to the short-lived Ilkhanate had been declining almost from their inception and would finally be destroyed by the Karluk migration. A distinctive Turkic people, the Karluks had been the dominant force on the Eurasian Steppe between the Ural and Altai Mountains since the eleventh century, outcompeting Cumans, Turkmen, Bolghars and even the Mongols themselves. In the late 1280s a faction of Karluks from the Steppe under the leadership of Boqi Togluqid, the younger brother of the Great Karluk Khan on the Steppe, invaded the Khiva Khanate. They brought with them not only thousands of warriors, but their livestock, their women and their children. The Karluks quickly overwhelmed their teetering Mongol rivals and established themselves as masters of all Transoxiania – with Boqi making himself Khan of the Southern Karluks.
The migratory element of the invasion brought about largescale and rapid demographic change. The Karluks largely settled in the eastern half of Transoxiania – around the fertile Fergana Valley. Turning much of the land to pasture, they forces large numbers of Iranian peoples to flee southwards. Those that remained would gradually be affected by the region’s wider Turkification. At the start of the century, Transoxiania had been largely Persian and Sogdian – by its end it had completed a culture shift to a new dominant Turco-Mongol culture, in which Turkmen, Mongols and Karluks led. Notably, this change led to the effective destruction of the ancient Sogdian culture – with the exactions of the thirteenth century claiming the lives of many, while Turkification for those who remained in the north and Persianisation for those who fled south leading the culture to extinction.
The flight of refugees from Transoxiania badly destabilised the already weak Khorosan Khanate. In a weakened and chaotic state the Mongols were beset by predatory Persian attacks from the Koohdashtids in the west, who capture the important city of Merv, and a Pashtun revolt in the east headed by the tribal leader Anwaaraddin. By 1297 the Khanate had been completely destroyed, ending Mongol rule in Central Asia. The Zoroastrian Afghan state established in the east of its old territories enjoyed its independence for a further decade, before its Shah swore allegiance to the Persian Shahanshah in an effort to stem the incessant raiding of the Karluks following a destructive sack of Kabul. In the years after gaining a degree of security by joining with Baghdad, the Pashtuns expanded Persia’s borders southwards – conquering all the way to Makran on the Arabian Sea.
Having caused significant cultural and geopolitical change in the region, the final great consequence of the Karluk invasion was religious, for the Karluks were followers of the religion of Manichaeism. This distinctive faith traced its origins back to the prophet Mani, who grew up in a Gnostic Christian sect in third century Sassanian Mesopotamia and travelled widely, most notably to India. In its famously dualist world-view it syncretised teachings from Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism and Gnosticism among others – placing Mani as the fourth great prophet after Zoroaster, the Buddha and Jesus.
For a time it flourished as a genuinely global religion in Late Antiquity – winning many followers in the Persian and Roman Empire, none more famous than St Augustine of Hippo who converted to Christianity from the Manichean faith. Political repression by Roman, Christian, Zoroastrian and later Muslim powers led to its decline into obscurity in these historic heartlands over the following centuries. Indeed, in the ninth century the Yamag, the Manichaean Patriarchate, was forced to relocate from its traditional Babylonian base to Samarqand, where the faith still had some following among the Sogdians of the Fergana Valley, marking its effective demise in western Eurasia.
However, by this point the religion had already found a new following in the east. Having attracted many converts in China, Manichaeism was adopted as the official religion of the powerful Uyghur Khanate in the eighth century. Although this empire collapsed less than a hundred years later, Manichaeism had established itself as key part of the Steppe’s religious milieu. The Karluks adopted the religion around the tenth century, and over time it grew to become inseparably associated with their ethnic identity – with many making the pilgrimage to Samarqand to receive the wisdom of the Yamag – with Samanid, Persian and Mongol empires all willingly tolerating the Manichaean High Priest’s presence in the city in hopes of using it as leverage to control their northern neighbour.
Despite the survival of the Yamag in Samarqand, Manichaeism had been a largely forgotten religion in the Persian world for centuries. The Karluk invasion changed this definitively. Sincere in their piety, and inspired by a missionary ethos they won over significant interest Persians who would carry the religion south into Khorosan where it would plant the seeds for a popular religious revolution in the Persian east – rejecting the distance power of the Zoroastrian clerics in Baghdad in favour of the Religion of Light.
One of the greatest projects of Shahanshah Mehrzad’s long reign was the reconstruction of the imperial capital in Baghdad. The glorious city of the Islamic golden age had been destroyed and significantly depopulated by the Mongols – leaving behind an empty shell of ruins inhabited by a shrunken citizenry. Mehrzad hoped to restore the grandeur of old with huge investments in building projects and the forcible resettlement of tens of thousands into the city. This led to the importation of a large numbers of ethnic Persians from east of the Zagros Mountains, who transformed what had been a sizeable minority of the city’s population into a plurality by the end of the century.
Alongside the Persianisation of the Arab world’s greatest city, its Jewish population began a precipitous climb. Baghdad had long been one of the most important centres of Sephardic Judaism and Jews, without the connection to foreign powers associated with other religions, had maintained a comfortable relationship with Zoroastrianism since the time of Cyrus the Great. As such, the Persians offered safe haven as the attitudes of the Christian powers of the eastern Mediterranean soured, with repression and expulsions becoming a greater danger than they had been for generations, particularly in the former lands of the Byzantine Empire. Baghdad would act as a magnet for those fleeing east from the Christian world – establishing itself the largest Jewish city in the world. Their presence was particularly encouraged by the Shahanshah, who saw the Jews as a vital component in the commercial revival of Baghdad and the wider Mesopotamian region.
Mehrzad passed away peacefully in 1298, allowing his martially gifted son Sina to take on the reigns of power. Leading the imperial army, the new sovereign sought to use his military power more assertively than his father had done in an effort to strengthen the power of the crown. In his first decade in power he put down major Christian and Muslim Arab rebellions in Syria and Iraq respectively. In 1306, he intervened to protect his vassals in the recently created Syrian Satrapies from being overwhelmed by a Christian counterattack. This war had been brought about by a botched attempt by the western lords to invade Greek-ruled Cilicia. Not only had they been defeated in the treacherous mountain passes, they had encouraged the Kozarians to join with a coalition of Greek states to invade Syria itself – threatening Antioch and Aleppo and capturing numerous smaller settlements. Only with the arrival of Sina’s army were these attempts fended off and a truce agreed.
Yet Sina had ambitions beyond defending the empire he had inherited from his father – he desired great conquests of his own and saw his opportunity in the north where tensions with the Karluks had been running for some time. In 1310 he crossed over into Transoxiania with a large army and proceeded to storm Samarqand and Bukkhara. With the Karluks in disarray, Sina met their Khan at a great battle near Samarqand in 1311. There, the warrior king was cut down while his army was ultimately victorious. In Baghdad, the Shah’s brother Gholam assumed the imperial diadem and moved to secure a peace with the Karluks in 1312 that saw them give up the largest part of their Khanate – ceding Dihistan in the west and the rich Fergana Valley, including the Manichaean holy city of Samarqand itself, in the east.
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