Chapter 7: The Jewel of The Steppe
Artistic depiction of the old city of Shapuryan in the 11th century.
The Seljuk Invasion brought about many changes to Persia and the middle east. As they defeated the Farukids, the main line of the dynasty was installed in Baghdad as mere vassals to the Seljuk, despite maintaining their title of Caliphs. A different branch of the dynasty was pushed back to their original lands in Hejaz and Yemen, yearning to one day restore their great, but short lived rulership over the arab world. Moreover, after the death of Gregorios the Great without a clear heir, the eastern Roman empire fell into disarray, allowing the opportunity for the Seljuks to invade anatolia and establish the Sultanate of Rum.
To the North of the Shapurids, the Rus state, who until this point was the dominant power of the region and would normally provide fierce resistance to new rulers controlling their access to the black and caspian seas, had fell into disarray following their ruler’s conversion to a much unpopular religion. Lacking allies and facing constant infighting, the Rus fell to many invasions by turkic and ugrian tribes and had many of their lands split among foreign rulers. This led the Rus to an era of an increasing cultural and religious division.The few tribes that remained under Rus control to the west were still pagan, some of them adopting Catholicism or Orthodoxy as their state religion. The eastern Rus were assimilated by the invading tribes, creating many different subcultures of eastern slavs, despite mostly maintaining their linguistic similarities.
Meanwhile, in the Steppe, Zahak had been born to Shapur and his wife, Huiduan, in 1050, in the city to Beksima. Despite the difficult and harsh life and the circumstances around his birth, Zahak was a noticeably bright kid. Being educated in the art of war by his dad, he showed great talent in the field, and was extremely skilled with the spear and the bow, but had distinct interests of his own. A formidable administrator and impressively learned man in his own right, he was the clear heir to what was named the “Beksimashahdom” of the Steppe. But as Shapur had taken many concubines in his campaigns in the Steppe, his many young brothers, none of them nearly as competent as Zahak, were elected by the many different settlements and tribes in the region to become governors and chieftains, and remained as dangerous claimants to his title. Seeking to legitimize his rule as the leader of the Zoroastrians, he married the last Ziyarid princess, a survivor of the Seljuk invasion who fled to Beksima, despite her being much older than Zahak himself. They had only one son, Nesir, before she became infertile due to aging. Not long later, she would die of a sudden illness, and Zahak arranged for a new marriage, to the daughter of a high ranking Kurdish officer from Beksima, named Binevsh.
The society of the Shapurids was molded by their difficult conditions in the Steppe. Unlike most other powerful rulers, the Shapurids couldn’t afford long periods of mourning or wasteful rituals after the death of a Ruler, in risk of a famine. Instead, their rulers, such as Shapur himself, were given a traditional sky burial upon death. This greatly reflected on how their society was developing, the people of the Shapurid Shahdom were frugal and community minded folk. And these values were reflected on the upbringing of Zahak. Showing great maturity from a young age, Zahak quickly became a fundamental figure to the complex process of building a nation and an identity from nothing. He moved to the city of Shapuryan alongside his court at the age of 25, where he began, with the help of refugee scholars and his esteemed councilmen, to lay the legislative foundations that would be credited for the long term survival and success of the Shapurids. As a nation built by religious refugees, Zahak decreed that Shapuryan should provide sanctuary to those fleeing from religious persecution, regardless of their faith. Refugees coming to their lands had equal rights to its Zoroastrian citizens, being free to practice their own religion and build their own temples without additional taxes or downsides, in stark contrast to the peoples conquered by the Shapurids, who often underwent various methods of religious conversion. Historians see this policy as a method of attracting migration, as the shahdom is believed to have a very sparse population at the time. Over the years, a lot of Jews made Shapuryan their home, where they opened businesses which contributed to the development of the city.
After Shapur’s death, Yousef, Zahak’s younger sibling, was taken to Azerbaijan by Kurds who wished to abandon life in the steppe. They hoped to swear him as vassal to the Seljuks by right of birth over the former Ziyarid lands and convert to Islam. This plan didn’t turn out too well, as unknowingly to them, Yousef would grow to be an incredibly Zealous zoroastrian who refused to accept Islam, leading to problems with the Sultans.
At this point in time, many settlements started to appear in the Shapurid Shahdom. Zoroastrians came in from as far as India seeking for a place to practice their religion in peace. Castes began to develop: while the nobility was made up of Kurds, most of them Shapurids, commerce and trade was commonly run by jews. Military officers and high ranking warriors were both Kurdish and Cuman, while most of the work of the common folk such as farming and tailoring was done by Cumans and the many ethnic minorities who came to the Shahdom seeking refuge. Many of the Kurds took on Cuman wives, and their children in the streets spoke between themselves a language that was neither Kurdish nor Cuman, but rather an amalgamation of the two. The settlements in the Shahdom became resting places for traveling traders of the Silk Route and the many people who sailed from the Don and Volga rivers into the black and caspian seas. While normally the Rus wouldn’t accept a foreign state ruling and taxing over trade in these rivers, they were in too much turmoil at the time to pose any threat to the Shahdom. Lacking in fertile soil and gold, most of the economy of the region was based around slavery, trade, and smithing. With a growing economy, many former tribal settlements were built up into proper townships with palaces and walls by the sons of Shapur, who took on the title of Marzoban. The formalization of power of the many sons of Shapur throughout the shahdom demonstrated a great trend developing within these lands of a dynastic administration. For every small village in the Shahdom, a descendant of Shapur would hold the title of marzoban, the non-dynastic rulers being few and far between. But with this trend, came many claimants to the title of Shah, and soon Zahak would need to face his first rebellions.
Luckily, for Zahak, none of his brothers held the influence and power that came with being the ruler sat in the great city of Shapuryan. Zahak marched out of the capital in January of 1086, with 1500 brave men willing to face the rough winters of the pontic steppe, meeting his retinue from Beksima shortly thereafter, across the Volga in the siege of one of his brother’s palaces. A great administrator, he organized wood supply lines and let none of his men spend a single day in the cold. The large campfires in their encampments served both as a protection from the cold and a site of religious practice, greatly raising his men’s morale. When he finally met his brothers in battle, the much higher morale of his men turned a battle into a slaughter. After returning to Shapuryan in december of 1087, in a day of snowfall, his regent wife had arranged for a crown to be forged in his name. Zahak was crowned in the streets of Shapuryan, as the rightful ruler of the Shapurid Shahdom and all of its people. From this point on, no one could question Zahak’s rule. Historians generally consider this day as when the Shapurid empire truly began.
At this point, European powers finally begin to take note on the Shapurids, meaning we don’t need to rely solely on the Shapurid scriptures and religious texts as our only historical source. As news finally spread across the world of a new Shahdom’s rise in an unlikely place, people finally began to understand that the Iranians in the steppe were not a fleeting civilization doomed to fall and be erased by history like its predecessors. The news were well received by many rulers, who saw the Iranians as more civilized than the turkic nomads who formerly inhabited the region, and were glad to have a buffer state dividing the wildly different cultures of Asia and Europe. Names began to emerge, as people were confused as to what to call the people and lands of the Shapurids. While Greeks anachronistically saw them as a return of the Schythians, other European powers simply called them the Caucasian Persians. Meanwhile, in Persia, it is during this period we find the first mention of the name we nowadays associate with the people of the pontic-caspian steppe. In a small report to the Seljuk Sultan, an emissary, for the first time in recorded history, refers to the lands of the Shapurids as Zardustan, roughly translated to land of Zoroaster, the founder of their peculiar religion. But for historicity sake, let’s for now refer to them as the name they were most commonly known as at the time.
Zahak wasn’t nearly done with his plans for his new Shahdom, however. One of his first objectives as ruler was to expand west, into the lands of the Crimean Khanate which were still ruled by nomadic Cumans. The lands to the west of the Don river were significantly more fertile and fit for agriculture, which the settled society of the Shahdom was very much in need of. It is at this point we begin to notice the development of the military unit that came to be known as the Savaran. As more and more Cumans began to be employed in Shapurid warfare, horse archery and its tactics became increasingly important in their wars. As such, the traditional, heavily armored horseman traditions of the persians was adapted to steppe warfare. Contrary to popular belief, the Savaran were not a title of nobility or landholders in their own right like an European knight, but rather professional mounted warriors that served a military officer known as a Bazbeg, who themselves served a Shah or Marzoban. The Bazbeg was a high ranking officer, tasked with training and leading the Shapurid horsemen in wars, and at times of peace, collecting taxes for their Shah and often engaging in mercenary work, as to maintain their savarans’ battle experience, provided they paid a sum of the profits to their Shah.
Drawn depiction of a 12th century Savaran. As shown, the Savaran wore mostly persian style armor, although some Cuman officers were still known to wear their traditional facemasks in battle. While their weaponry were usually of Cuman traditions, the serrated spear was a Shapurid invention. It offered no advantage in fighting footmen, but the Savarans were known to effectively use it while fighting cumans to pull them off their horses.
With the formalization of the Savaran, Zahak was in proper standing to confront the Crimean Khanate. Zahak met the Crimeans in the Steppe in the battle of Yilik Su, leading the Caucasian army, an impressive force of 5 thousand men, many of them Savarans, against the 4 thousand Cumans in the opposing forces in 11th of December, 1094. The battle was long and difficult, but with the military expertise of Zahak in fighting in cold weather, the Cumans were defeated and forced to retreat to Crimea. Content with his conquest of the Western steppe, Zahak agreed to end hostilities, uninterested with conquering the remainder of Crimea.
Zahak spent the following years in Shapuryan, which was still, despite its impressive size, a relatively impoverished city. He dedicated his time to developing the township, holding court and creating laws that continuously transformed the Caucasian society. His court was small and kept to essentials, but as Zahak knew he was envied by his many brothers, he saw fit to employ personal guards and a food taster to protect himself from attempts on his life. This proved to be a wise decision, as in 1095 his food taster fell dead in his court, saving his life. It took the Shah a long time to find out which of his many brothers was behind the attempt, but Mihemed was eventually discovered and thrown in the dungeon, never to see the light of day. His imprisonment and seizing of titles signified an ongoing trend of centralization within the Shapurid Shahdom.
In contrast to most other Shahs, Zahak didn’t maintain a harem, perhaps woeful to the many things he had to endure due to his ambitious brothers. Instead, he dedicated his time to his only wife, Binevsh. Her first son, Mehmud, was second in line for inheriting the Shapurid throne, and was betrothed to his younger sister, also born to Binevsh.
A common question when it comes to the Shapurids is how they managed to avoid producing heirs with bad genetic conditions, seeing as the practice of marrying relatives was still allowed and sometimes even incentivized within their faith and realm. While it is true, indeed, that some early Shapurids married their sisters and cousins, a crucial event in the court of Zahak during his time in Shapuryan allowed him to codify a law that may have saved his empire from disaster. In July of 1102, as the Shah held court, a commoner exposed that Nesir, his first born son and heir, had, in a sort of sadistic hobby, spent his time in the countryside luring commoners into fights so he could ruthlessly kill them. In shock, the Shah questioned his heir, who confessed to his own crimes as if something to be proud of. Horrified, the Shah removed him from inheritance altogether, naming his son Mehmud as heir of the Shahdom.
After this crisis, Zahak officially wrote the laws for the inheritance of the royal titles, making them into a strictly meritocratic system, though of course limited to the bounds of the ruler’s family. He codified that a Shah should always have a relative appointed as heir, their order of birth being unimportant, with full authority on the Shah to change the appointed heir as he saw fit. Upon his death, the Shahdom would be inherited in its entirety, never to be split, although minor titles were still given away to other qualifying heirs. A seemingly simple law at the time, this is believed to have protected the Shahdom in the years to come from an inheritance crisis related to inbreeding. As some Shapurids later on would marry their sisters and cousins, they would still pick their heirs from the many kids in their harem, and as such, the sons who did have apparent health conditions related to inbreeding were obviously deemed unfit to inherit in favor of those who were healthy.
In the following years in which Zahak stayed in Shapuryan, some of his remaining brothers who still swore him allegiance waged wars of their own, extending the Shahdom’s borders to contain the entirety of the Don river. Zahak, however, was mostly dedicated to developing his own lands rather than conquering any more. He invested the crown’s gold in building farms and canals to the west of the Don, and minted coins depicting himself, further solidifying the Shapurid society and its institutions.
A young Zahak as depicted in a 12th century gold coin from the Shapurid Shahdom.
A healthy king due to his warrior background, Zahak lived long, and perhaps too long for his own good. At the age of 71, his body and mind started tp fail him. His legs could no longer stand as well as they used to. The Shah became increasingly forgetful and unpredictable. According to legend, he went as far as taking his entire entourage in a hopeless search for a village named “Samiran” within his lands, a place he was adamant existed, but no courtier of his had ever heard of.
Luckily for him, his decline didn’t last too long. He died 4 years later, in the palace of Shapuryan, leaving the Shahdom in the hands of Mehmud in 1125. His 60 year long regin is to this day one of the longest in history, and represented a golden age in the Shahdom where he developed a township of refugees into an ever growing society with their own identity. His passing was felt throughout the Shahdom, and in the following day he was given a traditional sky burial in the fire temple of Shapuryan. In his honor, an eternal fire was lit in the tower of the temple, illuminating the city of Shapuryan, which, at night, could be seen from afar for the years to come.
Thus, we come to the end of an era. There is still much to be told about the Shapurids, but, as Mehmud’s reign was far less significant, let’s for now move on to India, where a new ruler is about to rise to power…
This wraps up the Shapurids for now! As you can clearly see they were my favourite dynasty to play so far and we will be seeing more of them soon since i will return to them to help them at the very least survive the Mongols in a way. I plan to take them into EU4 since i'm pretty interested into how they will develop. Thanks again for reading!
