5.13 THE FIRST REIGN OF KAWĀD I. THE ZARĀDUŠTI HERESY.
5.13 THE FIRST REIGN OF KAWĀD I. THE ZARĀDUŠTI HERESY.
The first reign of Kawād I stretched from 488 CE, after the deposition (and possible blinding or murder) of his uncle Walāxš and his dethronement by the nobility in 496 CE. As we have seen in previous posts, in 488 CE Kawād I was probably fifteen years old, and so he came of age according to ancient Iranian custom, but he spent the first part of this first reign, probably until 493 CE, under the de facto guardianship of Suḵrā (a situation deeply humiliating for the young king, as it equated him to a minor or a woman to the eyes of his subjects), whom he managed to displace and execute in said year by means of the latter’s enemy Šābuhr Mihrān of Rayy. The experience seems to have made a deep impression on the young king, for he then embarked in what was possibly the more radical social and religious experiment in the history of the House of Sāsān, his support for the so-called Mazdakites. It is possible that his youth (he must have been around twenty years old in 493 CE) was the very reason that led him to take such a drastic decision for when he recovered the throne in 498/499 CE, he did not repeat the experiment, although “Mazdakism” remained as a latent force during all his reign (as we will see in the next thread).
Few events in Sasanian history have caused more ink to be spilt by modern authors than the figure of Mazdak and the so-called “Mazdakite heresy” that ancient sources attribute to him. For an overview of what “Mazdakism” was like I will follow the paper Kavād’s heresy and Mazdak’s revolt, by the British historian Patricia Crone, who devoted many years of study to Late Antique and Early Islamic religious history. Her views are not shared by many scholars, but I personally think that her analysis is the one that makes more sense of the tangled web left to us by the ancient sources. I will also borrow some material from her last published book, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism, where she studied the influence of Sasanian “Mazdakism” on the Early Islamic “heretic” movements in Iran collectively labelled as Khurramīs (followers of the Khurramīyya, “the Joyous Religion”) by Islamic authors and which appear in the sources until the XII c. CE.
Silver drahm of Kawād I, issued during his first reign. Mint of Staxr (mint mark “ST”).
The common view is that the heresiarch Mazdak would have been a “communist” (sorry about the anachronism, but this expression is often used as XX c. Soviet and Marxist historians decided to turn him into a sort of proto-communist) active in the time of Kawād I (r. 488- 496, 498- 531 CE), who was killed along with many of his followers by Xusrō I (r. 531-579 CE), Kawād I's son and successor, after this king’s attempt to implement his “communist” ideas had unleashed a popular revolt which plunged the Sasanian Empire into chaos.
This is the common view, but due to the very confused state of the ancient sources, dissenting voices also abound: in the 1980s, German historian Heinz Gaube posited that Mazdak may never have existed, and that even if he did, he played no role in Kawād I's politics, nor did such doctrines as he may have espoused stir up social unrest: it would have been Kawād I who mobilized the masses against the nobility in the name of “communist” ideas, while Mazdak would have been probably invented or misrepresented to take the blame for the king's “unorthodox” behavior. Gaube’s view is an extreme one but is a good example of the dissent that this subject has caused amongst scholars.
The problems with Gaube’s theory are evident: as Crone noted, though friction between kings and nobles has been commonplace in history, it’s not often heard that kings stir up peasant revolts against their noble rivals, for the obvious reason that the latter were the pillars of the established order: if the peasants destroyed the nobility, how would the king have restored order among the peasants? Thus, whatever its merits may have been, Gaube's argument certainly made Kawād I's behavior even more problematic than it already is. Gaube’s hypothesis rests on the two facts that no contemporary V-VI c. CE source mentions Mazdak (though several refer to Kawād I's “communist phase”) and that the later Perso-Arabic sources are full of contradictions. Both facts do indeed suggest that something is wrong with the standard account, but Crone thought there was a less radical way of explaining them than Gaube’s radical thesis.
As I have already stated, Kawād I reigned twice. He was elevated to the throne in 488 CE and expelled in 496 CE, and afterwards he spent two years in exile among the Hephthalites: he regained his throne with Hephthalite help in 498 CE and ruled without interruption from then onwards until his death in 531 CE. All the VI c. CE sources date his “communist” phase to his first reign. The sources in question are, first, the Syriac chronicle attributed to Joshua the Stylite which was compiled ca. 507 CE, well before Kawād I's second reign was over; secondly, Procopius of Caesarea’s account based on information gathered during the Roman-Sasanian war of 527-531 CE, in which he took part as secretary to the Roman general Belisarius; and thirdly, Agathias of Myrina, who died about 582 CE and who had access, not just to Procopius’ work, but also to notes taken by a Christian interpreter from the “Royal Annals” of the Sasanians.
Given the unanimity of the contemporary sources, Kawād I's “communist phase” must be considered as securely dated. The late Arabic Christian Chronicle of Se’ert also places it in his first reign, and so do numerous Muslim authors: Ibn Qutaybah, Dīnawarī, Ṭabarī, Mas’ūdī, Maqdīsī and others. All these sources, both Christian and Muslim, state that his unorthodox views were the very reason for his overthrown. However, neither the VI c. CE sources nor the Chronicle of Se’ert mention Mazdak, whereas practically all the Muslim sources claim that he was the moving force behind Kawād I. This is the problem that led Gaube to formulate his theory.
The Czechoslovak historian Otakar Klíma, who was the first to discuss this VI c. CE “silence”, initially argued that these Roman Christian sources were simply ill-informed. But Mazdak's absence from the contemporary sources is in stark contrast with his towering presence in later accounts: if he were really so prominent, how could contemporaries have overlooked him? Joshua the Stylite was remarkably close indeed to the events in terms of time and place alike, while Procopius' account is full of circumstantial and local detail which he must have picked up in conversation with Iranians. For example, he knew the story of how Kawād I’s wife and/or sister helped the latter escape from jail; so why did no story about Mazdak come to his attention?
When Klíma returned to the problem years later, he argued that Xusrō I might have deleted Mazdak from the official records in order to save his father's reputation. But as Crone’s pointed out, this hypothesis is even less satisfactory than Klíma’s first one. Xusrō I may well have revised the official records after his accession, but he cannot thereby have affected information transmitted before it: Mazdak's absence from the accounts by Joshua the Stylite and Procopius thus remains problematic. Xusrō I's revisions ought however to have affected the Perso-Arabic tradition, given that much of it goes back to the Xwadāy-Nāmag, based on the very records from which Mazdak was supposedly deleted, so Mazdak's presence in the Muslim sources becomes problematic too. Due to this, Klíma felt compelled to argue that Ibn al-Muqaffa’, the first translator of the Xwadāy-Nāmag into Arabic (which was the version on which later Muslim authors based their accounts), inserted an account of Mazdak where he found it missing, a quite forced explanation that Crone found lacking.
Although it’s unclear if a “Joshua de Stylite” was indeed the author of the so-called “Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite”, stylite monks were widespread in the Late Roman provinces in the Levant. This tower at Umm ar-Rasas in Jordan (the ancient Late Roman settlement of “Mephaas” or “Kastron Mefa’a”) has been tentatively labelled as a stylite’s pillar.
Gaube’s hypothesis was actually the mirror opposite of Klíma’s: Xusrō I would not have deleted Mazdak from the official records, but on the contrary he would have written him into them; Mazdak would not be absent from the contemporary sources because he played no role in the events which they report, but present in the later sources because Xusrō I invented or redesigned him as a scapegoat for Kawād I’ “misbehavior”. This does at least have the merit of offering a coherent solution, and there is no objection to it on the Greek or Syriac side, though. It would have been to Gaube's advantage if Mazdak had figured in Agathias' account: his sudden appearance in a Roman author who used Sasanian official records some forty years after Xusrō I’s accession would have reinforced the suspicion that the records had been doctored. But Crone thought that Agathias' silence is not important, as she deemed Gaube's hypothesis hard to square with the Perso-Arabic tradition. To Crone, Mazdak did not sound in the least like an apologetic invention in its accounts, and she thought highly unlikely that Xusrō I’s court could have concocted such a believable figure out of thin air, to the point that Mazdak captured even popular imagination.
Crone also pointed out that there is an obvious chronological problem though. If Mazdak was the man behind Kawād I, then he must have been active in the 490s CE; yet the sources agree that he was suppressed by Xusrō I, in the 530s CE. Kawād I was dethroned for heresy thirty-five years before Xusrō I’s accession, at a time when the latter had not even been born; and there is no suggestion that he resumed his heretical activities after his restoration: both Joshua the Stylite and Procopius of Caesarea provide detailed accounts of his second reign (up to 506 CE and his death respectively) without issuing a word about “communist” activities on his part, or for that matter on the part of anyone else; some later Muslim sources explicitly say that his heretical phase came to an end on his fall; and as Theodor Nöldeke already pointed out in the XIX c., he would hardly have been capable of conducting major wars against the Eastern Roman Empire if he had continued to alienate his clergy and nobility. Yet Mazdak is associated with both Kawād I and Xusrō I, or with Xusrō I on his own, both in Zoroastrian and Muslim sources: Mazdak, they say, seduced the former and was killed by the latter. Thus, Crone wondered what was he doing in the thirty-five years in between? To her, the simplest solution is that two different incidents may have been conflated: the sources contemporary with Kawād I's heretical phase fail to mention Mazdak for the simple reason that Mazdak only made his appearance after this phase, in the reign of Xusrō I.
As Crone pointed out, this hypothesis accords well with the fact that the sources associate Kawād I and Mazdak with different doctrines and incompatible events. As regards the doctrines, the VI c. CE sources unanimously describe Kawād I as a “communist” in respect of women alone. According to Joshua the Stylite, “he reestablished (sic, a point we will address later in more depth) the abominable heresy which teaches that women should be in common and that everyone should have intercourse with whomever he liked". According to Procopius of Caesarea, he legislated "that Persians should have communal intercourse with their women" which is also what Agathias of Myrina and John Diakrinomenos tell us: "it is said that he actually made a law according to which women were to be available to men in common", as Agathias puts it, adding that "these sins were committed frequently and with full legality". But of common ownership in respect of property there is not a word. The Chronicle of Se’ert provides details of the facilities provided for the sins in question: Kawād I built “shrines and inns” where people could meet and “engage in incontinence”. And the Jewish Seder Olam Zutta refers vaguely to “sexual immorality” at the courts of Sasanian princes. But there is no reference to “communism” in respect of property in these sources either. Communal sex was of course a particularly scandalous idea, but the abolition of private property struck Muslim authors as almost equally abhorrent, and it would be incongruent to suppose that contemporaries to the events would have remained silent if Kawād I had launched an attack on aristocratic and priestly possessions. Yet silent they were. By contrast, practically all the later sources associate Mazdak, and thus Kawād I too, with heretical views in respect of women and property alike. Attempts by modern scholars at solving or harmonizing these disagreements in the sources have been unsatisfactory. So, crone proposed that we may take it that Kawād I 's heresy was only about women, whereas Mazdak's involved “communal sharing” of women and property alike.
As for the events, VI c. CE sources are unanimous that Kawād I 's measures were unpopular:
Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite:
Kawād I’s law "by no means pleased the common people", who rose against him according to Procopius. Many later sources also state that his heresy led to his dethronement. So, Crone concludes that under Kawād I the Iranians thus rebelled against a heresy. But under Mazdak they rebelled in the name of one; and whereas Kawād I’s heresy had been imposed from above, Mazdak's heresy was sponsored by the masses. Mazdak's adherents were “the poor, base, weak and ignoble plebs”, as numerous Arabic sources tell us; and there is general agreement that the crowds ran riot: they began by breaking into the royal granaries according to Tha’ālibī and Ferdowsī (whose accounts are however largely fictional according to Crone); "they would break in to a man's home and take his dwelling, his wives, and his property without him being able to prevent them", according to Ibn Qutaybah, Ṭabarī and others; they "killed those who did not follow them” in the words of Maqdīsī. Countless people followed Mazdak, and immense numbers were duly slaughtered by Xusrō I: no less than 80,000, 100,000 or even 150,000 were killed in one day in just one area, as several sources allege (Mas’ūdī, Maqdīsī, Tha’ālibī and Ibn Balḵī). Crone points out that it is because of this that it is hard to agree with Gaube that Muslim accounts of Mazdak's revolt are a cover up for an original account of royal manipulation of the masses. For one thing, Muslim sources patently describe a phenomenon directed against the authorities; and for another thing, there is no mention of an alliance between king and masses in the contemporary accounts of Kawād I 's “communist phase”; on the contrary, even the common people disliked his innovations according to Procopius. So, Crone concluded that Kawād I was a heretic who tried to impose his views on a reluctant populace (reluctant nobles above all), while Mazdak was a rebel who stirred up a peasant revolt: they simply did not act a t the same time, let alone in alliance.
In Crone’s opinion, her hypothesis would also explain the proliferation of variations and contradictions in later sources. According to her, it would be obvious that once Mazdak had come to be seen as the moving force behind Kawād I even though he was only suppressed by Xusrō I, then the interval between Kawād I's “heretical phase” and the accession of Xusrō I had somehow or other to be eliminated. So, Crone thought that it was for this reason that we are told, now explicitly and now implicitly, that Kawād I adopted “communist” ideas after his restoration (Mojmal al-Tawāriḵ wa’l-Qeṣaṣ, Tha’ālibī, Ḥamza Eṣfahāni, Bīrūnī and Niẓām al-Mulk) or that he was deposed for his heresy by Xusrō I (Niẓām al-Mulk, Ibn Isfandīyār), or that his heresy caused him to abdicate in favor of the latter (Ibn al-Balḵī), or that he made the latter his co-regent (Bundahišn, Mojmal al-Tawāriḵ wa’l-Qeṣaṣ) or that the heretics survived his deposition or came back towards the encl of his reign (Dīnawarī, Ibn Qutaybah, Ṭabarī, Ibn al-Balḵī) or even that Mazdak's revolt lasted all the time from his first reign to Xusrō I’s accession (Eutychius of Alexandria). In Crone’s view, what all these variant versions are trying to say is that a heretical Kawād I gave way directly to an orthodox Xusrō I, without a thirty-five-year gap in between. But an explanation also had to be found for the problem that Kawād I was supposed to have been in league with the very heretics who rebelled against the crown. Hence we read that Kawād I was forced to join the rebels, the latter having grown exceedingly strong (Ṭabarī, Bīrūnī) or that he had to pretend to be on their side lest he lose his throne (Nihāyat al-arab), or that he was deceived into supporting people who were really against him (Bīrūnī, Ibn Qutaybah, Niẓām al-Mulk, Tha’ālibī, Ibn al-Balḵī) some sources even think that it was the rebels who deposed him (Ṭabarī, Miskawayh) or at least kept him in isolation while the grandees of the realm enthroned his brother (Eutychius of Alexandria); Kawād I escaped from them to become king again, which is why the Mazdakites had to be suppressed prior to his restoration (Ṭabarī, Maqdīsī, Eutychius of Alexandria, Ibn al-Athīr), Mazdak himself being killed at that time (Ibn Qutaybah). But the problem then is obvious: how did Mazdak and his followers come to be around at the time of Xusrō I’s accession? Since all this wriggling and writhing is accompanied by efforts to fit in Kawād I’s flight to the Hephthalites, his fathering of Xusrō I, and his relations with his regent Sūkhrā and the latter's alleged son Zarmihr, it is hardly surprising that the outcome is a confusing mass of similar, yet never quite identical accounts.
So, Crone’s hypothesis states that Kawād I tried to enforce communal access to women in the 490s CE, only to be deposed by his nobles in 496 CE, while Mazdak was a later heretic who tried to enforce communal access to women and property by raising a peasant revolt, only to be executed along with his followers by Xusrō I in the 530s. According to the British historian, the reason why the two episodes have been conflated might be that they were closely spaced events in the history of the same religious sect, of which we will now address its nature.
Orange grove in Fasā, province of Fārs, Iran.
Not much can be learnt about the king’s religious “deviation” in the Greek sources, all of whom describe Kawād I's innovations in terms of secular legislation; but according to Joshua the Stylite, Kawād I’s “communism” was derived from "the abominable Magian heresy known as the Zaradushtaqan", which he “reestablished”. This heresy is also referred to in the Syriac Chronicle of Karkā ḏe Bēṯ Selōḵ, a VI c. CE account written in what is today modern Kirkuk in Iraq which credits a certain Zarādušt, described as a contemporary of Mani, with a heresy that existed now openly and now secretly until the time of Xusrō I. The heresiarch in question was Zarādušt-ē Xrōsagān of Fasā (name of a city and province in Pārs) according to the Dēnkard, which identifies him as the original advocate of the doctrine that women and property should be held in common; and that he was the source of Kawād I’s ideas is confirmed by the Chronicle of Se’ert (in which the author has some trouble distinguishing the III c. CE heresiarch from the original Zoroaster). He was the source of Mazdak’s ideas, too. According to Tabarī, Zarādusht b. Khurrakān of Fasā had introduced innovations into Zoroastrianism and many people had followed him: Mazdak was one of those who made propaganda for his views. Ibn Miskawayh says much the same. Ya’qūbī and others wrongly make him a contemporary of Mazdak rather than a III c. CE figure, while Ibn al-Nadīm quaintly refers to him as "the older Mazdak", but the sole fact that these authors know him is important. The Slovenian scholar Marijan Molé proposed taking the name of Zarādušt as a title, noting that this would make Zarādušt of Fasā identifiable with Mazdak himself: i.e. Mazdak was “Zarādušt” in the sense of “mowbed”. According to Otakar Klíma, on the other hand, it is Mazdak's name that could be taken as a title: Zarādušt would have thus been the “older Mazdak” in the sense of first leader of the sect. But whether one or the other name was a title or not, Syriac and Muslim evidence leaves no doubt that Zarādušt of Fasā was a person separate from, and indeed much earlier than, Mazdak. Besides, Crone pointed out that both characters had different patronymics, Zarādušt being a son of Xrōsag/Khurrak while Mazdak was the son of Bāmdād; and they are also said to have come from different places, Zarādušt being a native of Fasā, whereas Mazdak is said to have come from Nasā, Ištakhr, Tabrīz, Nīšāpūr or MDRYH, identified as Mādharāyā in Iraq by Arthur Christensen or as the Murghāb in eastern Iran by Franz Altheim and R. Stiehl. So, Crone accepted that Zarādušt-ē Xrōsagān was the original source of doctrines taken up by Kawād I and Mazdak in succession.
The fundamental idea behind Zaradušt’s heresy was that women and property engender envy, anger, hatred, greed and needs which would not arise if both were held in common (according to Crone, that’s what she could conclude from Ferdowsī’s account): women and wealth are the ultimate causes of practically all dissension among mankind. But God had created all men alike (according to al-Shahrastānī) and placed the means of sustenance, including the means of procreation, on earth "so that mankind may divide them equally among themselves" (according to al-Malaṭī and Niẓām al-Mulk). Women and property should be held in partnership like water, fire, and pasture; nobody was allowed to have more than others (according to al-Shahrastānī); sharing was a religious duty (Ibn Qutaybah, Maqdīsī, Eutychius of Alexandria, Tha’ālibī, Ferdowsī, al-Malaṭī).
The sources are not clear exactly how the sharing is to be envisaged. Most accounts suggest collective ownership, and this is also what many other authors took to be the objective: Mazdak abolished marriage and private property according to Bal'amī; he told his followers that "your wives are like your other possessions, they too should be regarded as common property", according to Niẓām al-Mulk; he preached communal control of children as well, according to the Bundahišn and Ibn al-Balḵī. Theodor Nöldeke also believed Mazdak to have abolished private property and marriage, on the grounds that equality in respect of possessions cannot be maintained for long unless collective ownership is instituted and hereditary transmission of property eliminated. But though this may well have been what Zarādušt had in mind, it is not how it worked out in practice. Kawād I is said to have ruled that children born of extra-marital unions were to be affiliated to the husband (according to Syriac sources); his “communist views” on women notwithstanding, marriage thus persisted along with parental control of children and hereditary transmission of property. A widely cited tradition has it that Mazdak and his followers did not institute collective ownership as much as engage in redistribution: they claimed that "they were taking from the rich and giving to the poor, and that whoever had a surplus in respect of landed property, women or goods had no better right to it than anyone else" (Ṭabarī, Ibn Qutaybah, Maqdīsī, Ibn Miskawayh, Tha’ālibī). Mazdak "ordered that people should be equal in respect of property and women", as al-Ya’qūbī put it. Mazdak "made people equal", according to Ibn al-Athīr, he "would take the wife of the one and hand her over to another, and likewise possessions, slaves, slave girls and other things, such as landed property and real estate” (Ibn al-Athīr) These statements clearly imply that private property and marriage alike were left intact, only inequalities being removed. Mazdak's view seems to have been that the rich should divest themselves of their surplus by giving freely, and that the poor were allowed to help themselves to the possessions of those who had more than the rest: "when Adam died, God let his sons inherit [the world] equally; nobody has a right to more property or wives than others, so that he who is able to take people's possessions or obtain their wives by stealth, deceit, trickery or blandishment is allowed and free to do so; the property which some people possess in excess of others is forbidden to them until it is distributed equally among mankind", as al-Malaṭī quotes the Mazdakites as saying (in terms obviously borrowed from Islam and with an emphasis on non-violent methods which suggests that the statement refers to later conditions rather than Mazdak's revolt). This goes well with the claim that Mazdak sanctioned guest prostitution (Niẓām al-Mulk, Ibn al-Athīr) and other forms of wife-lending, a measure for which he may have found inspiration in Zoroastrian law (see the three previous posts in this thread). The later Khurramīs also endorsed ibāḥat al-nisā' (as the Muslims were to call communal access to women) without abolishing marriage thereby. Kawād I and Mazdak seem to have argued that nobody had exclusive rights to women or (in Mazdak's case) to anything at all: everything in a man's possession was available to others, ownership being common in the last resort, and anything he possessed in excess of others could be freely taken, the correct distribution being equal. But actual pooling of property, women or children was apparently not attempted.
Even so, Crone agreed with Nöldeke that ibāḥat al-nisā' was meant in a drastically egalitarian vein. What the Zaraduštis demanded was not simply that women hoarded in princely harems should be redistributed or that women should be allowed to marry outside their own class, that it should be cheaper to marry, that the rules of levirate should be relaxed, or the like; but nor was it against hereditary transmission of property that their views on women were directed. What ibāḥat al-nisā' achieved was to obstruct the growth of social distance and (crucially in Kawād I's case) to undermine the power of those who had a vested interest in its preservation (i.e. the aristocracy). Communal access to women prevented the formation of noble lineages sealed off from the rest of the community by endogamous or indeed incestuous unions; communal access to the wives of aristocrats destroyed the mystique of noble blood produced by generations of such unions, placing a question mark over the political entitlements with which such blood was associated. The horror of ibāḥat al-nisā' to non-Zaraduštis lay precisely in the fact that it obliterated hereditary ranking. It worked by "obscuring the descent of every individual", as the Dēnkard complains. "Genealogies were mixed" (Maqdīsī) "base people of all sorts mixed with people of noble blood" (Ṭabarī, Ibn Miskawayh) as we are told with reference to Mazdak’s revolt. "If people have women and property in common, how can they know their children and establish their genealogies?", as Zoroastrian priests asked Mazdak, who was supposedly dumbfounded, never having thought that far himself (Tha’ālibī, Niẓām al-Mulk, a similar objection to that stated by the Dēnkard above).
If Kawād I and Mazdak modified Zaradušt’s vision on women and property in the course of their attempt to implement it, the later Mazdakites, or some of them, seem to have changed it almost beyond recognition. The Dēnkard accuses them of tracing descent through the mother and of holding the property of sons and brothers in common, thus creating a society similar to that of the Nayar of Malabar in India (or Strabo's Yemenis), among whom ownership of land and livestock was vested in the matrilineal lineage, agricultural work being done by brothers while their sisters produced children by non-resident and temporary husbands. So, according to Crone, in western Iran, to which the information in the Dēnkard is most likely to refer, Mazdakism would thus appear to have come to validate a local and, by Zoroastrian standards, highly unorthodox form of kinship organization to which there is perhaps an allusion in Herodotus' account of Achaemenid Iran as well (according to him, the Massagetae of the Caucasus used wives promiscuously; if a man visited a woman, he would hang his quiver in front of her wagon. Presumably, they too were matrilineally organized, though Herodotus does not say so), and Naršakhī seems to imply that Mazdakism came to perform the same function in Transoxiana. But there were also Khurramīs who used the creed to sanction monogamy. The Mazdakite association with “deviant” systems is lines up with the fact that it was among isolated mountaineers (many of them Kurds) that Mazdakism survived, but it is unlikely to throw light on the origins and nature of the heresy itself. For Crone, Zaraduštism was undoubtedly a priestly response to mainstream Zoroastrian problems which only came to be adapted to local institutions after Mazdak's death.
Manuscript containing the Yasna dated to ca. 1630 from Yazd, Iran. Sasanian Zoroastrianism was a religion centered around ceremonies and the enactment of Zoroastrian Law in the daily behavior of its believers, so if the Zaraduštis were indeed antinomian, this might have set them apart as heretics to the eyes of the official priests that until then had been supported by the Sasanian dynasty.
Zaradušt’s creed was not just egalitarian, but also pacifist. Kawād I is said in the sources (Ṭabarī, Sebeos and Ibn Qutaybah) to have disliked war and bloodshed in his “heretical phase; he was a mild man who tried to deal leniently with his subjects and enemies alike, a fact which some construed as weakness (Ṭabarī, Ibn Qutaybah) and he was a vegetarian too: "the king eats no meat and holds bloodshed to be forbidden because he is a zindiq (heretic)", as the ruler of the Yemen was informed (Ṭabarī). The king proved warlike enough on his restoration. Mazdak similarly wanted to eliminate war, hatred, and dispute, (Shahrastānī) and he too was a vegetarian: according to Ibn al-Athīr, he held that "plants and animal products such as eggs, milk, butter and cheese suffice as human food". According to Bīrūnī, he told Kawād I to abstain from the slaughter of cattle "before the natural term of their life has come", which is more ambivalent: it could be taken to mean that carrion was legitimate food, which Crone (following Nöldeke) deemed unlikely, or that cattle could be both slaughtered and eaten provided that it was old, which is a view attested in Zoroastrian literature (Dēnkard and the Pahlavi Rivāyāt), or that cattle could only be slaughtered (but not eaten, as opposed to cut up for its hides, horns, etc.) after it had died. Crones considers possible that Bīrūnī mixed up Zoroastrian and Mazdakite doctrine here and that possibly it was the third interpretation he had in mind; either way, the evidence for Zarādušti vegetarianism is strong. The Khurramīs of the early Muslim world likewise disapproved of bloodshed, except in times of revolt; no living being should be killed in their view (Maqdīsī, Ibn al-Nadīm) and they too were vegetarians: after his capture, the famous IX c. CE Khurramī rebel leader Bābak complained that the hands and breath of his Muslim prison-guard stank of meat (Ṭabarī). One twelfth century Khurramīs sect even forbid injury to humans, animals, and plants alike.
Possibly, Zaradušt was also an antinomian (i.e. that he rejected laws or legalism and argued against moral, religious or social norms), but it is only of Mazdak's followers that we have any information on this point. According to the Dēnkard, they did not perform the external acts of worship. They continued to ignore them after they had become Muslims (of sorts) as well: the Khurramīs did not perform the ritual prayer, observe the fast or otherwise adhere to Islamic law, as several sources inform us.
Crone also considered necessary to drive home three further points about the Zarādušti heresy. First, neither Zaradušt’s heresy nor its Mazdakite version was a species of Manichaeism. The idea that Mazdak was a Manichaean dissident was first raised by Arthur Christensen and it can still be found in secondary literature even though it has been refuted repeatedly. Christensen based his argument on a passage in Malalas according to which a III c. CE Manichaean named Bundos proposed a new doctrine to the effect that the good god had defeated the evil god and that the victor should be honored; this Bundos was active in Rome under Diocletian (r. 285-305 CE), but he subsequently went to the Sasanian Empire where his religion was called the doctrine of tōn daristhenōn, explained by Malalas as " the adherents of the good [god] " (probably from d'rist-dēn, MP for “professing the true religion"). Due to the fact that Malalas also calls Kawād I ho darasthenos, Christensen identifies Bundos and Zarādušt of Fasā, construing Bundos as a Greek rendition of MP bundag or the like, meaning "venerable". Crone conceded that there is an odd coincidence here, and all the more so in that the Dēnkard could be taken to say that Zarādušt of Fasā was called d'rist-dēn (a disputed lecture of the Pahlavi writing, though), that various garbled epithets of Kawād I in Muslim sources (Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī, Tha’ālibī) could likewise be read as d'rist-dēn ( though this reading is not compelling), and that the appellation al-‘adliyya and madhhab-i ‘adl attested in Muslim sources for the Mazdakite sect could be taken as a translation of the same term (a supposition that Crone also considers far from obvious). Also, the Islamic scholar al-lskāfī wrote that Mazdak came from Syria. But even so, Crone found Christensen's theory hard to accept. She thought that Iskāfī’s testimony is best discounted, partly because adab (a genre of Islamic literature dealing with matters of etiquette and good behavior) works are unreliable sources of historical information and partly because it is Bundos/Zarādušt rather than Mazdak who ought to have come from (or via) Syria. Crone continued by observing that if "Mazdak" was a title, as Klíma argued, one could of course take Iskāfī’s statement as a confused reflection of the fact that the older Mazdak came from Syria and seek support for this view in the fact that Iskāfī has his Mazdak go to Fārs, the province with which Zarādušt is associated. But to Crone, conjectures based on confusion did not make good evidence. She even though that Malalas' testimony should probably be discounted too. It is not highly likely that a native of a provincial town of Fārs should have travelled all the way to Rome and made it as a preacher there before going back to found a religious sect in Iran; conversely, if Bundos was a Roman (or other non-Iranian resident of the Roman Empire), how did the people of Pārs come to accept him as a religious authority? A Syriac speaking citizen of the Roman empire might well have made it as a preacher in Iraq, but surely not in Fasā; that Zarādušt came from Fasā is however a point on which Zoroastrian and Muslim sources agree. No “communist views” are reported for Bundos, and no assertion regarding the victory of the good god is attested for Zarādušt, or for any of his followers, so that all they have in common is the appellation d'rist-dēn. So, Crone concluded that if there is any significance to this, all one can say is that Malalas' story is too garbled for us to retrieve it.
Crone further added that if one accepts that Bundos and Zarādušt are somehow related, it does not in any way follow that Zaradušt’s creed was a variant of Manichaeism, for according to her, Malalas plainly uses that word in the vague and nonspecific sense of "dualist heresy". Obviously, Zarādušt was a dualist. Zoroastrian, Christian and Muslim sources however agree that his dualism was Zoroastrian rather than Manichaean.
Thus the Dēnkard refers to him as a heretic who came up with the wrong answer to a Zoroastrian problem, while the Chronicle of Karkā ḏe Bēṯ Selōḵ credits him and Mani with different heresies. Ṭabarī described his sect as a development within Zoroastrianism and it is similarly described by Ya’qūbī and Ibn al-Nadīm. As for Kawād I, the “abominable Zarādušti heresy” that he took up was described as Zoroastrian by Joshua the Stylite, and his religion is likewise described as Zoroastrianism (majūsiyya) in the Chronicle of Se’ert; the description is correct for he tried to impose fire-worship on the Armenians in his heretical phase according to Joshua the Stylite. Mazdak, too, is classified as a Zoroastrian by Ibn al-Nadīm; and Mazdak was also a Zoroastrian according to the Pahlavi books, which depict him as a heretic, not as a Manichaean (Mani being seen as the founder of a new religion); Mazdak “modified Zoroaster’s religion” according to Bīrūnī, Abū ‘l-Ma'ālī and Ibn al-Athīr, all of whom clearly mean the original prophet, not Zarādušt of Fasā; he proposed a new interpretation of "the book of Zoroaster known as the Avestā", according to Mas’ūdī, Bīrūnī and Khwārizmī, and it was for this reason that be was known as a zindīq. He claimed to be a prophet sent to restore the religion of Zoroaster according to Niẓām al-Mulk. He aspired to the spiritual leadership of the religion of Ohrmazd according to the Dēnkard (in a passage in which he is not however explicitly named). What is more, he is said to have been a mowbed or even chief mowbed (Bīrūnī, Khwārizmī, Niẓām al-Mulk) that is to say, a member of the Zoroastrian priesthood; and though he is more likely to have been a minor priest than a leader of the clerical hierarchy (a position ascribed to him on the basis of his supposed association with Kawād I), his allegiance to that hierarchy is not in doubt, for he (or a follower of his) compares two divine powers to the chief mowbed and chief hērbed in the fragment in cosmology preserved by al-Shahrastānī. He worshipped fire, too, for he had his own views on the number and distribution of fire temples (Hamadhānī, Qummī); and he allegedly proved the truth of his religion by making a fire speak (Niẓām al-Mulk), a miracle which is moreover borrowed from the life of Zoroaster. He also appears as a Zoroastrian in the Dābistān-i Mazāhib, the author of which relied on Mazdakite informants and an alleged book of Mazdak's entitled the Dīsnād; and his speeches in Niẓām al-Mulk, Ferdowsī and other sources are wholly Zoroastrian too.
Manichaean religion accepted female priests. Painting dated to the X c. CE depicting Manichaean Electae found in Gaochang/Qočo (Xinjiang, China).
But Crone elaborates things further: the fact that Mazdakism originated within Zoroastrianism does not of course rule out the possibility that Zarādušt and/or Mazdak were influenced by Manichaeism; but where is the influence supposed to be? In terms of ethos, the two heresies were diametrically opposed. Manichaeism was a world renouncing religion which taught liberation from matter through abstention from procreation, bloodshed, and material possessions. Zarādušt and his followers by contrast taught equal access to all the good things of life, including women and material possessions. Christensen understood Mazdak's vegetarianism as an attempt to avoid entanglement in matter, and others followed suit by crediting the Mazdakites with abstention from sex and material goods as well in their supposed effort to kill desire. But as Crone points out, the followers of Zarādušt, unlike the Manichaeans, were vegetarians because life was good, not because bloodshed would entangle them in matter. Their general idea (as reported with particular clarity for later Khurramīs) was that everyone should be nice to everyone else, and that all pleasurable things should be allowed as long as they did not harm the interests of others, animals included (Maqdīsī, Ibn al-Nadīm). According to Crone, there is in fact no reason at all to assume that the Mazdakites practiced asceticism, though Mīr-Khvānd (a late source) claimed that Mazdak "wore woolen clothing and engaged in constant devotion", all early sources give us to understand that Mazdak preached elimination of desire through fulfilment; of one Mazdakite sect we are explicitly told that they rejected the asceticism of' the Marcionites; with whom they otherwise had much in common. But what then does Abū 'Īsā al-Warrāq’s statement that Mazdak authorized killing mean? Since he knew that Mazdak was a pacifist, he can hardly have credited the latter with a recommendation of ritual murder; but Crone speculated that he may well have meant that Mazdak permitted killing, normally prohibited, under conditions of revolt, which is what the later Mazdakites took to be the case; and he may further have stated that Mazdak rationalized this dispensation on the grounds that opponents (so overcome by evil as to force the believers into revolt) should be killed because there was no other way of releasing their souls. But this is not a Manichaean view. Crone stated that Mazdak's heresy undoubtedly resembled Manichaeism, as Abū 'Īsā al-Warrāq said with reference to Mazdak's belief in two principles, but then what dualism did not? To Crone, the fact that Abū 'Īsā al-Warrāq compared it with Manichaeism rather than Zoroastrianism merely illustrates the fact that Manichaeism was the most important form of dualism to early Muslims, being infinitely more intelligible, enticing and dangerous than Zoroastrianism; it does not necessarily mean that Manichaeism and Mazdakism were especially closely related. Like all the Iranian dualists, Mazdak had views on the nature of light and darkness, but his views were Zoroastrian, not Manichaean. If Abū ‘Īsā al-Warrāq (or an anonymous informant) is to be trusted, Mazdak had certainly been exposed to Gnostic influence in respect of his cosmology (as reflected in Shahrastānī, who is unclear in this precise case if his source is Abū ‘Īsā al-Warrāq or an anonymous informant) but there is nothing specifically Manichaean about this influence; according to Crone some even conjecture it to have been neo- Platonic; the American scholar Wilferd Madelung suggested that it was Kanthaean (an obscure a Gnostic-Baptist sect in Sasanian Babylonia, possibly related to the Mandaeans). The later Khurramīs likewise subscribed to a number of beliefs commonly associated with Gnosticism, notably reincarnation of the soul and periodic incarnation of the deity (or, less radically, of messengers) on earth, and they shared with the Manichaeans the concept of the moon as a soul-carrying vessel which waxes and wanes in accordance with its freight (Maqdīsī, Ibn al-Nadīm). But Crone judged that they did not need to have borrowed any of these ideas from the Manichaeans, and they were in any case quite unlike the Manichaeans in their ethos, a fact well captured by the fact that they came to be known as Khurramīs or Khurram-dīnīs "adherents of the joyous religion". Zarāduštism was not a religion of cosmic alienation in either its original or its later versions; it did not preach that man is a stranger in this world, a fallen soul or spark of light trapped in matter by mistake, nor did it teach asceticism as a means of escape. It did say that the world has arisen through a deplorable mixture of light and darkness to which man should respond by trying to vanquish darkness and its evil creations (notably by avoiding discord and bloodshed), but then so did Zoroastrianism. Clearly Zoroastrianism was the common source of Gnostic dualism and the Zarādušti/Mazdakite/Khurramī religion; the latter sprang directly from it, not from a Gnostic offshoot, and it continued to be a Zoroastrian heresy rather than a Gnostic creed as it remained life-affirming: hatred of matter is not attested.
The second point that Crone stressed is that Zarādušt’s “communism” owed its existence to Zoroastrian thought, not to classical antecedents. The practice of looking for Greek antecedents is a time-honored one as already Agathias of Myrina was the first to do so: he rejected the theory, not because of its historical implausibility, but rather because the Iranians could not in his view be credited with motives higher than concupiscence. In the XX c, Franz Altheim and Ruth Stiel argued that they had located the origins of Mazdakite thought in Neoplatonism supposedly transmitted by Bud, a VI c. CE Syrian whom the authors briskly dated back to the III c. CE and identify with Bundos, who supposedly would have picked up Neo-Platonist ideas in Rome before moving on to the Murghāb in eastern Iran, where his ideas would have lay dormant for two centuries until they were picked up by Mazdak. Klíma, on the other hand, tried to find the roots of Zarādušti communism in Carpocratianism (a Gnostic sect founded in the first half of the II c. CE by Carpocrates of Alexandria), and though he more or less renounced this view later in time, it was subsequently revived by other scholars, according to whom Zarādušt may have picked up Carpocratian ideas during his sojourn as Bundos in the Roman Empire. Crone judged these suggestions strained in the extreme. For one thing, the idea of joint property and/or women is so simple that it is unlikely only to have been dreamed up once, all other occurrences being the outcome of diffusion. For another thing, Zarādušti “communism” was intimately linked with Zoroastrian speculation on Āz, concupiscence, which is the principal force through which Ahreman gains power over mankind and which represents both excess and deprivation, fulfilment in the right measure being the remedy against it. Communal goods and wives were meant to diminish the power of Āz, as a heretic affirms in the Dēnkard; and the only objection his orthodox adversary could mobilize against it was that “communism” turned the socio-political order upside down: so it seems that the communist argument was unimpeachable. That the Zoroastrians should have had to visit the Roman Empire in order to develop such ideas is implausible in the extreme.
And the third and final point that Crone wanted to drive home is that the modern tendency to dismiss accounts of Zarādušti “communism”, or more precisely that in respect of women, as exaggerated by hostile reporters, twisted by malicious slander and so forth, is mistaken. Obviously, there are embellishments in the sources, such as Kawād I becoming a Mazdakite because he fancied an otherwise unavailable woman or Mazdak provoking his own fall by asking Kawād I for Xusrō I's mother (Bīrūnī, Ibn Qutaybah, Niẓām al-Mulk, Tha’ālibī, Ibn al-Balḵī), this is as might be expected. But there is nothing embellished about the simple claim that communal access to women was part of the Zarādušti creed. On this there is agreement in Greek, Syriac, Zoroastrian, and Muslim sources; and we may take the sources on their word, for the Zarāduštis are the only sectarians of the Middle East to whom a “communist” vision of· production and reproduction are imputed.
It is true, of course, that numerous Gnostic sects both before and after the appearance of Kawād I and Mazdak were accused of promiscuity and that the Ismā’īlīs of X c. CE Iraq and XI c. CE Baḥrayn are said to have been “communists”, the former in that they pooled both their women and their property on the eve of their ritual departure from non-lsmā'īlī society and the latter in that they organized themselves along “communist” (or “semi-communist”) lines on a permanent basis. But neither the Ismā’īlīs nor their Gnostic predecessors, with the exception of the Carpocratians, are described as adherents of “communist” creeds. The Gnostics rejected the law as an instrument of salvation and frequently preached and/or engaged in the most outrageous behavior they could think of by way of proving its irrelevance , with the result that they were routinely accused of promiscuity; and believers in messianic visions were prone to engage in the same kind of behavior, partly because they shared the Gnostic view of the law and more particularly because ritual violation of deeply internalized rules is an effective way of burning bridges, or in other words of ensuring that the sectarians will have to stick together even though life on the margins may prove difficult and the messiah may fail to arrive. But the antinomian behavior rarely amounted to “communism” in either case, and there was no “communism” in the creeds themselves. The Ismā'īlī leader in Iraq who persuaded his followers to pool their women and property under his control accomplished the bridge burning and united his followers in abject dependence on himself by one and the same measure: his “communism” was instrumental. We do not know what sort of permanent order emerged from his innovations, but in lsma’īlī Baḥrayn, where the first (and apparently “noncommunist”) attempt at transition to millenarian conditions was a failure (Bīrūnī), a new order eventually emerged which had “communist” features too. Here the “communism” was not instrumental, or not anymore, but it was still a local vision of messianic society which the founders of the official creed had not envisaged. One can deny that the Ismā’īlīs engaged in any “communist” activities whatever, be it in Iraq or Baḥrayn (and many scholars are suspicious of the reports) without greatly affecting our understanding of the Ismā’īlī belief system.
But in the case of Zarāduštis, “communism” is presented as an integral part of the belief system itself, and one cannot reject it as mere slander without thereby causing the very creed to vanish: take away the “communist” vision of production and reproduction and what is left? Either we must accept that the Zarāduštis advocated joint control of women and property, as the sources say (since one can hardly reject the claim in respect of women and accept it in respect of land), or else we must admit that all we know about their beliefs is that they included pacifism and vegetarianism, everything else being misrepresentation. But misrepresentations of what? If we take the sources to be indulging in stereotypes, the only stereotypes available are those associated with Gnostic and millenarian sects, but these have the merit of being instantly recognizable and they do not fit: whether a particular group did or did not go in for orgiastic nights, incestuous couplings, obligatory pederasty/wine-drinking/murder, or the like is usually impossible to determine, but the nature of the charge is unmistakable; and it is not the charge we encounter in connection with the Zarāduštis. Mazdak preached qatl al-anfus, but the reference is not to ritual murder. Both he and Zarādušt may have rejected Zoroastrian law, given the Gnostic tendencies of their sect, but the sources say nothing about it. The Zarāduštis believed in communal access to women and property, but their views are described as utopian, not antinomian. It was only among the later Khurramīs that ibāḥat al-nisā' assumed an antinomian coloring (ibāḥat al-māl, or communal access to land, having been largely or wholly forgotten in the meantime), just as it was only among them that millenarianism made its appearance. It is precisely because the Zarāduštis were utopian rather than antinomian “communists” that some modern scholars were fascinated by the Carpocratians, who likewise incorporated “communism” in their very creed: the parallel is real even though the “genetic” relationship between them is fictitious. It is for the same reason that the Zarāduštis cannot be presented as victims of a stereotype; on the contrary they engendered one: all “communist” tendencies in the Muslim world were automatically branded as Mazdakite borrowings. And it is not of course problematic that the Zarāduštis were less communist in practice than they were in principle, whereas it is the other way round with the Ismā’īlīs. Neither Kawād I nor Mazdak could hope to transform Sasanian Iran into a “communist” society in the sense of one in which resources were pooled under state control: the empire was too large and too complex for this to be possible, and too opposed to the attempt; however the vision was to be enacted, public ownership was not an option, and it does not in fact seem to have suggested itself to them. But petty communities opting out of mainstream society in the name of a heretical creed were well placed to obtain a consensus on “communist” ways, even if these ways were not part of the heresy itself, and they were small and homogeneous enough for public control of land and other resources to be viable. (There was no pooling of women once the transitional phase was over).
Kawād I's “communism” was interpreted by Crone and many other historians as an anti-noble measure. Joint access to women, promoted in the name of the Zoroastrian faith to which practically all Iranian nobles were committed, offered a beguilingly simple way of curtailing the power of the nobility for a ruler who had no army with which to defeat or despoil it, his only troops being those furnished by the nobles themselves (as we have seen in previous posts, this statement by Crone -dated to the 1980s- has been rightly put in doubt since the 2000s with the excavation of the Wall of Gorgān and other massive complexes that suggest that the Sasanian state in the V c. CE was far more centralized that had been thought before, and that the Šāhān Šāh had at his disposal substantial military forces on a permanent basis). In practice, of course, the attempt was a failure, and Kawād I would scarcely have made it if he had not been a really young man at the time (see above) meaning that he was only in his early twenties when the Iranian nobility put an end to his experiment. I disagree with Crone in her analysis of the reasons that led Kawād I to indulge in such extreme measures; Crone sees in it an attempt at modernizing the Sasanian state, but as I’ve said before, recent evidence seems to show that the Sasanian state was already considerably centralized in the V c. CE and that the kings of this century were able to mobilize massive forces to build and garrison enormous military barriers and fortresses in their northern borders; permanent garrisons that by their very nature cannot have come from seasonal feudal levies. Instead, I would suggest that what irked young Kawād I was the fact that under all the V c. CE kings powerful nobles from the great families had managed to reach positions of great power and influence and to become almost equals to the king (Mihr-Narsē Sūrēn, Ṙaham Mihrān, Sūkhrā Kārēn, Šābuhr Mihrān, etc.), and that especially his humiliating position vis-à-vis Sūkhrā during five years had decided him to take decisive action to end this situation once and for all, and since (as I’ve shown in the previous posts about Sasanian law) the very legal structures of Ērānšahr that underpinned the status of these families were supported by the Zoroastrian priesthood and their interpretation of the Avestā, he tried to subvert it in order to subvert the whole structure of the social order of the Sasanian Empire. An overly ambitious (and very risky) enterprise that ended with his dethronement and his narrow escape from death. In his second reign he refrained himself from such adventures, although the Zarāduštis remained a latent force in the Empire that would explode at is death in the form of a massive peasant rebellion led by Mazdak.
The first reign of Kawād I stretched from 488 CE, after the deposition (and possible blinding or murder) of his uncle Walāxš and his dethronement by the nobility in 496 CE. As we have seen in previous posts, in 488 CE Kawād I was probably fifteen years old, and so he came of age according to ancient Iranian custom, but he spent the first part of this first reign, probably until 493 CE, under the de facto guardianship of Suḵrā (a situation deeply humiliating for the young king, as it equated him to a minor or a woman to the eyes of his subjects), whom he managed to displace and execute in said year by means of the latter’s enemy Šābuhr Mihrān of Rayy. The experience seems to have made a deep impression on the young king, for he then embarked in what was possibly the more radical social and religious experiment in the history of the House of Sāsān, his support for the so-called Mazdakites. It is possible that his youth (he must have been around twenty years old in 493 CE) was the very reason that led him to take such a drastic decision for when he recovered the throne in 498/499 CE, he did not repeat the experiment, although “Mazdakism” remained as a latent force during all his reign (as we will see in the next thread).
Few events in Sasanian history have caused more ink to be spilt by modern authors than the figure of Mazdak and the so-called “Mazdakite heresy” that ancient sources attribute to him. For an overview of what “Mazdakism” was like I will follow the paper Kavād’s heresy and Mazdak’s revolt, by the British historian Patricia Crone, who devoted many years of study to Late Antique and Early Islamic religious history. Her views are not shared by many scholars, but I personally think that her analysis is the one that makes more sense of the tangled web left to us by the ancient sources. I will also borrow some material from her last published book, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism, where she studied the influence of Sasanian “Mazdakism” on the Early Islamic “heretic” movements in Iran collectively labelled as Khurramīs (followers of the Khurramīyya, “the Joyous Religion”) by Islamic authors and which appear in the sources until the XII c. CE.
Silver drahm of Kawād I, issued during his first reign. Mint of Staxr (mint mark “ST”).
The common view is that the heresiarch Mazdak would have been a “communist” (sorry about the anachronism, but this expression is often used as XX c. Soviet and Marxist historians decided to turn him into a sort of proto-communist) active in the time of Kawād I (r. 488- 496, 498- 531 CE), who was killed along with many of his followers by Xusrō I (r. 531-579 CE), Kawād I's son and successor, after this king’s attempt to implement his “communist” ideas had unleashed a popular revolt which plunged the Sasanian Empire into chaos.
This is the common view, but due to the very confused state of the ancient sources, dissenting voices also abound: in the 1980s, German historian Heinz Gaube posited that Mazdak may never have existed, and that even if he did, he played no role in Kawād I's politics, nor did such doctrines as he may have espoused stir up social unrest: it would have been Kawād I who mobilized the masses against the nobility in the name of “communist” ideas, while Mazdak would have been probably invented or misrepresented to take the blame for the king's “unorthodox” behavior. Gaube’s view is an extreme one but is a good example of the dissent that this subject has caused amongst scholars.
The problems with Gaube’s theory are evident: as Crone noted, though friction between kings and nobles has been commonplace in history, it’s not often heard that kings stir up peasant revolts against their noble rivals, for the obvious reason that the latter were the pillars of the established order: if the peasants destroyed the nobility, how would the king have restored order among the peasants? Thus, whatever its merits may have been, Gaube's argument certainly made Kawād I's behavior even more problematic than it already is. Gaube’s hypothesis rests on the two facts that no contemporary V-VI c. CE source mentions Mazdak (though several refer to Kawād I's “communist phase”) and that the later Perso-Arabic sources are full of contradictions. Both facts do indeed suggest that something is wrong with the standard account, but Crone thought there was a less radical way of explaining them than Gaube’s radical thesis.
As I have already stated, Kawād I reigned twice. He was elevated to the throne in 488 CE and expelled in 496 CE, and afterwards he spent two years in exile among the Hephthalites: he regained his throne with Hephthalite help in 498 CE and ruled without interruption from then onwards until his death in 531 CE. All the VI c. CE sources date his “communist” phase to his first reign. The sources in question are, first, the Syriac chronicle attributed to Joshua the Stylite which was compiled ca. 507 CE, well before Kawād I's second reign was over; secondly, Procopius of Caesarea’s account based on information gathered during the Roman-Sasanian war of 527-531 CE, in which he took part as secretary to the Roman general Belisarius; and thirdly, Agathias of Myrina, who died about 582 CE and who had access, not just to Procopius’ work, but also to notes taken by a Christian interpreter from the “Royal Annals” of the Sasanians.
Given the unanimity of the contemporary sources, Kawād I's “communist phase” must be considered as securely dated. The late Arabic Christian Chronicle of Se’ert also places it in his first reign, and so do numerous Muslim authors: Ibn Qutaybah, Dīnawarī, Ṭabarī, Mas’ūdī, Maqdīsī and others. All these sources, both Christian and Muslim, state that his unorthodox views were the very reason for his overthrown. However, neither the VI c. CE sources nor the Chronicle of Se’ert mention Mazdak, whereas practically all the Muslim sources claim that he was the moving force behind Kawād I. This is the problem that led Gaube to formulate his theory.
The Czechoslovak historian Otakar Klíma, who was the first to discuss this VI c. CE “silence”, initially argued that these Roman Christian sources were simply ill-informed. But Mazdak's absence from the contemporary sources is in stark contrast with his towering presence in later accounts: if he were really so prominent, how could contemporaries have overlooked him? Joshua the Stylite was remarkably close indeed to the events in terms of time and place alike, while Procopius' account is full of circumstantial and local detail which he must have picked up in conversation with Iranians. For example, he knew the story of how Kawād I’s wife and/or sister helped the latter escape from jail; so why did no story about Mazdak come to his attention?
When Klíma returned to the problem years later, he argued that Xusrō I might have deleted Mazdak from the official records in order to save his father's reputation. But as Crone’s pointed out, this hypothesis is even less satisfactory than Klíma’s first one. Xusrō I may well have revised the official records after his accession, but he cannot thereby have affected information transmitted before it: Mazdak's absence from the accounts by Joshua the Stylite and Procopius thus remains problematic. Xusrō I's revisions ought however to have affected the Perso-Arabic tradition, given that much of it goes back to the Xwadāy-Nāmag, based on the very records from which Mazdak was supposedly deleted, so Mazdak's presence in the Muslim sources becomes problematic too. Due to this, Klíma felt compelled to argue that Ibn al-Muqaffa’, the first translator of the Xwadāy-Nāmag into Arabic (which was the version on which later Muslim authors based their accounts), inserted an account of Mazdak where he found it missing, a quite forced explanation that Crone found lacking.
Although it’s unclear if a “Joshua de Stylite” was indeed the author of the so-called “Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite”, stylite monks were widespread in the Late Roman provinces in the Levant. This tower at Umm ar-Rasas in Jordan (the ancient Late Roman settlement of “Mephaas” or “Kastron Mefa’a”) has been tentatively labelled as a stylite’s pillar.
Gaube’s hypothesis was actually the mirror opposite of Klíma’s: Xusrō I would not have deleted Mazdak from the official records, but on the contrary he would have written him into them; Mazdak would not be absent from the contemporary sources because he played no role in the events which they report, but present in the later sources because Xusrō I invented or redesigned him as a scapegoat for Kawād I’ “misbehavior”. This does at least have the merit of offering a coherent solution, and there is no objection to it on the Greek or Syriac side, though. It would have been to Gaube's advantage if Mazdak had figured in Agathias' account: his sudden appearance in a Roman author who used Sasanian official records some forty years after Xusrō I’s accession would have reinforced the suspicion that the records had been doctored. But Crone thought that Agathias' silence is not important, as she deemed Gaube's hypothesis hard to square with the Perso-Arabic tradition. To Crone, Mazdak did not sound in the least like an apologetic invention in its accounts, and she thought highly unlikely that Xusrō I’s court could have concocted such a believable figure out of thin air, to the point that Mazdak captured even popular imagination.
Crone also pointed out that there is an obvious chronological problem though. If Mazdak was the man behind Kawād I, then he must have been active in the 490s CE; yet the sources agree that he was suppressed by Xusrō I, in the 530s CE. Kawād I was dethroned for heresy thirty-five years before Xusrō I’s accession, at a time when the latter had not even been born; and there is no suggestion that he resumed his heretical activities after his restoration: both Joshua the Stylite and Procopius of Caesarea provide detailed accounts of his second reign (up to 506 CE and his death respectively) without issuing a word about “communist” activities on his part, or for that matter on the part of anyone else; some later Muslim sources explicitly say that his heretical phase came to an end on his fall; and as Theodor Nöldeke already pointed out in the XIX c., he would hardly have been capable of conducting major wars against the Eastern Roman Empire if he had continued to alienate his clergy and nobility. Yet Mazdak is associated with both Kawād I and Xusrō I, or with Xusrō I on his own, both in Zoroastrian and Muslim sources: Mazdak, they say, seduced the former and was killed by the latter. Thus, Crone wondered what was he doing in the thirty-five years in between? To her, the simplest solution is that two different incidents may have been conflated: the sources contemporary with Kawād I's heretical phase fail to mention Mazdak for the simple reason that Mazdak only made his appearance after this phase, in the reign of Xusrō I.
As Crone pointed out, this hypothesis accords well with the fact that the sources associate Kawād I and Mazdak with different doctrines and incompatible events. As regards the doctrines, the VI c. CE sources unanimously describe Kawād I as a “communist” in respect of women alone. According to Joshua the Stylite, “he reestablished (sic, a point we will address later in more depth) the abominable heresy which teaches that women should be in common and that everyone should have intercourse with whomever he liked". According to Procopius of Caesarea, he legislated "that Persians should have communal intercourse with their women" which is also what Agathias of Myrina and John Diakrinomenos tell us: "it is said that he actually made a law according to which women were to be available to men in common", as Agathias puts it, adding that "these sins were committed frequently and with full legality". But of common ownership in respect of property there is not a word. The Chronicle of Se’ert provides details of the facilities provided for the sins in question: Kawād I built “shrines and inns” where people could meet and “engage in incontinence”. And the Jewish Seder Olam Zutta refers vaguely to “sexual immorality” at the courts of Sasanian princes. But there is no reference to “communism” in respect of property in these sources either. Communal sex was of course a particularly scandalous idea, but the abolition of private property struck Muslim authors as almost equally abhorrent, and it would be incongruent to suppose that contemporaries to the events would have remained silent if Kawād I had launched an attack on aristocratic and priestly possessions. Yet silent they were. By contrast, practically all the later sources associate Mazdak, and thus Kawād I too, with heretical views in respect of women and property alike. Attempts by modern scholars at solving or harmonizing these disagreements in the sources have been unsatisfactory. So, crone proposed that we may take it that Kawād I 's heresy was only about women, whereas Mazdak's involved “communal sharing” of women and property alike.
As for the events, VI c. CE sources are unanimous that Kawād I 's measures were unpopular:
Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite:
Kawād I’s law "by no means pleased the common people", who rose against him according to Procopius. Many later sources also state that his heresy led to his dethronement. So, Crone concludes that under Kawād I the Iranians thus rebelled against a heresy. But under Mazdak they rebelled in the name of one; and whereas Kawād I’s heresy had been imposed from above, Mazdak's heresy was sponsored by the masses. Mazdak's adherents were “the poor, base, weak and ignoble plebs”, as numerous Arabic sources tell us; and there is general agreement that the crowds ran riot: they began by breaking into the royal granaries according to Tha’ālibī and Ferdowsī (whose accounts are however largely fictional according to Crone); "they would break in to a man's home and take his dwelling, his wives, and his property without him being able to prevent them", according to Ibn Qutaybah, Ṭabarī and others; they "killed those who did not follow them” in the words of Maqdīsī. Countless people followed Mazdak, and immense numbers were duly slaughtered by Xusrō I: no less than 80,000, 100,000 or even 150,000 were killed in one day in just one area, as several sources allege (Mas’ūdī, Maqdīsī, Tha’ālibī and Ibn Balḵī). Crone points out that it is because of this that it is hard to agree with Gaube that Muslim accounts of Mazdak's revolt are a cover up for an original account of royal manipulation of the masses. For one thing, Muslim sources patently describe a phenomenon directed against the authorities; and for another thing, there is no mention of an alliance between king and masses in the contemporary accounts of Kawād I 's “communist phase”; on the contrary, even the common people disliked his innovations according to Procopius. So, Crone concluded that Kawād I was a heretic who tried to impose his views on a reluctant populace (reluctant nobles above all), while Mazdak was a rebel who stirred up a peasant revolt: they simply did not act a t the same time, let alone in alliance.
In Crone’s opinion, her hypothesis would also explain the proliferation of variations and contradictions in later sources. According to her, it would be obvious that once Mazdak had come to be seen as the moving force behind Kawād I even though he was only suppressed by Xusrō I, then the interval between Kawād I's “heretical phase” and the accession of Xusrō I had somehow or other to be eliminated. So, Crone thought that it was for this reason that we are told, now explicitly and now implicitly, that Kawād I adopted “communist” ideas after his restoration (Mojmal al-Tawāriḵ wa’l-Qeṣaṣ, Tha’ālibī, Ḥamza Eṣfahāni, Bīrūnī and Niẓām al-Mulk) or that he was deposed for his heresy by Xusrō I (Niẓām al-Mulk, Ibn Isfandīyār), or that his heresy caused him to abdicate in favor of the latter (Ibn al-Balḵī), or that he made the latter his co-regent (Bundahišn, Mojmal al-Tawāriḵ wa’l-Qeṣaṣ) or that the heretics survived his deposition or came back towards the encl of his reign (Dīnawarī, Ibn Qutaybah, Ṭabarī, Ibn al-Balḵī) or even that Mazdak's revolt lasted all the time from his first reign to Xusrō I’s accession (Eutychius of Alexandria). In Crone’s view, what all these variant versions are trying to say is that a heretical Kawād I gave way directly to an orthodox Xusrō I, without a thirty-five-year gap in between. But an explanation also had to be found for the problem that Kawād I was supposed to have been in league with the very heretics who rebelled against the crown. Hence we read that Kawād I was forced to join the rebels, the latter having grown exceedingly strong (Ṭabarī, Bīrūnī) or that he had to pretend to be on their side lest he lose his throne (Nihāyat al-arab), or that he was deceived into supporting people who were really against him (Bīrūnī, Ibn Qutaybah, Niẓām al-Mulk, Tha’ālibī, Ibn al-Balḵī) some sources even think that it was the rebels who deposed him (Ṭabarī, Miskawayh) or at least kept him in isolation while the grandees of the realm enthroned his brother (Eutychius of Alexandria); Kawād I escaped from them to become king again, which is why the Mazdakites had to be suppressed prior to his restoration (Ṭabarī, Maqdīsī, Eutychius of Alexandria, Ibn al-Athīr), Mazdak himself being killed at that time (Ibn Qutaybah). But the problem then is obvious: how did Mazdak and his followers come to be around at the time of Xusrō I’s accession? Since all this wriggling and writhing is accompanied by efforts to fit in Kawād I’s flight to the Hephthalites, his fathering of Xusrō I, and his relations with his regent Sūkhrā and the latter's alleged son Zarmihr, it is hardly surprising that the outcome is a confusing mass of similar, yet never quite identical accounts.
So, Crone’s hypothesis states that Kawād I tried to enforce communal access to women in the 490s CE, only to be deposed by his nobles in 496 CE, while Mazdak was a later heretic who tried to enforce communal access to women and property by raising a peasant revolt, only to be executed along with his followers by Xusrō I in the 530s. According to the British historian, the reason why the two episodes have been conflated might be that they were closely spaced events in the history of the same religious sect, of which we will now address its nature.
Orange grove in Fasā, province of Fārs, Iran.
Not much can be learnt about the king’s religious “deviation” in the Greek sources, all of whom describe Kawād I's innovations in terms of secular legislation; but according to Joshua the Stylite, Kawād I’s “communism” was derived from "the abominable Magian heresy known as the Zaradushtaqan", which he “reestablished”. This heresy is also referred to in the Syriac Chronicle of Karkā ḏe Bēṯ Selōḵ, a VI c. CE account written in what is today modern Kirkuk in Iraq which credits a certain Zarādušt, described as a contemporary of Mani, with a heresy that existed now openly and now secretly until the time of Xusrō I. The heresiarch in question was Zarādušt-ē Xrōsagān of Fasā (name of a city and province in Pārs) according to the Dēnkard, which identifies him as the original advocate of the doctrine that women and property should be held in common; and that he was the source of Kawād I’s ideas is confirmed by the Chronicle of Se’ert (in which the author has some trouble distinguishing the III c. CE heresiarch from the original Zoroaster). He was the source of Mazdak’s ideas, too. According to Tabarī, Zarādusht b. Khurrakān of Fasā had introduced innovations into Zoroastrianism and many people had followed him: Mazdak was one of those who made propaganda for his views. Ibn Miskawayh says much the same. Ya’qūbī and others wrongly make him a contemporary of Mazdak rather than a III c. CE figure, while Ibn al-Nadīm quaintly refers to him as "the older Mazdak", but the sole fact that these authors know him is important. The Slovenian scholar Marijan Molé proposed taking the name of Zarādušt as a title, noting that this would make Zarādušt of Fasā identifiable with Mazdak himself: i.e. Mazdak was “Zarādušt” in the sense of “mowbed”. According to Otakar Klíma, on the other hand, it is Mazdak's name that could be taken as a title: Zarādušt would have thus been the “older Mazdak” in the sense of first leader of the sect. But whether one or the other name was a title or not, Syriac and Muslim evidence leaves no doubt that Zarādušt of Fasā was a person separate from, and indeed much earlier than, Mazdak. Besides, Crone pointed out that both characters had different patronymics, Zarādušt being a son of Xrōsag/Khurrak while Mazdak was the son of Bāmdād; and they are also said to have come from different places, Zarādušt being a native of Fasā, whereas Mazdak is said to have come from Nasā, Ištakhr, Tabrīz, Nīšāpūr or MDRYH, identified as Mādharāyā in Iraq by Arthur Christensen or as the Murghāb in eastern Iran by Franz Altheim and R. Stiehl. So, Crone accepted that Zarādušt-ē Xrōsagān was the original source of doctrines taken up by Kawād I and Mazdak in succession.
The fundamental idea behind Zaradušt’s heresy was that women and property engender envy, anger, hatred, greed and needs which would not arise if both were held in common (according to Crone, that’s what she could conclude from Ferdowsī’s account): women and wealth are the ultimate causes of practically all dissension among mankind. But God had created all men alike (according to al-Shahrastānī) and placed the means of sustenance, including the means of procreation, on earth "so that mankind may divide them equally among themselves" (according to al-Malaṭī and Niẓām al-Mulk). Women and property should be held in partnership like water, fire, and pasture; nobody was allowed to have more than others (according to al-Shahrastānī); sharing was a religious duty (Ibn Qutaybah, Maqdīsī, Eutychius of Alexandria, Tha’ālibī, Ferdowsī, al-Malaṭī).
The sources are not clear exactly how the sharing is to be envisaged. Most accounts suggest collective ownership, and this is also what many other authors took to be the objective: Mazdak abolished marriage and private property according to Bal'amī; he told his followers that "your wives are like your other possessions, they too should be regarded as common property", according to Niẓām al-Mulk; he preached communal control of children as well, according to the Bundahišn and Ibn al-Balḵī. Theodor Nöldeke also believed Mazdak to have abolished private property and marriage, on the grounds that equality in respect of possessions cannot be maintained for long unless collective ownership is instituted and hereditary transmission of property eliminated. But though this may well have been what Zarādušt had in mind, it is not how it worked out in practice. Kawād I is said to have ruled that children born of extra-marital unions were to be affiliated to the husband (according to Syriac sources); his “communist views” on women notwithstanding, marriage thus persisted along with parental control of children and hereditary transmission of property. A widely cited tradition has it that Mazdak and his followers did not institute collective ownership as much as engage in redistribution: they claimed that "they were taking from the rich and giving to the poor, and that whoever had a surplus in respect of landed property, women or goods had no better right to it than anyone else" (Ṭabarī, Ibn Qutaybah, Maqdīsī, Ibn Miskawayh, Tha’ālibī). Mazdak "ordered that people should be equal in respect of property and women", as al-Ya’qūbī put it. Mazdak "made people equal", according to Ibn al-Athīr, he "would take the wife of the one and hand her over to another, and likewise possessions, slaves, slave girls and other things, such as landed property and real estate” (Ibn al-Athīr) These statements clearly imply that private property and marriage alike were left intact, only inequalities being removed. Mazdak's view seems to have been that the rich should divest themselves of their surplus by giving freely, and that the poor were allowed to help themselves to the possessions of those who had more than the rest: "when Adam died, God let his sons inherit [the world] equally; nobody has a right to more property or wives than others, so that he who is able to take people's possessions or obtain their wives by stealth, deceit, trickery or blandishment is allowed and free to do so; the property which some people possess in excess of others is forbidden to them until it is distributed equally among mankind", as al-Malaṭī quotes the Mazdakites as saying (in terms obviously borrowed from Islam and with an emphasis on non-violent methods which suggests that the statement refers to later conditions rather than Mazdak's revolt). This goes well with the claim that Mazdak sanctioned guest prostitution (Niẓām al-Mulk, Ibn al-Athīr) and other forms of wife-lending, a measure for which he may have found inspiration in Zoroastrian law (see the three previous posts in this thread). The later Khurramīs also endorsed ibāḥat al-nisā' (as the Muslims were to call communal access to women) without abolishing marriage thereby. Kawād I and Mazdak seem to have argued that nobody had exclusive rights to women or (in Mazdak's case) to anything at all: everything in a man's possession was available to others, ownership being common in the last resort, and anything he possessed in excess of others could be freely taken, the correct distribution being equal. But actual pooling of property, women or children was apparently not attempted.
Even so, Crone agreed with Nöldeke that ibāḥat al-nisā' was meant in a drastically egalitarian vein. What the Zaraduštis demanded was not simply that women hoarded in princely harems should be redistributed or that women should be allowed to marry outside their own class, that it should be cheaper to marry, that the rules of levirate should be relaxed, or the like; but nor was it against hereditary transmission of property that their views on women were directed. What ibāḥat al-nisā' achieved was to obstruct the growth of social distance and (crucially in Kawād I's case) to undermine the power of those who had a vested interest in its preservation (i.e. the aristocracy). Communal access to women prevented the formation of noble lineages sealed off from the rest of the community by endogamous or indeed incestuous unions; communal access to the wives of aristocrats destroyed the mystique of noble blood produced by generations of such unions, placing a question mark over the political entitlements with which such blood was associated. The horror of ibāḥat al-nisā' to non-Zaraduštis lay precisely in the fact that it obliterated hereditary ranking. It worked by "obscuring the descent of every individual", as the Dēnkard complains. "Genealogies were mixed" (Maqdīsī) "base people of all sorts mixed with people of noble blood" (Ṭabarī, Ibn Miskawayh) as we are told with reference to Mazdak’s revolt. "If people have women and property in common, how can they know their children and establish their genealogies?", as Zoroastrian priests asked Mazdak, who was supposedly dumbfounded, never having thought that far himself (Tha’ālibī, Niẓām al-Mulk, a similar objection to that stated by the Dēnkard above).
If Kawād I and Mazdak modified Zaradušt’s vision on women and property in the course of their attempt to implement it, the later Mazdakites, or some of them, seem to have changed it almost beyond recognition. The Dēnkard accuses them of tracing descent through the mother and of holding the property of sons and brothers in common, thus creating a society similar to that of the Nayar of Malabar in India (or Strabo's Yemenis), among whom ownership of land and livestock was vested in the matrilineal lineage, agricultural work being done by brothers while their sisters produced children by non-resident and temporary husbands. So, according to Crone, in western Iran, to which the information in the Dēnkard is most likely to refer, Mazdakism would thus appear to have come to validate a local and, by Zoroastrian standards, highly unorthodox form of kinship organization to which there is perhaps an allusion in Herodotus' account of Achaemenid Iran as well (according to him, the Massagetae of the Caucasus used wives promiscuously; if a man visited a woman, he would hang his quiver in front of her wagon. Presumably, they too were matrilineally organized, though Herodotus does not say so), and Naršakhī seems to imply that Mazdakism came to perform the same function in Transoxiana. But there were also Khurramīs who used the creed to sanction monogamy. The Mazdakite association with “deviant” systems is lines up with the fact that it was among isolated mountaineers (many of them Kurds) that Mazdakism survived, but it is unlikely to throw light on the origins and nature of the heresy itself. For Crone, Zaraduštism was undoubtedly a priestly response to mainstream Zoroastrian problems which only came to be adapted to local institutions after Mazdak's death.
Manuscript containing the Yasna dated to ca. 1630 from Yazd, Iran. Sasanian Zoroastrianism was a religion centered around ceremonies and the enactment of Zoroastrian Law in the daily behavior of its believers, so if the Zaraduštis were indeed antinomian, this might have set them apart as heretics to the eyes of the official priests that until then had been supported by the Sasanian dynasty.
Zaradušt’s creed was not just egalitarian, but also pacifist. Kawād I is said in the sources (Ṭabarī, Sebeos and Ibn Qutaybah) to have disliked war and bloodshed in his “heretical phase; he was a mild man who tried to deal leniently with his subjects and enemies alike, a fact which some construed as weakness (Ṭabarī, Ibn Qutaybah) and he was a vegetarian too: "the king eats no meat and holds bloodshed to be forbidden because he is a zindiq (heretic)", as the ruler of the Yemen was informed (Ṭabarī). The king proved warlike enough on his restoration. Mazdak similarly wanted to eliminate war, hatred, and dispute, (Shahrastānī) and he too was a vegetarian: according to Ibn al-Athīr, he held that "plants and animal products such as eggs, milk, butter and cheese suffice as human food". According to Bīrūnī, he told Kawād I to abstain from the slaughter of cattle "before the natural term of their life has come", which is more ambivalent: it could be taken to mean that carrion was legitimate food, which Crone (following Nöldeke) deemed unlikely, or that cattle could be both slaughtered and eaten provided that it was old, which is a view attested in Zoroastrian literature (Dēnkard and the Pahlavi Rivāyāt), or that cattle could only be slaughtered (but not eaten, as opposed to cut up for its hides, horns, etc.) after it had died. Crones considers possible that Bīrūnī mixed up Zoroastrian and Mazdakite doctrine here and that possibly it was the third interpretation he had in mind; either way, the evidence for Zarādušti vegetarianism is strong. The Khurramīs of the early Muslim world likewise disapproved of bloodshed, except in times of revolt; no living being should be killed in their view (Maqdīsī, Ibn al-Nadīm) and they too were vegetarians: after his capture, the famous IX c. CE Khurramī rebel leader Bābak complained that the hands and breath of his Muslim prison-guard stank of meat (Ṭabarī). One twelfth century Khurramīs sect even forbid injury to humans, animals, and plants alike.
Possibly, Zaradušt was also an antinomian (i.e. that he rejected laws or legalism and argued against moral, religious or social norms), but it is only of Mazdak's followers that we have any information on this point. According to the Dēnkard, they did not perform the external acts of worship. They continued to ignore them after they had become Muslims (of sorts) as well: the Khurramīs did not perform the ritual prayer, observe the fast or otherwise adhere to Islamic law, as several sources inform us.
Crone also considered necessary to drive home three further points about the Zarādušti heresy. First, neither Zaradušt’s heresy nor its Mazdakite version was a species of Manichaeism. The idea that Mazdak was a Manichaean dissident was first raised by Arthur Christensen and it can still be found in secondary literature even though it has been refuted repeatedly. Christensen based his argument on a passage in Malalas according to which a III c. CE Manichaean named Bundos proposed a new doctrine to the effect that the good god had defeated the evil god and that the victor should be honored; this Bundos was active in Rome under Diocletian (r. 285-305 CE), but he subsequently went to the Sasanian Empire where his religion was called the doctrine of tōn daristhenōn, explained by Malalas as " the adherents of the good [god] " (probably from d'rist-dēn, MP for “professing the true religion"). Due to the fact that Malalas also calls Kawād I ho darasthenos, Christensen identifies Bundos and Zarādušt of Fasā, construing Bundos as a Greek rendition of MP bundag or the like, meaning "venerable". Crone conceded that there is an odd coincidence here, and all the more so in that the Dēnkard could be taken to say that Zarādušt of Fasā was called d'rist-dēn (a disputed lecture of the Pahlavi writing, though), that various garbled epithets of Kawād I in Muslim sources (Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī, Tha’ālibī) could likewise be read as d'rist-dēn ( though this reading is not compelling), and that the appellation al-‘adliyya and madhhab-i ‘adl attested in Muslim sources for the Mazdakite sect could be taken as a translation of the same term (a supposition that Crone also considers far from obvious). Also, the Islamic scholar al-lskāfī wrote that Mazdak came from Syria. But even so, Crone found Christensen's theory hard to accept. She thought that Iskāfī’s testimony is best discounted, partly because adab (a genre of Islamic literature dealing with matters of etiquette and good behavior) works are unreliable sources of historical information and partly because it is Bundos/Zarādušt rather than Mazdak who ought to have come from (or via) Syria. Crone continued by observing that if "Mazdak" was a title, as Klíma argued, one could of course take Iskāfī’s statement as a confused reflection of the fact that the older Mazdak came from Syria and seek support for this view in the fact that Iskāfī has his Mazdak go to Fārs, the province with which Zarādušt is associated. But to Crone, conjectures based on confusion did not make good evidence. She even though that Malalas' testimony should probably be discounted too. It is not highly likely that a native of a provincial town of Fārs should have travelled all the way to Rome and made it as a preacher there before going back to found a religious sect in Iran; conversely, if Bundos was a Roman (or other non-Iranian resident of the Roman Empire), how did the people of Pārs come to accept him as a religious authority? A Syriac speaking citizen of the Roman empire might well have made it as a preacher in Iraq, but surely not in Fasā; that Zarādušt came from Fasā is however a point on which Zoroastrian and Muslim sources agree. No “communist views” are reported for Bundos, and no assertion regarding the victory of the good god is attested for Zarādušt, or for any of his followers, so that all they have in common is the appellation d'rist-dēn. So, Crone concluded that if there is any significance to this, all one can say is that Malalas' story is too garbled for us to retrieve it.
Crone further added that if one accepts that Bundos and Zarādušt are somehow related, it does not in any way follow that Zaradušt’s creed was a variant of Manichaeism, for according to her, Malalas plainly uses that word in the vague and nonspecific sense of "dualist heresy". Obviously, Zarādušt was a dualist. Zoroastrian, Christian and Muslim sources however agree that his dualism was Zoroastrian rather than Manichaean.
Thus the Dēnkard refers to him as a heretic who came up with the wrong answer to a Zoroastrian problem, while the Chronicle of Karkā ḏe Bēṯ Selōḵ credits him and Mani with different heresies. Ṭabarī described his sect as a development within Zoroastrianism and it is similarly described by Ya’qūbī and Ibn al-Nadīm. As for Kawād I, the “abominable Zarādušti heresy” that he took up was described as Zoroastrian by Joshua the Stylite, and his religion is likewise described as Zoroastrianism (majūsiyya) in the Chronicle of Se’ert; the description is correct for he tried to impose fire-worship on the Armenians in his heretical phase according to Joshua the Stylite. Mazdak, too, is classified as a Zoroastrian by Ibn al-Nadīm; and Mazdak was also a Zoroastrian according to the Pahlavi books, which depict him as a heretic, not as a Manichaean (Mani being seen as the founder of a new religion); Mazdak “modified Zoroaster’s religion” according to Bīrūnī, Abū ‘l-Ma'ālī and Ibn al-Athīr, all of whom clearly mean the original prophet, not Zarādušt of Fasā; he proposed a new interpretation of "the book of Zoroaster known as the Avestā", according to Mas’ūdī, Bīrūnī and Khwārizmī, and it was for this reason that be was known as a zindīq. He claimed to be a prophet sent to restore the religion of Zoroaster according to Niẓām al-Mulk. He aspired to the spiritual leadership of the religion of Ohrmazd according to the Dēnkard (in a passage in which he is not however explicitly named). What is more, he is said to have been a mowbed or even chief mowbed (Bīrūnī, Khwārizmī, Niẓām al-Mulk) that is to say, a member of the Zoroastrian priesthood; and though he is more likely to have been a minor priest than a leader of the clerical hierarchy (a position ascribed to him on the basis of his supposed association with Kawād I), his allegiance to that hierarchy is not in doubt, for he (or a follower of his) compares two divine powers to the chief mowbed and chief hērbed in the fragment in cosmology preserved by al-Shahrastānī. He worshipped fire, too, for he had his own views on the number and distribution of fire temples (Hamadhānī, Qummī); and he allegedly proved the truth of his religion by making a fire speak (Niẓām al-Mulk), a miracle which is moreover borrowed from the life of Zoroaster. He also appears as a Zoroastrian in the Dābistān-i Mazāhib, the author of which relied on Mazdakite informants and an alleged book of Mazdak's entitled the Dīsnād; and his speeches in Niẓām al-Mulk, Ferdowsī and other sources are wholly Zoroastrian too.
Manichaean religion accepted female priests. Painting dated to the X c. CE depicting Manichaean Electae found in Gaochang/Qočo (Xinjiang, China).
But Crone elaborates things further: the fact that Mazdakism originated within Zoroastrianism does not of course rule out the possibility that Zarādušt and/or Mazdak were influenced by Manichaeism; but where is the influence supposed to be? In terms of ethos, the two heresies were diametrically opposed. Manichaeism was a world renouncing religion which taught liberation from matter through abstention from procreation, bloodshed, and material possessions. Zarādušt and his followers by contrast taught equal access to all the good things of life, including women and material possessions. Christensen understood Mazdak's vegetarianism as an attempt to avoid entanglement in matter, and others followed suit by crediting the Mazdakites with abstention from sex and material goods as well in their supposed effort to kill desire. But as Crone points out, the followers of Zarādušt, unlike the Manichaeans, were vegetarians because life was good, not because bloodshed would entangle them in matter. Their general idea (as reported with particular clarity for later Khurramīs) was that everyone should be nice to everyone else, and that all pleasurable things should be allowed as long as they did not harm the interests of others, animals included (Maqdīsī, Ibn al-Nadīm). According to Crone, there is in fact no reason at all to assume that the Mazdakites practiced asceticism, though Mīr-Khvānd (a late source) claimed that Mazdak "wore woolen clothing and engaged in constant devotion", all early sources give us to understand that Mazdak preached elimination of desire through fulfilment; of one Mazdakite sect we are explicitly told that they rejected the asceticism of' the Marcionites; with whom they otherwise had much in common. But what then does Abū 'Īsā al-Warrāq’s statement that Mazdak authorized killing mean? Since he knew that Mazdak was a pacifist, he can hardly have credited the latter with a recommendation of ritual murder; but Crone speculated that he may well have meant that Mazdak permitted killing, normally prohibited, under conditions of revolt, which is what the later Mazdakites took to be the case; and he may further have stated that Mazdak rationalized this dispensation on the grounds that opponents (so overcome by evil as to force the believers into revolt) should be killed because there was no other way of releasing their souls. But this is not a Manichaean view. Crone stated that Mazdak's heresy undoubtedly resembled Manichaeism, as Abū 'Īsā al-Warrāq said with reference to Mazdak's belief in two principles, but then what dualism did not? To Crone, the fact that Abū 'Īsā al-Warrāq compared it with Manichaeism rather than Zoroastrianism merely illustrates the fact that Manichaeism was the most important form of dualism to early Muslims, being infinitely more intelligible, enticing and dangerous than Zoroastrianism; it does not necessarily mean that Manichaeism and Mazdakism were especially closely related. Like all the Iranian dualists, Mazdak had views on the nature of light and darkness, but his views were Zoroastrian, not Manichaean. If Abū ‘Īsā al-Warrāq (or an anonymous informant) is to be trusted, Mazdak had certainly been exposed to Gnostic influence in respect of his cosmology (as reflected in Shahrastānī, who is unclear in this precise case if his source is Abū ‘Īsā al-Warrāq or an anonymous informant) but there is nothing specifically Manichaean about this influence; according to Crone some even conjecture it to have been neo- Platonic; the American scholar Wilferd Madelung suggested that it was Kanthaean (an obscure a Gnostic-Baptist sect in Sasanian Babylonia, possibly related to the Mandaeans). The later Khurramīs likewise subscribed to a number of beliefs commonly associated with Gnosticism, notably reincarnation of the soul and periodic incarnation of the deity (or, less radically, of messengers) on earth, and they shared with the Manichaeans the concept of the moon as a soul-carrying vessel which waxes and wanes in accordance with its freight (Maqdīsī, Ibn al-Nadīm). But Crone judged that they did not need to have borrowed any of these ideas from the Manichaeans, and they were in any case quite unlike the Manichaeans in their ethos, a fact well captured by the fact that they came to be known as Khurramīs or Khurram-dīnīs "adherents of the joyous religion". Zarāduštism was not a religion of cosmic alienation in either its original or its later versions; it did not preach that man is a stranger in this world, a fallen soul or spark of light trapped in matter by mistake, nor did it teach asceticism as a means of escape. It did say that the world has arisen through a deplorable mixture of light and darkness to which man should respond by trying to vanquish darkness and its evil creations (notably by avoiding discord and bloodshed), but then so did Zoroastrianism. Clearly Zoroastrianism was the common source of Gnostic dualism and the Zarādušti/Mazdakite/Khurramī religion; the latter sprang directly from it, not from a Gnostic offshoot, and it continued to be a Zoroastrian heresy rather than a Gnostic creed as it remained life-affirming: hatred of matter is not attested.
The second point that Crone stressed is that Zarādušt’s “communism” owed its existence to Zoroastrian thought, not to classical antecedents. The practice of looking for Greek antecedents is a time-honored one as already Agathias of Myrina was the first to do so: he rejected the theory, not because of its historical implausibility, but rather because the Iranians could not in his view be credited with motives higher than concupiscence. In the XX c, Franz Altheim and Ruth Stiel argued that they had located the origins of Mazdakite thought in Neoplatonism supposedly transmitted by Bud, a VI c. CE Syrian whom the authors briskly dated back to the III c. CE and identify with Bundos, who supposedly would have picked up Neo-Platonist ideas in Rome before moving on to the Murghāb in eastern Iran, where his ideas would have lay dormant for two centuries until they were picked up by Mazdak. Klíma, on the other hand, tried to find the roots of Zarādušti communism in Carpocratianism (a Gnostic sect founded in the first half of the II c. CE by Carpocrates of Alexandria), and though he more or less renounced this view later in time, it was subsequently revived by other scholars, according to whom Zarādušt may have picked up Carpocratian ideas during his sojourn as Bundos in the Roman Empire. Crone judged these suggestions strained in the extreme. For one thing, the idea of joint property and/or women is so simple that it is unlikely only to have been dreamed up once, all other occurrences being the outcome of diffusion. For another thing, Zarādušti “communism” was intimately linked with Zoroastrian speculation on Āz, concupiscence, which is the principal force through which Ahreman gains power over mankind and which represents both excess and deprivation, fulfilment in the right measure being the remedy against it. Communal goods and wives were meant to diminish the power of Āz, as a heretic affirms in the Dēnkard; and the only objection his orthodox adversary could mobilize against it was that “communism” turned the socio-political order upside down: so it seems that the communist argument was unimpeachable. That the Zoroastrians should have had to visit the Roman Empire in order to develop such ideas is implausible in the extreme.
And the third and final point that Crone wanted to drive home is that the modern tendency to dismiss accounts of Zarādušti “communism”, or more precisely that in respect of women, as exaggerated by hostile reporters, twisted by malicious slander and so forth, is mistaken. Obviously, there are embellishments in the sources, such as Kawād I becoming a Mazdakite because he fancied an otherwise unavailable woman or Mazdak provoking his own fall by asking Kawād I for Xusrō I's mother (Bīrūnī, Ibn Qutaybah, Niẓām al-Mulk, Tha’ālibī, Ibn al-Balḵī), this is as might be expected. But there is nothing embellished about the simple claim that communal access to women was part of the Zarādušti creed. On this there is agreement in Greek, Syriac, Zoroastrian, and Muslim sources; and we may take the sources on their word, for the Zarāduštis are the only sectarians of the Middle East to whom a “communist” vision of· production and reproduction are imputed.
It is true, of course, that numerous Gnostic sects both before and after the appearance of Kawād I and Mazdak were accused of promiscuity and that the Ismā’īlīs of X c. CE Iraq and XI c. CE Baḥrayn are said to have been “communists”, the former in that they pooled both their women and their property on the eve of their ritual departure from non-lsmā'īlī society and the latter in that they organized themselves along “communist” (or “semi-communist”) lines on a permanent basis. But neither the Ismā’īlīs nor their Gnostic predecessors, with the exception of the Carpocratians, are described as adherents of “communist” creeds. The Gnostics rejected the law as an instrument of salvation and frequently preached and/or engaged in the most outrageous behavior they could think of by way of proving its irrelevance , with the result that they were routinely accused of promiscuity; and believers in messianic visions were prone to engage in the same kind of behavior, partly because they shared the Gnostic view of the law and more particularly because ritual violation of deeply internalized rules is an effective way of burning bridges, or in other words of ensuring that the sectarians will have to stick together even though life on the margins may prove difficult and the messiah may fail to arrive. But the antinomian behavior rarely amounted to “communism” in either case, and there was no “communism” in the creeds themselves. The Ismā'īlī leader in Iraq who persuaded his followers to pool their women and property under his control accomplished the bridge burning and united his followers in abject dependence on himself by one and the same measure: his “communism” was instrumental. We do not know what sort of permanent order emerged from his innovations, but in lsma’īlī Baḥrayn, where the first (and apparently “noncommunist”) attempt at transition to millenarian conditions was a failure (Bīrūnī), a new order eventually emerged which had “communist” features too. Here the “communism” was not instrumental, or not anymore, but it was still a local vision of messianic society which the founders of the official creed had not envisaged. One can deny that the Ismā’īlīs engaged in any “communist” activities whatever, be it in Iraq or Baḥrayn (and many scholars are suspicious of the reports) without greatly affecting our understanding of the Ismā’īlī belief system.
But in the case of Zarāduštis, “communism” is presented as an integral part of the belief system itself, and one cannot reject it as mere slander without thereby causing the very creed to vanish: take away the “communist” vision of production and reproduction and what is left? Either we must accept that the Zarāduštis advocated joint control of women and property, as the sources say (since one can hardly reject the claim in respect of women and accept it in respect of land), or else we must admit that all we know about their beliefs is that they included pacifism and vegetarianism, everything else being misrepresentation. But misrepresentations of what? If we take the sources to be indulging in stereotypes, the only stereotypes available are those associated with Gnostic and millenarian sects, but these have the merit of being instantly recognizable and they do not fit: whether a particular group did or did not go in for orgiastic nights, incestuous couplings, obligatory pederasty/wine-drinking/murder, or the like is usually impossible to determine, but the nature of the charge is unmistakable; and it is not the charge we encounter in connection with the Zarāduštis. Mazdak preached qatl al-anfus, but the reference is not to ritual murder. Both he and Zarādušt may have rejected Zoroastrian law, given the Gnostic tendencies of their sect, but the sources say nothing about it. The Zarāduštis believed in communal access to women and property, but their views are described as utopian, not antinomian. It was only among the later Khurramīs that ibāḥat al-nisā' assumed an antinomian coloring (ibāḥat al-māl, or communal access to land, having been largely or wholly forgotten in the meantime), just as it was only among them that millenarianism made its appearance. It is precisely because the Zarāduštis were utopian rather than antinomian “communists” that some modern scholars were fascinated by the Carpocratians, who likewise incorporated “communism” in their very creed: the parallel is real even though the “genetic” relationship between them is fictitious. It is for the same reason that the Zarāduštis cannot be presented as victims of a stereotype; on the contrary they engendered one: all “communist” tendencies in the Muslim world were automatically branded as Mazdakite borrowings. And it is not of course problematic that the Zarāduštis were less communist in practice than they were in principle, whereas it is the other way round with the Ismā’īlīs. Neither Kawād I nor Mazdak could hope to transform Sasanian Iran into a “communist” society in the sense of one in which resources were pooled under state control: the empire was too large and too complex for this to be possible, and too opposed to the attempt; however the vision was to be enacted, public ownership was not an option, and it does not in fact seem to have suggested itself to them. But petty communities opting out of mainstream society in the name of a heretical creed were well placed to obtain a consensus on “communist” ways, even if these ways were not part of the heresy itself, and they were small and homogeneous enough for public control of land and other resources to be viable. (There was no pooling of women once the transitional phase was over).
Kawād I's “communism” was interpreted by Crone and many other historians as an anti-noble measure. Joint access to women, promoted in the name of the Zoroastrian faith to which practically all Iranian nobles were committed, offered a beguilingly simple way of curtailing the power of the nobility for a ruler who had no army with which to defeat or despoil it, his only troops being those furnished by the nobles themselves (as we have seen in previous posts, this statement by Crone -dated to the 1980s- has been rightly put in doubt since the 2000s with the excavation of the Wall of Gorgān and other massive complexes that suggest that the Sasanian state in the V c. CE was far more centralized that had been thought before, and that the Šāhān Šāh had at his disposal substantial military forces on a permanent basis). In practice, of course, the attempt was a failure, and Kawād I would scarcely have made it if he had not been a really young man at the time (see above) meaning that he was only in his early twenties when the Iranian nobility put an end to his experiment. I disagree with Crone in her analysis of the reasons that led Kawād I to indulge in such extreme measures; Crone sees in it an attempt at modernizing the Sasanian state, but as I’ve said before, recent evidence seems to show that the Sasanian state was already considerably centralized in the V c. CE and that the kings of this century were able to mobilize massive forces to build and garrison enormous military barriers and fortresses in their northern borders; permanent garrisons that by their very nature cannot have come from seasonal feudal levies. Instead, I would suggest that what irked young Kawād I was the fact that under all the V c. CE kings powerful nobles from the great families had managed to reach positions of great power and influence and to become almost equals to the king (Mihr-Narsē Sūrēn, Ṙaham Mihrān, Sūkhrā Kārēn, Šābuhr Mihrān, etc.), and that especially his humiliating position vis-à-vis Sūkhrā during five years had decided him to take decisive action to end this situation once and for all, and since (as I’ve shown in the previous posts about Sasanian law) the very legal structures of Ērānšahr that underpinned the status of these families were supported by the Zoroastrian priesthood and their interpretation of the Avestā, he tried to subvert it in order to subvert the whole structure of the social order of the Sasanian Empire. An overly ambitious (and very risky) enterprise that ended with his dethronement and his narrow escape from death. In his second reign he refrained himself from such adventures, although the Zarāduštis remained a latent force in the Empire that would explode at is death in the form of a massive peasant rebellion led by Mazdak.
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