Notes · Book E10Yazdegard

E10.1Yazdegard Ascends the Throne

Yazdegard is crowned in Sapandarmad on the day of Ard. A weary, unnamed voice laments that the spheres spare nobody, naming Yazdegard himself; the young Shah then claims Anooshirvan’s blood and sets fame above desire. Sixteen years of peace pass.

In Sapandarmad, on the day of Ard: Sapandarmad is the twelfth and last month of the Zoroastrian year, named for the Amesha Spenta of the earth; on the day of Ard see I, B9.43. The date matters more than it looks. Ferdowsi gives the same month and the same day for the crowning of the last Shah and for the finishing of his own poem (E11), so the end of the kings and the end of the book fall on one anniversary.

“Would that my mother had not given birth: The last reign opens in the mouth of an unnamed speaker — brave, eloquent, tired of the world — whose lament slides out of the first person and asks what the seven spheres did to young Yazdegard. The reign is given its epitaph before the king has spoken a line, and when he does speak, of fame outlasting the body, the reader already knows how it ends.

For sixteen years his destined course was sped: The poem grants Yazdegard sixteen years of peace and justice before the invasion. The record allows nothing of the kind: the decisive battle is usually dated within four or five years of his accession, and he was still in flight some fifteen years after that, nearly twenty from the day he was crowned. The quiet years are the poem’s gift to the last of the line, and this is the only reign in the book that it lets alone.

E10.2Sa’ad Invades, and Rostam Takes the Field

Umar sends Sa’ad Wakkas against Iran, and Rostam son of Ormozd takes command. At Kadisiya his astrolabe tells him the war is lost. He writes to his brother foretelling his own death, the fall of the House of Sasan, and four centuries in which nothing of his people will count.

His name was Rostam, famed throughout the land: The last commander of Iran is Rostam son of Ormozd — the Rostam son of Farrokh Ormozd of the histories, the great sepahbod of the east — and he carries the name of the hero who held this poem up for a third of its length. Ferdowsi never once remarks on it. The epic that began with a Rostam who could save Iran ends with a Rostam who reads the sky, knows he cannot, and rides out anyway.

He took his astrolabe to read the day: The letter is built on a horoscope: the Sun looking down from the fourth heaven, Mars and Venus hostile, Mercury facing Saturn from Gemini. Rostam is an astrologer as well as a commander, and his skill tells him only that he will lose; he says as much himself, that his knowledge brings him nothing but loss and pain. It is the poem’s fatalism at full strength, spoken by the man it is about to destroy.

For four full centuries none of our race: Rostam sets a term on the disaster: four hundred years in which nothing of his people will count for anything anywhere. Ferdowsi dates the finishing of his book to the year four hundred of the Hijra (E11). Whether or not the arithmetic is designed, the poem answers the prophecy with itself, and the term runs out at the moment the Persian past is handed back in sixty thousand couplets.

On men who wear no jowshan and no chain: Rostam’s complaint is a technical one. Sasanian cavalry fought as armored riders on armored horses, and their weapons were built to open armor (on this equipment see I, B8.17); against men in cloth, an arrow that pierces iron and a sword that takes a lion’s neck are the wrong answers. It is the lament of a heavy cavalry that has met a war it was not made for.

Then Turk and Arab mix with Iran’s seed: These are among the most quoted lines in Persian. The passage grieves for a social order as much as for a religion: the dehqan (I, A6.23), the freeborn, birth counting for something, the mounted man outranking the man on foot, wine at feasts, the difference between spring and snow. Later readers have put the lines to purposes Ferdowsi could not have foreseen; the grief in them belongs to the poem, and to the man it is given to.

E10.3Rostam and Sa’ad Exchange Letters

Rostam writes mocking Sa’ad’s poverty and cataloguing the Shah’s wealth; Sa’ad answers with the Oneness of God, the Koran and Paradise, and offers the crown for conversion. The envoy Shobae Moghireh sits in the dust, and Rostam sends back word that honorable death is better.

Twelve thousand dogs and hawks and cheetahs, decked: Cheetahs were trained for the hunt in Iran, belled and collared and carried to the field like hawks, a court practice that lasted into modern times. Rostam’s boast is an inventory of the Sasanian court at play, and he offers it as proof of the Shah’s greatness to a man whose reply is that he would not buy the whole of it, gardens and ivory thrones included, for one hair of a houri.

His scimitar he used just like a cane: The envoy’s poverty is his argument. He will not walk on the brocade, he leans on his sword like a stick, he sits down in the dust and does not look at the lords in gold boots and violet robes. Versions of this scene, the ragged embassy in the Persian camp before Kadisiya, run all through the Arabic accounts of the war, and Ferdowsi stages it without softening the contrast for either side.

He spoke of jinn and men, and what was told: Ferdowsi lets the invader preach, at length and in his own terms: the Oneness of God, the Koran, the Prophet’s intercession (on Mohammad in the poem see I, A0.8), Hell’s pitch and cold, Paradise with its streams of milk and wine and its houris. It is the fullest statement of Islam inside the Shahnameh, it is set out straight, and it stands immediately before the battle the poem will spend a book grieving over.

E10.4Rostam Battles Sa’ad and Is Slain

The armies fight three days in dust and thirst. Rostam and Sa’ad leave the ranks and meet alone; Rostam brings down Sa’ad’s horse, but a blow to the helm blinds him with his own blood and he is killed. The Iranians break and flee to the Shah.

And there the chieftains joined in single fight: The poem settles the fate of Iran as it has settled everything since Rostam and Sohrab: the two commanders leave their armies and fight alone behind a rock. The Arabic accounts describe several days of general fighting, each remembered by its own name, and do not bring the two leaders together at all; Sa’ad is remembered as directing the battle while ill. Ferdowsi gives the last war of the epic the shape of all the others.

From Arvand, Farrokhzad Ormozd now came: This is the brother the great letter was addressed to (E10.2), Farrokhzad son of Ormozd, who now takes up the war and will escort the Shah eastward. He is not the Farrokhzad who held the throne for a month in E9.6; the poem has two men of the name within a dozen chapters, and this is the loyal one.

E10.5Yazdegard Withdraws to Khorasan

Farrokhzad urges the Shah to rebuild his strength in Tabaristan. Yazdegard refuses to abandon his people, then chooses Khorasan, counting on the Turks, a marriage into Faghfoor’s house, and Mahwi of Marv, whom he raised from nothing. Farrokhzad warns that base stock never changes.

By wedding Faghfoor’s daughter, bright and pure: The plan is to buy the east: a Turkish alliance sealed by marriage into the house of Faghfoor, the Chinese emperor (on the title see I, A8.2). The eastward flight is historical — the court fell back through Media and Fars into Kerman and Sistan and at last into Khorasan — and a Sasanian prince of the next generation is said to have reached the Chinese court, still asking for troops long after there was anything to send them to.

But trust the one your kindness raised on high: Two proverbs meet here and the poem decides between them. Yazdegard quotes a Mobad: fear the man you have injured, trust the man your kindness raised from nothing. Farrokhzad answers with the harder doctrine, that nature and lineage are a bond no key will open. Mahwi proves Farrokhzad right, which is the poem’s last word on a question it has argued since Fereydoon: whether worth is made or born.

To fight the foe is better than disgrace: The Shah refuses Tabaristan in the finest terms available to him — a king may not save his own life and watch his people fall — and then in the next breath proposes Khorasan, which is also flight, only further off. Ferdowsi lets both speeches stand without comment. The scene that follows, a whole court begging to come and being sent home, is the poem’s farewell to Iran as a place with people in it.

E10.6Yazdegard Writes to Mahwi

The Shah dictates a letter to Mahwi Suri, warden of Marv: Rostam is dead by Sa’ad’s hand, the enemy stands at the gate of Tisfoon, and Mahwi must gather his army for battle. The Shah adds that he is riding after the letter himself.

To Mahwi Suri, warden of that land: A marzbān is a warden of the marches, the Sasanian governor of a frontier province with troops and revenues of his own. Marv was the great city of the eastern march, on the road toward Turan (see I, B9.16), and Mahwi holds the last frontier the poem has left. The Shah, having no army, is riding toward the one man he believes he owns.

Who formed the ant and elephant, each one: The last royal letter in the Shahnameh keeps the form of all the others: praise of the Maker before any business (see I, B12.20), here by way of the ant and the elephant, with the gnat’s foot and the eagle’s claw following in the next letter. The form is intact, the state behind it is not, and the business under the formula is that the commander is dead.

E10.7Yazdegard Appeals to the Frontier Lords

Yazdegard writes to the frontier lords of Tus, recalling their loyalty under Bahram Chubin, citing Anooshirvan’s dream of the Arab flood, and setting out in detail the grain, honey, salt and naphtha to be stored in the mountain forts, with robes and silver for the workers.

Anooshirvan dreamed that this bright throne: The Sasanian books keep foretelling their own ending: this dream fathered on Anooshirvan, the warnings of sages before it, Rostam’s letter five chapters back. What the dream sees is not a lost battle but the end of an order — nothing sown and nothing reaped, the Fire gone dark in its temple, Nowruz and Sadeh extinguished (I, A4.1; I, A2.2). Both of those festivals are still kept.

Some forty thousand oxen draw the train: For a hundred lines the poem becomes a quartermaster’s ledger: oxen and wagons, wheat still in the ear, millet, pistachios and pomegranate seed, salt by the ox-cart, dates and sugar, honey by the vessel, and naphtha by the camel-load for the mountain forts. Nothing else in the Shahnameh reads like this. The last act of the Sasanian state, as Ferdowsi tells it, is an inventory kept in two copies, one for the treasurer and one for the nobles.

One face bears God’s pure name, whom we revere: Forty silver coins for every workman, God’s name on one face and the king’s own face and crown on the other. Sasanian silver did carry the crowned bust of the Shah, but the reverse held a fire altar with two attendants rather than a divine name, so the coin described here is closer to the money of Ferdowsi’s own century than to Yazdegard’s. On dirham and dinar see I, B11.3.

E10.8Mahwi Meets Yazdegard at Tus

Mahwi meets the Shah on the road with every show of reverence, kissing the ground. Farrokhzad entrusts the king to him and rides for Rey. As the days pass Mahwi’s loyalty ebbs, the shepherd’s son begins to want the throne, and he withdraws, feigning sickness.

Yet by a crow-head’s hand that hero died: Crow-heads here, snake-eaters in the letter to the frontier lords, men with Ahriman’s stare: the poem’s abuse of the Arabs is heavy, and it is always given to Iranian nobles who have just been beaten. Ferdowsi keeps it there. When he hands Sa’ad a letter of his own (E10.3) the invader speaks at length and with dignity, and nobody replies to him in this register.

I place with you to guard his crown and fame: Farrokhzad, who three chapters ago warned the Shah that base stock cannot be changed by kindness, now hands him over to Mahwi himself and rides for Rey, asking only that the king be put under no obligation. The hinge of the tragedy is a good man’s errand elsewhere, and Ferdowsi does not stop to underline it.

E10.9Yazdegard Hides in the Mill

Mahwi brings Turkish troops from Samarkand against his own Shah and flees the field, leaving him ringed. Yazdegard fights, escapes, and hides in a mill beside the Zark. The miller offers barley bread and cress; the king asks for barsom, and the errand betrays him.

The barsom twigs, as sacred rites decree.”: Barsom (Avestan baresman) is the bundle of twigs, later metal rods, held in the hand through the Zoroastrian liturgy, and bāj is the grace murmured over food before eating. A fugitive in a mill will not touch barley bread without both. The miller goes out to beg for twigs, the request is passed up the line, and Mahwi knows at once who is sitting in the hay: the last Sasanian is given away by his own piety.

The low-born man was Khosrow known by name: Ferdowsi names the miller Khosrow — the name of the greatest kings of the line whose last member is sitting on his dry grass — and says nothing whatever about it. The scene is the poem’s image of the world as a lodging for one night made literal (I, B14.10): a throne that had climbed to the sky, and a man with an empty mouth and sleepless eyes waiting for the sun to come up.

E10.10The Plot against Yazdegard

Mahwi orders the miller to kill his guest. The Mobadan and nobles denounce him in turn — Radwi, Ormozd son of Kharrad, Shahruy, and Mehr-e-Nush, who recites seven murdered kings and the vengeance each brought. Mahwi listens until nightfall, then asks his son, who tells him to strike.

Who has not seen God’s farr should pause and hear: The poem’s last sighting of the farr (I, A4.1) belongs to a miller: he opens his mill, finds it bright as day, and describes the eyes, the brows, the crown and the Chin brocade to a man who wants their owner dead. Glory that has marked out kings since Jamshid is working here as the description on a warrant.

Are two gems set within one ring of light: Kingship and religion as twins, each ruined by the breaking of the other, is Sasanian state doctrine; the Letter of Tansar has them born of one womb and never to be parted, and the Arabic versions of Ardeshir’s testament put it as the two being brothers. Radwi turns the doctrine against a regicide, and the argument carries an edge Ferdowsi leaves alone: a few chapters later the poem reports the crown gone and the Fire’s people gone with it, in one couplet (E10.13).

When Jamshid fell beneath Zahhak’s dark hand: Mehr-e-Nush recites seven murdered kings and the vengeance each brought: Jamshid and Fereydoon (I, A5), Iraj and Manuchehr (I, A6), Siavash and Kay Khosrow (I, B9; II, C4), Lohrasp and Esfandiyar (II, C6), Esfandiyar, Rostam and Bahman (II, C8–C9; II, D1), Pirooz and Sofrye (III, D11), Hormizd and Parviz (III, E5–E6). It is the Shahnameh’s own table of contents, recited to prevent the last killing in it, and it fails.

E10.11The Death of Yazdegard

The miller comes back weeping and stabs Yazdegard among the barley loaves. Mahwi’s riders strip the body and throw it into the Zark. Christian monks draw it from the water, build a garden tomb, and mourn the king in a long sequence of speeches.

On Niran’s night, in Khordad month, he sped: The murder is dated by the Zoroastrian calendar: the month of Khordad (I, A5.6) and the day usually identified with Aneran, the thirtieth and last day of every month, the day of the endless lights. The last of the Sasanians dies on the last day of a month, and Ferdowsi gives the date as flatly as he gave the date of the crowning (E10.1).

The seven spheres, grown weary, now discard: The chapter ends by asking whether what the heavens did should be called justice or revenge, and refuses to answer; the next chapter opens on the same question and says no sage has ever brought an answer to light. The poem has blamed the turning sky for a hundred deaths. At the one death that ends everything, it declines to say what the sky was doing.

Then monks and prelates hastened from each side: The last Zoroastrian king of Iran is pulled from the river, sealed with pitch, musk and camphor, wrapped in yellow brocade and buried in a garden by Christian clergy, one of whom says that before Christ no one had heard of such a sight. The Arabic tradition preserves the same story, with the head of the church at Marv arranging the burial; Marv was an old and important Christian see.

E10.12Mahwi of Sur Takes the Throne

Ferdowsi breaks off to curse a hailstorm that has ruined his own year, then returns. Mahwi kills the mourners and plunders the land, invents a story that the dying Shah gave him crown and signet, and seizes Khorasan; his captains know the tale is false.

This year the hail came like a deadly gale: At the death of the last Shah the poem breaks off and the poet’s own year comes in: hail has taken his fuel, his wheat and his sheep, he would rather have died than seen it, and he calls for wine because the days are few. Ferdowsi lets his own life interrupt the epic at its darkest point, and the note he strikes here, earnings that will not cover spending, is the one the epilogue ends on (E11).

The name of Yazdegard is on the seal: Mahwi holds the crown and the signet and nothing else, and he names his problem exactly: the towns obeyed a name, the sages will not hail him, the troops put no weight on his ring. His counselor’s remedy is a story about a dying king’s gift and a daughter hidden from the Arabs. The captains see through it at once, say so among themselves, and crown him anyway.

E10.13Bijan Marches against Mahwi

Bijan of Samarkand hears that Mahwi has taken the throne. Barsam tells how Mahwi used his troops at Marv, abandoned his own Shah in the field and then murdered him. Told that the royal line is finished, Bijan waits for Mahwi’s army to cross and meets it near Paykand.

Let Mahwi first cross over the Jihun: The last battle in the Shahnameh is fought over the Jihun, the Oxus, the border between Iran and Turan since Fereydoon divided the world among his sons. The whole epic turned on who crossed that river and why. At the end a Turkish lord of Samarkand waits for an Iranian to cross, to avenge the Shah of Iran upon him, and the old map has stopped meaning anything.

No king remains; the Fire’s own faithful band: Bijan asks whether a son, a brother or even a daughter of the king survives, and is told that the line and the religion are finished together, in one couplet. The histories are less final: a son of Yazdegard is said to have kept the claim alive in the east for years. The poem shuts the door because its subject is over, not because nobody was left.

E10.14The Death of Mahwi of Sur

Barsam runs Mahwi down on the desert near Farab and brings him in alive. Bijan has his hand, then his feet, ears and nose cut off, leaves him bound on the hot sand, and burns him with his three sons. The age of Umar begins.

And burned the father and three sons they found: Mutilated piece by piece, left bound on hot sand, then burned with his sons: the punishment is built to appall. In Zoroastrian practice fire must not be defiled by a corpse, so a burning is an exclusion as well as an execution — though the poem does not say that, and the herald who rides through the camp afterward names only the crime, a servant who killed his lord.

Now Umar’s age would follow; Faith would rise: The narrative of the Shahnameh ends not on a battlefield but with a pulpit standing level with a throne — the same image Rostam used in his letter (E10.2), where pulpits equal to thrones and the names of Abu Bakr and Umar are the sign that everything is lost. Ferdowsi names the coming age in two lines, after sixty thousand couplets, and stops. What remains is his own.