New NaqqaliNotes · Book E9The Years of Chaos
E9.1Ardeshir, Son of Shiruyeh, Takes the Throne
Read the verse →Shiruyeh’s young son Ardeshir takes the throne and speaks to the assembled chiefs, promising to worship God, keep the former Shahs’ justice and Faith, raise the loyal and cut down oppressors, and naming Pirooz Khosrow to command the army. His hearers are quieted.
We will pursue the former Shahs’ high way: Every new Shah in these books opens with the same promises, God remembered, justice kept, the farr and the Faith of the old kings, the loyal rewarded and the oppressor struck down, and Ferdowsi sets the formula out here without a word of comment. It is spoken by a child over his murdered grandfather’s throne, at the head of the book he calls the years of chaos; the emptiness is the point.
At seven years the child assumed the throne: He is the last of Khosrow Parviz’s line to hold the throne. The histories make him a boy of about seven who reigned something over a year before the general Ferdowsi calls Guraz (E7.9) killed him and took the crown himself, which is where the years of chaos properly begin.
E9.2Ardeshir Is Slain by Guraz’s Design
Read the verse →Guraz, who helped bring Khosrow Parviz down, writes from Rum denouncing the new Shah and suborns Pirooz Khosrow, the court’s minister and treasurer. At a night drinking party Pirooz clears the hall and smothers the boy king Ardeshir, whose reign has lasted six months.
From Rum he sent a messenger to say: Guraz is usually identified with the general the histories call Shahrbaraz, Khosrow Parviz’s commander in the west, who held Roman Syria and Egypt and appears in Greek sources under a version of the same name. On gorāz, the boar, see I, B5.10. The poem keeps the name and drops the conquests: the reader meets him only as a traitor writing home from Rum to say that a cypress has been felled by grass.
Thus Ardeshir six months of kingship filled: Between the murder of Khosrow Parviz and the crowning of Yazdegard the poem runs through six rulers, and measures reigns in months: six here, then six, then four, then one. The histories allow Ardeshir longer, something over a year. Ferdowsi’s speed is itself the argument, and so is the manner of each death; the throne has stopped meaning anything to the men standing nearest it.
E9.3The Reign of Guraz, Also Called Farayin
Read the verse →Guraz marches on Tisfoon, crowns himself as Farayin, and empties Ardeshir’s treasury on his followers. His two sons argue whether gold or royal blood makes a king. Ormozd Shahran Guraz of Istakhr conspires with the nobles and shoots him in the back on a hunt.
No man is born possessing royal right.”: The usurper’s younger son denies the whole doctrine of inherited farr, and argues it from Fereydoon, who had no king among his forebears. The famous lines at I, A5.9 draw the opposite lesson from the same case: Fereydoon became Fereydoon by justice and giving. Here the moral is that troops and treasure make a king, and Ferdowsi gives it to the son of a man who is about to be shot in the back by the nobility.
Dawn’s yellow brocade spread; each mountain’s back: The killing sets off a night battle in which nobody can tell whose blade is whose, and Ferdowsi closes it with one of his dawn pictures: light spreading like yellow brocade, the mountains mottled gold and black like a leopard’s hide. He keeps a stock of these openings for the day, usually to start something. This one shows only the dead and an army scattering like sheep.
E9.4The Reign of Poorandokht
Read the verse →Poorandokht takes the throne, promising to keep the nobles together, enrich the poor and drive out the foe. She has Pirooz Khosrow bound to an unbroken colt and dragged to death, rules mildly for six months, then sickens and dies.
Poorandokht was her name; when she ascended: Poorandokht and her sister Azarmidokht, both daughters of Khosrow Parviz, are the only women to hold the Sasanian throne, and coins struck in Poorandokht’s name survive. The narrator’s opening couplet is bleak about a woman ruling; the portrait that follows is not. She holds the nobles together, relieves the poor, punishes her father’s murderer, keeps the customs of the kings, and carries her good name out with her.
She bade them lead a wild colt from its stall: Her first act as Shah settles the account opened in E9.2: Pirooz Khosrow, the minister who stopped Ardeshir’s mouth, is lashed to an unbroken colt and dragged on the riding-ground until he dies. Ferdowsi rounds it off with the plainest of his maxims about harm returning to the hand that dealt it. It is the only justice done in this whole book of the poem.
E9.5The Reign of Azarmidokht
Read the verse →Azarmidokht is crowned, pledges justice and the ancient way, and promises the gallows to anyone who breaks faith with her, Iranian, Arab or Roman. She fills the throne four months; the fifth brings her death, and the crown stands empty again.
Till in the grave, on bricks, our heads abide: A brick under the head is the Persian figure for the grave: however a man slept in life, a mud brick is his last pillow. Azarmidokht puts it in her accession speech, and the lament that opens Yazdegard’s reign will put it there too (E10.1), so two of the last reigns of the poem open by naming their own end. Her threat a few lines later names Iranian, Arab and Roman together, which is the world the court now sits in.
She died; the throne was left without a king: The poem gives her a quiet death in the fifth month. In the Arabic historians she is deposed and killed, and the quarrel is bound up with the house of Farrokh Ormozd, whose son Rostam will command the Iranian army at Kadisiya a few chapters from here. Ferdowsi’s sources had already smoothed the court intrigues out of these short reigns, leaving only the turning sphere to blame.
E9.6The Reign of Farrokhzad
Read the verse →Farrokhzad is brought from Jahram and promises to protect the guiltless. A month later the slave Siyah Chashm, imprisoned for courting a serving maid and then pardoned, poisons his wine. He lingers seven days and dies, and the poet turns to spending while one lives.
Another Siyah Chashm upon this earth: Siyāh chashm, black-eyed, is ordinary praise for a beauty in Persian verse; here it is the name of the slave who poisons a king, and Ferdowsi asks that turning Heaven never make another. The murders that end the poem are all domestic — a minister with his hands, a slave with the wine cup, a miller with a dirk — and not one of them is committed by an enemy of Iran.
Becomes no more than wind upon the plain: Eat what you have, give it away, and do not keep your labor for your enemies to reap: the old refrain arrives at its bleakest here, in the wreck of a dynasty, with the hoard turning to wind on the plain. Ferdowsi will turn the same image on himself in the last chapter of all, where thirty-five years of work are carried off by the wind and leave him nothing (E11).