Peroz I

After Yazdegerd II’s death Hormizd was crowned and Peroz fled. Nearly two years later he came back with an army led by Rahām Mehrān and defeated Hormizd at Ray. Armenian sources make Hormizd the elder, Persian sources Peroz.

Whether the Hephthalites helped Peroz is disputed. Schippmann reports it; Christensen rejects it, since in his view the Hephthalites had not yet reached Persia’s border; Shahbazi calls the story a legend. Ṭabari calls Peroz just and pious, which Schippmann reads as a sign that the priests were pleased with him.

A source that calls a king “just” often writes from the view of a group that gained from him. The same period also saw persecution of Christians and Jews.

A few years into the reign a seven-year drought brought a great famine. According to Iranica (following Rawlinson and Nöldeke), Peroz gave food to the poor, abolished taxes and helped the needy from the treasury.

Schippmann warns that the reports may be exaggerated: in those same years Peroz was preparing for war. So the famine story, at least its scale, is disputed. Its Arabic and Persian telling also comes from the Sasanian tradition that praised the king.

Abolishing taxes in a famine means leaving bread in the hands of those who grew it. It shows that taxation, in hard times, could be the line between living and dying. This is our reading.

In the first war with the Hephthalites, Peroz and his son Kavad were captured near Gorgan. Peroz swore lasting peace and paid a ransom; Joshua the Stylite says twenty mule loads. Kavad stayed two years as a hostage. Ṭabari calls the Hephthalite king Aḵšonvār, and Ferdowsi Ḵošnavāz.

Procopius tells a story: the Hephthalites lured the Persians into a dead-end valley, and the Hephthalite king offered freedom if Peroz would prostrate himself before him. The priests told him to meet him at dawn and bow towards the rising sun. Only Procopius has this story. The year of the captivity is also disputed (469 or 465).

As a boy Kavad spent two years as a hostage of the Hephthalites. Later, when he lost the crown, he took refuge with the same Hephthalites and came back with their help. Hostage-taking between states made ties too, whether they meant it or not.

Peroz, though his closest advisers urged against it, gathered all his troops and began a new war with the Hephthalites around 481. At the end of 483 or, more probably, in 484, in what is now Afghanistan (perhaps near Balkh), he was defeated and killed with some of his sons. Afterwards Persia paid the Hephthalites an annual tribute.

Procopius, about fifty years later, says the Hephthalites dug a hidden trench and the Persian army fell into it in pursuit. He also tells the story of Peroz’s pearl earring, but does not believe it himself. That Peroz had broken his oath, and that the Hephthalite king hung the salt of the oath on his banner, is Procopius’s Roman point of view. No other source we checked confirms the trench.

A king who twice staked everything on war against his advisers’ counsel left the bill to the people who paid the Hephthalites tribute for years. When the decision for war lies with one man, his defeat is everyone’s. This is our reading.

Under Peroz Christians and Jews were persecuted. At the same time Peroz supported the rise of Nestorianism. In 484 a council at Gondēšāpūr declared Nestorianism the doctrine of the Christian church of Persia.

A church whose doctrine differed from the Roman church looked less tied to Rome. So the king’s support for the Nestorians can be read as frontier policy too. This is our reading of Iranica’s report.

Here the state backed a doctrine to build political loyalty. Separating faith and state exists partly so that people’s belief does not become a tool of foreign policy.