Shapur II

Agathias, the 6th-century Byzantine historian who says he used the Persian royal annals, tells it this way: Hormizd II died while his wife was pregnant. The Magi said the child would be a boy, and the nobles placed the diadem on the mother’s womb. Hamza Isfahani and the Mojmal al-Tawarikh tell the same.

Iranica (Daryaee) calls this a “legend”. Shahbazi puts it in its political setting: the nobles pushed aside Hormizd’s older sons and made a child king so as to rule themselves. Tabari, too, says the same courtiers and priests who served his father ran the empire.

A crown placed on a womb asks no one’s consent. The legend is charming, but its message is plain: kingship was hereditary and blood, not the people’s consent, gave the right to rule.

In Shapur’s childhood, tribes from Bahrain and Hajar crossed the Persian Gulf and plundered the coast of Fars and the district of Ardashir-Khwarrah. According to Tabari and Miskawayh, at sixteen Shapur attacked them: the Iyad in Iraq, then al-Khatt, Hajar and Yamama. He moved the Taghlib, ʿAbd al-Qays, Tamim and Bakr ibn Waʾil to new lands. To stop new raids he built the “wall of the Arabs” near Hira.

Checking the epithet: Dhu’l-Aktaf is Arabic, “he of the shoulders”. Iranica renders it “he who pierces shoulders” and says the Persian form is Huya sonbā (Hamza Isfahani, Mojmal), which may render a Middle Persian *Šānag āhanj (“shoulder-puller”). The asterisk means that form is reconstructed, not attested. The epithet appears in no Sasanian inscription or coin. The Bundahišn, a Zoroastrian text, speaks of pulling out “many shoulders”. So the epithet comes from post-Sasanian tradition, but has roots in Zoroastrian lore too.

Moving tribes and destroying wells, if true, was war on people’s very livelihood, not only on fighters. Water in the desert was everyone’s property. The campaign secured the Persian Gulf for the empire, but others paid its price.

In 359 Shapur came to Amida (modern Diyarbakır) with Grumbates, king of the Chionitae. Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman officer, was inside the city. Shapur rode forward wearing a golden ram’s-head crown. During the parley a ballista bolt killed Grumbates’ young son, and the fight began in anger. After 73 days the Persians broke into the city over earthen mounds.

This is an eyewitness account, but from inside the besieged city. Ammianus himself calls the figure of 30,000 Persian dead the “reckoning” of a Roman tribune. Iranica says the townspeople were deported to Khuzestan because Grumbates’ son had been killed. The next year the fort of Bezabde fell to him as well.

In a mass deportation the townspeople were counted as spoils of war. For those taken to Khuzestan it made no difference whether Rome or Persia was in the right: they had lost their homes and land.

In spring 363 the emperor Julian invaded Persia with a large army and a fleet on the Euphrates. He took forts, crossed the Naarmalcha and won before the walls of Ctesiphon. But the council of generals judged a siege rash. Julian burned the fleet and marched inland. The Persians burned the crops and harassed the Roman column from a distance. The army turned back; near Maranga there was a great battle with elephants, and a few days later Julian was wounded and died.

Iranica says the capital was not taken partly because of disorder and plundering in the Roman army (Libanius). Shapur’s scorched-earth policy starved the Roman army. Eutropius, who was himself on the campaign, says Julian was killed by the enemy. Ardashir II’s relief at Taq-e Bostan shows a fallen Roman underfoot, whom many identify as Julian.

Scorched earth means a state burning its own farmers’ fields so that the enemy starves. The strategy saved Persia, but a year’s harvest of those who worked that land became ash. No one asked them.

The starving army made Jovian emperor. Shapur, as Ammianus tells it, demanded lands which he said were his and had been taken from Persia by Maximianus. Jovian gave up five provinces beyond the Tigris, fifteen forts, and Nisibis, Singara and Castra Maurorum, and agreed that Rome would not help Arshak, king of Armenia. A thirty-year peace was sworn.

Ammianus calls the peace “necessary, but shameful” and says it would have been better to fight ten battles than give up any of these places; that is a Roman verdict. Iranica (Kettenhofen) says that with this treaty Rome lost the eastern half of its province of Mesopotamia. Jovian tried to present the outcome as a success on his coins, and the Sasanians immortalized it in the relief at Taq-e Bostan. The treaty also left Armenia open to Persia.

Jovian won only one point by insisting: the people of Nisibis and Singara could leave. The land went to Persia, but its people had the right not to live under a rule they did not want.

Iranica (Daryaee): from 337 the persecution of Christians grew. One reason was that Rome had become Christian, and the Christians of Iran were seen as collaborators with the enemy. During the war Shapur asked a double tax of them. According to the Acts of Simeon, their leader, he refused. Among the martyrs named are Posi (Pusai), Shapur’s master craftsman, and his daughter Martha.

Most of what we know comes from Syriac martyr acts; religious writings meant to honour the martyrs, not neutral history. Iranica notes that in them persecution is usually blamed on the priests. Not all were persecutors either: according to the Chronicle of Arbela, a mowbed named Pagrasp refused to order persecution, or the king cancelled the order. The Chronicle of Arbela’s own authenticity is questioned.

A double tax on one religious group meant people’s property was taken because of their faith. When political loyalty is measured by religion, every subject’s conscience is under suspicion. Two liberties were trampled together here: freedom of belief and security of property.

The 363 treaty kept Rome out of Armenia. Shapur seized Arshak II, who had joined Julian, and imprisoned him in the “Castle of Oblivion” in Khuzestan. The towns of Artashat, Vagharshapat, Eruandashat, Zarehawan, Zarishat, Van and Nakhchivan were taken and their people, including many Jewish families, deported. In 367 Rome put Pap, Arshak’s son, on the throne, and in 371 the Armenians held Shapur off near Bagawan.

The main source, the Armenian Epic Histories (Faustus of Byzantium), is vivid and sometimes legendary; the story of Arshak’s suicide in prison comes from it. Iranica reports it with “is said to”.

Armenia between the two empires was like a field two neighbours fight over without asking its owner. The Armenian nobles (naxarars) sided now with one, now with the other, to keep their own lands and rank.

With Shapur II royal reliefs move from Fars to Kermanshah. In the small grotto at Taq-e Bostan two kings stand side by side. The inscriptions name them as Shapur II and his son Shapur III, and in it Shapur II calls himself son of Ohrmazd and grandson of Narseh.

Overlaet (2011) argues that the second figure’s crown matches Ardashir II’s coins, not Shapur III’s, and that the inscriptions were probably added later. So who the second figure is remains disputed.

An inscription added later rewrites history in favour of the new king. It is the same thing Narseh did to Bahram I’s relief.