In an empire which minted a stable silver coinage, the drahm, throughout
most of its history, the continuing resort to land-grants in return for military
service calls for an explanation. The drahm was the only denomination in
constant circulation, raising the question whether such a simple economic
system can be described as a truly advanced monetary economy.Gold dinars
were issued occasionally – not, it seems, for purposes of monetary circulation,
but rather in commemoration of solemn events. Bronze change seems
to have been issued only very intermittently, perhaps in response to specific
demands, as atMerv; the volume progressively decreased, posing problems
for the mechanics of everyday economic exchanges.50 The assumption that
Arsacid copper coinage was still used in many parts of the Sasanian kingdom
is unconvincing,51 and the conclusion must be that much economic
activity was based on barter.
This situation explains a good deal about the Sasanian system of taxation
before the beginning of the sixth century. It was based on crop-sharing, the
exaction of agricultural produce proportionate to annual yield, as assessed
by royal tax-collectors on the spot, and levied in kind. In addition, a poll
tax was imposed on most subjects, which may largely have been paid in
money, though part was perhaps commuted to goods. The system was
inefficient and wasteful, especially with regard to the land tax; it was subject
to frequent fluctuations, and allowed little scope for advance financial
planning. The necessity of waiting for the tax-collector with the crops
untouched in the field or on the tree meant that some might be damaged
or destroyed before being enjoyed by farmers or the shah. Only lands held
directly by the shah could be taxed in this manner effectively, but even
on royal domains the avarice of corrupt tax-assessors will have hampered
collection.52
Towards the end of the fifth century, the burden of taxation on the
peasantry seems to have become increasingly oppressive: the complex relations
with the Hephthalite khanate, looming in the east, resulted in heavy
demands at a time when recurrent famines compelled shahs to grant occasional
– and somewhat measly – tax relief. This oppression contributed
significantly to the popularity of Mazdak, a heretical Zoroastrian priest,
who advocated the economic equality of all human beings and regarded
the higher classes of the Sasanian kingdom as the worst enemies of his
doctrines. For some time he managed to enlist the support of Shah Kavad
I himself: Kavad appears to have used this movement precisely in order
to humble his recalcitrant nobility.53 When eventually he turned his back
on the movement and allowed his son to put it down, the battered nobles
needed royal support to recuperate and regain a fraction of their former
grandeur. They were obviously in no position to form a viable opposition
to the one serious attempt to introduce a tax reform in the Sasanian realm,
begun apparently towards the end of Kavad’s reign (531) and continued by
his son Khusro I.54
On the basis of a general land survey, a new system for exacting the
land tax was devised. Fixed rates of tax were imposed on agricultural land
according to its size and according to the kind of crops raised. The tax was
calculated in drahms, although at least some was probably still levied in
kind, calculated according to the current value of the produce in drahms.
This new system, efficiently applied, would enable a monarch to anticipate
incomes and budget expenses. It might be seen as harsh on the peasantry,
primarily because the fixed drahm rates apparently disregarded fluctuations
in agricultural yield caused by drought, other natural calamities or war. But
this is to ignore the best testimony about the reform: if a distinction is drawn
between the reform’s institution and operation in Khusro’s reign, and the
way it subsequently worked, the system appears reasonably efficient and fair.
It considerably augmented crown revenues, but also included a mechanism
for constant revision, making tax rebates and remissions possible when and
where necessary.
The fiscal reform was accompanied by agricultural reform. Dispossessed
farmers were restored to their lands, financial help was available to enable
them to restart cultivation, and a mechanism was instituted to assist farms
affected by natural disasters. The overall result should have been to maintain
a system of small farms that could be taxed easily, and to prevent the growth
of huge estates whose powerful owners might accumulate privileges and
immunities, and obstruct effective taxation.
Khusro’s reform was meant to have a lasting impact on Sasanian military
organisation by providing the shah with a standing army of crack units of
horsemen (asavaran), under his direct command and permanently at his
disposal, who received a salary, at least while on foreign campaign. This
body of palace guards was recruited from among young nobles, as well as
the country gentry who wished to start a military career. On the frontiers,
troops recruited from the nomadic periphery, such as Turks, as well as from
semi-independent enclaves within the empire – for example, Daylam in
the mountainous region of Gilan – might be employed to repel invasions
or hold them up until the mobile crack units arrived.
Khusro’s system appears to have enjoyed moderate success for a few
decades, until the difficulties that beset the Sasanian monarchy exposed its
weaknesses. In the fiscal area, its proper functioning depended on internal
stability, external security and continuing financial prosperity, backed up
by revenues other than the land and poll taxes – such as taxes on international
trade, especially the silk trade, booty from foreign wars, tribute
and diplomatic subsidies. These supplementary sources of income were
necessary to ensure the smooth running of the control mechanism that was
integral to Khusro’s system. However, its stability as a whole depended
too much on a delicate balance which only a very powerful monarch
could maintain at the best of times, and in the vast Sasanian monarchy,
with its long frontiers, it was exposed to the dangers that threatened
the empire itself. Growing military commitments increased the financial
demands and pressure on tax-payers, thereby threatening the system; if central
government lost effective control, abuse and corruption might swamp
arrangements.
A neglected source which appears reliable on this issue – the Sirat
Anushirwan, embedded in Ibn Misqawayh’s Tajarib al-umam – indicates
that towards the end of his reign, Khusro struggled to keep his system functioning.
55 The control mechanism proved to be as susceptible to corruption
as the taxation machinery it was supposed to regulate. Furthermore, the
strained relations between soldier and civilian, especially in the remoter
zones, took their toll. In effect, the shah could restrain only those soldiers
under his direct command from despoiling the rural tax-payers, as is shown
by the restrictions imposed by Hormizd IV on a journey to Media. It is
probable, however, that even during the last days of his father many of the
cavalrymen no longer owed direct allegiance to the shah, and had reverted to
being retainers of the great, virtually independent landlords. A brief glance
at the aftermath of Khusro’s military reforms may help us to understand
what happened.
The fragility of the financial arrangements underpinning the standing
army militated against enduring success for Khusro’s reforms. If, as suggested
above, the Sasanian economy was never fully monetarised, the need
to provide for the army’s everyday needs, at times mostly in goods, will have
encouraged the reintroduction of enfeoffment as the standard military contract,
even among the lower ranks. Following a short period when Khusro
made serious attempts to sustain his new standing army, even in his own
lifetime the asavaran increasingly reverted to an enfeoffed estate, despite
such fiefs’ tendency to become hereditary and the consequent problems of
alienation.56 Khusro’s reforms were, at best, of such limited duration and
impact that their scope and intent might be questioned.
From the royal perspective, the higher nobility posed even more serious
problems than the cavalrymen. The Mazdakite revolt and its aftermath
made possible a feudal system more directly dependent on the shah than
ever before. The nobility restored by Khusro was firmly beholden to the
shah, so there could be no doubts about the origin of its estates or the nature
of the services it owed the crown. But the nobility soon returned to its former
position of power. The notion that the supreme military commanders
and ministers of state were now salaried civil servants is contradicted by
the limited evidence available. Thus, for example, Khusro’s nominees as
spahbads – the four supreme military commands he created to supersede
the old office of the artestaransalar – can only have been mighty territorial
lords from the start, as the very territorial nature of their command
suggests. The same goes for the marzbans, the commanders of the frontier
provinces.
The supposition that direct dependence on Khusro as restorer and benefactor
would make his nobility more tractable and obedient to the shah in
the long term is not sustainable, in view of the role played by the nobility
under subsequent reigns, quite apart from the revolts in Khusro’s first
decade. Bahram Chobin of the noble house of Mihran, the first serious
pretender outside the royal house since the establishment of the Sasanian
dynasty, was supported by many disgruntled nobles. Khusro II overcame
him in 591 with great difficulty, and only with the expensive support of the
Byzantine emperor Maurice.57 Later, the Sasanian monarchy was rocked
by other major revolts, such as those of Bistam and Bindoe – Khusro’s relatives
and allies turned foes – and of his powerful general, Shahrvaraz, who
was to depose his grandson Ardashir III (628–9) and claim the throne.58
By the time of the Arab conquest local rulers, especially in the east and
in the Caspian provinces, had become virtually independent. The same
is indicated by the confused Arabic traditions concerning Yemen after its
conquest by the Persians in the last decade of Khusro I’s reign. The growing
independence of the great landlords meant that sooner or later they
would inevitably control not only their own retinues of fighting men but
also independent taxation in their domains. Thus, for example, according
to Dinawari, the future rebel Bistam, upon his nomination as governor
by Khusro, instituted taxation in the territories under his rule (Khorasan
Qumis,Gurgan andTabaristan) and in the process remitted half of the tax.59
Other potentates, not in direct or prospective revolt against the shah, may
have acted less openly but may not have been impelled by the requirements
of war propaganda to be so generous.
Under Khusro II, oriental sources record impressive data about royal
revenues, which might suggest that the machinery devised by Khusro I
was still operating smoothly, and that Khusro II made even better use of it
than his grandfather.60 But the full narrative of al-Tabari gives a different
impression: the revenueswere not the product of regular taxation and should
be explained in part by the influx of booty from Byzantine territories (the
rich spoils of Alexandria and Jerusalem), and in part by extreme measures
of extortion.61 It was primarily as an efficient operator of the taxation
machinery that Khusro’s Nestorian finance minister (vastaryoshansalar),
Yazdin, endeared himself to his lord; the favourable Khuzistan chronicle
insists on the vast amounts of money that he sent to the treasury from the
sunrise of one day to the sunrise of the next.62 Such extortions seem to
have involved not only an unbearable burden on tax-payers in the royal
domain but also an attempt to reintroduce direct royal taxation in the
domains of grandees, who had by now come to regard this as a blatant
encroachment upon their privileges: the nobles proved ultimately to be his
downfall. Thus Khusro II’s riches cannot be attributed to the tax reforms of
Khusro I.
The last decades of the Sasanian dynasty are the story of a chain of violent
upheavals, exposing all the inherent weaknesses of the huge empire. The
reforms of Khusro I did constitute a serious attempt to cope with these
weaknesses and to re-establish the shah’s position on a firmer basis. They
failed in the long run because they strove to superimpose the framework of
a fully centralised state, with a salaried civil bureaucracy and army, financed
by an efficient and easily manageable taxation apparatus, on a realm which
proved too weak to bear these heavy burdens. The political and military
organisation of its vast territories was too flimsy, the economic infrastructure
too primitive, and the social structure hidebound by traditions that
could not be easily transformed. Khusro’s own conservatism was a characteristic
reflection of these traditions, for it was Khusro who did much to
restore the battered nobility to its traditional powers after the Mazdakite
interlude.
Warfare had always been the primary activity of the Sasanian state, but
even by its own standards the last century of its existence witnessed a
sustained intensity of campaigning that may have weakened the structures
of society. After war broke out against Justin I in 527, there were only
twenty-eight years of formal peace with Byzantium until the conclusive
victory of Heraclius in 628 – and this is to ignore the recurrent tensions
enmeshing the Arab satellites of the rival empires, Sasanian involvement in
the affairs of the Arabian peninsula and the struggle to maintain control
in Caucasian principalities such as Suania and Albania. We know much
less about the sequence of campaigns on the north-eastern frontier, but
these were probably more debilitating. Khusro’s apparent triumph over the
Hephthalites in the 550s was only achieved through alliance with the rising
Turkish confederation, which now replaced the Hephthalites as Persia’s
neighbours and soon constituted a far more powerful threat during the
570s and 580s.63 No less than Justinian, Khusro was repeatedly involved
in wars on more than one front, and the expenses of eastern campaigning
probably proved much heavier than the gains from spoils, ransoms and
payments stipulated in his treaties with Byzantium.
The success of the state depended ultimately on the character and reputation
of the shah, and there was a recurrent danger that such a personal
monarchy would experience bouts of severe dynastic competition: thus, the
long reigns of Shapur I and Shapur II were both followed by shorter periods
of instability. This danger may have been increased in the sixth century by
the withdrawal of Persian shahs from regular active participation in warfare,
a move which fundamentally changed the nature of royal legitimation.
Early rulers from the house of Sasan had demonstrated divine favour for
their rule through personal victories, but the successors of Khusro I relied
on others to win their wars.64 From the royal perspective, legitimacy ran
in the family, but the nobility and armies might prefer to give their loyalty
to a successful commander such as the non-Sasanian Bahram Chobin or
Shahrvaraz. The existence of substantial minority religious groups, Jews
as well as Christians, allowed an established ruler to secure his position
by balancing their different claims against the majority Zoroastrians. But
it also meant that a rival could promote himself by seeking the support
of one particular group: Bahram Chobin is known for his links with
the Jews.
In spite of the attempted reforms of Khusro, the Sasanian state remained a
fairly simple structure in which much economic and military power rested
with the feudal nobility. Royal authority was bolstered by a supremacy
of patronage, but this presupposed regular inflows of wealth for redistribution.
Wars against the empire provided considerable short-term gains,
and Byzantine peace payments under the ‘perpetual peace’ (532) and the
fifty-year peace (562) were also important, but it is impossible to calculate
how much of this wealth drained eastwards, almost immediately, to
the Hephthalites or the Turks. The monetarised heartland of the Sasanian
state (as of its Achaemenid antecedent) lay in the rich agricultural lands of
Mesopotamia and lower Iraq, areas susceptible to attack from the west, and
it seems to have been impossible to increase their tax revenues in the long
term.
It is ironic that the most successful Sasanian conqueror, Khusro II, must
also bear responsibility for the monarchy’s subsequent rapid collapse. In
the first decade of his reign, his status as a virtual puppet of Constantinople
must have contributed to support for the long-running rebellion of
Bistam in the east.65 The overthrow of his patron Maurice in 602 gave
Khusro an opportunity to assert his independence, and the disorganisation
of Byzantine defences, particularly during the civil war between supporters
of Phocas and Heraclius in 609–11, permitted Khusro to transform a
sequence of traditional lucrative frontier campaigns into a massive expansionist
thrust towards the west. But whereas a war of pillage replenished
royal coffers, the annexation of territories reduced the inflow of funds and
meant that the newly acquired resources had to be devoted to maintaining
troops in remote regions. Furthermore, Khusro’s successful armies had little
direct contact with their distant monarch, being tied more closely to their
victorious commanders; as a result, the soldiers of Shahrvaraz supported
their general when he was threatened by the shah. In the 620s, Heraclius’
campaigns into the heart of Persia exposed the fragility of Khusro’s achievements,
prompting a palace coup that introduced the most severe bout of
dynastic instability the Sasanian state had ever known. The return of
booty to the Byzantines together with the destruction caused by campaigns
in Mesopotamia left the monarchy short of wealth and prestige at the very
moment when the Arabs started to raid across the Euphrates. Yazdgard III
was forced to abandon Iraq in 638–9 and thereafter lacked the resources and
reputation to challenge the new Islamic superpower. The Iranian nobility
abandoned the Sasanians and transferred their allegiance to the Muslim
rulers, who offered stability, while the rural majority went on paying their
taxes – to support a new elite.
World History
