In what ways if any did the Byzantine and Sasanian empires resemble one another?

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1 Adam Rebick In what ways if any did the Byzantine and Sasanian empires resemble one another? The two great empires of Byzantium and Sasania stand out as the dominant powers in western Asia in late antiquity. They held control over the trading routes from China to Europe and militarily were each other s greatest enemy. Yet the roots of the empires were strikingly different: Sasania a new kingdom rising out of the ashes of the fallen Parthian Empire, Byzantium a continuation of the old Eastern Roman Empire. In religious terms they constituted Byzantine Christianity on the one hand, and the restored Zoroastrianism of the old Persian empires that was upheld by the Sasanians on the other. The military tactics of the two are strikingly dissimilar, and even their respective declines appear to be different, as the Sasanians crumbled in the face of Islam as quickly as they had risen, where the Byzantines by contrast survived more than a millennium of gradual decline. Yet looking more deeply into the cultures of the two empires, links begin to appear beyond the extent to which the polarising propaganda of either empire would account for, and when considering also their respective military philosophies, the structure of their societies and even the ways in which the administrations were run, strong connections and similarities become clear which are key to the identities of both kingdoms, and to their own concepts of themselves as empires. One way in which it is possible to examine the two empires is through the general structure of their development over time and their identity, and in this respect they appear to be very different. The Byzantine Empire was not a new entity; rather it can be seen as an extension of the Eastern Roman Empire, and continued to be referred to as Roman by others at the time. Although Constantine is often regarded as the founder of the Byzantine Empire and the man who ensured its Christian basis, he was himself emperor of Rome, and it was the transfer of the seat of the wider empire under his rule to his city of Constantinople that allowed for this continuation after the collapse of power in Rome. The Sasanian Empire, by contrast, was distinct in origins as it rose out of the decline of the Parthian Empire amidst internal conflict. Ardashir I was the ruler of a local region known as the Fars Province, but was able to expand and then conquer the lands of the Parthian emperor, Artabanus IV, in a relatively brief period. However, as the Sasanian Empire started to come into contact with the Byzantines, the question of the identity of this new empire became important. The Byzantines were able to trace their history through the Roman Empire back several centuries, and it was important for the Sasanians to respond to this with a claim of their own. Ancient Persia (Curtis 2000, pp ) references investiture reliefs made by Ardashir at Naqsh-e Rustan, which were situated beside similar reliefs of Darius the Great, Xerxes I and Artaxerxes I. By comparing himself to the great Achaemenid kings, Ardashir was claiming to be creating a neo-persian kingdom that had a heritage dating from the conquests of Cyrus the Great in the 7 th Century BC, when Rome was merely a small Italian city. The two empires show some similarities in their development later in the millennium. After a more troubled early period in regular conflict with Byzantium, the Sasanian

2 2 Empire could generally be seen to have had two golden eras: the first under Shapur II, and the second under Kavadh I. The second of these periods was considerably longer, stretching from the turn of the 6 th to the early 7 th century, in which the territory under the control of the emperor was substantially extended so that it bordered the lands of the Chinese empires. Kavadh s son Khosrau I was emperor at the time of the invasion of Syria in 540 that led to the sacking of Antioch; Khosrau II brought the empire to its greatest extent as it took control of Palestine and Egypt from Byzantium. This is quite similar to the height of the Byzantine Empire under Justinian in 550, when Constantinople had control over south-eastern Europe (including Italy) and the entirety of the North-African coast. Yet at both times, as is discussed below, neither empire was able to fully conquer the other, despite a clear intention to do so from both sides. Yet while the respective heights of both empires may in some ways be comparable, the manner of their decline and fall differed markedly. Although the victories of the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in 628 finally drove the Sasanian armies back to Ctesiphon, it was the unexpected arrival of Arabs fighting zealously for the new religion of Islam that finished them off (Curtis 2000, pp.82-3). This shows a significant contrast to the gradual decline of the Byzantine Empire over several centuries, which generally appeared to follow a pattern of periods of small gains alternating with periods of large losses. As Islamic unity began to fracture over time after the death of Mohammed, its expansion was slowed, and the Macedonian Dynasty slowly returned power to the Byzantines until they were of comparable prominence to the Fatimid Caliphate. Poor military strategy at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 led to the capture of the emperor, and Byzantium once again went into sharp decline. This pattern continued with the small gains of the Komnenian Restoration and the Palaiologan Emperors of the 12 th and 13 th centuries respectively broken up by the dramatic failure of the Fourth Crusade and finally the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire following years of civil war. Thus in terms of structure, while the particular origins and dramatic collapse of the Sasanian Empire are distinct from the gradual decline of the Byzantine Empire, whose origins lay in the division of the Roman Empire, it is possible to see some considerable resemblance between the respective golden ages of both empires, which grew under specific military leaders, as will be discussed below, and faced each other while dominating the entire region. Also important in considering two such empires is a comparison of their religion and culture. The Cambridge Ancient History (Bowman et al. 2005, pp ) suggests that religion was an extremely polarising issue and very much formed the identity of people living in the region. This was in spite of a tradition of tolerance established by Shapur I, who had befriended a Babylonian Jewish rabbi and allowed Christians in particular to practice in freedom. The Nestorian sect of Christianity could even be seen to be sanctioned by the state as the Sasanian monarch appointed the Nestorian leadership. However, Zoroastrian priests put pressure on Shapur II to persecute Christians, and led indiscriminate pogroms against them where followers were accused of poisoning water supplies as well as blasphemy through contradiction of Zoroastrian teachings (Foster and Foster 2009, pp ). Similarly, if you were the wrong type of Christian in Byzantium you could face persecution, and the enmity towards Jews was in reality far stronger than at any point in the Sasanian Empire, evidenced by the tendency of Jews to

3 3 support the Sasanians during wars between the empires (Bowman et al. 2005, pp ). The religious divide also had a military element by the time of the Byzantine-Sasanian war of , in which the relics of the True Cross were taken from Jerusalem after its capture and brought to Ctesiphon until Heraclius achieved their return as part of the peace treaty in 628. However, it is possible to view the strong religious differences in another light. The religious crackdown under Shapur II, which occurred at approximately the same time as the completion of the Avesta, the sacred text of Zoroastrianism, coincided with the first serious victories for the Sasanians over the Byzantines, with Jovian being forced to return all the provinces ceded by the Sasanians in earlier conflicts following Julian s failed attempt to take Ctesiphon in 359, which ended in his death. Religious difference was used as a tool to foster an identity as an empire, and the capture of the relics of the True Cross may have been as much an insult to the honour of the Byzantines (the relics finder, Helen, was the mother of Constantine) as a religious statement. Until the fall of the Sasanian Empire, the two empires would each be the other s greatest enemy, and distinct religious identities played an important part in defining what it meant to be Byzantine as opposed to Sasanian. The religious polarisation was also representative of a wider attempt to differentiate the two empires along the lines of the old East-West divide. The Persians (Brosius 2006, pp. 76-8) suggests that, from the time of the ancient Greek-Persian wars, an idea of Greeks as Hellenes and everyone else as other had developed. The Persians were singled out as being the epitome of barbarity and the antithesis of Greek civilisation, and especially during the period in which Greece was divided between Athens and Sparta, it had been important to focus on the foreign threat in order to maintain political unity. The Romans saw themselves as being to a certain extent the heirs to the Greeks and Macedonians, and continued the tradition of viewing the eastern empires as other, with Persian, Parthian and Sasanian becoming interchangeable and used to mean barbaric. Brosius suggests that this viewpoint gave greater justification to the campaigns of Byzantine Emperors in the east. The propaganda did not allow for the reality of two empires standing on an equal footing, and successfully framed the wars between them as the intellectual triumph of the free world over Asiatic peoples in an enslaved east. The extent to which this was reciprocated in the Sasanian Empire is unclear, as unlike Roman coins which commemorated military victories, those minted in Ctesiphon lacked any form of political propaganda (Bowman et al. 2005, pp ). The reliability of these and other small antiquities from the period is called into question in Ancient Persia (Curtis 2000, pp ) as very few artefacts in museum collections today were discovered and excavated scientifically, and so are hard to date. What we do know, however, is that a commemorative relief was carved at Naqsh-e Rustan alongside Ardashir s investiture relief to commemorate the humiliation of Valerian in being captured by Shapur I in battle, demonstrating that military success was very much defined in terms of victory over Byzantium. Yet however either empire may have tried to revive old ideas of an East-West divide or emphasised religious difference to create a sense of identity in wartime, it is simply not the case that any cultural separation had continued to exist after the fall of the Achaemenid Dynasty. There is considerable evidence of a multicultural society throughout this period. Examples are given of people with Semitic names writing in

4 4 Greek, while the use of Syriac and Aramaic still remained widespread. Important Jewish communities existed in Antioch and Edessa and the dividing lines of administrative regions dated back to the reforms of Diocletian, showing clear links between the two empires (Cameron et al. 2000, pp ). The structures of the two societies were also comparable, with the Sasanian model of higher classes of nobility separated from farmers and professionals such as merchants and craftsmen (Foster and Foster 2009, pp ) being comparable to the aristocratic elites of Byzantium and the peasants in the countryside who had more freedom than in some western European feudal systems. Both were centralised states with coin minting restricted to the capital and a developed system of bureaucracy. In the Sasanian Empire this was on a much greater level than under previous minimalist Hellenist and Parthian rule. A major new development was the creation of records comparable in detail to the Domesday Book, of arable land and potential revenue to be taken from them, to allow accurate economic projections to be made. In both cases, the success of a strong state was seen to depend on sound fiscal policy; at the heart of this lay a prosperous citizenry ruled by a just elite (Foster and Foster 2009, pp ). It is clear that the greatest military losses on both sides, such as that of Julian at Ctesiphon, were connected with rash fiscal policy to fund campaigns (Cameron and Garnsey 1998, pp ). Christianity had become well established in the region by the end of the 1 st century, and contrary to the perceptions of theologians in Rome and Constantinople, there was little uniformity of doctrine, but rather a diverse blend of sects with widely differing beliefs and using different languages, the most prominent in Sasania being the Nestorians (also referred to as Chaldeans) (Foster and Foster 2009, pp ). Although Christians may have been persecuted because they were associated with a Byzantine enemy that defined itself as Christian, this shows that clear-cut cultural and religious divisions between East and West had not existed for centuries, and such ideas were merely being used as propaganda tools by the rulers of Constantinople and Ctesiphon. Key points of contrast between the two empires can also be seen when looking at their military history and foreign policy, yet at first glance they appear to be reasonably similar. Neither empire was based around a military society in a similar manner to Sparta, and both saw their success as being dependent on good economic policy rather than aggressive expansionism, even to the extent that Byzantine military philosophy did not recognise the validity of the concept of holy war in the same way as western Europe and medieval Islam took up the ideas of crusade and jihad. In spite of this, when there were periods of rapid territorial growth, as outlined earlier, both empires successfully expanded to dominate the region and had little need of alliances with other empires, with the only exception being their inability to completely conquer the other side. However, looking deeper it is clear that the military strategies of the two empires diverged to a significant extent. The most obvious example of this was the type of tactics they employed. From the earliest battles fought by the Sasanians, heavy cavalry was always the backbone of the main army. This is evidenced by a second set of rock reliefs at Tuq-e Bustan, which show mounted warriors in battle with very heavy armour, and armed not with spears but bows (Bowman et al. 2005, pp ). On the contrary, the army of Justinian relied heavily on infantry divisions, with cavalry only becoming more

5 5 important in the 6 th century (Maas 2005, pp ). While both armies were fairly effective when fighting pitched battles, siege warfare was also an important part of military strategy, and this type of conflict was approached in very different ways by the two empires. The Sasanians were renowned for their manufacture of impressive siege engines, such as battering rams and various types of catapult, which allowed them to attempt a direct attack on enemy cities. Conversely, the Byzantines preferred to invest a city and blockade it until garrisons were starved out. This inevitably meant that Byzantine sieges were long, protracted affairs with a much greater impact on civilians in the area. In general, Justinian s army was also much less flexible and found it much harder to deal with enemies who avoided pitched battles and fought on harsh terrain (Maas 2005, pp ). However, one positive effect of heavy involvement in siege warfare was that the Byzantines were required to fortify military infrastructure (such as city walls, castles etc.), which provided substantial protection in the future, and may help to explain why the Byzantines lasted so much longer than the Sasanians when faced with the encroaching Muslim invaders. There are several possible reasons why the Sasanians crumbled as quickly as they did in the mid 7 th century, which are outlined in Ancient Persia (Curtis 2000, pp.82-3). One important factor must have been the depletion of resources after decades of war with the Byzantines. While Constantinople itself was run down from war and so didn t have the capacity to conquer Sasania, the strength of the religious zeal of the Arab invaders was sufficient to entirely crush the armies of Yazdegerd III, the last Sasanian ruler, at Qadisiya and then take his capital, Ctesiphon. However, there is also evidence that the Arabs had previously made inroads into the Mesopotamian region, and so any threat posed by them was ignored in an act of complacency by the Sasanian leadership. Finally, on a more subtle level, Islam offered a change from the rigid class systems of Sasania and after years of oppressive taxation to fund the war with Byzantium, Islam could even have been an attractive prospect for some local people. Problems of funding war were not, however, limited to one side. The rule of Justinian saw a break from the traditional Byzantine military philosophy outlined above, and as a result the normal standards of financial prudence were sometimes overridden by religious ideology (Maas 2005, pp ). This proved problematic in a couple of cases when there were not sufficient funds to adequately pay troops after particularly large defeats to the Goths in Europe. This broke the tradition of maintaining army discipline using rewards for good conduct and penalties for infringements, and there was an inevitable negative effect on general morale. In a similar manner, Julian s failure to adequately prepare funds for his expedition to try and take Ctesiphon resulted in spectacular defeat and his own death despite previous substantial gains. When military affairs went so badly wrong, both empires turned to diplomacy to prevent total loss, and in this respect they were quite similar. However, in the early periods of the empires the Byzantines can be seen as distinctly less effective at negotiating favourable deals when in a losing position. As mentioned above, after the death of Julian the new emperor Jovian, trapped on the east bank of the Tigris, agreed to return to Sasania large areas of land which had previously been ceded to Byzantium (Cameron and Garnsey 1998, pp ). While almost all conflicts between Byzantium and Sasania were eventually resolved through diplomacy, the most obvious case of a treaty being extremely unfavourable to Sasania is the one following the catastrophic

6 6 defeat to Heraclius in 628. Unlike the previous example, Kavadh II had very little choice in the matter if he wanted to avoid annihilation at the hands of the Byzantines, and had even gone so far as to murder his father (Khosrau II) to ensure that peace would be bought. Yet perhaps the most important feature to compare when considering what happened when the two empires went to war against each other is their individual military strategy. In some cases, attacks were opportunistic, such as the sack of Antioch in 540 under Khosrau I, which took advantage of Justinian s weakness as Ostrogoths attacked him from the west. This should not be seen as anything other than an attempt to loot and pillage an important Byzantine city, as Khosrau did not capitalise on his successes by taking large areas of land for himself, despite the compounded weakness of the Byzantine Empire as a serious plague broke out in Constantinople (Foster and Foster 2009, pp ). This contrasts with the more calculated attack of Khosrau II in 602 which started the Byzantine-Sasanian war. Again making use of a period of relative Byzantine weakness, the Sasanian army overran Syria and over the next two decades conquered Palestine (including the Holy City of Jerusalem) and Egypt, which accounted for a vast area of Byzantine lands. Yet it was another example of potential complacency on the part of the Sasanians that led to their eventual defeat, as they ignored an outflanking manoeuvre by the Byzantine Emperor, Heraclius, on the assumption that the encroaching winter would force him to turn back. After waiting for months in the mountains, he was ready to attack in early spring and defeated the Sasanians at Nineveh before driving them back to Ctesiphon (Foster and Foster 2009, pp ). Thus it is possible to conclude that the military success of either empire when facing the other depended not on who fought well, given their shared inability to wipe out the other, but on which side made mistakes and became complacent. In conclusion, it is not at first obvious that the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires did resemble each other. Considering their remarkably different developmental structures and even the way they defined themselves in antithesis to each other both culturally and religiously would suggest that they were worlds apart. As the two greatest rival superpowers of the region who by the early 7 th century were, in the words of Foster and Foster (2009, pp ) engaged in the closest thing to a world war of the age, every part of the identity that the emperors framed for themselves must be seen in terms of conflict with the other. In spite of a clear lack of continuity between the great Achaemenid Emperors and the Sasanians, Ardashir I and Shapur I attempted to set themselves up as the heirs to the old Persia. This sent out a strong message to other empires which were encountering them for the first time, that the neo-persian kingdom they were creating would be as impressive as the historical empire they were invoking. This large-scale political posturing could only have been an attempt to define the identity of this new and distinct empire while also rapidly encountering new enemy powers which would attack at any opportunity. The dramatic shifting of the balance of power between the two enemies revealed great differences in military practice, but also important similarities in the basic nature of what they sought to achieve in terms of expansion as an empire. Fundamentally, there is something extremely revealing in the way both the Byzantines and the Sasanians defined their concept of what empire actually was. Both

7 7 sets of emperors used religion to justify their right to rule, claiming their authority from God. Both had similar styles of governance based around sound fiscal policy and both societies had remarkably similar class structures. In spite of an attempt by both sides to create an image of a highly polarised world of East and West as had existed during the Greek-Persian wars centuries earlier, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that there was a huge mix of languages and cultures across the region which remained relatively unchanged even after the rise of Islam. All of this begs the question: why were there so many similarities between two empires which were outwardly so different? The answer to this lies not in how the Byzantines and Sasanians tried to define themselves, but how history defines them in terms of their origins. The Byzantine military traditions held their roots in the Roman armies, and before that those of the Greeks, while the Sasanians had only slightly adapted the basic cavalry tactics of the Parthians, and extending further back, the Hellenist rulers. While some administrative regions in Sasanian land had their roots in the reforms of Diocletian, as mentioned above (Cameron et al. 2000, pp ), others can be traced back to Alexander the Great and Seleucid rule. After defeating the last Achaemenid Emperor, Darius III, Alexander chose to maintain the administrative structures that already existed, and employed local people in official positions, while at the same time adapting everything to fit his own empire. This shows us that a shared history existed between the Byzantines and Sasanians, a history which shaped the very structures on which they relied and created a strong connection between them, and which helps to explain why the two greatest rivals of their time, so remarkably different in so many ways, were in fact at their core profoundly similar.

8 8 Bibliography Brosius, Maria. The Persians. Oxford: Routledge, Bowman, Alan K., Peter Garnsey and Averil Cameron, eds. Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cameron, Averil and Peter Garnsey, eds. Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cameron, Averil, Bryan Ward-Perkins and Michael Whitby, eds. Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Curtis, John. Ancient Persia. London: British Museum Press, Foster, Benjamin R. and Karen Polinger Foster. Civilisations of Ancient Iraq. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Maas, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.