Everything about Khosrau Ii totally explained
Khosrau II or
Khosrow II (
Chosroes II or
Xosrov II in classical sources, sometimes called
Parvez, "the ever Victorious" – in
Persian: خسرو پرویز) was the twenty-second
Sassanid King of Persia from
590 to
628. He was the son of
Hormizd IV (579–590) and grandson of
Khosrau I (531–579).
Biography
Personality and skills
Khosrau II was inferior to his grandfather in terms of proper education and discipline. He was haughty, cruel, and given to luxury; he was neither a warrior-
general nor an
administrator and despite his brilliant victories, he didn't personally command an army in the field, relying instead on the strategy and loyalty of his generals. Nevertheless
Tabari describes him as:
Excelling most of the other Persian kings in bravery, wisdom and forethought, and none matching him in military might and triumph, hoarding of treasures and good fortunes, hence the epithet Parviz, meaning victorious.
He had a
shabestan of over 3,000
concubines . Many leading men and part of the troops acknowledged Khosrau II, and in 591 he was brought back to
Ctesiphon. Bahram VI was defeated in
Azerbaijan and fled to the
Turks of Central Asia, among whom he was murdered. Peace with Rome was then concluded. Maurice made no use of his advantage; he merely restored the former frontier and abolished the subsidies which had formerly been paid to the Persians.
Military Exploits and Early Victories
At the beginning of his reign, Khosrau II favoured the
Christians; but when in
602 Maurice had been murdered by
Phocas (602–610), he began war with Rome to avenge his death. His armies plundered
Syria and
Asia Minor, and in
608 advanced to
Chalcedon.
In
613 and
614 Damascus and
Jerusalem were taken by the general
Shahrbaraz, and the
True Cross was carried away in triumph. Soon after, General
Shahin marched through Anatolia and conquered
Egypt in
618. The Romans could offer but little resistance, as they were torn by internal dissensions, and pressed by the
Avars and
Slavs.
Khosrau's forces at times also invaded
Taron.
Richard Nelson Frye speculates that one mistake of Chosroes II, which was to have future consequences, was the imprisonment and execution of
Nu'aman III (
crushed by elephants in some accounts), king of the
Lakhmids of
Al-Hira about 600, presumably because of the failure of the Arab king to support Chosroes on his fight with the Byzantines. Afterwards the central government took over the defense of the western frontiers to the desert and the buffer state of the Lakhmids vanished. This soon led to invasion of lower Iraq in less than a decade after Khosrau's death.
Turn of Tides
Ultimately, in
622, the Emperor
Heraclius (who had succeeded
Phocas in
610 and ruled until 641) was able to take the field. In
624 he advanced into northern
Media, where he destroyed the great fire-temple of
Ganzhak (
Gazaca); in
626 he fought in Lazistan (
Colchis). In 626, Persian general
Shahrbaraz advanced to
Chalcedon and tried to capture
Constantinople with the help of
Persia's
Avar allies. His attempt failed, and he withdrew his army from
Anatolia later in 628.
Following the
Khazar invasion of Transcaucasia in 627, Heraclius defeated the Persian army at the
Battle of Nineveh and advanced towards
Ctesiphon. Khosrau II fled from his favourite residence, Dastgerd (near
Baghdad), without offering resistance; some of the grandees freed his eldest son
Kavadh II (he ruled briefly in 628), whom Khosrau II had imprisoned, and proclaimed King (night of
23-4 February, 628). Four days afterwards, Khosrau II was murdered in his palace. Meanwhile, Heraclius returned in triumph to Constantinople; in
629 the Cross was given back to him and Egypt evacuated, while the Persian empire, from the apparent greatness which it had reached ten years ago, sank into hopeless anarchy. It was overtaken by the armies of the first
Islamic Caliphs beginning in
634.
Letter of Muhammad to Khosrau II
Khosrau II (Arabic كسري) is also remembered in Muslim tradition to be the Persian king to whom
Muhammad had sent a messenger,
Abdullah ibn Hudhafah as-Sahmi, together with a letter to preach the religion of Islam. In
Tabari’s original Arabic manuscript the letter to Khosrau II reads:
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
من محمد رسول الله الى كسرى عظيم الفارس . سلام على من اتبع الهدى و آمن بالله و رسوله و شهد ان لااله الا الله وحده لاشريك له و ان محمد عبده و رسوله. ادعوك بدعاء الله، فانى رسول الله الى الناس كافة لانذر من كان حيا و يحق القول على الكافرين. فاسلم تسلم . فان ابيت فان اثم المجوس عليك .
English translation:
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Ever Merciful
From Muhammad, Messenger of Allah, to Chosroes, Ruler of Persia. Peace be on him who follows the guidance, believes in Allah and His Messenger and bears witness that there's no one worthy of worship save Allah, the One, without associate, and that Muhammad is His Servant and Messenger. I invite you to the Call of Allah, as I'm the Messenger of Allah to the whole of mankind, so that I may warn every living person and so that the truth may become clear and the judgment of God may overtake the infidels. I call upon you to accept Islam and thus make yourself secure. If you turn away, you'll bear the sins of your Zoroastrian subjects.
The
Persian historian
Tabari continues that in refusal and outrage, Khosrau tore up Muhammed's letter and commanded
Badhan, his vassal ruler of Yemen, to dispatch two valiant men to identify, seize and bring this man from Hijaz (Muhammad) to him. Meanwhile, back in Madinah, Abdullah told Muhammad how Khusraw had torn his letter to pieces and Muhammad's only reply was, "May his kingdom tear apart". The narration carries on with trivial accounts of their encounter and dialogue with Muhammad and conversion of Badhan (Bāzān) and the whole Yemenite Persians to Islam subsequent to receipt of shocking tidings of Khosrau’s murder by his own son,
Kavadh II.
In other chapters
Tabari gives two more detailed accounts. One on how Islam had been presented in three subsequent years to the Persian monarch (Khosrau II) by an angel of Allah while he'd refused the whole time; and the other on how Khosrau II orders Persians thrice to construct a dam and
iwan on the
Tigris river with untold toil and outlay with exact intervals of 8 months, only to see each one break once Khosrau himself embarked it to celebrate.
Criticism of Muslim Accounts
Leone Caetani, in his ten-volume book
Annali dell' Islam that was based on the research presented by German scholar
Hubert Grimme in
Das Leben Muhammed, dismisses the notion that Muhammad ever sent any envoys to rulers of neighboring kingdoms, much less received any responses; Caetani also refutes that whatever is told or written in this regard is merely a myth fabricated by the
Islamic Caliphate many years after Muhammad's death.
In his work, Caetani alludes to a number of facts to prove his point of view:
- All the information from historical sources (Persian, Armenian, Georgian, Syriac, Egyptian, etc.) suggest that Sassanid court ceremonies have been the most intricate in the ancient world, and among the most elaborate of such formalities had been granting audience to individuals seeking to meet with the Sassanid Shahanshah. Ibn Khordadbeh in Kitāb al-Masālik w’al- Mamālik describes how each and every foreign envoy had to submit his message to the marzban of the bordering province (in this case: vassal kingdom of Al-Hirah) whose bureaucratic system would evaluate the contents of the message and the envoy’s purpose of audience with the monarch. Most often, the envoy would be accommodated in an envoys' border lodge for a certain period of time awaiting such decision. The envoy was then escorted to the capital only if the message was considered pertinent for the court in Ctesiphon or if the said marzban wouldn't be capable of resolving a much complicated diplomatic issue. In all other cases, the embassy was refused. » Even second-class marzbans and spahbods were not exempted from such cumbersome formalities, not to mention an envoy arriving from a relatively obscure source to the Sassanid court; and even then during the royal audience, one had to observe certain strict customs such as kissing the floor, covering one’s mouth by panam (Persian: پنام), conversing with particular etiquette, and carefully avoiding approaching Shahanshah’s throne.
Caetani deduces that bearing in mind the impertinence and assertive tone of the message, Sassanid administrators must, in all probability, have denied such audience.
As regards to Khosrau’s challenging dam project on the Tigris, Caetani elaborates that the years 6 and 7 AH (627-628 AD) had been the most tumultuous periods of the Sassanid era: Heraclius was closing in on gates of Ctesiphon following his decisive victory at Nineveh; the treasury was nearly exhausted and the empire itself was weakening. » It would then be negligence towards historical facts to imagine an unstable monarch triply commencing the ambitious task of “untold toil and outlay” with a bankrupted treasury and lack of safety on the Tigris riverside.
Caetani also hints at the fact that none of the Persian historical chronicles recording the ending years of the Sassanid era - specifically khodaynamehs (Persian: خداينامه meaning “book of lords”) that later became sources of information for Ferdowsi and other scientists and historians such as Birouni, Tha'alibi, Masudi, Isfahani – mention such an embassy, and whatever narrated in this context is exclusively limited to Arabic sources, while Iranians have never been aware of this matter.
Furthermore, there's no reference to these letters in Latin, Greek, Armenian, Georgian, or Syriac sources, signifying that these letters - including the ones dispatched to Heraclius, Ashama ibn Abjar and Patriarch of Alexandria- for all non-Arabic sources, are entirely unheard-of.
In art
The battles between Heraclius and Khosrau are depicted in a famous early Renaissance fresco by Piero della Francesca, part of the History of the True Cross cycle in the church of San Francesco, Arezzo.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Khosrau Ii'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://khosrau_ii.totallyexplained.com">Khosrau II Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
