Khosrow I

Khosrow I, Anushirvan, ruled Sasanian Persia from 531 to 579. He is the Persian king whom the Göktürks met first, as partner and then as enemy. With Istemi he destroyed the Hephthalite realm and divided its lands along the Oxus. Against Istemi he fortified the passes and closed his markets. The silk he burned before the eyes of the Sogdian envoys sent the Göktürks to Constantinople.^[1] Tabari and Menander Protector are the two witnesses to his dealings with the Göktürks. The Chinese histories give the Hephthalite victory to the Göktürks alone. They do not know his name.^[2]

Reign

For decades, at least until the beginning of Khosrow’s reign, the Sasanians had paid a colossal tribute to the Hephthalites. The Hephthalites had killed King Peroz in battle in 484, and they had returned his successor Kawad to the throne more than once.^[3] A great part of the Sasanian silver went east in those years. It is still found by the thousand in the markets of Afghanistan.^[3] In Tabari, Khosrow is the king who ended that. He built cities, castles, walls and many other works in the region of Sul. The inhabitants could take refuge in them from sudden attack.^[4] He settled ten thousand captured raiders in Azerbaijan. He also fortified the gate of Sul and the roads and passes through which an enemy from the north would have to march.^[4] Tabari may have confused the fortifications of Gurgan, against the steppe east of the Caspian, with those of the Caucasus. The khagan’s objective would then have been Khorasan, not the Caucasus.^[5] The Arabic tradition’s later name for him, the just king, is then not without foundation. It adds that the justice of a Persian monarch was a very peculiar modification of justice as such.^[6]

The Hephthalite war

Khosrow may have crushed the Hephthalites in 557 in alliance with the western Göktürk khagan Sinjibu, that is Istemi. In this version Khosrow slays their ruler, whom Tabari names Wrz and Masʿudi Axšunwāz. The victors then divide the territory.^[7] In one of Tabari’s versions the war is the khagan’s alone: Sinjibu, “the boldest and mightiest of all the Türk and with the most numerous troops, was the one who killed Warz, king of the Hayāṭila; without fearing their number and strength he killed the king with the greater part of his army, took their wealth as booty and conquered their land, except the parts that had fallen into Khosrow’s hand”.^[8] In the other version, Khosrow first allied himself with the khagan by marriage and asked him to march as well. Then Khosrow killed the Hephthalite king himself and pressed on beyond Balkh.^[9] Dinawari has Khosrow take Tokharistan, Zabulistan, Kabulistan and Chaghaniyan from the Hephthalites. In his account Sinjibu occupied Chach, Ferghana, Samarkand, Kesh and Nasaf as far as Bukhara.^[6] Dinawari adds that Khosrow sent his son Hormizd against the khagan. The khagan then gave all of it up.^[6] The last claim is false on Menander’s evidence, since the Sogdians after the Hephthalite fall were Göktürk subjects.^[6] Khosrow advanced about as far as Balkh and Tokharistan, while Istemi attacked the Hephthalites from the north. The two conquerors then stood so close that they were bound to quarrel.^[6] Seen from the Göktürk side, the same division gave everything north and east of the Oxus to the Göktürks and everything west of it to the Persians, with Bukhara between. How and where Khosrow and Istemi came to their arrangement is not known.^[10] The fall of the Hephthalites is dated to about 560, to 557, or to between 563 and 567, depending on the study. The decisive fight of the war was the battle of Bukhara.

The sequel of 560 followed the war.^[10] Khosrow and Istemi met at Gurgan. The border was fixed on the Oxus, and the Hephthalite ruler Faganish was handed over.^[10] A daughter of Istemi was married to Khosrow and became the mother of Hormizd IV. The king who fought the Göktürks in 588 was therefore a Göktürk khan’s grandson.^[10] One reckoning dates the sealing of the marriage to 554, another to after the victory. The border agreement is dated to 566 or 571.^[11]

Sinjibu at the gate of Sul

Tabari continues with the quarrel. The khagan won over the Abkhaz, the Bangar and the Balangar. They told him that the kings of Persia had always bought them off with payments to keep them from raiding.^[12] He set out with a hundred and ten thousand warriors and came near the land of Sul. Then he sent Khosrow a threatening and haughty message. It demanded money for himself and the tribute for the three peoples, failing which he would overrun the country and attack the king in person.^[12] Khosrow paid no attention to the threat and granted none of the demands. The reason was that he had fortified the region of the gate of Sul and secured the roads and passes through which Sinjibu would have to march.^[12] He knew the Armenian frontier to be held by five thousand foot and horse.^[12] When Sinjibu heard how strong the fortifications at Sul were, he went home with his people without having achieved anything.^[12] This Sinjibu is the Silzibulos of Menander and the Sizabul of Theophanes.^[6] The collision of Göktürks and Persians became possible only after the fall of the Hephthalite realm. Silzibul undertook such a campaign against Persia in 569 or 570, while Zemarchos was with him.^[6] Menander tells that campaign from the side of the Roman envoy Zemarchos.^[1]

Silk and the Sogdians

Menander tells the episode of the quarrel over the silk that turned the Göktürks west. The Sogdians, once subjects of the Hephthalites and now of the Göktürks, asked Istemi for an embassy to Persia to sell their raw silk there. Istemi agreed, and Maniakh led it.^[1] Khosrow was unwilling to give the Sogdians free access to Persia. He took the advice of the Hephthalite Katulph, bought the silk at a fair price and burned it before the envoys’ eyes. He did so in order that he should not be held to have done an injustice and that it should be plain that he did not want raw silk from the Göktürks.^[1] Istemi then sent a second embassy, this one Göktürk. Khosrow had the envoys poisoned, all but three or four, and let it be said that they had died of the Persian heat.^[1] Katulph told him that friendship with the Göktürks was against Persian interest, since the Scythians were not to be trusted.^[1] Istemi saw through the story. On Maniakh’s advice he turned to the Romans.^[1]

The burning was policy, not blockade. The Sasanians fixed trade at frontier towns by permit and protected a merchant class of their own.^[3] The Sogdians could not sell the silk on the western frontier. Confiscated, it could not be used at Khosrow’s court either, because it was the very symbol of the wealth and power of the new enemy, the product of the tribute China paid the Göktürks.^[3] The refusal was political. It was aimed at the Göktürks rather than at the Sogdians, whose merchants were the middlemen of the drachms that made up the currency of Central Asia.^[3] A second telling of the same scene has more colour. Istemi reports the burning at Bukhara and sends a second delegation “now more than ever”. The outcome was a licence refused to the Sogdians and a passage refused to the Göktürks.^[10] When Zemarchos came back from Istemi’s camp through Talas, a Persian envoy was there before him. Istemi seated the Roman above the Persian and set out against Persia.^[1]

Legacy

Khosrow died in 579 and left the Göktürk question to his son. Two events mark the ends of the policy he began. One is the first great Göktürk–Persian war, of 588, in which Hormizd IV sent Bahram Chobin against the Göktürk army at Herat. The other is the alliance that Heraclius made with the Göktürks before Derbent and Tiflis in 627. That policy was a fortified frontier against the steppe, and a trade held at the frontier by permit. Three great Göktürk–Persian wars followed his death, in 588, 606 and 627. The first of them was the war of 588.^[13]

Assessment

Khosrow is the only Persian king with whom a Göktürk khan dealt as an equal. The dealings ran the full course from alliance to poison in a decade. The Göktürks remembered the poison. Tabari remembered the walls at Sul that turned Sinjibu home. The Sogdian silk that Khosrow burned to keep out of his markets went instead to Constantinople, and the Göktürks went with it.

References

^ a b c d e f g h Menander Protector
^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ a b c d e de la Vaissière 2005a
^ a b Tabari; Nöldeke 1879
^ Nöldeke 1879, p. 158
^ a b c d e f g Nöldeke 1879
^ Golden 1992, p. 83
^ Tabari; Nöldeke 1879, p. 158–159
^ Tabari; Nöldeke 1879, p. 167
^ a b c d e Yavuz 2025
^ Kurbanov 2010
^ a b c d e Tabari
^ Yavuz 2025, p. 428

Sources

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Aydogdy Kurbanov, The Hephthalites: Archaeological and Historical Analysis (2010)
Theodor Nöldeke, Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden. Aus der arabischen Chronik des Tabari übersetzt und mit ausführlichen Erläuterungen und Ergänzungen versehn (1879)