Egypt in the 11th Century
The Khardi conquest of Egypt was declared achieved long before they had effective control over the sprawling territory. Evidence points to the mass seizure of river-boats by Iranian troops to allow travel up and down the Nile. Alexandria itself was besieged and did not fall until the subsequent year, but by 1018 Artaxser ruled everything from the Nile delta to Syene – at least notionally.
By 1019, Artaxser had returned to Susa, where he was aiming to rebuild the “ancient capital.” In one of the strange twists of history, the Kurdish nomads who had conquered Mesopotamia generally had a narrow view of their own past. While the Mitradharmid dynasty traced their lineage back to mythological ancient Shahs, they had only a foggy understanding of the Sasanian dynasty or the Arascids before them. In general, history began when they settled Mesopotamia less than two centuries previously – all else took on the cast of antique legend. Accordingly, Susa was the eternal capital of any Iranian Empire, and Tesiphon and other historic centers of power were poorly regarded as mere provincial seats.
After leaving Egypt, Artaxser left it in the hands of Prince Berxwedan, his brother, who was allowed to rule it with the title of Shah. He took with him a large portion of the army, ordering Rojkhat to launch a punitive expedition against the Arabs. The Arab tribes of Syria and Palestine were old allies of the Heshanids, and with the decline of Saihism, they made easy allies with interior tribes such as the Tayy and waged guerilla war against the Khardi. Doctrinal differences were for the moment forgotten in the face of the overwhelming threat posed by the Iranian armies. While Jerusalem had fallen to pagans before, never had there been such a disruption of pilgrimage or a desecration of holy places. Word of this violence would ultimately spread as far as the Frankish lands.
Berxwedan was an unpopular ruler, to say the least. In Heliopolis, the seat of the Royal Palace, he enjoyed near absolute license to do as he pleased – the population of the city was small and primarily existed to serve the bureaucratic needs of the state. However, he could not govern and pacify Egypt by remaining in a single isolated palace city. He travelled to Alexandria and according to contemporary Coptic chronicles, he carried out pagan sacrifices in the churches and allowed his soldiers to loot the richly decorated interiors. In the words of the monk Cyril of Memphis, he “burnt alive twelve horses to honor Ohrmazd and Virhrm, and spread the blood of babes in the baptismal font.” Despite the obvious exaggeration, it seems obvious that Berxwedan had no regard for the Alexandrine populace and when they broke out in rioting, he ordered his troops the massacre the protestors.
The people of Alexandria, and Egypt in general, were not particularly warlike. The Heshanids had never relied on Coptic peasants for anything more than garrisons and preventing civil insurrections, allowing them to take the field only in major campaigns and then preferring to utilize Arabs and Syrians, who they viewed as more martial races. Accordingly there was little knowledge of warfare among the Egyptians.
During the rebellions of 1019-1024, the Egyptian forces time and again had poor discipline, poor equipment, and limited training. They put their faith in religious conviction, believing they could not fail if their cause was righteous. Alas, God favored the side with the lance-armed heavy cavalry whose horses were barded with scale and lamellar. Furthermore, the geography of Egypt made guerilla warfare difficult. The Khardi army gained control of the Nile and major cities, and then with almost contemptuous ease proceeded from village to village slaughtering any resistance. That the rebellion lasted some five years is a testament to the fanaticism of the resistance even in spite of massive material disadvantages.
It was Rojkhat, ironically, who struggled, despite being a kinder and more accommodating figure in the eyes of the locals. Despite being notionally a member of the Nowbahar, he was a personally tolerant figure who refused to allow his personal austerity to dictate the beliefs of his subjects. He reversed prohibitions on pilgrimage and allowed the Christians to carry out the religious services in peace. However, on the battlefield he found himself struggling. The rough terrain of Palestine saw some portion of his vanguard caught in an ambush and henceforth he found that the Arabs were a dangerous foe, who knew the countryside and knew where to drill for water. His own advantages were minimal, and he had few allies – but an ample supply of reinforcements with which to wear down the Arab partisans. In desperation he also made an alliance with surviving Saihist tribesmen, gaining guides that allowed him to pursue the enemy deep into their own territory – only to awaken one cool desert morning to find the guides departed and Arab soldiers all around. On some anonymous outcropping, the Khardi forces barely fought their way out of the ambush and limped back to Palestine.
Syavos, meanwhile, had fled to Makuria, where he pleaded with the Emperor Zacharias for aid. However, it was slow in coming. The Makurian army was engaged primarily in the south, fighting bandits in the wake of the Hawiyan collapse. The Jewish warlords of Zanafij were a more potent and immediate threat to Makuria. Further, Zacharias imposed certain demands – namely, he wanted to reverse the relationship between Egypt and Makuria, where Makuria was the lesser partner and dependent on Egypt for the confirmation of Bishops. Syavos found any terms that would leave him a vassal to his southern counterpart intolerable, and was unable to put aside his pride for several years. Though he was treated as an honored guest, he was not permitted to leave the palace, and finally this confinement wore him thin and he acceded to Zacharias’ demands. Even then, however, aid did not come. The two men signed a treaty of sorts, but deciding the timetable was the luxury of the Makurians.
Other Egyptians looked to hope from Agillid Igider of Cyrene, but the young King rebuffed their pleas. He was now free entirely from the tributary yoke of the Heshanids, and a small, halfhearted attempt by Berxwedan to bring him to heel was rebuffed. Inscriptions on stele from Igider’s reign seem to indicate a heterodox approach to Christianity, where the Berbers refused to stop worshipping their traditional gods, but cheerfully included Jesus and the Christian God amongst their pantheons. Coins bore the stamp of “Khrist Idir” a sort of syncretic deity first recorded in 1012, who began to gain a widespread following in 1026 after Igider’s brother Izarasen took power.
The [Persian] Crisis of the 11th Century[1]
What greater perversion of the Darma can there be than Arthasher the son of Anisherivana who is the breaker of idols and sets himself among the number of the gods? The hour of the Mithra Bodda is nigh upon us, and may we all be saved from ignorance and despair.
-11th century manuscript recovered from an Azerbijani temple
Stand and know you stand before the ultimate, the great God and Lord, the ultimate divinity of all divinities, the ultimate controlling principle of all controlling powers.
Lord of the becoming world, the principle that is invoked and worshipped through the name of Zurvan has itself no notion or faculty; nor has it anything that it must do.
No natural thing or artifice is God’s equal or superior. God cannot take the form of any bodily thing. Meditate then upon this.
-Text found in the Iranian city of Ram
The religious and ethnic conflicts which defined Iran since the fall of the Eftal eventually gave way to something new and altogether more unified. It was a bloody, but perhaps inevitable, process. Ironically, it was the Khardi, a people who were mostly “pagans” in the most classical sense of the term, who would bring about the reforms necessary to end the sectarian violence between the great factions of Iranian society. Religious sects such as the Homihna and the Nowbahar, the latter Mahadevists and the rising cult of Virhrm-Ohrmazd all clashed at times with the polytheist Buddhism that was by now the mainstream, majority religion of Iran, to say nothing of the communal violence afflicted on the remaining Christian communities of Armenia and Asoristan. The common Iranians resented the privileged status of Turks and Eftal within the Ifthal mercenary system, and all comers resented the Khardi for settling amongst them and building new garrison cities, and perhaps above all for conquering them.
The Yazdati beliefs of the Khardi themselves fell somewhere between the “mystery cult” movements popularized by Bakhti refugees and Zoroastrian holy men and the lay Buddhism of the common Eftal and Iranian. Accordingly, they were distrusted by all – neither strange enough to be exotic and not familiar enough to be trusted, their detractors whispered of the “perversion of religion” while cheerfully ignoring the fact that their own religion would have been unrecognizable to a Sasanian nobleman or even an Eftal tribesman from but a few centuries ago.
Despite this distrust, the Khardi were innovators determined to maintain their hold on power. They had carved an empire that stretched from Sogdia to Cappadocia, effectively restoring the Eftal Empire at its height in a way not even equaled by the Aghatsaghids, who had relied heavily on viceroys and tributary princes to accomplish a similar feat. However, unlike the Eftal, the Mitradharmid dynasty could not depend on the relative tolerance of their subjects. Furthermore, despite their relatively small numbers, the Nowbahar enjoyed a disproportionate voice which showed every sign of growing stronger and more resolute in the face of persecution.
The groundwork for Artaxser’s religious reforms would be laid even during his first major campaign into Egypt. From the moment of his ascension to the Imperial bench he claimed to be a Chakravarti and the bringer of universal justice – weaving the Buddhist conception of monarchy with language and rhetoric not unfamiliar to any of the more Iranianized sects including the new Mahadevist movements. The Iranshahr was not going to deny divinities entirely, but many of the Iranian mystery cults had themselves always had an iconoclastic streak, preferring to represent God as fire or an absence in their art. He equated the Yazdati deities with their equivalents in Eftal and Iranian mythology, a practice which was relatively easy given the widespread intermixing of Khardi and their subjects.
Artaxser avoided open persecution in favor of covert persecution and propaganda. Forcing prominent Nowbahar preachers to publicly recant their testimony through less than savory means and give favorable accounts of his reign was a particular favored tactic of his. He minted coins where his own image was absent, replaced with an icon of the throne and the Buddha on one side and a stylistic symbol representing Ohrmazd or Mitra on the reverse. Thanks to the long propagation of Indian religious thought over the centuries, the merger and equating of gods was something that most people were familiar with. Various philosophical and religious tracts even argued for something akin to monotheism or pantheism – influenced by the pantheistic tendencies which had been in vogue across the subcontinent in the wake of the Maukhani. The struggle, as ever, was incorporating the nontheistic tendencies of Buddhism, and this was where the vicious Nowbahar reaction diverged with the moderate repudiations of traditional western Buddhism.[2]
Artaxser established himself as an almost divine figure, but notably refused to take this in an explicitly Buddhist route. The victories of the Khardi and his dynasty in particular, his propaganda claimed, were because they were rightful rulers of Iran, descended from the mythic Askanid dynasty, and thus their rule was in accordance with truth and the spread of universal justice and enlightenment to all. Abandoned stupa and temples across Iran but especially in Avghanistan were renovated and claimed to be evidence of the ancient Askanid dynasty’s patronage of the Buddha.
In this manner, Artaxser, more than any of his predecessors, laid the ideological groundwork for the survival and continuance of the Khardi state. As a conqueror and ruler alike he developed a cult of personality around himself and his dynasty which ensured its endurance. By skirting close to claiming the title of something like the Maitreya Buddha or a Saosyant but without openly taking any such title and indeed actively repudiating these notions, he managed to appropriate the rhetoric of a messianic redeemer and tread a delicate middle path between those who wished to smash idols and end god-worship, and those for whom the Buddha was just another aspect of a vast pantheon of gods.
Those Nowbahar who refused to be silenced fled in no small numbers to southern Arabia and among the Savahila. The former embraced them for their iconoclasm and the latter were remarkably tolerant. In general, however, the Khardi Iranshahr lost little. They patronized any intellectual willing to write positively about their regime, and co-opted many others with subtle applications of force, which allowed their narrative to overpower the dissenting voices. Other mystery cultists and radicals fled north, seeking the Sahu country, or east into India, where their mysticism was sometimes embraced.
It is worth noting that certain regions required different policies. Ferghana, Sogd, and Avghana all were more deeply Hindu in their religious observances, and accordingly were not deeply penetrated by Nowbahar sympathies. Furthermore, they were sufficiently peripheral that their satraps were allowed to issue currency which differed in style (if not in weight or specifications) from the royal currency. These coins frequently feature depictions of Hindu and Iranian deities as human beings, and their temples did not undergo the iconoclastic transformation that afflicted the west. Imperial policy was frequently one of benign neglect, so long as taxes were collected and garrisons respected. However, stele commemorating Artaxser’s reign can nevertheless be found across these regions, so Imperial rule was never quite as light as Aghatsaghid dominion over large parts of Persia and Mesopotamia was.
[1] Obviously the Persians wouldn’t have called it that. Also there’s another big crisis in the 11th century that will involve a major setback to the Indian “Republican” tradition, so I wanted to clarify. Spoilers!
[2] Iranian/Sogdian Buddhism of course allows for plenty of traditional deities and like most of the western Buddhist traditions is quite heretical. However it refuses to acknowledge or concern itself with an overall deity or a creator deity, seeing both as heretical. Even after Artaxser’s reforms, the notion of a universal deity should not be confused with a creator deity – the universe is both eternal and cyclical in their conception.
also appreciate the focus on religion, especially from such a subtle theologic angle.
