Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

taxation and military organization 657
on the 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
Khusro, towards the end of his reign, was hard put to keep his system functioning.
50 The control mechanism proved to be as susceptible to corruption
as the taxation machinery that had to be controlled. Furthermore, the
strained relations between soldier and civilian, especially in the remoter
zones, exacted their toll. In effect, the king could restrain only the soldiers
under his direct command from despoiling the rural tax-payers, as is shown
by the restrictions imposed by Hormizd IV (579–90) on a journey to Mah.
It is probable, however, that already during the last days of his father many
of the cavalrymen no longer owed direct allegiance to the king, but had
become again retainers of greater and virtually independent landlords. A
brief glance at the aftermath of Khusro’s military reforms may provide the
clue to understanding what happened.
The fragility of the financial arrangements that underpinned the standing
army militated against enduring success for Khusro’s reforms. If, as
suggested above, the Sasanid economy was never fully monetized, the need
to provide for the soldiers’ everyday needs, at times mostly in goods, will
have encouraged the reinstitution of enfeoffment as the standard military
contract, even among the lower ranks. Thus, following a limited period
when Khusro seriously attempted to sustain his new standing army, already
in his own lifetime the asavaran were increasingly reverting to an enfeoffed
estate, even though the tendency of such allotments to become hereditary,
with the consequent problems caused by alienation, had to be faced. 51
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 high nobility was a more serious problem
even than the cavalrymen. The Mazdakite revolt and its aftermath made possible
a feudal system more directly dependent on the king than ever before:
the nobility restored by Khusro himself was firmly beholden to the king, so
there could be no doubts about the origin of its estates and the nature of the
services owed to the crown. But the nobility soon returned to its pristine
positions of power. The notion that the supreme military commanders and
ministers of state were now salaried civil servants is contradicted by the
limited available evidence. Thus, for example, Khusro’s nominees as spahbads
– the four supreme military commands he created to supersede the old office
of the artestaransalar – must have been mighty territorial lords right from the
50 Discussion in Rubin (1995) 237–9, 279–84.
51 Theophylact iii.15.4 states that Persian troops did not receive a proper salary during service within
the kingdom’s borders, but had to rely on ‘customary distributions’ from the king. This contradicts the
hypothesis of a salaried standing army in Howard-Johnston (1995).
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