On this date… 23 February 628
Khosrow II overthrown
Empires rise and fall. Borders change. Kings (and Queens, and various other titles for similar rulers) fight and die. It’s the nature of leadership. Somebody’s got to be the last King (or Queen or whatever) of a place. For the Sasanian Empire, the last (great) leader was Khosrow II, who was executed on this date 23 February, back in 628. Technically there were later leaders of the Sasanian Empire, but with Khosrow’s death the empire effectively came to an end.
Despite his eventual defeat and overthrow, Khosrow has sometimes been called “the Victorious” for his exploits in his early rule as Shahenshah (King of Kings). Khosrow was born around 570 to powerful noble families from both parents. With the help of two uncles, Khosrow overthrew his father to become king in 590, aged around 20, but was himself deposed by a rebellious general. Khosrow fled the Persian capital of Ctesiphon to Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire (after they had their own small rebellion in the Nika Riots). With the help of the Byzantine emperor Maurice, Khosrow regained the throne in 591, and remained in power until his death. Upon regaining his throne he consolidated power and began expanding the empire by conquering the rich Byzantine provinces in the Middle East, which helped earn him the epithet “the Victorious.” He even attacked Constantinople in 626, but was unable to conquer it, which in part led to a coup to replace him just two years later.
The coup against him marked the practical end of the Sasanian Empire, since there were a series of civil wars and weak, ineffectual rulers afterwards. The empire was completely subsumed after the Muslim conquest of Persia just a few years later (and the Golden Age of Islam soon after). The Sasanids were the last purely Iranian empire before the Arab Muslim conquest, and one of the longest-lived Persian dynasties in their long, illustrious history.
First unified as a country around 625 BCE, Persia became major players in the international stage when Cyrus the Great founded what became known as the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE). It was the Achaemenids that had the largest ever (at the time) empire and who terrorized the Greek city-states (I talked briefly about the Greeks earlier) during the Greco-Persian Wars. These clashes included such famous encounters as the Battle of Marathon (yes, that’s where the modern 26.2 mile distance run comes from), the Battle of Thermopylae (with the famous 300 soldiers under Leonidas), and the naval Battle of Salamis. The Achaemenids were also the Persians whom Alexander the Great fought and conquered, which then led to his Greek successors the Seleucids (312–247 BCE), before another native Iranian group known as the Parthian Empire (247 BCE–224 CE) and, eventually, the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE). At its greatest extent, the Sasanian Empire encompassed much of the Middle and Near East, including all of present-day Iran and Iraq, the Levant, parts of India, the Arabian peninsula, and Central Asia.
The Sasanians spurred a revival of Iranian nationalism and trade, characterized by the rise of Zoroastrianism as the state religion and the importance of the Silk Road trading routes. These helped lead to a centralized bureaucracy, important government sponsored arts and architecture (including famous rock reliefs in the already established Naqsh-e Rostam, the tombs of the ancient Achaemenid kings, and Bishapur), and a stress on scholarship, including translations of works from both the East and the West into Pahlavi (Middle Persian), the official state language. The Sasanian period is also characterized by its frequent clashes with its neighbors, including the Roman and Byzantine Empires in the west, and various nomadic tribes and clans in the north and east.
It’s hard to explicitly state the future impact the Sasanian Empire had on the world stage, but some notable influence can be seen. Persian warfare of the time did impact the structure and character of the Roman and Byzantine armies. Scholars believe that the Babylonian Talmud was composed in Sasanian territory sometime between the third and sixth centuries and major centers of Jewish scholarship were established in numerous cities. After the fall of the empire and the establishment of Islam, a large group of Zoroastrians emigrated to India and became known as the Parsee. Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen, was Parsee. The Empire may have fallen, but the Queen still exists.