Boran was queen (banbishn) of the Sasanian Empire. She was the daughter
of emperor Khosrow II, and the first of only two women to rule the Sasanian
Empire; the other was her sister and successor, Azarmidokht. Various authors
place her reign between one year and four months to two years.
Her name appears as Bōrān (or Burān) on her coinage. The Persian poet
Ferdowsi refers to her as Purandokht in his epic poem, the Shahnameh. She was
committed to revive the memory and prestige of her father, during whose reign
the Sasanian Empire had grown to its largest territorial extent.
The Sasanian Empire conquered Jerusalem after a brief siege
in 614, during the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628, after the Persian Shah
Khosrau II appointed his general Shahrbaraz to conquer the Byzantine controlled
areas of the Near East. Following the victory in Antioch, Shahrbaraz conquered
Caesarea Maritima, the administrative capital of the province. By this time the
grand inner harbor had silted up and was useless, however the Emperor
Anastasius had reconstructed the outer harbor and Caesarea remained an important
maritime city, providing the Persian Empire with access to the Mediterranean
Sea. The Sasanian Persians were joined by Nehemiah ben Hushiel and Benjamin of
Tiberias (a man of immense wealth), who enlisted and armed Jewish soldiers from
Tiberias, Nazareth and the mountain cities of Galilee, and together with a band
of Arabs and additional Jews from southern parts of the country they marched on
Jerusalem. Some 20,000 Jewish rebels joined the war against the Byzantine
Christians. Depending on the chronicler figures of either 20,000 or 26,000 are
given. The Persian army reinforced by Jewish forces led by Nehemiah ben Hushiel
and Benjamin of Tiberias would capture Jerusalem without resistance.
#
In the fateful year 614 the armies of the Sassanian king
Khosroes II set up siege towers outside Jerusalem, breached its walls, and
invaded the city. With due allowance for the partisan and rhetorical
exaggeration in our sources, it is safe to say that this invasion was the most
devastating event to befall this ancient and holy city since the Roman forces
had brought to an end the rebellion of Bar Kokhba in 135 and expelled the
Jewish population. The Persians had made their way to Jerusalem after
assaulting Syrian Antioch and moving southwards by way of Caesarea-on-the-sea.
Apart from marauding monks, Samaritan uprisings, a minor disturbance under the
Caesar Gallus, and the indeterminate mischief wrought by the apostate Julian,
Palestine had not seen such violence or devastation for well over four
centuries. Although the Christian population grew in number over this period,
the region had been generally hospitable to indigenous Jews, who flourished
particularly in the Galilee and nourished an increasingly large cadre of
rabbinical scholars. Traditional local pagan cults continued to flourish along
with traditional Hellenism, which had in late antiquity led to the widespread
designation of pagans simply as Hellenes. The invasion of the Sassanian
Persians delivered a shattering jolt to this world after so many centuries and,
in retrospect, foreshadowed another great invasion just over two decades later.
The relation between the Persian capture of Jerusalem in 614 and the Muslim
seizure of the city in 638 has nourished endless scholarly and homiletic
debate. We have finally reached a point at which once-fashionable dogmas have
spectacularly dissolved one after another.
It will no longer do to claim that the Persian devastation
left the region so physically, economically, and spiritually ruined that it was
inevitably receptive to the armies of the Prophet, nor will it do to claim that
the Muslims wiped out the vestiges of the old symbiosis of Jews, Christians,
and pagans. What happened between 614 and 638 was undoubtedly traumatic, but
the wounds that Jerusalem and Palestine suffered were by no means mortal. It
has gradually become apparent that the cultural, economic, and religious
landscape did not look very much different after 638 from what it had done
before 614. The religious and ideological impulses behind the momentous
upheavals of that period spawned such varied and often contradictory narratives
of what had just happened that only the most arduous exercise of historical
source criticism and archaeology can make sense of it all. And everyone knows
that historical source criticism and archaeology have not always been the most
congenial or accommodating allies.
The Persian arrival in Jerusalem had its ultimate origin in
the murder of the Byzantine emperor Maurice in 602 through the intrigue of the
usurper Phocas. The king of Persia, Khosroes II, had owed his throne to the
favorable intercession of Maurice at a difficult time, and so when Maurice was
removed by a usurper, Khosroes rightly saw an opportunity to avenge his
benefactor’s death by taking advantage of the new weakness of the Byzantine
Empire. He began a formidable campaign of aggression that constituted the
greatest incursion of Persian forces into Syria, Asia Minor, and Palestine
since the conquests of Shapur I in the third century. The dormant hostility of
the Sassanians, which Maurice had successfully used to his own advantage, now
became terrifyingly active. This initiative not only opened the way for the
removal of Phocas by the exceptionally astute Heraclius in 610. It also brought
the two empires into direct conflict under the personal leadership of their
emperors. In 613, Khosroes inflicted a crushing defeat upon Heraclius in Asia
Minor. He subsequently moved on into Syrian Antioch, which had barely recovered
from the devastation of a Persian sack of the city in 540. The taking of
Antioch was an ominous prelude to the taking of Jerusalem in the following
year.
Up to the moment of Maurice’s death, the Sassanian Empire,
which had long been Byzantium’s rival in the Near and Middle East, had been
quiescent during the aggressive expansionism of Justinian, and the two empires
had pursued their interests obliquely by supporting client tribes such as the
Jafnids (or Ghassānids) in Syria and the Naṣrids (or Lakhmids) in the south. In
the Arabian peninsula the Persians had, as we have seen, brilliantly exploited
the ambitions of the Arab converts to Judaism in Ḥimyar. With the rise of a
strong king in Ethiopia who promoted an irredentist claim to recover former
Ethiopian dominions in Arabia, the Christian negus in Axum was able to further
his ambitions by coming to the aid of Christians across the Red Sea when they
were suffering a cruel persecution at the hands of the Jewish Ḥimyarites. We
have seen in the previous lecture that this gave the Persians an opportunity to
reassert their support of the Jews in opposition to the Christians, whose final
operations in the Arabian peninsula had received explicit encouragement from
the Byzantine emperor. The Chalcedonian beliefs of the New Rome did not at all
stand in the way of using the monophysite Ethiopians as a buffer against the
Persians, who were more worried about the Byzantine state than its doctrinal
position. The Nestorian Christians in the Sassanian realm were rarely a pawn in
sixth-century power politics. But Sassanian support of the Jews served as a
banner of anti-Byzantine policy. It was only to be expected that when the
Ethiopian Abraha, whom Axum had duly installed as its Christian ruler in Ḥimyar,
lost his grip and fell from power, he was soon replaced by a Persian client,
who remained there throughout the last decades of the sixth century.
By the time that the army of Khosroes stood outside the
walls of Jerusalem, it could hardly have been a secret that Jews had every
reason to expect the support of the invaders. Persian sympathy for Jews in the
Arabian peninsula was firmly on record, and it is likely that Jewish Ḥimyarites
in Palestine, such as those whose tombs have been found at Bet She’arim, would
have been well aware of what their co-religionists owed to the Persians. Not
far from Jerusalem itself, the recently discovered epitaph for a certain Leah
points to an even closer link to the holy city. It has a bilingual text,
starting with a quotation from Daniel, in mixed Aramaic and Hebrew and, below
it, a text in South Arabian Sabaic.
It is clear from two surviving texts that were composed within
a few decades of 614 that the Jews were not disappointed in any hopes they may
have placed in the Persian invaders, and that the Jews in Jerusalem, for their
part, did what they could to support the Persian presence. Despite the ancient
history of the Babylonian Captivity, the Jews had had a long presence in
Mesopotamia, and we should not be altogether surprised that the Jews in
Jerusalem in 614 cooperated willingly with the Persian invaders. What we learn
from the history of Ḥimyar in the previous century only confirms what we find
in two eyewitness sources for Jerusalem.
The first of these, on which there is much to be said, was
written by a monk of Mar Saba after the return of the True Cross to the holy
city by Heraclius in 630. He bears the name of Strategios, although this name
has, in recent scholarship, sometimes been illicitly annexed to that of a
ghostly character called Antiochus or Antiochius, whom Migne’s Patrologia
Graeca has patched together from various texts. There is no doubt that Strategios
was not Antiochus or Antiochius and that he wrote his narrative originally in
Greek. But unfortunately for us, we know it only from Georgian and Arabic
translations. The Georgian tradition is more reliable and certainly better
edited. Despite the efforts of the excellent Belgian scholar Gérard Garitte in
rendering the Georgian version into fluent Latin, historians down to the
present have tended to favor a seriously abridged English version that F. C.
Conybeare published from the initial Georgian edition early in the twentieth
century. Strategios’ narrative is undoubtedly hyperbolic in places, but it is
marvelously circumstantial, with many topographical details concerning
recognizable places in Jerusalem as well as an explicit reference to the monk
Modestus, whose correspondence with the Armenian Katholikos Komitas guarantees
his historicity. Strategios strangely blamed the fate of the Christians in
Jerusalem on the city’s circus factions, the Blues and the Greens, because he
considered them responsible for the reckless conduct that led the Christian
population into sin. He saw the Persian invasion as a divine penalty.
Strategios’ reports of massacres and communal burials, as well as his claims of
Persian destruction of churches and shrines, necessarily require the sober
control of archaeology, and fortunately this has very recently become
available.
But, before turning to that as well as to the second
eyewitness source, we need to examine Strategios’ account of the Jews in
connection with the argument advanced so far. Here is what he reports:
The vicious Jews, both enemies of truth and haters of Christ,
greatly rejoiced as they saw the Christians handed over into the hands of the
enemy. They conceived an evil plan in accordance with their ill will towards
the people, for they had acquired a great reputation with the Persians as the
betrayers of Christians. At that time they were standing by the edge of a
reservoir and shouting to the sons of God, who were detained there, and they
said to them, “If you want to avoid death, become Jews and deny Christ. Come up
from there and come to us. We will buy you back from the Persians with our
money, and you will thereby benefit through us.” The wicked intent of their
plan was not carried out, and their effort turned out to be in vain. For the
sons of the holy Church chose to die for Christ rather than to live impiously.
The tendentious character of this narrative is obvious, but
there is no explicit assertion that the Persians might have been predisposed to
favor the Jews, although that is more than likely. Strategios also mention
another religious constituency in the city, apparently the pagans, whom he
calls, in conformity with the widespread usage of the time, Greeks (Hellenes),
but he accuses these people of cowardice. For Strategios the Christians, with
whom the Persians struggle, are called simply Christians, and the Persians’
friends, the Jews, are called Jews. The monk Modestus had tried to mobilize an
army of so-called Greeks to help, but as soon as those poor souls had taken a
look at the size of the Persian force, they fled. Hence those Greeks who bolted
ought probably to be local pagans. Strategios also mentions “inhabitants of the
city” who were distressed by the flight of the Greeks before the Persians, and
they could well have been other pagans, those whom Modestus had not recruited.
Neither the Jews nor the pagans appear to receive the slightest sympathy from
the Christians, even though Strategios believed that it was the Christians who
had brought on the whole catastrophe through their wanton behavior as fans of
the circus factions. His entire interpretation, to say nothing of his language
for the various communities in the city, is open to debate, but it would
nevertheless seem reasonable to assume that the Persians had indicated both
their support of the Jews and their lack of hostility towards the pagans. The
Byzantine Christians were their target.
At more or less the same time as Strategios was writing, a
second eyewitness report came from the monk and future patriarch Sophronius,
who was engaged in the composition of a series of twenty-two bravura Greek
poems in the classical Anacreontic meter to celebrate liturgical feasts.
Sophronius, who was also known as a sophist, was clearly steeped in Greek
poetic traditions, and his twenty-two Anacreontic poems (a twenty-third is
rightly considered spurious) include a piece on the Persian capture of
Jerusalem, as well as two others on the city’s holy places. It is unknown
whether Sophronius was in the city in 614, although he certainly had been there
and was briefly in Alexandria later, where he was with his friend John Moschus.
He soon left Alexandria for Rome with Moschus, who died in the city. The
fourteenth of Sophronius’ Anacreontic poems is entirely devoted to the capture
of the holy city, and, like Strategios’ account, appears to be based on personal
experience, or at the very least on direct testimony from an eyewitness. It
inveighs mercilessly against the Sassanian invaders, who are called not only
Persians, but also, derogatively, Medes and Parthians. Sophronius wrote, in
vivid language, “The treacherous Mede arrived from wicked Persia, fighting
cities and citizens, fighting the lord of Rome (that is, Byzantium) . . . A
daemon has arisen in blazing rage and envy of the knife, destroying many holy
cities with bloody swords.” The poem then alludes to the Jews: “When they (the
Christians) saw the Parthians at hand together with their Jewish friends, they
ran off at once and fastened the gates of the city” to pray for Christ’s help.
Sophronius died in 638 after serving as the patriarch of
Jerusalem for the previous four years. His poem on the Persian capture of the
city cannot be dated precisely, but it obviously reflects the outrage he felt.
It acquires a special poignancy when we recall that in his last year as
patriarch he made a pact with the Muslim Caliph ‘Umar ibn al Khaṭṭāb to turn
over Jerusalem to the Arabs. This is but another thread in the tangled web of
relations among the Persians, Byzantines, and Arabs, as the struggle between
the two old empires and the rising new one played itself out.
If we can find some kind of historical explanation for the
role of Jews during the capture of Jerusalem in 614, even after discounting the
tendentiousness of the story of the reservoir as narrated by Strategios, we are
still left with a wealth of topographical details about mass burials and
devastated churches, and these details have long colored modern accounts of the
capture of the city. The numbers of the Christian dead are given in the tens of
thousands, which is intrinsically improbable. The Nea Church of the Theotokos,
the Church of Holy Zion, the Church of the Probatica, and the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre, as well as churches on the Mount of Olives, figure prominently
in modern accounts. Many of these sites appear, with an appeal to
archaeological remains, in Ben Isaac’s comprehensive introduction to
Jerusalem’s history at the beginning of the first volume of the recently
published Corpus of inscriptions of Judaea and Palestine. But we now owe to
Gideon Avni a thorough and definitive report on the archaeological evidence
both for mass burials and the destruction of churches. With the data and
support supplied by many of his colleagues, he makes a powerful case against
the historical value of much of Strategios’ evidence, without, as in
Strategios’ comments on the Jews, rejecting it altogether.
Avni observes that a certain Thomas, according to
Strategios, organized the burial of the Christian dead in Jerusalem in
thirty-five different locations. Although some of these locations can be
correlated with known sites, overall careful archaeological examination of the
stratigraphy either shows no evidence for destruction layers at the time of the
Persian invasion or lacks ceramic materials that might be used to date any
burnt layers. As for actual burials, only seven sites of Byzantine date have
been discovered, and these are all outside the Old City. The one secure
correlation with the information in Strategios occurs in the case of a rock-cut
cave in Mamilla, some 120 meters west of the Jaffa Gate. Strategios states that
masses of Christians assembled in the Mamilla pool were massacred, and that the
pious Thomas removed their corpses to a nearby cave. The cave that has been
excavated at Mamilla proved to be full of human bones, and a small chapel in
front of it was decorated with Christian symbols, including three crosses.
Anthropological analysis of the bones has suggested that most of the hundreds
of skeletons in the cave were the remains of young persons, with women
outnumbering men. Avni writes, “All this suggests that the deceased met a
sudden death.”
In the Mamilla cave, as well as in the six other mass
burials of the same period, the method of burial, as Avni has stressed, is very
different from other Byzantine burials in Jerusalem. These normally were in
spaces devoted to a family or in crypts within the grounds of a monastery. So
the seven mass burials are indeed exceptional, indicating a hasty removal of
corpses and reasonably pointing to the time of the Persian invasion. But, with
that said, it is clear that the number of deaths and sepulchres is far less
than Strategios has described, and this encourages skepticism about his reports
of the devastation of buildings, especially churches. Despite previous
archaeological claims of evidence for this devastation, Avni stresses that the
interpretations were inaccurate because there was no reasonable ceramic
classification to provide a credible chronology. The recent and extensive
analysis carried out by Jodi Magness now reveals a remarkable continuity of
pottery types, as well as coins, that has suggested to many historians in
recent years an uninterrupted occupation across and beyond the Persian
conquest, as well the Islamic.
Robert Schick has emphasized in his invaluable work on the
Christian communities of Palestine that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is
often said to have been set on fire and seriously damaged, providing an
opportunity for the holy Modestus to make major repairs with the help of
donations from the pious.18 But we now know that there was no significant
damage to the Church in the early seventh century, nor were there any
substantial repairs or renovations. Thanks to Leah Di Segni’s acute analysis of
monograms inscribed on the Byzantine capitals of the Church, we learn that the
emperor Maurice installed the capitals during repairs at the end of the sixth
century. These were left untouched by the Persian invaders. Similarly, Avni has
demolished the archaeological conclusions, on which Ben Isaac had relied, for
the destruction at the Church of Holy Zion as well as Eleona and Gethsemane on
the Mount of Olives.
It will always be possible that whatever damage the Persians
did in Jerusalem was so rapidly repaired that no traces remained, but the odds
are against this when such a partisan source as Strategios can be convicted of
exaggeration and error in both his numbers of the dead and the location of mass
burials. But recent excavations on the northwest side of the City of David hill
provide an instructive modification of this conclusion. A horde of 264
mint-condition gold coins has been discovered in what seems to have been an
administrative building. These coins are unique, representing a hitherto
unknown variant of Heraclius’ coinage as it appears between 610 and 613. The
264 unexampled coins, all including a particularly egregious error in which the
first letter of Heraclius’ name appears as an A rather than an H, look to
excavators, with good reason, as if they were struck locally in a temporary
mint in Jerusalem that was set up to provide cash for the Byzantine occupation
force. If so, the horde represents a desperate effort to salvage the money when
the building itself was destroyed, as it seems to have been. Because the date
would evidently be soon after 613, we may well have in this new discovery a
trace of the Persian invasion in 614, but if so, this was clearly not a
violation of a sacred building. The scholars who have published this new horde
ask whether the coins could have come from a Byzantine treasury used for paying
troops, and that, of course, may be precisely why the Persians might have
wanted to break up the building. Holy places and sectarian struggles do not
seem, however, to have had any part in the Persian action at the site, and to
that extent the new excavations, while documenting destruction in 614, in no
way alter the picture that archaeologists have constructed in the last few
years for Jerusalem’s tombs and churches.
In fact, the picture that has now emerged of the holy city
after the Persians moved on into Egypt bears a startling resemblance to the one
that Clive Foss sketched nearly a decade ago for all the places through which
the armies of Khosroes II passed after the usurpation of Phocas. It had become
commonplace to assume, as Kondakov and Vasiliev had done long ago, that the
Persian invasion wiped out the civilization of the region, as well as its
agriculture, its cities, and its trade. This apocalyptic vision has not only
informed subsequent scholarship but has led archaeologists to interpret their
data in accordance with it. It dominated the fundamental study of Scythopolis
by Gideon Foerster and Yoram Tsafrir in 1997. The devastation of the Persian
invasion seemed to many to have facilitated the early Islamic conquests.
While acknowledging that the various fragmentary chronicles
upon which historians are obliged to rely often suggest that Persian rule “was
a disaster for the local populations, featuring bloodshed and extraordinary
exactions,” Foss meticulously documented the systematic retention of local
administrative structures by the Persians and the modest scope of their more
violent acts, usually in response to resistance. In Armenia, for example, after
an initial deportation of the citizens of Theodosiopolis, the Persians secured
the city to such an extent that a new church could be dedicated and the
cathedral restored. Similarly at Edessa in Mesopotamia, Khosroes’ initial
savagery was followed by a benevolent administration that recognized ancestral
landholding and supported the local Monophysites. The Persian invaders
understandably won the allegiance of Christians who believed that their new
masters would keep the Byzantine Chalcedonians out. After the first jolt, life
in Edessa was not much altered.
At Caesarea-on-the-sea, to judge from the survival of the
churches of Christ and of St. Cornelius and the Tetrapylon, a similar picture
of continuity after initial disruption emerges. While some continue to believe
that the Persian raids had a substantial impact on the city and its population,
recent work, particularly by Jodi Magness, seems clearly to move in the
opposite direction. Overall, as Foss observed, the archaeological record
“offers little corroboration for notions of widespread destruction at the hands
of the Sassanian invaders. On the contrary, as in the case of southern Syria,
evidence from the outlying regions of the Holy Land reveals normal activity
continuing through the occupation, with numerous inscriptions dated to the
period 614–630.” This revisionist account of the Persian invasion in the
seventh century has encouraged a new consensus about the Near East on the eve
of the Islamic conquests. Instead of lying desolate and ready for new rulers,
it can be seen as already experienced in survival under a foreign power, and therefore
all the more likely to be accommodating when a new one arrived. Since the
Persians generally supported the Monophysites, they were able to maintain their
struggle against Byzantium in a doctrinal way that was not unlike their support
of Jews in Jerusalem in their opposition to the orthodox Christians they found
in the city. Certainly the Christians suffered grievously, but there is little
indication that either the Jews or the pagans did.
The aftermath of the Persian capture of Jerusalem was, above
all, the occupation of Egypt. Alexandria had received mostly Chalcedonian
refugees, who were uncomfortable in Palestine with a foreign administration
that supported Monophysites, but the arrival of the Persians exiled these
Chalcedonians yet again. Such a dedicated Christian as John the Almsgiver,
orthodox patriarch of Alexandria from 610 to 617, chose to leave his flock and
flee to Cyprus, where he died in 619. Even the future patriarch of Jerusalem,
Sophronius, who had recently come to Alexandria and had written—or would soon
write—such eloquent verses about the capture of the city, decamped as well for
Rome. The Persians cleverly exploited the confessional confusion of
near-eastern Christendom in their war against Byzantium. This meant that the
brunt of the invasion fell upon the Chalcedonians and the emperor Heraclius,
against whom the Sassanians were waging their war. In pacifying and
administering the regions they had conquered, they created a world that was not
much different from what it had been before, with its rich traditions of
Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and Hellenism.
Accordingly when the armies of Muḥammad arrived, they did
not find a shattered civilization and a ruined economy. They found Christian
communities that the previous invaders had supported, as well as Chalcedonians
like Sophronius, who had returned peacefully to Jerusalem in 619 to bury his
friend John Moschus. At some point after his exile in Alexandria, Sophronius
included among his Anacreontic poems on church feasts not only his bitter
lamentation over the Persian invasion, but also two further poems that were a
detailed and nostalgic celebration of the city’s principal monuments and holy
places. Exactly when he wrote these is unclear, but we know that he was back in
Jerusalem by 619. He had either experienced the events of 614 in person or was
well informed about them, and five years later he certainly saw the condition
of the city at that time with his own eyes. Since he is unlikely to have been
composing fancy Greek verses when Moschus was dying in Rome, the odds are that
the Anacreontics about the glories of Jerusalem were written after he had
actually returned to the city. The poems themselves imply, by their impassioned
longing to see the various monuments, that he was away when he was writing
them, or perhaps, by a common literary artifice, imagined he was away. But, in
any case, absolutely nothing in the two poems about the holy places of
Jerusalem suggests that Sophronius was aware of the slightest damage or
destruction to any of them.
Meanwhile, the Arabs in Arabia showed little interest in the
quarrels of Monophysites and Chalcedonians, and there was no reason why they
should. They could remember that the monophysite negus of Ethiopia had gladly
made common cause with the orthodox emperor in Constantinople, and that
refugees from the civil strife in the Prophet’s city of Mecca had fled for
safety, at an early stage, to Axum. At the moment of Muḥammad’s emigration
(hijra) from Mecca to Medina in 622, the superpowers of the Near East were
still Sassanian Persia and the state that we call Byzantium, but was known
everywhere in the region simply as Rome. One of these was soon to be
annihilated. Neither of them could possibly have expected that. But the
hagiographical tradition suggests that the holy Anastasius, who had been a
Zoroastrian in the Persian army at Ctesiphon when the fragments of the True
Cross arrived there from Jerusalem after 614, was moved to convert to
Christianity, and he, so we are told, at least at the time of his subsequent
martyrdom, allegedly foretold the death of Khosroes and the end of his empire.
It seems that the Prophet Muḥammad in Mecca may have also foretold this
momentous event.
