Iranian Resistance: Tabaristan and the Dabuyids

While the rest of Iran passed under Arab rule in the 640s and 650s, the mountain and forest lands south of the Caspian Sea held out. In Tabaristan, today’s Mazandaran, a dynasty of Sasanian descent called the Dabuyids ruled until the Abbasids conquered them in 760, and smaller mountain houses such as the Bavandids survived far longer, keeping Persian titles, coinage and, for a time, the Zoroastrian religion.

A country the armies could not easily reach

Tabaristan lies between the Alborz range and the Caspian shore: a narrow, wet lowland of rice fields and swamps behind a wall of mountains covered in dense forest. Roads from the plateau cross a few high passes. Arab armies from Kufa and Basra, built for open country, found it very hard to campaign there, and the local lords knew it. When the plateau cities made their treaties after Nahavand, the princes of Tabaristan made only loose agreements to pay tribute, and sometimes none at all.

The Dabuyids, a Sasanian branch

The Dabuyids traced their line to Jamasp, a brother of the Sasanian king Kavad I, whose story appears on Zamasp and Kavad’s return. Their founder, Gil, nicknamed Gavbara, is said to have taken power over Gilan and Tabaristan in the time of Yazdegerd III. The family is named after his son Dabuya. The chronology of the early rulers is uncertain, and modern scholars have revised the dates given in the later local histories.

The Dabuyids ruled with the old Sasanian title Ispahbadh and some modern historians see them as the last heirs of Sasanian kingship. Under them Tabaristan remained largely Zoroastrian, with its own court, its own nobility and an economy based on silk, timber and rice.

Farrukhan and the invasion of 716–717

The best-known episode comes from the reign of Farrukhan, called the Great. In 716 the Umayyad governor Yazid ibn al-Muhallab invaded with a large army from Khorasan and Iraq. He took Gorgan, on the eastern edge of the Caspian lowland, and pushed into Tabaristan. According to the Arabic accounts, the Ispahbadh’s forces, with allies from Daylam and Gilan, trapped the invaders in the mountain forests and inflicted heavy losses. Yazid had to accept a negotiated withdrawal and a tribute far below what he had hoped for. Gorgan stayed in Muslim hands; Tabaristan did not.

Coins of a vanished empire

The Dabuyids struck silver coins in the Sasanian style, with a crowned bust on one side, a fire altar on the other and legends in Middle Persian (Pahlavi) script. They were dated by a local era counted from the end of Yazdegerd III’s reign. Remarkably, the Abbasid governors who took over Tabaristan kept minting coins of the same type, with Pahlavi legends and their own Arabic names, for several decades after 760. Numismatists treat these coins as one of the best sources for the region.

The Abbasid conquest

The last Dabuyid, Khurshid, had kept on good terms with Abu Muslim and the new Abbasid regime. In 759 the caliph al-Mansur sent an army that Khurshid allowed through his territory, and which then turned on him. He fled to Gilan, and lowland Tabaristan was taken in 760. The sources say he took poison in about 761 when he learned that his family had been captured. Arab governors settled in the lowland towns of Amol and Sari, and the conversion of the population began in earnest only after this.

The mountain houses that survived

The conquest of the lowlands did not end Iranian rule in the mountains. Several families held the highlands under Abbasid overlordship:

• The Bavandids, who claimed descent from a brother of Khosrow I and whose traditional founding date is 651. In several branches they lasted until 1349, making them by some reckonings the longest-lived dynasty in Iranian history.
• The Qarinvand (Karenids), a family of Parthian descent. Its best-known member, Mazyar, rebelled against the caliphate in 839 and was executed at Samarra in 840.
• The Masmughans of Damavand, rulers of the district around Mount Damavand until the Abbasid campaigns of the 750s and 760s.

Further west, the Daylamites of the Alborz were never conquered by the Umayyads at all. Islam reached them in the 9th century through Shi’a missionaries rather than armies, as told on the Zaydi Alavids of Tabaristan, and in the 10th century Daylamite soldiers founded the Buyid dynasty.

Resistance or survival

Iranian nationalist writing often presents Tabaristan as a heroic refuge where the Iranian spirit held out against the Arabs. There is something in this: the Caspian dynasties did preserve Sasanian titles, coinage and court culture, and the region’s later histories, such as Ibn Isfandiyar’s Tarikh-e Tabarestan of the early 13th century, are proud of that heritage. But the Dabuyids and their neighbours were also practical rulers who paid tribute when they had to, made alliances with Arab governors and rival caliphs, and fought each other. Historians tend to see their survival as the result of geography and politics more than ideology. Other Iranian responses to Arab rule are covered on the death of Abu Muslim and the Iranian revolts and on Babak Khorramdin’s revolt.

For the region today, see Sari and travelling in the north of Iran.