The Great Houses of Parthia

The Parthian Empire was held together less by a central bureaucracy than by a small number of great noble families, above all the houses of Suren and Karen, who owned vast lands, raised their own cavalry and helped choose the king. Alongside them ruled a ring of vassal kings, from Persis to Armenia, who recognised the Arsacid as King of Kings. Historians often call this system “feudal”, though the word is debated, and it explains both the empire’s resilience and its frequent civil wars.

A king among nobles

The Arsacid king was the head of a clan, not an absolute monarch in the Achaemenid style. The geographer Strabo, drawing on the earlier writer Posidonius, says the Parthians had two councils: one made up of the king’s kinsmen, and one of “wise men and magi”. Kings were chosen from the royal family by these bodies. Any Arsacid male could in principle claim the throne, which is why the dynasty’s history is full of brothers, uncles and cousins fighting each other, such as the rivals described on the page Gotarzes II and Vardanes.

The great families were the king-makers. Plutarch says the head of the Suren house had the hereditary right to place the crown on a new king’s head, and Tacitus confirms the custom when he describes a Surena crowning a new king in 36 CE “according to ancestral custom”. A king who lost the support of these men could be deposed, as Phraates V and Queen Musa were around 4 CE, or Vonones I a few years later.

The house of Suren

The Suren family held the lands of Sakastan, today’s Sistan on the border of Iran and Afghanistan, which had been settled by Saka nomads in the 2nd century BCE. The most famous member, known to us only by the title Surena, destroyed the army of Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BCE with a force of horse archers and armoured cavalry drawn largely from his own estates. That battle, and Plutarch’s portrait of Surena, are told on the page Surena and the Battle of Carrhae.

A branch of the family may also have ruled in the east. Gondophares, the Indo-Parthian king of the 1st century CE, is often thought to have belonged to the Suren house, though this is not certain; see The Indo-Parthians and Kushans.

The house of Karen

The Karen were based in Media, around Nahavand, south of Hamadan. Tacitus names a general called Carenes who fought in the civil wars of 49 CE. The family remained powerful into Sasanian times and beyond: Karenid princes still ruled parts of Tabaristan, south of the Caspian, in the 8th and 9th centuries. Iranian tradition later linked them to Qaren, son of the blacksmith Kaveh, one of the heroes of the Shahnameh.

Lords, retainers and dependants

Below the great houses stood a wider class of lesser nobles and free warriors. Their wealth came from land and from the peasants and dependants who worked it. Roman writers understood little of these relationships and described the dependants as slaves. Justin, for example, says that of the 50,000 horsemen who fought Mark Antony, only 400 were free men. The figure is not reliable, but it reflects a real feature of Parthian society: a noble rode to war with a large following of men bound to him personally, armed and fed at his expense.

This was the source of Parthian military power. The king did not maintain a large standing army. When war came, the nobles brought their contingents of horse archers and heavily armoured cataphracts, described on the page Parthian Cavalry: Cataphracts and the Parthian Shot. A popular king could raise a huge force; a weak one could find his nobles staying at home or joining a rival.

Estates and documents

A few documents show how land was held. Thousands of ostraca (inscribed pottery sherds) from Nisa, the early capital in Turkmenistan, record deliveries of wine from royal and temple estates in the 1st century BCE, with the names of estate managers and officials. Parchments found in a cave at Avroman in Iranian Kurdistan record the sale of vineyards, and their dating formulas name the reigning king and his queens. These are local glimpses, but they show a society of landowners, written contracts and royal officials beneath the noble elite.

Vassal kings and the King of Kings

Beyond the lands ruled directly by the Arsacids lay a ring of client kingdoms with their own dynasties. In the south, Persis (Pars) was ruled by local kings who struck their own coins, as did Elymais in Khuzestan and Characene at the head of the Persian Gulf. In the west were Adiabene, around Arbela (Erbil), whose royal family converted to Judaism in the 1st century CE; Osrhoene, around Edessa; and the desert city of Hatra. In the north, Media Atropatene and Armenia were often given to younger Arsacid princes.

The title King of Kings, which Mithridates II adopted and his successors kept, expressed this structure. The Arsacid was supreme because other kings stood beneath him. The arrangement was flexible and cheap to run, but it carried an obvious risk: a strong vassal could turn against his overlord. That is exactly what happened in 224 CE, when Ardashir, a ruler of Persis, defeated the last Parthian king; see The Last Parthian Kings.

Was it feudalism?

Earlier historians, such as Geo Widengren, described Parthian society as feudal and compared it to medieval Europe: a king, great vassals, lesser knights and dependent peasants, bound by oaths of loyalty. Many recent historians, among them Josef Wiesehöfer, are more cautious. The comparison captures the dispersal of power and the role of mounted aristocrats, but the sources say almost nothing about formal grants of land in return for service, which is what defines European feudalism. Most now prefer to speak of an aristocratic or decentralised empire and use “feudal” loosely, if at all.

The houses after the Arsacids

The great families outlived the dynasty. The Suren and Karen made terms with Ardashir and the Sasanians, and later Sasanian tradition counted them among the seven great houses of the realm, alongside the Mihran and others. Their memory also passed into Iranian epic. Ehsan Yarshater and other scholars have argued that many heroes of the Shahnameh preserve Parthian names and family traditions: the hero Gudarz, for example, bears the same name as the Parthian king Gotarzes, and the families of Gudarz and Giv look very much like a Parthian noble house. The religion and minstrel culture of these noble courts are described on the page Religion and Culture in Parthian Iran.