The Reforms of Khosrow I

The reforms of Khosrow I, carried out in the mid-6th century CE and begun under his father Kavad I, replaced a tax on a share of each harvest with fixed cash rates based on a survey of the land, introduced a graded poll tax, created a salaried cavalry drawn from the lesser gentry, and split the command of the army among four regional generals. They strengthened the crown against the great noble families and gave the late Sasanian state the fiscal system that the Arab conquerors later inherited.

Why reform was needed

The empire Khosrow inherited had just been through half a century of crisis: the death of Peroz and his army in 484, tribute to the Hephthalites, famine, the deposition of Kavad and the Mazdakite upheaval. Royal revenue depended on the old system in which the state took a share of the harvest, assessed each year by officials in the field. Income rose and fell with the crops and passed through the hands of the great landowners and local agents, who could hide much of it. The king’s army, too, depended on the contingents that the noble houses chose to bring. The reforms were designed to give the crown a predictable income and an army of its own.

The new land tax

The basis of the reform was a general survey of cultivated land, which the Arab geographers Ibn Khurradadhbih and Ibn Rusta credit to Kavad, and which was still incomplete when he died. On this survey Khosrow fixed tax rates in silver drachms. Al-Tabari, drawing on Persian sources, gives the scale:

• wheat and barley: 1 drachm per jarib of land
• vines: 8 drachms per jarib
• clover (alfalfa): 7 drachms per jarib
• date palms: 1 drachm for every four Persian palms, or every six of the common kind
• olive trees: 1 drachm for every six trees

Al-Tabari says the tax was to be paid in three instalments a year, and that a copy of the registers was kept at the court, in the provinces and with local judges so that officials could not demand more. In practice some of it was probably still paid in kind, at the cash value of the produce.

The poll tax

Alongside the land tax Khosrow reorganised the poll tax. Al-Tabari describes it as graded by means, in classes of 12, 8, 6 and 4 drachms a year. The great nobles, the priests, the soldiers, the scribes and others in royal service were exempt, as were people under twenty and over fifty. The tax thus fell on the commoners, the peasants, artisans and merchants, and, as Jewish and Christian sources show, on religious minorities. The Muslim jizya and kharaj of later centuries owed a good deal to these Sasanian models, though historians such as Zeev Rubin doubt that the conquerors took them over unchanged.

A new army

The dehqans

Khosrow built up a standing force of armoured horsemen, paid by the state and under the king’s command. Its men came from the young nobles and above all from the dehqans, the lesser landowners who lived in the villages and ran local affairs. Many dehqans had lost out in the troubles of the previous decades; the king gave them equipment, pay on campaign and a stake in the regime.

Al-Tabari tells a story that shows how seriously the new discipline was taken. The official in charge of army musters, Papak, summoned all horsemen to present themselves in full equipment, and sent the king away when he arrived without two spare bowstrings. Khosrow came back properly equipped and was enrolled at a pay of one drachm more than the highest-paid soldier. The anecdote belongs to the legend of the just king, but it reflects a real attempt to replace noble contingents with a professional, inspected force.

Four generals instead of one

Before the reform, a single commander, the Eran-spahbed, led the armies of the empire, a post often held by a great noble family. Khosrow divided the realm into four quarters, each with its own spahbed: the east (Khorasan), the west (Mesopotamia), the south (Nemroz) and the north (Azerbaijan and the Caucasus). The Arabic sources reported this, and clay seal impressions of the four generals, published by Rika Gyselen, have confirmed it. Frontier governors, the marzbans, also reported directly to the king.

The new army was matched by building on the frontiers. The great walls at Darband (Derbent) on the Caspian, closing the coastal route from the north, are generally dated to Khosrow’s reign. Today the citadel, ancient city and fortress buildings of Derbent are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. For the army’s equipment and tactics, see The Sasanian Army.

Society after the reforms

The reforms went with an effort to restore the social order after Mazdak. Al-Tabari says Khosrow had property returned to its owners, ruled on the status of children born of disputed unions, provided dowries for the daughters of ruined noble families and repaired villages, bridges and canals. Middle Persian literature of the period stresses the division of society into fixed estates, priests, warriors, scribes and commoners, each in its place (see Sasanian Society and the Class System).

The dehqans were the long-term winners. They became the backbone of the late Sasanian state and, after the Arab conquest, the class that kept Persian traditions, stories and the memory of the old kings alive. Ferdowsi, the poet of the Shahnameh, came from a dehqan family.

How historians judge the reforms

The Persian and Arabic tradition praises the reforms almost without reserve, as part of the image of Anushirvan the Just. Modern historians are more divided. Patricia Crone and others pointed out that fixed cash rates ignored good and bad harvests and could weigh heavily on peasants in poor years, and one Arabic history describes the system as oppressive. Zeev Rubin, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, answers that the sources are nearly unanimous in their praise and that the reforms should be judged as intended principles, which practice may not always have matched. Some historians have compared them with the tax reforms of the Roman emperor Diocletian, though there is no direct evidence of borrowing.

What is clear is the result. Khosrow had the money and the soldiers to fight Byzantium, destroy the Hephthalites and send an expedition to Yemen. The same system later funded the long wars of Khosrow II, and its registers and rates passed to the caliphate after the conquest.