Anōšazād

Anōšazād was a late antique Persian king's son who rebelled against his father, the Sassanid king Chosrau I , around 543 .

According to the report of his contemporary Prokopios of Caesarea, Anōšazād was the king's eldest son. Its name is made up of / anōšag / ("immortal") and / zād / ("born"), so it means something like "born as an immortal" or "son of the immortal". The Greek form of the name is Anasozados . Whether it is really a proper name or a nickname is unclear - his father Chosrau I is known in oriental tradition as Anuširvān ("with the immortal soul").

According to Prokopios' report in the eighth book of histories (8, 10), the prince was exiled to Bēth Lapat ( Gondēšāpūr ) in Khuzestan (in the southwest of present-day Iran ) due to disputes with Chosrau , where he was reliant on the news of proclaimed an alleged fatal illness of his father to the king. The later oriental reports (e.g. in Abū l-Qāsem-e Ferdousī , cf. also Tabari ) confirm this in the main, although the sources differ in some details. When it became clear that Chosrau had survived the disease, Anōšazād raised an army, but was defeated by a general of his father and was taken prisoner. According to some reports, he was executed; Prokopios claims, however, that Chosrau did not punish his son with death, but with mutilations in the face in order to deprive him of further hopes for the crown - in the late ancient Sassanid Empire , only physically intact persons were allowed to ascend the throne.

Allegedly, Anōšazād was interested in Christianity and is said to have also sought support from Christians (his mother is said to have been a Christian herself). According to Theodor Nöldeke , an active participation of a large number of Christians, who were relatively strongly represented in Mesopotamia , is rather unlikely, since otherwise anti-Christian measures would have been taken after the suppression of the rebellion, which is not mentioned in the sources.

literature

• Henning Börm : Prokop and the Persians. Investigations on the Roman-Sasanid relations in the late late antiquity . Stuttgart 2007, pp. 119-124.
• D. Khaleghi-Motlagh: Anōšazād . In: Encyclopædia Iranica 2 (1987), p. 99f.
• John Martindale: The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire IIIa . Cambridge 1992, pp. 59f.
• Theodor Nöldeke: History of the Persians and Arabs at the time of the Sasanids. Translated from the Arabic chronicle of Tabari and provided with detailed explanations . Leiden 1879, pp. 467-474.