Mazdakites

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The Mazdakiten were a late antique religious reform movement that the Persian Sassanid Empire at the time of the Great King Kavadh I. offset in unrest.

The details are unclear and controversial. According to the mostly later and / or foreign sources, a certain Mazdak appeared as a renewer of Zoroastrian orthodoxy around 500 AD, apparently around the teachings of the founder Zaraduscht (not to be confused with Zarathustra ), who according to at-Tabarī actually came from Pasa , to proclaim. If this Zaradushht was, as some sources indicate, a contemporary of Mani , then Mazdacism arose as early as the later 3rd century . Proceeding from the Zoroastrian belief system, the Mazdakites approached Gnostic currents, to which Manichaeism belonged, and at an uncertain point in time apparently combined them with a social ethic based on proto-communist ideas with ascetic elements: The world should therefore not at the end of days be purified by a great struggle against evil, but people could redeem their souls and thus the world by renouncing personal property. This trend evidently demanded not only a community of land and property without private property, but also a community of women. Perhaps the idea behind this was that the inheritance of power and property would become impossible if no one knew who the father of a child was.

A considerable part of the population obviously felt addressed by the mystical and social revolutionary elements of the new teaching; The aristocracy, however, was challenged - in a politically troubled time - and reacted in two ways: some magnates supported the movement, others opposed it.

The sources are contradicting the role of Kavadh. In any case, his son and successor Chosrau I (ruled 531-579) succeeded in breaking the power of the Mazdakite movement, whose ideas probably survived in the people until the Islamic period. It is quite possible that the Mazdakites only revolted violently at the beginning of Chosrau's rule. Their uprising was bloodily suppressed.

history

Already who Mazdak was, after whom the movement is named in some Eastern sources (such as Tabari ), and when he lived is uncertain. Was he the leader of those groups that made a name for themselves in the late 5th century, did he not appear until the early 6th century, or was he just referred to? Was there already a first founding figure in the 3rd century, to which Mazdak later referred (De Blois 2012), or did he found the new religion himself?

It appears that the Mazdakite ideas were essentially religious in nature. According to the sources, they are considered a heretical split from Zoroastrianism and were probably also influenced by Manichaeism , with whose followers they were sometimes confused. Its followers probably saw themselves as religious innovators. Apparently they saw worldly possessions as the root of all evil; this evoked the idea of ​​a “communist” community of property, at least in parts of the movement.

Perhaps there was a mixture of originally different groups into a single one that combined religious and “social revolutionary” elements and possibly also wanted to meet the wishes of the poorer sections of the population. Late Roman sources - above all Prokopios of Caesarea and Agathias - report the spectacular demand of the Mazdakites (or King Kavadh) for "community of women"; this element is also mentioned in the oriental accounts. It is probably related to the idea of ​​a community of property.

Both the Zoroastrian clergy and parts of the high nobility (but apparently not the entire aristocracy, as the sources suggest) were hostile to the Mazdakites - so the community of women would have led to an uncertainty of biological paternity, which would have meant the end of the hereditary nobility. The role of the king is basically completely unclear. Most researchers believe that Kavadh tried to use the Mazdakites to weaken the high nobility and was therefore dethroned and imprisoned by the nobility and priesthood in 496. After Kavadh had regained his crown in 499 with the help of the Hephthalites , the sources are silent for a long time about the Mazdakites, but it is mostly assumed that his son and successor Chosrau I bloody them as "Manicheans" in the first years of his reign (around 530) have followed. However, the movement could not be completely eradicated.

However, this reconstruction is not plausible in all respects, so that it has been questioned in different ways: One extreme position claims that Mazdak was merely a fiction that was later used to cover up the prominent role of Kavadh. Other scholars, on the other hand, believe that those groups that appeared around 490 were not the predecessors of those that were then persecuted around 530, but two completely different phenomena. It is possible that the Great King only turned away from the Mazdakites completely after 525 - around this time the powerful noble Seoses, who was a follower of the Mazdakites, was disempowered and killed - which would explain the persecutions that began around 530: Perhaps it came too It was only in this late phase that the movement became radicalized, especially since at the beginning there were definitely “Mazdakite friends” among the high nobility - including the aforementioned Seoses - which makes a doctrine fundamentally directed against the aristocracy unlikely, at least for the beginning (cf. Wiesehöfer 2009 ).

Most of the time it is assumed that parts of the Mazdakite ideas remained alive in the people after 530 and became virulent again in post-ancient movements - perhaps up to the Bogomils and Cathars .

Ultimately, however, it is only certain that Persia was plagued by internal unrest in the years around 500, in which the Great King was also involved and which were in some way connected with a religious-social-revolutionary movement that the later oriental sources refer to as Mazdakites . Apparently, the events ultimately weakened the old nobility, which seems to have enabled Kavadh and Chosrau to strengthen the position of the king. Everything else is still the subject of scholarly discussion within ancient historical and Iranian research.

literature

  • François de Blois: A new look at Mazdak . In: T. Bernheimer / A. Silverstein (Ed.), Late Antiquity: Eastern perspectives . Exeter 2012, pp. 1-24.
  • Henning Börm : Prokop and the Persians. Investigations into the Roman-Sasanid contacts in late antiquity . Stuttgart 2007, pp. 230-233.
  • Arthur Christensen: Le règne du roi Kawadh et le communisme Mazdakite . Copenhagen 1925.
  • Patricia Crone : Kavad's heresy and Mazdak's revolt . In: Iran 29, 1991, pp. 21-42.
  • Heinz Gaube : Mazdak: Historical reality or invention? . In: Studia Iranica 11, 1982, pp. 111-122.
  • Gerardo Gnoli: Nuovi studi sul Mazdakismo . In: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (ed.), La Persia e Bisanzio [Atti dei convegni Lincei 201] . Rome 2004, pp. 439-456.
  • Michelangelo Guidi: Mazdak . In: The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition . Vol. 6, Brill, Leiden 1991, pp. 949-952.
  • Udo Hartmann : Mazdak and the Mazdakites. Persian Empire, 528/29 . In: M. Sommer (Ed.), Politische Morde . Darmstadt 2005, pp. 89-98.
  • Zeev Rubin: Mass Movements in Late Antiquity . In: I. Malkin / Z. Rubinsohn (Ed.), Leaders and Masses in the Roman World. Studies in Honor of Zvi Yavetz . Leiden / New York 1995, pp. 187-191.
  • Klaus Schippmann : Basic features of the history of the Sassanid Empire . Darmstadt 1990.
  • Werner Sundermann : New insights into the Mazdakite social doctrine . In: Das Altertum 34, 3, 1988, pp. 183-188.
  • Josef Wiesehöfer : The Mazdakites: "Heretics" in Sasanian Iran. In: Anja Pistor-Hatam , Antje Richter (ed.): Beggar, Prostitute, Paria. Marginalized groups in Asian societies. (Asia and Africa. Contributions by the Center for Asian and African Studies (ZAAS) at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Volume 12) EB-Verlag, Hamburg 2008, pp. 191–210
  • Josef Wiesehöfer: Kawad, Khusro I and the Mazdakites. A new proposal . In: Philippe Gignoux et al. (Ed.): Trésors d'Orient . Paris 2009, pp. 391-409.
  • Ehsan Yarshater : Mazdakism . In: Cambridge History of Iran III / 2. Cambridge 1983, pp. 991-1024.

Web link

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Otto Günther von Wesendonk : The world view of the Iranians . Ernst Reinhardt, Munich 1933, pp. 273-275; Henrik Samuel Nyberg : The Religions of Ancient Iran . (1938) New edition: Otto Zeller, Osnabrück 1966, p. 421 (both works are partly out of date).