Merv

After Qadisiyyah and the fall of Ctesiphon, the young king Yazdegerd III flees east across Iran, looking for an army. In the Shahnameh he comes at last to Merv, whose governor, Mahuy Suri, owes everything to the royal house. Mahuy greets him, then plots against him and calls in Bizhan, a Turkish ruler from beyond the river. Yazdegerd escapes the fighting on foot and hides in a water mill by the river.

The miller, a poor man named Khosrow, finds a stranger in fine clothes and a jewelled belt sitting on the straw. Yazdegerd asks only for food and the sacred twigs, the barsom, used in Zoroastrian prayer before eating. The request gives him away. Mahuy's men learn where he is, and the miller is ordered, under threat, to kill him. He does. The poem records the horror of the act and the grief that follows: the monks of the area bury the king with honour, and Mahuy meets a terrible end. Then Ferdowsi lays down his pen, with a closing passage about his own long labour on the book.

The city today

Historically, Yazdegerd III was killed near Merv in 651, and the details recorded by the Arabic and Persian historians differ but agree on a mill and a betrayal. Merv itself grew into one of the largest cities in the world under the Seljuks before the Mongols sacked it in 1221. Its ruins, a series of walled cities of different ages side by side in the Murghab oasis near Mary in Turkmenistan, form the State Historical and Cultural Park "Ancient Merv", a UNESCO World Heritage site.