Qobad and Mazdak

Drought has emptied the sky over Iran. No snow falls and no rain, and the great men of the realm crowd to King Qobad's door asking for bread and water. Waiting for them is Mazdak, a learned and eloquent man whom Qobad has made his chief minister and the keeper of his treasury.

Mazdak promises the crowd an answer and goes in to the king with a question. If a man is dying of snakebite, he asks, and another man has the antidote but will not share it, what does that man deserve? "He is a murderer," says Qobad, "and should be put to death." Next morning Mazdak asks again: what of a man who lets a prisoner starve while he himself has bread? The same answer. Mazdak kisses the ground, goes out to the crowd and tells them to take the hidden grain. The hungry plunder every store in the city, the king's own included.

When Qobad calls him to account, Mazdak repeats the king's own words. Bread is the antidote for the hungry, he says, and many have died while the granaries stood full. The king is shaken, and then won over. Mazdak's teaching spreads: rich and poor are equal, no one should have more than another, and women, houses and goods are to be shared. Qobad takes up the new faith and seats Mazdak at his right hand, and the poor flock to him. From this point the poem calls his teaching crooked.

One morning Mazdak brings a hundred thousand followers out to the plain and asks the king to make his son Kasra give a written undertaking to abandon his opposition. Envy, revenge, anger, need and greed, he argues, are five demons that turn men from the right, and they feed on women and wealth: share those, and the demons lose their hold. He takes Kasra by the hand. The prince pulls it away in anger and asks for five months to prove the creed false.

Kasra sends for learned men from every side: old Hormozd from Khorra-ye Ardashir, and Mehr-Azar of Pars, who comes from Estakhr with thirty companions. On the appointed day the case is put to Mazdak before the whole court. If women are shared, how will a son know his father, or a father his son? If all are equal, who will serve and who will lead? If everyone has treasure, who will be the treasurer? Qobad turns against Mazdak, the court cries out that he must not stay, and the king hands him over to Kasra with all who follow his way.

Kasra has a garden at his gate with a wall higher than a hill. Around it he digs a trench and plants Mazdak's followers in it like trees, feet in the air and heads packed into the earth. Then he invites Mazdak to see trees such as no one has ever seen. Mazdak opens the gate, cries out and faints. Kasra has him hung alive, head down, from a gallows and killed with a shower of arrows. Qobad, ashamed, gives freely to the poor and to the fire temple, and from then on takes his son's advice in everything. Before he dies he names Kasra his heir, and the nobles give the new king the name he is remembered by, Nushin-ravan: Anushirvan.

Mazdak was a real religious reformer of Qobad's reign, around the turn of the sixth century, and most of what is known about him comes from writers hostile to his movement, the Shahnameh's sources among them.