The shoemaker's son

Late in his reign Anushirvan marches against Rum once more. Caesar comes from Amorium to Aleppo (in the poem, Halab), and the city becomes a sea of blood before the Roman army asks for quarter. Then a trench filled with water is dug across the king's path, and the war comes to a halt. It drags on, and the army needs pay: silver, horses, mail and Roman helmets. The paymasters count the treasury and find it three hundred thousand short.

Anushirvan wants to send camels to fetch gold from the treasures of Mazandaran. Bozorgmehr points out that the road is long and the army is idle in the meantime. Better, he says, to borrow from the merchants and landowners of the nearby towns; they will not refuse. A young and careful messenger rides to a town close by and asks for a loan for the king, and a crowd of rich men gathers round him. Among them is a shoemaker, a maker and seller of boots, who asks how much is needed. Forty man of silver, says the envoy, each man a hundred thousand dirhams. The shoemaker brings his scales and weights, weighs out the coin, and asks for no written bond.

He asks one favour in return. He has a son, he tells the envoy, and he would like the king, as a private kindness, to have the boy taught and made a scribe. The envoy promises to pass it on, glad to have his errand so quickly done. Anushirvan is delighted with the money. He thanks God that a bootmaker in his kingdom can be so prosperous, prays that no injustice ever touch such a man, and tells Bozorgmehr to repay the loan with a hundred thousand dirhams more. Only then does Bozorgmehr give him the shoemaker's request.

The king's mood changes at once. "Why has the demon darkened your eyes?" he asks. Send the camels back; we will not take his silver. When my son comes to the throne, he goes on, he will need a scribe of good fortune. If a merchant's son, however learned, becomes his scribe, the wise and the wellborn will be left with nothing but sighs, the man of judgement will be held cheap, and we will be cursed after our deaths for setting such a custom. "Ask for silver, but not from bootmakers." The envoy carries the money back, and the shoemaker's heart fills with pain.

Ferdowsi tells the story without comment, and soon afterwards envoys arrive from Caesar asking for peace. The episode is often cited as a picture of Sasanian society as the poem imagines it, an order of ranks in which a father's trade decided what his son could become.