Suppression of the Mazdakites

Mazdak, son of Bamdad, was a Zoroastrian priest who preached a dualist faith: the world was a mixture of Light and Darkness, and people should overcome the darkness by shunning envy, wrath and greed, sharing their goods, avoiding violence and eating no meat. Hostile sources also accuse the Mazdakites of holding women in common; modern historians such as Touraj Daryaee and Matthew Canepa regard this as a slanderous exaggeration of a decree that loosened the marriage rules in favour of the lower classes. The movement grew out of the crisis that followed Peroz’s death in the war with the Hephthalites in 484 — tribute to the victors, drought and famine, and a nobility and priesthood strong enough to make and unmake kings. Kavad I backed it to curb them: royal granaries were opened and land was redistributed. In 496 the nobles deposed him, but two or three years later he regained the throne with a Hephthalite army.

Back in power, Kavad pressed on with reforms — a survey of taxable land, a poll tax, the division of the army command among four regional generals — which his son Khosrow I would complete, and by the 520s he no longer needed Mazdak. A debate was arranged at which Zoroastrian priests, joined by Christian and Jewish leaders, condemned the Mazdakites, and Mazdak and his followers were executed; the date is given as 524 or 528, and in some Russian works as 528 or 529. The Shahnameh tells how Prince Khosrow had the Mazdakites buried head down in a walled garden — “trees that no one has ever seen” — and then had Mazdak hanged and shot with arrows; the story may preserve a memory of the massacre, but it cannot be read literally.

How much of this is history is disputed. The contemporary writers Procopius and Joshua the Stylite hold Kavad himself responsible for the movement and never name Mazdak; he appears only in later Zoroastrian books and in histories of the Islamic era such as al-Tabari’s, and some scholars suspect that the figure of Mazdak was shaped to take the blame away from the king. The weakening of the great houses made possible the reforms that Khosrow I completed, while Mazdakite ideas lived on underground: later egalitarian movements such as the Khurramites of the 9th century were linked with them, and “Mazdakite” became a label for radical rebels in Iran.