Hormizd II

Hormizd II reigned over the Sasanian empire for seven years and is remembered chiefly for the succession crisis his death produced. He was the son of Narseh, who had lost a disastrous war to the Roman emperor Galerius and signed the Peace of Nisibis in 299, ceding territory beyond the Tigris and Roman control of Armenia. Hormizd inherited that settlement in 302 and kept it, which is why his reign was quiet. The Persian and Arab sources credit him with a reputation for justice, the founding of a court of appeal for subjects with grievances against nobles, and the building or refounding of a city in Khuzestan; they also record friction with the nobility and the Zoroastrian priesthood, whose power had grown enormously under his predecessors. He campaigned against Arab tribes on the southern frontier and, by most accounts, was killed in 309 while fighting them, though at least one tradition has the nobility murdering him. What followed determined the next seventy years. The magnates blinded his eldest son, imprisoned the second, who eventually escaped to Roman territory, and passed over the rest; they then crowned an unborn or newborn child, Shapur II, said to have been acclaimed while still in the womb with the crown laid on his mother's belly. The nobles and priests governed for sixteen years in his name. Shapur went on to reign for seventy years, the longest in Iranian history, and to reverse everything his grandfather had conceded. His queen was reportedly a princess of the Kabul kingdom, which points to Sasanian interests well east of the Iranian plateau. The coins of his reign show an elaborate eagle crown that later kings did not copy. Almost nothing written from within his reign survives, and the narrative depends on Arabic and Persian historians writing centuries afterwards.

• Nationality: Persian
• Roles: ruler