Rustam Farrokhzad

Rustam Farrokhzad commanded the Sasanian army destroyed at Qadisiyyah and was killed there, which is the battle that ended Persian rule in Iraq and began the end of the empire. He came from the house of Ispahbudhan, one of the seven great Parthian families, and his father had been the general who put the young Yazdegerd III on the throne after the chaos that followed the deposition of Khosrow II - a decade in which the empire had run through perhaps ten rulers while exhausted from the last war with Byzantium. Rustam was effectively regent for a boy king and held the state together by controlling the army. He is presented in the Arabic and Persian sources as reluctant to fight at Qadisiyyah, preferring to wear the Arabs down by delay, and as overruled by a court that wanted a decisive battle; how much of that is hindsight is impossible to say, since every account was written after the defeat and knows how it ended. The battle in 636 lasted three or four days. His elephants were driven off when the Arabs went for their eyes and trunks, a sandstorm blew into Persian faces on the last day, and he was killed in the collapse - by one account crushed under a load from a baggage mule, by another cut down at the river. Ctesiphon fell within months and Yazdegerd fled east, to be murdered at Merv in 651. The Shahnameh gives Rustam a letter to his brother foretelling the ruin of Persia, which is a literary composition rather than a document. His brother Farrukhzad Khosrow briefly held the throne in 631. The Ispahbudhan family had made and unmade Sasanian kings for a century. Qadisiyyah is commemorated in modern Iraq and Iran in ways that say more about the twentieth century than the seventh.

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