Yazdegerd III

Yazdegerd III was the last Sasanian king of kings, came to the throne at about eight after a decade of chaos, and was murdered by a miller near Merv at twenty-seven. The empire he inherited in 632 had exhausted itself in a twenty-six-year war with Byzantium that ended in defeat, had lost Khosrow II to a palace coup, and had run through something like ten rulers in four years; the great families governed and the boy was a legitimising figure. The Arab armies arrived almost immediately. Qadisiyyah in 636 destroyed the field army under Rustam Farrokhzad and lost Iraq, which was the empire's richest province and provided a large share of its revenue. Ctesiphon fell, the court withdrew to the Iranian plateau, and Nahavand in 642 - called by Arab historians the victory of victories - broke the last organised resistance. He spent the rest of his life moving east, from Isfahan to Kerman to Sistan to Khurasan, trying and failing to raise forces from local magnates who increasingly preferred to make their own terms with the Arabs. He appealed to the Tang court in China, which sent sympathy. In 651 he was killed at Merv, by the usual account by a miller who wanted his jewellery, having been abandoned by the local governor. His son Peroz reached the Tang capital and was given a title and a command. The Sasanian empire had lasted four hundred and twenty-seven years, and the Zoroastrian calendar still counts its years from his accession.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history