Doug Metzger
speaker
2,647 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Doug Metzger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Kings.
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But even though the Shapurs, Hormuzds, and Khosros of the Sasanian Empire wanted to be perceived as unchallenged and indomitable by posterity, and even though they were powerful imperial leaders, the later Persian Empire was so vast and populous and full of moving parts that a unitary monarchy quite simply couldn't manage the whole thing.
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You could, if you were
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Were a Sasanian king, flex your biceps in Catesophon and trumpet your grandeur over the distant east.
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But up in present-day Armenia and along the Caspian shore, and especially out in Kuracan to the far northeast, there were major semi-autonomous baronies ruled by ancient noble houses that kept the machinery of the empire running.
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Sasanian emperors in Samation.
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were extremely powerful, but they were leaders in a changing late antique world, where constant population migrations were making giant empires unfeasible, and where kings of kings, as the name perhaps unintentionally emphasizes, depended on subordinate monarchies to largely manage themselves.
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We learned about the patchy and unstable nature of the late Sasanian Empire last time, and perhaps the biggest takeaway from our long program on the so-called Last Great War of Antiquity was that the Rashadun Caliphate was able to trounce the Sasanian Empire because there was no Sasanian Empire.
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Khosro II was a relentless and formidable leader who nearly clobbered the Byzantines.
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But when the tides of war turned against him, the Persian noble houses from which his power came did away with him pretty quickly, just as they had propped him up in the first place.
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When Rashadun armies started marching up the Tigris and Euphrates, they attacked a feudal world at war with itself, rather than a unified empire.
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Let's connect what we learned in the previous episode with what we've learned in this program.
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We tend, when we study history, to want to categorize things.
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The Umayyad Caliphate, we say, was an Islamic caliphate.
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Never mind the fact that 90% of people living under Umayyad rule were not Muslims.
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The Roman Empire, we say, became Christian.
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In the 300s, never mind the fact that paganism marched onward and that Christianity was dozens of different things.
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We tend, in other words, to take imperial leadership at face value when edicts are issued and garrison towns are built, even though real religious and cultural changes in populations are sluggish, asymmetrical, and always subject to research.
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resurgences and the revitalizations of old creeds.
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And just as historians have often overestimated the political unity of the Sasanian Empire, historians have also overestimated the religious unity of the Sasanian Empire.
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Showing 2521–2540 of 2,647 · page 127 of 133
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