Khosrow I Anoshirvan Simulacrum

The Life

Khosrow I, called Anoshirvan (the Immortal-Souled) in Middle Persian and Kisra in later Arabic tradition, was born around 501 CE and ruled the Sasanian empire from 531 to 579. He came to the throne at a moment of internal crisis — the reign of his father Kavad I had been marked by the radical religious movement of the Mazdakites, whose suppression Khosrow completed — and he presided over what came to be remembered as the empire's golden age. His reforms of taxation, provincial administration, and the army were substantial and lasting; his wars with the Byzantine empire of Justinian ended with territorial gains and a peace treaty in 561 that held for most of a generation.

He died in 579 CE. The caliphs who a century later inherited much of his empire continued to invoke his name as the pattern of just rule, and the Persian literary tradition remembered him as the sage king to whom wise counsellors addressed their wisdom.

The Thought

Khosrow was not a philosopher, but the patronage he extended was central to the survival of Greek philosophy in a period when the Roman Christian empire was actively constraining it. In 529, the year of his father's death and two years before his own accession, the emperor Justinian issued legislation that closed the Platonic Academy at Athens. A small group of Platonists — Damascius, Simplicius, and their associates — rather than submit, travelled east to Khosrow's court at Ctesiphon. The experiment was not a philosophical success; the philosophers found the Persian court less congenial than they had hoped, and after three years they negotiated their return. But the 532 peace treaty between Rome and Persia included, at Khosrow's insistence, a specific clause guaranteeing their freedom to practise philosophy privately without prosecution.

Khosrow's direct patronage of Gondishapur is harder to document precisely, but the ancient and medieval sources agree that the academy's development from a modest bishopric school into a major medical institution took place under his reign. He brought Syriac-speaking Christian physicians, Indian medical teachers, and Persian scholars together at the court and at Gondishapur, commissioning translations and cross-disciplinary exchange.

The Legacy

The Sasanian patronage of learning that Khosrow embodied was transferred, after the Islamic conquest of the empire in the mid-seventh century, into the institutional culture of the Abbasid caliphate. The House of Wisdom established at Baghdad in the ninth century was in several senses the successor of Gondishapur. The Christian physicians who had served the Sasanian court — the Bukhtishu family most prominently — served the early Abbasid caliphs in the same roles, and the translation culture that produced Arabic Aristotle and Arabic Galen drew directly on Sasanian precedent. Khosrow's name continued to appear in Islamic political and wisdom literature as the pattern of the just king who listened to his counsellors.