Before the main text, it should be emphasized that Persia is the Greek name for Iran, and the Persians claim to be Iranians.
Looking back at the Muslim conquest of Iraq, it seems inconceivable to people today that there is hardly any decent resistance from the Persians. The Sassanid Dynasty was a new empire established by the Iranians 500 years after the destruction of the Achaemenid dynasty by Alexander the Great, known as the Second Persian Dynasty. The Empire embraced Zoroastrianism (Zoroastrianism), which crossed Eurasia at its height, drank horses in the Mediterranean, and came to Constantinople! But when we look at the history of the 7th century, how fragile is this once great empire?
The Sassanid Empire in its heyday
For Islam rose at a time when centuries-long wars between Persia and Byzantium had brought down both powers. The consumption of resources by war is staggering, and centuries of war have long since hollowed out the country. In 626 AD, the Persians, Avars, and Slavs formed an alliance to besiege Constantinople, but Constantinople was easily defended on three sides, and the Byzantine navy had an overwhelming advantage, which made the numerical superiority of the Persian coalition army meaningless in siege warfare. The unhappiness of the war caused the Persian ruler Kuth lao II to become suspicious of the commander of the front, Shahbaraz, and he wrote to the senior generals in the front to plot to get rid of Shahbaraz, but unfortunately the letter fell into the hands of the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius. He immediately handed the letter to Shahbaraz, and the Persian general immediately chose to withdraw his troops, leading his troops back to Egypt and Syria to become warlords on one side.
Heraclius relieved the crisis in Constantinople, and in the winter of 627 he conquered Syria and Palestine from the east, and even invaded the persian hinterland to threaten the capital Ctesiphon (about 30 kilometers southeast of present-day Baghdad), wreaking havoc and plundering in the two river valley areas, the richest in Persia, and causing great damage to Persia's national strength, which was fatal to the Sassanid Dynasty. The defeat in foreign wars triggered internal turmoil in the Sassanid Dynasty, with Khuth's son, Khaward II, killing his father in a coup d'état in 628, and then less than two years after Kavad II died of illness, and in the next five years the Emperor of Persia changed five like a marquee. The once-mighty Sassanid Empire was already dying, and it was at this time that the Muslim invasion was ushered in.
The Arch of Ctesiphon, once the capital of the Sassanid Dynasty, was destroyed by muslims and is now only in ruins
At the end of 637 AD, the Arab army completely pacified all of Iraq, and at this time, the last Sassanid emperor, Yazd Gilder III, and his guards fled to the Iranian plateau in the north, where the Persians were located. In 640 AD, Abdullah ibn Amir led an army into the Iranian plateau of Persia. Some Sassanid officials tried to rally forces against the invaders, but due to the lack of a strong central government, they were unable to unite the local resistance, and were eventually defeated by an Arab army led by Sard's nephew near Hawand in 641 AD.
Sassanid cavalry
But the Persian resistance did not stop, unlike Byzantium, which was different from Byzantium, which lost Syria only a rich land and posed no threat to its homeland. Unlike Persia, if it loses, it will be a country, so the Arabs are fighting on the Iranian plateau much harder than in Syria. By 650, Arab armies had conquered the provinces of Faris and Khorasan, so that the territory of the original Sassanid Dynasty had basically fallen into Muslim hands.
In 651, the last Emperor, Yezd Gilder III, fled with a crown and treasure and a small number of attendants to the vicinity of Mulu (Mali, former Soviet Union), only to have the owner of a mill kill him in the mill, and the last secular dynasty in Iranian history, the Sassanid Dynasty, died tragically. The remaining nobles migrated to Central Asia and established the first Islamized Persian state, the Samanid dynasty, but the real revival of Persia was more than 800 years later.
Looking at this history today, the Sassanids, like the end of the dynasties in history, were ruthless and heavily taxed the people. The high-level power struggle was fierce and the coup d'état continued, and finally the power fell to the army, and the country died little by little in the midst of internal and external difficulties. But these are only appearances, how can we find commonalities in these perishing nations and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past? However, the more you look at it, the more you will find that this is an unsolvable tragedy, there is a saying called "there is nothing new under the sun", and everything we see today is just a reproduction of a small fragment of history. Human history tells us that humanity has never been a species that can learn its lessons.
In this series, we will tell in detail the development process from the birth of Islam to today's Arab world, and like friends like it and pay attention to it + comment! O(∩_∩)O~