ABSTRACT
[21] The famous heresiarch Mazdak is generally believed to have been a communist active in the time of Kavād (488–96, 498–531), and to have been killed along with many of his followers by Khusrau Anōshirvān (531–79), Kavād’s son and successor, after Kavād’s attempt to implement his communist ideas had unleashed a popular revolt which plunged the Sasanid empire into chaos 1 H. Gaube, however, dissents from this view. According to him, Mazdak may never have existed; even if he did, he played no role in Kavād’s politics, nor did such doctrines as he may have espoused stir up social unrest: it was Kavād who mobilised the masses against the nobility in the name of communist ideas, while Mazdak was probably invented or misrepresented to take the blame for the king’s unorthodox behaviour. 2 This is a claim apt to make a historian sit up in surprise. Though friction between kings and nobles has been commonplace in history, one does not often hear of kings stirring up peasant revolts against their noble rivals, for the obvious reason that the latter were the pillars of the established order: if the peasants destroyed the nobility, by what means was the king to restore order among the peasants? Whatever else may be said for it, Gaube’s argument certainly makes Kavād’s behaviour even more problematic than it already is. But is there anything to be said for it? It rests on the two facts that no contemporary source mentions Mazdak (though several refer to Kavād’s communist phase) and that the later sources are full of contradictions. Both facts do indeed suggest that something is wrong with the standard account, but there is a less radical way of explaining them than that which Gaube proposes.
