The Central Problem: the world of Late Antiquity from its Persian centre (2021)

From the early 220s to the Islamic conquests of the 630s and 640s, the lands that now comprise Iraq and Iran constituted the heartlands of the Sasanian Empire. From their capital at Ctesiphon the Sasanian shahs surveyed wide political horizons: to the west they viewed their chief 'civilised' rival, the Emperor of Rome; to the south and east they were deeply involved in the affairs of the Arabian world, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean; to the north and north-east, they vied for control of the Caucasus and confronted the nomadic empires of Central Asia, such as the Huns and Turks, who threatened to overwhelm their realm. In the sixth century, a Roman commentator regarded this empire as standing at the centre-point of the world. In the 620s the Persian shah Khusro II almost captured Constantinople and was on the verge of destroying the Roman Empire. The first 'holy war' of the early Middle Ages was not the jihad ordained by Muhammad: rather, it was the Sasanian struggle against the empires of the Eurasian Steppe. In The Last Empire of Iran, Michael Bonner has written an admirably lucid, insightful and comprehensive narrative history of the rise and fall of the Sasanian Empire. On subjects ranging from the impact of bubonic plague in the sixth and seventh centuries to the role of the Sasanians in international commerce, he has important and novel things to say.