Apocalyptic Imagery and Royal Propaganda in Khusraw II’s Letter to Emperor Maurice

The Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta (fl. 620s) records an exchange of letters with the Sasanian Empire. The correspondence of March 590, from the Iranian shah Khosrow II Parviz (r. 591-628) and addressed to the Byzantine emperor Maurice (r. 582-602), exhibits a particular style, focused on the ideological oppositions of order and disorder and legitimacy and usurpation. This paper suggests that Khosrow's claims to his kingdom made use of a discourse of catastrophic motifs that reflected common Sasanian apocalyptic beliefs. Thus, the chaotic situation provoked by the inversion of the rightful order elicited, from a Zoroastrian perspective, a response that stressed the dualistic nuance of demonic anarchy in order to stigmatize the risk of deposition. For these reasons, apocalyptic doctrines and royal propaganda share a common language: a political discourse based on the justification of kingship and the demonization of the enemy. CONTENTS: new interpretation of the Byzantine sources including information on Sassanian institutions and conceptions. In this case as a document recording an apocalyptical language of the Persian king Conroe II. METHODOLOGY: the novelty of this approach of a new reading aims at underscoring an apocalyptical flavor embedded in the speech of the Sassanian king but also common to an epoch of sharing conceptions on millenarism, eschatology and yearning for political characters bringing healing and salvation. The methodology has been welcomed in the recent essay of Domenico Agostini https://brill.com/view/journals/ic/26/1/article-p32_4.xml, p. 42.