hat they were repulsed with apparent ease. Kobad marched
against their Khan in person, at the head of a hundred thousand men,
defeated him in a battle, destroyed the greater portion of his army,
and returned to his capital with an enormous booty. To check their
incursions, he is said to have built on the Armenian frontier a town
called Amid, by which we are probably to understand, not the ancient
Amida (or Diarbekr), but a second city of the name, further to the
east and also further to the north, on the border line which separated
Armenia from Iberia.

The triumphant return of Kobad from his Khazar war might have seemed
likely to secure him a long and prosperous reign; but at the moment when
fortune appeared most to smile upon him, an insidious evil, which had
been gradually but secretly sapping the vitals of his empire, made
itself apparent, and, drawing the monarch within the sphere of its
influence, involved him speedily in difficulties which led to the loss
of his crown. Mazdak, a native of Persepolis, or, according to others,
of Nishapur, in Khorassan, and an Archimagus, or High Priest of the
Zoroastrian religion, announced himself, early in the reign of Kobad,
as a reformer of Zoroastrianism, and began to make proselytes to the new
doctrines which he declared himself commissioned to unfold. All men, he
said, were, by God's providence, born equal--none brought into the
world any property, or any natural right to possess more than another.
Property and marriage were mere human inventions, contrary to the will
of God, which required an equal division of the good things of this
world among all, and forbade the appropriation of particular women by
individual men. In communities based upon property and marriage, men
might lawfully vindicate their natural rights by taking their fair share
of the good things wrongfully appropriated by their fellows Adultery,
incest, theft, were not really crimes, but necessary steps towards
re-establishing the laws of nature in such societies. To these
communistic views, which seem to have been the original speculations
of his own mind, the Magian reformer added tenets borrowed from the
Brahmins or from some other Oriental ascetics, such as the sacredness
of animal life, the necessity of abstaining from animal food, other than
milk, cheese, or eggs, the propriety of simplicity in apparel, and the
need of abstemiousness and devotion. He thus presented the spectacle of
an enthusiast who pr