Military of the Sasanian Empire
He restored the Achaemenid military organizations, retained the Parthian cavalry model, and employed new types of armour and siege warfare techniques.
The Sasanian army protected Eranshahr ("the realm of Iran") from the East against the incursions of central Asiatic nomads like the Hephthalites and Turks, while in the west it was engaged in a recurrent struggle against the Roman Empire.
The principal changes which time had brought about were an almost entire disuse of the war chariot, the advance of the elephant corps into a very prominent and important position, and the increased use and pre-eminence of cavalry on the Parthian model, including both heavy cataphracts and horse-archers.
Their weaponry, battle tactics, tamgas, medallions, court customs, and costumes greatly influenced their Romano-Byzantine neighbours.
The Roman term appears for the first time in the vita Alexandri Severi (56.5) in the Historia Augusta, a work from the very end of the 4th century AD.
[citation needed] Depictions of aforementioned cavalry still survive, with one of the best preserved ones being a rock relief at Taq-e Bostan where Khosrau II is seen riding his favorite horse, Shabdiz.
Great store was set by it; and in some of the earlier battles against the Arabs the victory was regarded as gained mainly by this arm of the service.
[3] These giant beasts acted as walking towers on battlefields and caused panic and disorder in enemy ranks, creating openings in the lines that cavalry could take advantage of.
Accordingly, ... it is granted no great consideration in their laws.There is growing conjecture that the historical view that Sasanian infantry were mostly lightly armed spearmen, who, like their Achaemenid ancestors, were usually levied troops of little fighting ability, could be an incomplete picture of the actual composition of these forces.
Procopius of Caesarea, for example, described them as "a crowd of pitiable peasants who come into battle for no other purpose than to dig through walls and to despoil the slain and in general to serve the soldiers [i.e. the cavalrymen]".
The huge wattled shields, adopted by the Achaemenid Persians from the Assyrians (called sparabara by the Achaemenids), still remained in use; and from behind a row of these, rested upon the ground and forming a sort of loop−holed wall, the Sasanian bowmen shot their weapons with great effect; nor was it until their store of arrows was exhausted that the Romans, ordinarily, felt themselves upon even terms with their enemy.
They galled the foe with their constant discharges from between the ranks of the horsemen, remaining themselves in comparative security, as the legions rarely ventured to charge the Persian armoured cavalry.
[citation needed] In the fourth century CE, the Persians still used moving armoured siege towers, in order to strafe the battlements with artillery and to allow their soldiers to climb over them .
During the reign of Khosrow II (r. 590–628), probably sometime after 600, he resettled 4000 Daylamites in Ctesiphon and used them as an elite unit, where they became known as the Gond-i Shāhanshāh "the army of the Emperor".
After the Sasanian Empire suffered a major defeat in 636 during the Muslim conquest of Persia at the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah; the Gond-i Shahanshah defected to the Arabs, converted to Islam, and settled in Kufa, where they had their own quarter.
[22] The Aztan (Azadan, آزادان, "freemen") formed a numerous minor aristocracy of lower-ranking administrators, mostly living on their small estates and providing the cavalry backbone of the Sasanian army.
It was the elite cavalry of Sasanian Persia, who were the forerunners of the later Arabian Faris, the Caucasian horsemen, the Indian Sowar (derived from Persian Savar), and the Turkish Tarkhans.
