Spahbed

Spāhbad (also spelled spahbod)[1] is a Middle Persian title meaning "army chief" used chiefly in the Sasanian Empire.

[2] After the Muslim conquest of Persia, the spāhbed of the East managed to retain his authority over the inaccessible mountainous region of Tabaristan on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, where the title, often in its Islamic form ispahbedh (Persian: اسپهبذ; in Arabic: اصبهبذ ʾiṣbahbaḏ), survived as a regnal title until the Mongol conquests of the 13th century.

[3] An equivalent title of Persian origin, ispahsālār or sipahsālār, gained great currency across the Muslim world in the 10th–15th centuries.

[4] Until the early 6th century, there was a single holder of the title, the Ērān-spāhbed, who according to the list of precedence provided by the 9th-century Muslim historian Ya'qubi occupied the fifth position in the court hierarchy.

Thus during the Anastasian War of 502–506, a certain Boes (Bōē), who negotiated with the Byzantine magister officiorum Celer and died in 505, is named in the Syriac sources as an 'astable' (also spelled astabed, astabad, astabadh).

Some modern scholars have interpreted astabed as a new office corresponding to the Byzantine magister officiorum, supposedly instituted by Kavadh I shortly before 503 for the purpose of weakening the authority of the wuzurg framadar.

[5][7] To curb the power of the over-mighty generalissimo, Khosrow I—although this reform may already have been planned by his father, Kavadh I (r. 499–531)—split the office of the Ērān-spāhbed into four regional commands, corresponding to the four traditional cardinal directions (kust, cf.

[3][14] The title ispahbadh was also claimed by other lines of local rulers in the region, who claimed distant descent from the Sasanian past: the Karen family, who saw themselves as heirs of the Dabuyids and ruled central and western Tabaristan until 839/840, and the Bavandid dynasty in the eastern mountains, whose various branches survived until well after the Mongol conquests of the 13th century.