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Yazdegerd III (also Romanized as Yazdgerd, Yazdgird) was the last Sasanian Empire King of Kings from 632 to 651. His father was Shahriyar and his grandfather was Khosrow II.
Ascending the throne at the age of eight, the young shah lacked authority and reigned as a figurehead, whilst real power was in the hands of the army commanders, courtiers, and powerful members of the aristocracy, who engaged in internecine warfare. The Sasanian Empire was weakened severely by these internal conflicts, resulting in invasions by the Göktürks from the east, and Khazars from the west. Yazdegerd was unable to contain the Rashidun conquest of Iran, and spent most of his reign fleeing from one province to another in the vain hope of raising an army. Yazdegerd met his end at the hands of a miller near Merv in 651, bringing an end to the last pre-Islamic Iranian empire after more than 400 years of rule.
The murder of Khosrow II ignited a civil war that lasted four years, as the most powerful members of the nobility created their own autonomous government. Hostilities between the Persians ( Parsig) and ( Pahlav) noble families also resumed; they divided the treasury between themselves. And months later, a devastating plague swept through the western Sasanian provinces and killed half of the population. Kavad II was one of its victims.
Kavad was succeeded by his eight-year-old son Ardashir III who was killed two years later by the distinguished Sasanian general Shahrbaraz. Forty days later Shahrbaraz was deposed and murdered by the Pahlav leader Farrukh Hormizd, who installed the daughter of Khosrow II, Boran, on the throne. She was deposed a year later, and a succession of rulers followed until Boran was sovereign once more in 631, only to be murdered the following year by the Parsig leader Piruz Khosrow.
Eventually the two most powerful magnates in the empire, Rostam Farrokhzad and Piruz Khosrow—threatened by their own men—agreed to ally. They installed Yazdegerd III on the throne, putting an end to the civil war. He was crowned in the Temple of Anahita, Istakhr, where he had been hiding during the civil war. The site was chosen to be a symbol of the empire's rejuvenation, as it was the very place where the first Sasanian shah Ardashir I () had crowned himself four centuries earlier. Due to Kavad's massacre of his family, the new shah was among the few surviving members of the House of Sasan. Most scholars agree that Yazdegerd was eight years old at his coronation. His coronation occurred around the same time that Abu Bakr became Caliph. (2025). 9789231032110, UNESCO. ISBN 9789231032110
By 632, the Sasanian state resembled the Feudalism system of the Parthian Empire at its collapse in 224. Yazdegerd, though acknowledged by both the Parsig and Pahlav factions as the rightful monarch, was not in control of the empire. Indeed, during the first years of his rule the Pahlav, based in the north, refused to mint coins of him.
His coins were minted in Pars, Sakastan, and Khuzestan, approximately corresponding to the regions of the southwest ( Xwarwarān) and southeast ( Nēmrōz), where the Parsig was based. In the south, a Sasanian claimant to the throne who called himself Khosrow IV minted his own coinage at Susa in Khuzestan; he would do so till 636. According to Rezakhani, Yazdegerd also lost control over Mesopotamia and the imperial capital Ctesiphon. He argues that the conspiring aristocrats and the population of Ctesiphon "do not appear to have been too successful or eager in bringing Yazdgerd to the capital."
The empire was being invaded on two fronts; by the Göktürks in the east and by Khazars in the west. The Khazars raided Sasanian Armenia and Adurbadagan. The Sasanian army had been heavily weakened due to the war with the Byzantines and to its continuous internal conflict. The circumstances were so chaotic, and the condition of the state so alarming, that "the Persians openly spoke of the imminent downfall of their empire, and saw its portents in natural calamities."
In 636 Yazdegerd ordered Rostam to subdue the invading Arabs, telling him "Today you are the most man among the Iranians...The people of Iran have not faced a situation like this since the family of Ardashir I assumed power." Notwithstanding this speech, advisors asked Yazdegerd to dismiss Rostam and replace him with someone more popular and around whom the people would rally.
Yazdegerd ordered Rostam to assess the Arab forces camped at Qadisiyyah. Rostam reported that the Arabs were "a pack of wolves, falling upon unsuspecting shepherds and annihilating them." Yazdegerd responded to Rostam thus:
The Iranian defeat at al-Qadisiyyah has often been described as a turning point in the Arab invasion of Iran. The Iranians had finally became cognizant of the destructive consequences of their factionalism and internecine feuding. Al-Tabari wrote that after the fall of Ctesiphon "the people... were about to go their separate ways, but they started to incite one another: 'If you disperse now, you will never get together again; this is a spot that sends us in different directions'."
In 637 Arabs defeated another Sasanian army at the Battle of Jalula, and Yazdegerd fled deeper into Media. He raised a new army there and ordered it to Nahavand to retake Ctesiphon in the hope of preventing Muslim advances. The threat presented by the new army prompted Umar to combine his Arab forces. He ordered Al-Nu’man ibn Muqrin to take command of the armies of Kufa and Basra, with additional reinforcements from Syria and Oman.
In 642 this massive army attacked the Sasanians. The ensuing Battle of Nahavand is said to have lasted several days, with major losses on both sides. The dead included al-Nu'man ibn Muqrin and the Iranian generals Mardanshah and Piruz Khosrow. It marked a second military disaster for the Sasanians, six years after the crushing defeat at al-Qadisiyyah in 636.
In Kirman, Yazdegerd managed to alienate the marzban (frontier military governor or "margrave"), before leaving for Sakastan. Then another Arab army from Basra arrived at Kirman. A fierce battle ensued in which the marzban was slain. And Yazdegerd alienated the governor of Sakastan with his demands for more and higher taxes to fund the army. Yazdegerd next embarked to Merv to meet the leader of the Turkic people in the hope of forming an alliance. But when he reached Greater Khorasan, the war-weary populace insisted on peace with the Arabs, and Yazdegerd refused. In 650–652, an Arab army entered Sakastan and captured the city. Yazdegerd did secure the troops from the Principality of Chaghaniyan. He made the same demands on the marzban of Merv that he made in Kirman and Sakastsn and met with the same results. The marzban joined with Nezak Tarkan, the Hephthalite ruler of Badghis Province, and together they defeat Yazdegerd and his followers.
The death of Yazdegerd marked the end of the Sasanian Empire, and made it easier for the Arabs to conquer the rest of Iran. All of Khorasan was soon conquered by the Arabs, who would use it as a base to attack Transoxiana. The death of Yazdegerd thus marked the end of the last pre-Islamic Iranian empire after more than 400 years of rule. The empire—which had a generation earlier conquered Egypt and Asia Minor, reaching as a far as Constantinople—fell to a force of lightly-equipped Arabs used to skirmishes and desert warfare. The heavy Sasanian cavalry was too sluggish and systematized to contain them; employing light-armed Arab or East Iranian mercenaries from Khorasan and Transoxiana would have been more effective.
Yazdegerd was according to tradition buried by Christianity monks in Merv, in a tall tomb situated in a garden and decorated with silk and musk. A funeral and mausoleum were organized by Church of the East bishop Elias of Merv in honor of Yazdegerd's Christian grandmother Shirin. For his part in the murder of the Sassanian king, Mahoe Suri had his arms, legs, ears and nose cut off by the Turkic peoples, who eventually left him to die under the scorching summer sun. The corpse of Mahoe was then burned at the stake, along with the bodies of his three sons.
According to one tradition, the monks cursed Mahoe and made a hymn to Yazdegerd, mourning the fall of a "combative" king and the "house of Ardashir I". Whether the tradition was factual or not, it emphasizes that the Christians of the empire remained loyal to the Zoroastrianism Sasanians, even possibly more than the Iranian nobles who had deserted Yazdegerd. Indeed, there were close links between the late Sasanian rulers and Christians, whose conditions had greatly improved compared to that of the early Sasanian era. Yazdegerd's wife was according to folklore a Christian, whilst his son and heir, Peroz III was seemingly an adherent of Christianity, and had a church built in China where he had taken refuge. Yazdegerd became remembered in history as a martyred prince; many rulers and officers of Islamic Iran would claim descent from him.
Yazdegerd was well-educated and cultured, but his arrogance, pride and inability to compare his demands with the real situation led to his constantly falling out with his governors and to his influence diminishing as he, pursued by Arabs, moved from one city to another. At each new place, he behaved as if he was still the all-powerful monarch of the kingdom and not an outcast running away from enemies. Combined with his military failures, this arrogance turned many of his most loyal subjects away from him. (2025). 9785916600018, SMI-Asia. ISBN 9785916600018
took Yazdegerd III's death as the end of the millennium of Zoroaster and the beginning of the millennium of Oshedar (see "Saoshyant".
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