The last years of the Sasanid empire as reflected in the Persian romantic narrative tradition

The article moves from the hypothesis that many of the poems pertaining to the Persian medieval romantic tradition in verse (XII-XV centuries) seem to narrate a love story set in one and the same period of Iranian history: the epoch of one of the last great sovereigns of the Sasanid dynasty, Khusraw II Parvīz (r. 590-628 CE), and the years immediately following his reign. By retracing the relations between a series of personages and events narrated in the poems and historical facts, this study tries to illustrate the multiple influences that personages and events of the end of the Sasanid epoch exerted on the recounting of more ancient myths, from one side, and on later narratives, from the other. The mechanisms that had an effect on the transformation of historical into literary characters in the medieval Persian narrative tradition are also investigated. An explanation for the genesis of literary characters from historical or semi-historical personages of the end of the Sasanid era is put forward: the last years of the Sasanid rule correspond to the epoch in which the narrative materials of pre-Islamic origin which had been gathered in the Sasanid Book of Kings (Xwadāy nāmag) received their last, definitive written form, before being transmitted and assimilated into Islamic culture. This is supposed to be the reason of the central role that events and personages of this epoch had in the genesis of narrative materials of the Islamic period.