Here goes nothing.
Rise of the White Huns
The meteoric rise of the people known as the Eftal[1] or the Hyon marked a dramatic and irrevocable change to the political and social structures of the Near East. As with so often when steppe people disrupt the currents of settled cultures or even their own, their arrival was facilitated by substantial economic and societal disruptions. Their arrival as major players in the political sphere of the Near East was immediately preceded by prolonged drought and corresponding famine, beginning in 464 CE. Despite the efforts of the Sassanian Sahan Sah[2] Peroz, to alleviate the hardships of his people, the human cost was tremendous - thousands perished across Iran and in some years the Tigris and the Euphrates were said to have run completely dry at times.
In addition to these deprivations, the Eftal were immediately preceded by a people also identified as the Hyon[3]. The Hyon themselves were divided themselves into two peoples - the Karmir Hyon and Speda Hyon, or Red and White Huns, a distinctions that depended more on tribal affiliations than the ruddiness of ones’ cheeks, as certain ancient historians chose to assume. Types aside, the Hyon and Eftal were a very closely linked people, both culturally and politically, with some presuming that the Eftal were merely a dominant tribal affiliation within the Speda Hyon. Whatever their identifier, the Hyon did immense damage to urban society across Balkh and parts of Transoxania, raiding and plundering the region. Archaeological evidence shows that it would not be until the era of Eftal ascendency that the region truly recovered.
Understanding the patterns of political ascendancy and decline among these various Iranic peoples is made more complex by the sheer ignorance of the settled people who interacted with them. While Peroz himself ascended to the throne with the aid of a people who have been described as Eftal, and while Akhshunvar the Great, the future conqueror of Iran, is said to have been granted the districts around Taleqan as a reward for his service, it is unclear in what capacity he did this. It is possible that Akhshunvar at the time was a mercenary in the service of Peroz, or a foreign power lending assistance. It is also possible this tale is an apocryphal myth, assigning the Iranians even more blame for their downfall than they deserve.
In any case, Akhshunvar’s ascendance was rapid and indeed involved no little element of Iranian complicity. His wars against rival Hunnic groups was done with the support of Peroz, who sought to put an end to constant raids and establish some sort of stable ally in the east at the least, or ideally to secure Balkh for his own Empire. It transpires that he ultimately lost control of Balkh throughout the 60’s - while coping with famine in his own countries, domestic insurrections, and raids across the entire vast frontier of the east. Peroz was also ill-equipped to confront Hyon raiders unaffiliated with any major polity, and thus relied extensively on Akhshunvar for assistance in reigning in these bandits. The Eftal around this time began referring to himself as Sah, and minting his own coinage.
It was around this time that the fractious remnants of the Hunnic polity founded by Kidara, and thus by extension the remaining Kushan, were incorporated into the Eftal hegemony, establishing a pattern of confederal rule that was typical of Akhshunvar’s early policies. While they had to follow Eftal laws, there were countless rulers still referring to themselves as Kings among them, and their integration was minimal.
The Eftal political system was marked by such contradictions. On one hand, Akhshunvar was a different sort of ruler, urban and sophisticated, determined to rule with a degree of absolutism relatively unknown among the sorts of people he ruled. On the other hand, he was constrained by political realities and the centrifugal tendencies of his state. Khuttal, for example, was ruled by its own ruler, called a Sher. Such autonomous vassals were common, and perhaps reflective of the terrain of Tokharistan and indeed the whole region that the Eftal ruled. By the time Akhshunvar’s people were riding over Gandhara and bringing what remained of the Kushan to heel, his empire was already quite large and would become larger still almost autonomously - the defeats of the Kidara-affiliated Hyon in Gandhara led to a floodgate breaking and soon warlords aligned with the Eftal would pour into the wealthy lands of Pajcanada and Sindh.
Between the 60’s and 70’s, Peroz waged three wars against the Eftal, each more disastrous than the last. While little is recorded of any but the third, the third was a particular humiliation for the Sahan Sah. In the first two, Peroz was able to maintain his crown and his regime in exchange for cash ransoms. When Peroz declared war a third and final time, Akhshunvar reportedly sent him a letter, imploring him not to break the treaty and doom himself, reminding him of the common frontiers and accord they had come to. The language and tone of the text makes clear Akhshunvar already viewed himself as an equal to the Sassanian dynast, and accordingly there could be no peace. Peroz marched off, although a specter of hopelessness hung over the whole mission. Already he had suffered humiliating reversals twice now. How was this to be any different?
In the third war, Peroz himself was slain in an ambush near Herat. His retinue, including his daughter and two of his sons, were taken captive. When news of this disaster reached the capital, there was a general panic. The Sassanian Empire was at a low ebb - in previous wars they had been forced to beg the Romans for aid in paying ransoms, and they had still not quite recovered from the famines that had wracked Mesopotamia. The monarchy had for roughly a century now been in the hands of powerful nobles such as the Karens and the Mehrans. Zarer, Peroz’s son, attempted to seize the throne but was defeated in a Karen-backed coup. He fled northwards towards Nasibin, where there were additional forces he believed might rally to his side, and he hoped to gain the aid of the Nestorians, whom his father had patronized. But without Tesifon, Sukhra Karen, head of the Karen family, was able to place his uncle Balash in power. Balash, brother of Peroz, a feeble monarch, and just as suspected he left the defense of the throne in the hands of Sukhra Karen, who rallied yet another army and led them east.
It appears that Sukhra had alienated at least part of the Parthian families whose support he needed. The Esfandiar, at any rate, had sided with Zarer, and thus he was deeply outnumbered by Akshunvar, whose army was swollen with new tribal allies, even among those factions who had long resented his rule - plunder was almost guaranteed it now seemed, and Akshunvar made no secret of his plans to progress further, as Sukhra refused his demands to pay steep ransoms of both territory and coin.[4]
This final battle in 484 CE ensured the collapse of the Sassanian dynasty. The capture of Sukhra Karen and deaths of so many of the Parthian aristocrats who made up the backbone of the dynasty’s military and political elites was crippling. Akhshunvar marched on Tesifon and put the city to sack with minimal resistance. Although he was an aging man, and getting no younger, Akhshunvar presided over the dissolution of the Sassanian state with a mixture of brutality and compromise that he had become known for. The Parthian clans whose confederal arrangement with the Sassanians had provided the effective backbone of the empire were still peerless warriors and the Eftal and Hyons, although numerous and surging across the plateau, allowed many of these factions to enter into federal relations with the new Eftal Empire.
Zarer was one of the last holdouts. He occupied Nasibin for at least two years after the 485 sack of Tesifon, before fleeing to Constantinople with a few loyal retainers. At this point, the Esfandiar family, led by Artaxser, was left in control of the city and its environs, and was able to negotiate its surrender in exchange for being granted the lands around it - a desperate decision, given that their traditional patrimony was overrun by the Karmir. They would go on, ironically, to become reliable allies of Akhshunvar, who was predisposed to them for handing over one of the most powerful fortified cities in the empire without a fight.
Akhshunvar, before his death some seven years later in 491, was able to provide generous gifts of pastureland, titles, and wealth to his supporters and rivals alike - the sort of patronage that would ensure at least short term loyalty to his chosen successor, his son Varaz. However, the latter years of his reign and life consisted of the same sort of aggressive ambition that had characterized his youth. Unlike what had been typical of these latter migratory Hunnic dynasties, he also cultivated a reputation as a city-builder and a patron of the Irano-Buddhist and Indo-Iranian religious buildings and iconography that would come to characterize Hunnic belief systems. His founding of temples to Veshparkar stylistically defined as Shiva and the fire deity Mihr alike in the one-time Eftal capital of Piandjikent exemplifies this tradition. The fact that throughout his reign he promoted policies of irrigation, urbanization, and inviting learned men to debate earned him a degree of respect rarely afforded by settled peoples to their nomadic conquerors.
Additional eastern victories would come shortly thereafter. By 493[5], Sugd had fallen. By 509, Karashahr was under their control as well. While the royalty certainly celebrated these victories and credited them to their martial prowess, they were largely performed by ambitious lieutenants, some of whom, such as Khigi, would ultimately cause problems in frontier regions such as Sindh. However, by the time Varaz ascended the throne, the Eftal had reached unprecedented heights. Within a period of no more than forty years they had gone from a member of the Sped Hyon confederacy to rulers of a territory which dwarfed the greatest extent of the Sassanian Empire.[6]
Varaz was fortunate in many ways - a young successor who did not have to waste undue time with consolidation, as so many heirs of notable conquerors do. Charming and well-liked, he was a skilled horseman and hunter.
[1] Eptalit to the Syrians, Ephthalitai to the Greeks, Haital to the Arabs, or Hephthalite or Sveta Huna. Like all White Huns posts, this one assumes that Eftal or some bastardization comes to predominate ultimately.
[2] A horrific tongue twister.
[3] Chionites. For the purposes of this narrative, the term Hyon will not be applied to the Eftal.
[4] According to some accounts, Akshunvar ensured his negotiations only had the semblance of good faith - and actually made demands for territories strategically, so to aggravate key landholders within Sukhra’s army, while leaving those of Sukhra’s rivals untouched.
[5] A little ahead of schedule.
[6] ITTL, obviously. The patterns of Hunnic settlement have also substantially shifted as a result of these developments. India receives less of an influx because of the availability of land in Iran. This isn’t enough to stop the Hunnic settlement by any means, of course. The Kidarites made that clear.
Some Thoughts from OTL
Consider this, then, not a reboot per se but rather a return to my favorite region and period of (alt) history. This is not a replacement to the original White Huns - it has already diverged substantially from the narrative presented there - but rather an attempt on my part to remedy some of the issues that are clearly present in that timeline, and take a more in-depth and possibly more realistic focus on what a Hephthalite conquest of the Near East could actually look like. I have no intention of giving this timeline the scope of the White Huns.
This whole history was born from an idea that occurred to me - if the White Huns had conquered Iran at the dawn of the fifth century, nobody looking back on the event would have been surprised. Nobody with the benefit of hindsight in TTL would say “oh that seems unlikely.” Because with the benefit of hindsight you see that Iran is wracked with succession conflicts, conflicts the Hephthalites are intervening in to great effect. The late fifth century is one of those great seesaw moments in world history - either the Sassanians recover and advance to greater heights, or fail and are replaced. In our own timeline, the Hephthalites weren’t even decisively removed as a threat until they fell between the pincier of rising Turks in the East and a resurgent Sassanian Empire in the West.
At the dawn of the sixth century, before that resurgence began, there was nothing to indicate it would. Successive Sassanian dynasts had been elevated by Hephthalite armies and the Sassanians remind me of so many other settled dynasties at their nadir confronted by the confident, aggressive newcomer who has all the cards and all the advantages. At their peak, the Hephthalites has already co-opted the iconography of the Sassanian Emperors - they saw themselves at the least as coequals. It would only take a little push to have the Hephthalites topple whatever remained of the Sassanian Empire - whose borders they had penetrated with impunity.
I cheated a little too, I confess. I wanted to spare India entirely from the Hephthalite invasions, which I saw as a particularly scarring instance of northern invasion. This was a conscious choice - a decision that would have massive ramifications for the world history I wanted to create almost from the beginning. I think it was rational - I had my Hephthalite conqueror ride into Tesifon and self-consciously remake himself as a Sassanian-type monarch, laying the groundwork for a newer, more vital Persian dynasty. Still, I don't think it's implausible that the Hephthalites would have had it both ways - or many ways. Historically there’s no reason to suggest that a Hephthalite Empire couldn't have ruled from Sindh to the gates of Anatolia. In our own timeline they were rapidly expanding in all directions - the fall of Persia could have been an element of that.
One element of the White Huns I was always dissatisfied with was my treatment of Zoroastrianism. The resilience of the ancient religion in its post-Sassanian incarnation was, I don’t think, well enough modelled. The Hephthalites were certainly acquainted to varying degrees with a very wide world of beliefs and cultures. As I wrote, their own Iranic polytheism, the heritage of their nomadic origins, was probably dying by the time they would have conquered the Sassanians. They were a settled people whose presumptive Hindu-Buddhist-Zoroastrian syncretism I decided would be my model for world religion across the Near East (and ultimately Russia). But I think it could have gone another way too. It might have been interesting to envision a world where the Hepthalites, perhaps even a longer lived Akhshunvarid dynasty was torn between two masters.
It could have been interesting to explore a world where Buddhism and Zoroastrianism coexist but remain more separate. I’m by no means dissatisfied with my failed Zoroastrian millenarian movement and then the depredations of the Nowbahar breaking the back of the organized Zoroastrian church - but I think it’s interesting to consider the possibilities there, of two religions enduring and evolving alongside one another.
At the same time, the 6th century was a time of Roman reversal and military defeats in the Near East. Historically, the Sassanians were on the offensive almost from the beginning of the century, an offensive that culminated in Khosrow Aparvez’s stunning conquests. I don’t think it’s unreasonable either to imagine a world where the Sassanians are the long term victors in the Near East - they really came this close. Rome was ancient and powerful and not easily unseated from their position of dominance - the mere fact they survived the explosion of the Caliphate onto the scene speaks to that. But it could have happened, and without the pressure on their eastern flank, whoever held Iran would have been in a position, I think, to ensure it much earlier.
Thanks for reading. I intend to make a few additional posts paralleling the Rise of the White Huns’ trajectory in a rough sort of way, and then a few posts wrapping up the entire thing - a focused project akin to To Ourselves, To New Paganism.