At a glance
- Roles
- Ruler
- Era
- Pre-Islamic Arabia · The Prophetic Era
- Region
- Persia & Central Asia · Levant & Iraq
- Identifiers
- Wikidata
- Review
- Draft Completeness 2/5 · Help complete it
Life in time
Islam and ZoroastrianismWars and campaigns
Place in the story
- RulertowardThe Sasanian Empire · 590 CE – 628 CE · 7 AH†Historical
- InterlocutortowardMuhammad · c. 627 CE · c. 6 AH†Tradition
Zoroastrian (documented)
Roles are dated and sourced; the museum describes the act and attributes the judgement.
Brief
Khosrow II — "Khosrow the Victorious" — was the last great shah of Sasanian Persia (590–628). His empire swallowed half of Byzantium's lands, then shattered; the tradition remembers him as the king who tore up the Prophet's letter.
Life
Khosrow came to power as a fugitive who had appealed to Byzantium, then spent two decades waging the war that made Sasanian armies masters of Egypt and stood before Constantinople 1. Heraclius's counter-invasion broke the empire; in February 628 Khosrow was deposed by his own son and executed 2.
The Islamic sources place his fall in pointed sequence with a letter: the Prophet is reported to have written "From Muhammad, God's Messenger, to Kisra, king of Persia," and the shah to have torn the letter and ordered the governor of Yemen to seize the Prophet — before news of his own overthrow arrived {cite:ibn-sad-tabaqat-bewley, tabari-bosworth-1999}.
Legacy
Within a generation of his death the whole Sasanian world — the empire that had ruled Iran for four centuries — was absorbed into the caliphate. In Islamic memory he is the proud king warned and ignored; in Iranian memory, the beginning of an ending.
For young visitors
The king of the world's second superpower tore up the Prophet's letter. Within months he was dead — and within thirty years his whole empire was gone.
Connections
- Corresponded with
- Abdullah ibn Hudhafa al-Sahmi· Muhammad
- Ruler of
- The Sasanian Empire
- Fought
- The Byzantine Empire
- Participated in
- The Formation of the Bata'ih (Great Swamp)
People and things also explored
Heraclius· The Letters to Rulers and Kings· Return of the Abyssinian emigrants with Ja'far ibn Abi Talib· Alqama ibn Mujazziz's expedition to the Jeddah coast· The Second Abyssinian Occupation of Yemen· The Battle of Dhu Qar· The Conquest of Khaybar· The Battle of the Trench (al-Ahzab)
Sources
- al-Tabari, History vol. V: The Sasanians, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen (Bosworth translation, SUNY)
- Kaegi, Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium (2003)
Cite this page
islam.museum contributors. “Khosrow II”. islam.museum, https://islam.museum/en/person/khosrow-ii/. CC BY-SA 4.0. Last updated 2026-10-19.