Daylamites Erotic

The Daylamites were an Iranian highland people of Daylam, the mountain country of the western Alborz above Iran's southwestern Caspian coast. They flourished from late antiquity into the eleventh century and then slowly merged into the population of Gilan and the uplands around it. They stood out as a people because of the country they held and the way they fought. Daylam was forested, wet and hard to reach, and its men made a trade of that toughness. Sasanian kings recruited them as infantry, Byzantine chroniclers recorded them in Persian service, and later rulers across the Islamic world hired them in large numbers. A Daylamite soldier was easy to pick out: on foot, behind a tall shield, carrying short two-pronged spears and a battle axe.

When Arab armies took the Iranian plateau in the seventh century, Daylam held out. For more than two centuries its people beat back the caliphs' campaigns and kept their older faiths, Zoroastrianism alongside local practice. Islam reached them through refugees rather than conquest. Descendants of the Prophet fleeing Abbasid persecution found shelter in the Caspian highlands. Zaydi Shia preachers followed, above all al-Hasan al-Utrush in the early tenth century, and converted Daylamites and their lowland neighbors, the Gilites, in large numbers. Shia Islam in its several forms became part of the region's character: Alamut, the fortress Hasan-i Sabbah seized in 1090 and made the center of the Nizari Ismailis, stood in Daylamite country.

Their moment came in the tenth century, during what historians call the Iranian Intermezzo. Daylamite commanders founded states across Iran: the Musafirids in Azerbaijan, the Kakuyids around Isfahan and, most important, the Buyids. Three sons of a Daylamite named Buya rose through mercenary service. In 945 one of them, Ahmad, marched into Baghdad and reduced the Abbasid caliph to a figurehead. The Buyids held Iraq and much of Iran for about a century. They revived the old Persian royal title shahanshah and backed public Shia observances in Baghdad, including Ashura mourning for Husayn. Their armies paired Daylamite foot soldiers with Turkish cavalry, an uneasy partnership that often broke into open feuding.

Seljuk Turks entered Baghdad in 1055, and the last Buyid realm fell within a decade. After that the Daylamites gradually drop out of the sources as a distinct people. Their speech, which medieval geographers set apart from Persian, did not survive as a separate language, though the Caspian languages still spoken in Gilan and Mazandaran belong to the same Northwestern Iranian branch. What remains is the Deylaman district in the Gilan highlands, the family name Deylami, and the memory of a mountain people who for a century had the caliphs of Baghdad answering to them.