In the Sassanid Empire ruled the Dikhans, or local lords, while the brilliant court of these early-Eastern “Hohenstaufen” was in every respect a model for that of the Byzantines who followed Diocletian. Even much later the Abbassids in their new capital of Baghdad could think of nothing better than to imitate, on a grand scale, the Sassanid ideal of court life. In northern Arabia, at the courts of the Ghassanids[298] and at those of the Lakhmids,[299] there sprang up a genuine troubadour and _Minne_ poetry; and knightly poets, in the days of the Early Fathers, fought out their duels with “word, lance, and sword.” One of them was the Jew Samuel, lord of the castle of Al Alblaq, who stood a famous siege by the King of Hira for the sake of five precious suits of armour.[300] In relation to this lyric poetry, the Late-Arabic which flourished, especially in Spain, from 800 stands as Uhland and Eichendorff stand to Walter von der Vogelweide. For this young world of the first centuries of our era our antiquarians and theologians have had no eyes. Busied as they are with the state of Late Republican and Imperial Rome, the conditions of the Middle East seem to them merely primitive and void of all significance. But the Parthian bands that again and again rode at the legions of Rome were a chivalry exalted by Mazdaism; in their armies there was the spirit of crusade. So, too, might it have been with Christianity if it had not been wholly bound under the power of the pseudomorphosis. The spirit was there--Tertullian spoke of the “_militia Christi_,” and the sacrament was the soldier’s oath of fidelity.[301] But it was only later that Christ became the hero for whom his vassals went out against the heathen; for the time being, the hither side of the Roman frontier knew not Christian lords and knights, but only Roman legates; not the castle, but the _castra_; not tournaments, but executions. Yet in spite of all this it was not, strictly speaking, a Parthian war, but a true crusade of Jewry that blazed out in 115 when Trajan marched into the East, and it was as a reprisal for the destruction of Jerusalem that the whole infidel (“Greek”) population of Cyprus--traditionally 240,000 souls--was massacred.[302] Nisibis, defended by Jews, made an illustrious resistance. Warlike Adiabene (the upper Tigris plain) was a Jewish state. In all the Parthian and Persian wars against Rome the gentry and peasantry, the feudal levy, of Jewish Mesopotamia fought in the front line.