In the second half of the ninth century, an Iranian historian named Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā l-Balādhurī wrote The Conquests of the Lands, an Arabic history about the Islamic conquest of the Near East and the formation of the Caliphate. The drama reached from Spain to Khurāsān, and Balādhurī documents both the fall of the great cities of Sasanian Iran and Byzantine Syria and the establishment of caliphal rule through his own time. He includes information about Armenia and Caucasian Albania, Christian lands that had formed the border between the Byzantine Greeks and the Sasanian Persians for centuries. He records the names of caliphal governors and the circumstances of the cities of the North, such as Tiflīs/Tp'ilisi, Dabīl/Duin, and Bardhʿa/Partaw. Significantly, Balādhurī starts off his discussion of the North with an extended description of the activities of Sasanian emperors: Kavād I built cities such as Baylaqān/P'aytakaran and Bardhʿa/Partaw and Ḵosrow I Anūshirwān built still more, including the famous wall at Bāb al-Abwāb/Darband. According to Balādhurī, the Sasanians settled Persian populations in Armenia and Albania and installed rulers over the various regions.

Balādhurī's focus on the conquests cannot explain his interest in Sasanian emperors. By the time the caliphal armies arrived in the North in the 640s, the Sasanians had already abandoned their claim to the territory. The caliphal armies conquered Armenia and Albania from local, Greek, and Khazar forces. So why was a ninth-century historian writing about the seventh-century Islamic conquests of Armenia and Albania so concerned about Anūshirwān, a Sasanian emperor (shāhanshāh) who died in 579? What made Sasanian history of the North so relevant to ʿAbbāsid-era historians? Balādhurī rarely fixated on Sasanian history elsewhere in the Iranian cultural sphere, known today as the Iranian oikoumene, so why did he care about it here? And, further, what are we, as modern historians, to do with this information?

If we look through the seminal modern works about the North in the eighth and ninth centuries, there is little interest in reconciling caliphal history with the Sasanian legacy. Anūshirwān does not contribute to the discussions of treaties, caliphal governors, raids against Byzantium, or Arab–Khazar skirmishes that fill the pages of the modern histories about the Umayyad and early-ʿAbbāsid North. Yet this ʿAbbāsid-era preoccupation with the Sasanian legacy of the Northern provinces is pervasive and, interestingly, exhibits common ground with the description of the caliphal North as found in Armenian sources.