, Persian, “army chief”, the Islamic form of a military title used in the pre-Islamic Persian empires and surviving in the Caspian provinces of Persia down to the Mongol invasions.
In Achaemenid times the spād̲h̲apati was the commander-in-chief of the army. In the Arsacid period, the office of spāhpat was apparently hereditary in one of the great Parthian families; the Armenian geographer Moses of Choren (8th century A. D.) says that when Kos̲h̲m or Koms̲h̲, daughter of King Ars̲h̲avir (se. Phraates IV) married the commander-in-chief of the P…