Sapor undertook to rid his sovereign of the incubus whereof he complained, and, with the tacit sanction of the monarch, he contrived to fasten a quarrel on Sufrai which he pushed to such an extremity that, at the end of it, he dragged the minister from the royal apartment to a prison, had him heavily ironed, and in a few days caused him to be put to death.
Sapor, upon this, took the place previously occupied by Sufrai; he was recognized at once as Prime Minister, and Sipehbed, or commander-in-chief of the troops.

Kobad, content to have vindicated his royal power by the removal of Sufrai, conceded to the second favorite as much as he had allowed to the first, and once more suffered the management of affairs to pass wholly into the hands of a subject.
The only war in which Persia seems to have been engaged during the first reign of Kobad was one with the Khazars.

This important people, now heard of for the first time in Persian history, appears to have occupied, in the reign of Kobad, the steppe country between the Wolga and the Don, whence they made raids through the passes of the Caucasus into the fertile provinces of Iberia, Albania, and Armenia.

Whether they were Turks, as is generally believed, or Circassians, as has been ingeniously argued by a living writer, is doubtful; but we cannot be mistaken in regarding them as at this time a race of fierce and terrible barbarians, nomadic in their habits, ruthless in their wars, cruel and uncivilized in their customs, a fearful curse to the regions which they overrun and desolated.

We shall meet with them again, more than once, in the later history, and shall have to trace to their hostility some of the worst disasters that befel the Persian arms.