Heraclius built his alliances

Gradually, Heraclius built his alliances. Instead of marching east through Mesopotamia, as Romans so often had, he went north and then east from Constantinople along the Bosporus and Black Sea, approaching the Persian frontier from the north through Armenia. Embassies to the Khazars and other Turkic forces on the northern steppes found a good reception, and even inside the Persian forces there were opportunities to discover turncoats. In December 627 at the battle of Nineveh, Heraclius prevailed against Persian forces led by Rhazates—even though the Khazars failed him in the crisis. Holding the front, Heraclius looked south. Alliance with the Axumite Ethiopians—his fellow Christians—brought him support in winning back Yemen and the Red Sea provinces in 629 and afterward. Shaken on the south and now overextended—as would inevitably be revealed when any leader succeeded in opposing them—the Persians tottered. Heraclius finally moved on Ctesiphon, the Persian capital on the Tigris; and Khusro’s court revolted, deposing him, effectively surrendering the war. Heraclius claimed back as his terms for peace all that Khusro had taken from Rome, and the Persian government sank into anarchy and a series of short-lived rulers of no distinction.

Roman imperial title Augustus

Every sign pointed to a lasting victory for Rome over Persia. Heraclius took for himself the ancient Persian title “king of kings,” dropping the traditional Roman imperial title Augustus, just as Alexander had Persianized himself more than 900 years earlier. Back in Constantinople, Heraclius now styled himself basileus, the Greek word for king, and that title would be part of Byzantine pomp for the next 800 years. His reign also marked the effective end of Latin as the official language of empire and the permanent triumph of Greek. To this day, “Rum” is still an eastern name for the empire founded by the descendants of Romulus, but all the romanitas had gone out of it by now.

Heraclius’s ostentation of empire culminated in 630, when he traveled to Jerusalem, there to return the true cross of Christ to its rightful home. He marched into the city barefoot, as befitted a pious Christian pilgrim, carrying the cross himself, and brought it to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The church stood on the site now occupied by an elaborate, labyrinthine basilica shared among various Christian denominations, the spot identified 300 years earlier when the true cross was discovered in Constantine’s reign.

Born either in Armenia or in Africa

Heraclius at this time was in his thirties; he had been born either in Armenia (his father’s native land) or in Africa. He imitated Maurice and was only the second emperor at Constantinople to take the field and exercise the original role of commanding general since Theodosius more than 200 years before. Heraclius lived the role unrelentingly for the thiry-one years of his reign, also finding time to marry two wives who bore him at least eleven children. Many of those children were disabled in various ways, leading to whispered stories of divine vengeance for—incest? or worse? His thirty-one years on the throne should—if the gods were kind—have established him as one of the greatest of emperors. But the gods were not kind.

Bosporus from Constantinople

The apparent triumph and real tragedy of Heraclius’s reign lay on the Persian frontier. Phocas bought peace there for cash, while letting his grasp on the Balkans slip as well. The disruption of Roman attention that came from Heraclius’s revolt made things easier still for Khusro II, the worthy successor of his grandfather, who now ruled Persia. In short order, Persian forces led by Khusro swept into Roman domains. Damascus was lost in 613; Jerusalem, and with it the true cross, in 614; and Egypt in 619. Raids in Asia Minor reached as far as Chalcedon across the Bosporus from Constantinople, and persuasive rumors flew that Persia was in touch with the Avars for what could have been a fatal pincer maneuver. Persian forces seem at the end, however, to have backed off an attempt to establish themselves permanently to the north and west of Antioch. Some of what Asia Minor lost at this moment came from warfare and its destruction, and some from consequences as populations declined and economic vitality sank. Things were never the same.

A monk, Antiochos Strategos, recounted the desperate struggle in Jerusalem, as an eyewitness to it all. The Persians besieged the city for twenty days, from April into May. Eventually their siege engines succeeded in breaking through the city wall. Cisterns offered useful hiding places for a few, but many who took refuge in churches were discovered and hacked to death. Hundreds died in Justinian’s vast new church alone, just one part of a gruesome body count Antiochos provides, totalling 66,000 who lost their lives in the siege. This total is high but not impossible, and the sheer awfulness of the event is certain.

Justinian’s long neglect of the Balkans

These emperors took turns seizing a tired throne. Justinian’s long neglect of the Balkans, his uncomprehending disdain for the realities of power on the Persian frontier, and his failure to secure the loyalty of ecclesiastically unreliable provinces from Syria to Egypt severed the empire completely from any population that connected its own salvation to the empire’s success. Empire was now merely a bargain, a transaction, an opportunity. If we want to understand what happened when Muhammad’s forces loomed up half a century later, we must understand the tottering emptiness of the late sixth century.

The Avars

Maurice understood the Balkans, pressed hard, and failed catastrophically. The Avars made inroads, with their chagan in a church at one point donning imperial robes taken from people he had captured and setting himself up to mock Maurice. They were bought off for a time by outright bribes, but they may also have regrouped in view of a perceived threat from the Turks in the direction of Scythia-Ukraine; during this period, we begin to hear more and more of these Turks. Phocas forswore conquest in the Balkans, maintained the status quo in Persia, and knew that he could not succeed.

Phocas ascended by the sword and descended by it, quite literally. In 608, the elder Heraclius, governor, or exarch, at Carthage and Maurice’s colleague, friend, and appointee, revolted. He had a nephew and a son to deploy, so he sent the nephew, Niketas, to secure Egypt in 609; then he sent the son, Heraclius, to Constantinople in 610. There, the younger Heraclius allied himself with Priscus, the count of the excubitors (the platform Justin and Tiberius had used to ascend to the throne themselves). Consequently, Phocas was overthrown and the younger Heraclius installed as emperor on October 5, 610. Heraclius beheaded Phocas with his own sword, just as Theoderic had murdered Odoacer more than a century earlier.

Constantinople to Carthage

For his first decade, Heraclius stayed mainly at home, apart from one failed campaign in 613, and let his empire take its punishment. Desperation reached such a point that people said the emperor was thinking of moving his own headquarters, the capital of the remnants of empire, from Constantinople to Carthage. The thought that the Roman empire would find itself led now from the city of its ancient enemy, the city it had razed to the ground 750 years earlier, was too delicious for words. But it is reasonable to believe that Heraclius, raised in Carthage, would have been aware of the tactical possibilities of recruiting his forces from the west. He might have been smart to do so. To regain the advantage in the east, he bought his own peace in the Balkans, buying off the Avars for a time in 619. That was in the long run the real defeat, but these emperors in Constantinople were never able to discover that their long-term interests lay in the Balkans.

Predecessors and concentrated

Heraclius was wiser than most of his predecessors and concentrated his efforts in the 610s on rebuilding his army. Tradition ascribed to him the reorganization of civil government into “themes”—roughly, military recruiting districts—that after centuries would be made standard. The Byzantine empire was a stranger to irony, and none would sense it when the realm was organized into units whose functional purpose was to pro-vide soldiers in order to preserve the existing entity.

Despaired of, pressed hard, and finally becoming venturesome, Heraclius took the field in 621. For the first years of his wars, the issue remained in doubt. In the summer of 626 the Avars were at the gates of Constantinople in what could have been its last gasp, trapping the city while Heraclius and the main forces were away on the northern part of the Persian frontier, in Lazica, but the Persians’ attempts to cross the Bosporus and aid the Avars were repulsed by the Byzantine navy on August 10, and the Avars withdrew. There have been more famous battles in history, but few with greater lasting effect.

Maurice and Heraclius

In four years Tiberius was dead, and a younger, better general, Maurice, replaced him. In this Maurice and his two successors, Phocas and Heraclius, you saw the Byzantine empire at its best. These men were good officers, knew the difference between victory and defeat, and knew how to avoid disaster. Maurice and Heraclius (both, as it happens, Armenians by origin) have good reputations with moderns, whereas Phocas is reviled as a butcher. For he was leading troops in the Balkans when Maurice overplayed his hand and ordered them to remain on frontier post through the cold winter. The troops revolted and Phocas seized the throne and murdered Maurice. If we put aside our fastidiousness and affection for Maurice, the three men were of a piece. Maurice came from Cappadocia, deep in Asia Minor, and reigned for twenty years, from 582 to 602; Phocas lasted eight years; and Heraclius, the improbable Armenian from Carthage, survived for thirty-one years on the throne.

Approve of Maurice

Historians like and approve of Maurice: “He is described as intelligent and self-possessed, reserved in manner, and living a life of moderation and restraint; he maintained his dignity but displayed kindness to others and was free from pride and arrogance. . . . He enjoyed poetry and history. . . . Described as rich, kindly and charitable. . . . Said to have summoned his family to Constantinople and enriched them.”8 If he was a typical Roman of his age, no less typical was Comentiolus, an officer from Thrace who first appears in 583 on an embassy to the khan of the Avars. In the next year we see him as the commander of forces attempting to drive the Slavs from Thrace, and for the following five years he is active in the Balkans. He then turns up in 589 in the Byzantine outpost in Spain, where a Latin inscription records his work strengthening the fortifications at Carthago Nova. He next appears fighting on the Persian front, supporting Khusro II’s claim to regain the Persian throne as a shah friendly to Byzantium. Another four years pass and we see him fighting the Avars again in Thrace. Loyal to his emperor, Maurice, he fought in defense of Constantinople against Phocas’s coup, and was executed when the coup succeeded.

Eastern frontiers absorbed attention,

While the traditional northern and eastern frontiers absorbed attention, there is no sense that Constantinople was aware of what was happening to its south. Having outsourced its southeastern frontier to the management of the Ghassanid Arabs, the empire was in no position to appreciate developments there. By now, the frontier belonged to the Arabs, whom no one took seriously. Rome’s Ghassanids and Persia’s Lakhmids skirmished occasionally—but only occasionally. History repeated itself in this growth of a power both romanized and un-Roman sitting on the frontier and waiting for its opportunity.

Constantinople was blind to all this. So when, in the 570s, the Persian king sent a force south to Yemen to support the local Himyarite rulers in shaking off Ethiopian control, a domino at the farthest frontier fell silently into Persian hands. The future did not lie with the forces from remote northern Constantinople.

Justinian had struck with Persia

Justin, meanwhile, ordered the end of the “fifty-year peace” that Justinian had struck with Persia. By 573, the Mesopotamian frontier was in tatters, with the bulwark city of Daraa seized, and Khusro conducting raids at will far behind it into northern Syria and Asia Minor.

This was the time Justin picked to go mad, perhaps his most astute strategic decision. We needn’t linger over his precise medical diagnosis, for the outlines of a palace coup are clear. The empress Sophia, with a bit of her aunt Theodora’s backbone, gained control. She did this in alliance with Tiberius, the promising count of the excubitors who had smoothed the imperial transition in 565. In 574, Justin named him (was prevailed on to name him, the story went) to the rank of Caesar, second only in imperial title to Augustus, and heir presumptive to the throne. Khusro accepted an offer to buy a few years’ peace, and Constantinople subsided into selfabsorption.

Sophia and Tiberius sparred with each other, but it was Tiberius who knew he had the upper hand. By the time Justin died in 578, Sophia’s efforts to cling to power were obvious enough to raise stories of an attempted coup against Tiberius, but there must not have been much to the story, for once he had installed his own wife as his empress, Tiberius allowed Sophia to remove herself to a palace across the Bosporus.

Augustus almost 600 years earlier

Tiberius II brought back to the throne the name last borne by the successor of Augustus almost 600 years earlier. Whereas Justin had been parsimonious, Tiberius was a spendthrift, and such lavishness is always a popular quality in a ruler. While Justin was still alive, he sent a general to try to help his Italian outposts against the Lombards, but to no avail; and when in 578 the senate of Rome (making its last formal appearance in history) sent him money to try to purchase protection, he told the senators they would be better off taking it to the Lombards or the Franks instead, to see what deal they could make for themselves. He expanded the palace and bought peace in the Balkans from the Avars—who promptly reneged on the deal. His one lasting blunder was to yield to his impatience with the Ghassanid leadership, arresting their leader al-Mundhir in 581 on grounds of his religious (monophysite) sympathies and exiling him to Sicily.6 With that gesture, Tiberius lost the support and reliability of the Ghassanids, and he unwittingly smoothed the path to Syria and Asia Minor for any forces that would arise in Arabia. Tiberius cultivated a reputation for generosity: tax cuts marked his accession as sole emperor.

Ancient obsessiveness

In a subtle way, Tiberius also marks the end of imperial religion’s ancient obsessiveness. Emperors before Justinian had supervised doctrinal strife without caring about it; Justinian had cared deeply about it and thus created a new intimacy of union between state and church. Tiberius inherited an empire in which state and church were now so identical that an emperor could cease to care about theology himself.

Justin II had inherited his predecessor’s talent for dithering, trying to conciliate the monophysites and at one point in 571 issuing what was spoken of as a “second Henotikon,” in memory of Zeno’s attempt of 100 years earlier to find a formula of words that would bring unity. Nothing worked. Tiberius, on the other hand, enforced orthodoxy without a moment’s care for what it meant. The emperors after him who did care about theology knew in their hearts that they were playacting and that nothing they did would change the religious landscape. Tiberius was not unwise to let things be. Emperor Heraclius would stir the hornet’s nest again briefly, giving his enthusiasm to a factitious doctrine called monotheletism.7 His enthusiasm faded into irrelevance when the Arabs took Syria and Egypt away from the empire. Chalcedon prevailed by disaster and default as the religion of the Byzantine empire.

Theodelinda married Authari

At the time Theodelinda married Authari and then Agilulf, the duke of Spoleto was named Ariulf, who first appears in our records commanding the left wing of Byzantine forces against the Persians at the battle of Nymphaeum on the Tigris in 582. Constantinople had reason to dislike and distrust the Lombards, but it was hard to see them as anything other than leaders of an insurrectionary province, scarcely as invaders.

Elsewhere there was not much better news. Revolts in Africa killed a senior general and two praetorian prefects between 569 and 571, and the Visigoths were just then pushing the last Byzantine forces back closer to the sea. So naturally the emperor Justin—dumber than his predecessor, if this can be believed—chose to provoke Persia. Having to his name only about a quarter of the forces that some of his imperial predecessors could muster (one contemporary numbers his army at 150,000 empire-wide), he could ill afford this imprudence.

Armenian Christians against the Persians

Justin took the lofty view that Rome did not pay for peace. Unfortunately, the only peace Justinian had been able to achieve was one he had to pay for and could barely afford. On pretext of protecting Armenian Christians against the Persians’ imposition of Zoroastrianism, Justin rattled his saber, only to see Apamea leveled and Nisibis and Daraa taken and held by Persia.

Justin may have been encouraged in his folly by dreams of a grander alliance. In 568, an embassy arrived at Constantinople from far-off Sogdiana in central Asia, offering a long-term contract for the silk trade to Rome’s advantage, one that would cut out the Persian middlemen. In August 568, Justin sent a general, Zemarchus, to the Turks of Sogdiana to seal the arrangement. The delegates came and went by a northerly route along the shores of the Black and Aral seas. When they arrived in Sogdiana,5 they and their baggage were ritually purified—with drums, bells, incense, and chants—and then they were led to meet the khan. By the time they got back to Constantinople, they were ready to tell of unimaginable luxuries—thrones of gold surrounded by vessels of gold and silver, and furnishings and clothing of silk. The alliance lasted a decade or two, but it was hard to maintain contact at such a distance, and the Persians had every incentive to prevent their enemies to the west and north from staying in communication. Rome seems to have gained no real benefit from the contacts.

Realities of power were unchanged

Some were impressed, some were pleased; all understood that the realities of power were unchanged.

Justin did well enough at the outset, as younger replacements of superannuated leaders often do, complaining about and then paying off debts that Justinian had incurred to ensure peace abroad and to keep up appearances at home while forgiving tax arrears into the bargain. Never mind that rumor ran wild after the other Justin passed through Constantinople for an amicable visit, went on to Alexandria, and there was found murdered in his bed. The empress was said to have ordered his head brought back to Constantinople, to be kicked about like a football. Even her supporters would have known that story, and the guilt or innocence of the imperial couple was irrelevant: the court was, as courts will be, a world of spin. When two senators, Aetherios and Addaios, were executed for conspiracy to poison Justin, one of them confessing, few cared for the truth, for all recognized a regime in thrall to its insecurity.

Balkans had clearly slipped beyond imperial control

Abroad, Justin played the diplomatic game too nonchalantly, and disaster ensued. The Balkans had clearly slipped beyond imperial control, so he was content to send support or just empty promises of support to the players there. Such machinations always run the risk of replaying the last war, and since Justin knew that the Gepids were a threat of old, he both offered them support and then withheld it, leading to the triumph of the relatively obscure Lombards. The empire came out of the Lombard-Gepid war with its own position momentarily protected, but two strong powers now divided the Balkans between them, the Lombards to the west and the newly materializing Avars to the now neglected east, where they had made their way through and around Justinian’s failed line of forts on the Danube, acquiring an identity and support as they prospered. The Avars would remain there to plague Constantinople until the emergence of the “Slavs”; the Lombards, shortly afterward, in 568, moved west to take a place in Italy.2

The final dismemberment of Italy is the most lasting accomplishment of Justin’s reign. In the new balance of power, there were centers and hinterlands, but no Italy. Constantinople remained in firm control of Ravenna and in notional control of Rome, though control of Rome deteriorated over the decades that followed. Narses, who had succeeded in stabilizing the Constantinopolitan presence, died at Rome in 574, and no figure of substance ever succeeded him. Between them, a string of Lombard enclaves we call duchies straggled down the spine of Italy, headquartered at Spoleto to the north (in the mountains behind Tuscany) and Benevento in the south. They maintained at Genoa and Naples other outposts loyal to Constantinople. The ports, in other words, maintained contact across the water with the capital city, while the rest of the country became irrelevant.

Lombards as the last great wave

Old histories see the Lombards as the last great wave of barbarian hordes swooping down into Italy, but they were far more normal in Roman terms. Relocated in Italy, seizing the high ground, cowing their neighbors into grudging submission (for there was no one from whom to expect rescue), they promptly subsided. Their great leader Alboin, who had won the war against the Gepids and then led his forces into Italy, was overthrown and murdered in 572 at the hand of his wife Rosamund and a henchman, and his successor Clef lasted barely a year. For another ten years, the Lombards in Italy made do without a single leader. You could draw a map to show for every square foot of Italy at that time whether Lombards or Romans claimed suzerainty there, but over considerable stretches of country local lords held sway and the patterns we saw already under the rule of Theoderic’s successors grew stronger. A few landlords and a few soldiers could give a valley a semblance of government, whatever its notional relationship to some ruler elsewhere might be. Many of those landlords, moreover, were newcomers, military figures of sometimes ambiguous provenance, who had settled in Italy on vacant lands— sometimes forcibly vacated, of course—after Justinian’s great debilitating wars. If no one thought of them either as warlords or as barbarians, they were still men to be reckoned with in their petty domains, and were for the most part left undisturbed by more ambitious rulers elsewhere, who had enough to do just to maintain their own pretense of power.

Philo-Roman and Catholic queen

The best—not truest—yarns about them come from a writer more than a century later: Paul the Deacon. Admiring frescoes in the church at Monza, just north of Milan, commissioned by a very philo-Roman and Catholic queen of the Lombards, Theodelinda, Paul created what was for a long time the standard picture of the Lombards: “They exposed their forehead and shaved all the way round to the neck, while their hair, combed down on either side of the head to the level of the mouth, was parted at the centre. Their clothing was roomy, mainly made of linen, like the Anglo-Saxons wear, decorated with broad bands woven in various colours. Their boots were open at the big toe, held in place by interwoven leather thongs. Later on they began to use thigh boots, over which they put woollen greaves when out riding, in Roman fashion.” Theodelinda had been the queen of Authari; when he died in 590, she chose to call Agilulf to the throne as her spouse. While he reigned she undertook to advance the cause of Nicene Christianity, winning Pope Gregory’s friendship and flattery. In the treasure house of the cathedral at Monza there survives today a splendidly detailed small-scale gilded silver sculpture of a mother hen and its chicks, probably a gift from Gregory to her.