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.
Historical Ottoman 