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.
Historical Ottoman 