The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (36 page)

Once again, Heraclius sued for peace. Once again, Khosru refused. “I will have no mercy on you,” he is reported to have said, “until you renounce him who was crucified and worship the sun.” The capture of the True Cross had already struck the Byzantines to the heart; it seemed as though divine favor had been entirely lifted from the country. Now, the Persians were advancing on Constantinople from the east, while the Avars and Slavs approached from the northwest. The army was exhausted; grain supplies from North Africa and Egypt had ceased.
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Heraclius saw no way to save the empire. He loaded all of Constantinople’s treasures onto ships, sent them to North Africa for safekeeping, and began to make plans to abandon the city. He would go back to Carthage, the city of his youth, and from there would rule whatever Byzantine territories remained.

These plans stayed secret until the ships containing the Byzantine treasure sank in a storm, not too long after leaving the Golden Horn in 618. News of the disaster spread back to the people of the city and caused enormous angst. It had not occurred to them that the situation was so dire, or that Heraclius would ever consider leaving the city to destruction. Their horror was voiced to the emperor by the bishop of Constantinople, the patriarch Sergius, who convinced Heraclius that the defense of New Rome was his sacred duty. At the altar of the Hagia Sophia, Heraclius took a vow before God to stay in the city.
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Now he was forced to search for a way to dig himself out of an impossible situation. Fortunately for Heraclius, Khosru II sent him an extremely tactless letter demanding his surrender:

This letter was a misstep on Khosru’s part. Zoroastrianism was the religion of the aristocrats of Persia, and casting the war as a religious conflict did not make Khosru’s soldiers any more determined. But when Heraclius told the people of Constantinople that the Persians were blaspheming Christ, they were fired with indignation. Men began to join the army in increasing numbers. Sergius, the bishop of Constantinople, melted the treasures of Constantinople’s churches, turned them into coins, and presented the money to Heraclius.
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The war had become a crusade.

Heraclius used the church’s money to pay and provision new troops, outfit the army with new weapons, and build ships. He also bought a temporary peace with the Avars, protecting his western flank from attack and preventing the necessity of carrying on a two-front war. The Persians, meanwhile, were stalled at Chalcedon; Heraclius had sent his ships to guard the Bosphorus Strait, and the Persians were not quite ready to launch a full naval assault across the water.

On Easter Sunday, 622, Heraclius celebrated a solemn Easter mass at the Cathedral of St. Sophia, taking the Eucharist at the hands of Sergius. The mass was also a sendoff; the next morning, Easter Monday, he departed at the head of his troops, the first Byzantine emperor to ride personally into battle since Theodosius I. He left the bishop Sergius and the city official Bonus in charge of Constantinople, acting as regents for his ten-year-old son Constantine.

He did not try to sail straight across to Chalcedon, where the Persians waited. Instead, he ordered the army to be conveyed by ship southward, around the curve of Asia Minor, and landed at the Cilician Gates, the pass through the Taurus Mountains. The mountains protected the troops from immediate attack, and refugees from Syria could land on the shore to join the fight.

He spent the summer in Asia Minor, training this army. Apparently he had scores of men who had never fought before: “He found that the army was lazy, cowardly, disorderly, and disciplined,” Theophanes tells us, and so he organized them and taught them how to fight by setting them against each other with wooden swords: “It was like seeing the horrible fearful spectacle without its danger, men converging for murder without bloodshed. Thus each man got a start from this dangerless slaughter and was more secure thereafter.”
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It was unlikely that this army of baby soldiers would be able to defeat the hardened Persian troops, but Heraclius decided to try. In the fall, he began to march towards Armenia. The Persians were forced to draw away from Chalcedon to meet the challenge. The two armies met somewhere just south of the Armenian border; the exact battlefield is unknown, but Heraclius’s men broke the Persian line and drove the Persian army into frantic retreat.
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Heraclius himself led the attack, “leaping forward everywhere and fighting daringly,” and his men followed him: “Who could have expected the invincible Persian race ever to show its back to the Romans?” Theophanes marvels.
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The tide of the war had turned. For the next three years, the Persian advances were slowly wiped out, one at a time, as Heraclius and his men drove the Persians backwards towards Nineveh. The Byzantine army reclaimed Asia Minor and parts of Armenia and Syria; Jerusalem, farther south, remained in Persian hands, but the soldiers were nevertheless fired by the idea that God was with them as they avenged the insult to his Son.

By 626, Khosru had decided that it would be necessary to make a drastic move to bring the war to an end. He was ready to besiege Constantinople.

He prepared for the assault by doing a little behind-the-scenes diplomacy; he sent an embassy to the Avars, offering friendship on better terms than Heraclius had been able to give, and the Avars agreed to switch sides. They were prized allies (“large of stature and proud of spirit,” the
Russian Primary Chronicle
tells us), and Khosru arranged for them to launch an attack on Constantinople’s western walls, while the Persians crossed the water and besieged the east.
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He reinforced the land attack on the west by buying the loyalty of the Slavs. The Slavs and Avars were not natural allies. In fact, the Avars had started to dominate the Slavs, forcing them to pay tribute and, according to Fredegar, “sleeping with their wives and daughters.” In 623, a number of unhappy Slavic tribes had united under the leadership of a Frankish merchant named Samo, who had come into the Slavic land north of the Danube to trade. He was apparently a better general than merchant, and he had abandoned his goods in order to lead the Slavs into battle against their Avar overlords. “His prudence and courage always brought them victory,” Fredegar tells us, and there were more concrete rewards for Samo as well: he had twelve Slavic wives.
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Samo’s kingdom remained hostile to the Avars, but Khosru II’s money convinced at least some of the Slavs to join with their Avar neighbors in the attack on Constantinople. In the last week of July 626, Slavs and Avars marched on the city, while the Persians prepared to sail from the opposite shore. Heraclius and the bulk of the army were far away on the northern Persia border, and defense of the city fell to the remaining soldiers under the command of Bonus and the patriarch Sergius.
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The details of the siege are preserved in a sermon preached afterwards by the clergyman Theodore the Syncellus. On the first day of the attack, the city was completely surrounded, and all of the buildings outside the walls were set on fire, ringing Constantinople with flame. Siege engines and catapults were moved into place, while archers kept up a hail of arrows over the city wall. The Avar and Slav troops, numbering at least eighty thousand, stretched as far as the eye could see: “The firm ground and the sea were both full of wild people,” Theodore says.
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While the official Bonus organized the city’s garrison for defense, the patriarch Sergius began holding regular sermons, vigils, services, and sacred processions. He was determined to remind the people that they were suffering through a war of religion. Liturgy was said almost without pause in the Hagia Sophia, and the entire city was seized with a fervor that would have carried the people through a much longer siege.
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On the tenth day of the siege, the general in charge of the Persian attack sent his entire fleet into the strait. His plan was for the Avars and Slavs to occupy the garrison so that his ships could approach by water without meeting much opposition. But the Byzantine navy proved much stronger than he expected. The ships from Constantinople drove back the Persian fleet, sinking ships and drowning their crews: “One could have said that all the bay could have been passed with dry feet, because of all the corpses lying there,” says Theodore.
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With the attack from the east over, the garrison could concentrate on beating off the Avar and Slav assault from the west. Thousands of Avars and Slavs fell, until the allies began to retreat in disorder and chaos. The siege had failed. The Persians withdrew in disgrace; the Persian commander was forced to evacuate Constantinople and retreat back into Syria.

Heraclius, still far away, took immediate steps to strengthen the Byzantine position. Since he had lost the Avars and the Slavs as allies, he sent ambassadors north to yet another nomadic tribe.

Like the Avars, these nomads had been driven west to the Byzantine borders by the Turks, and they had made a home for themselves in the mountains north of the Black Sea. Heraclius knew them as the Khazars; his embassy to them is their first appearance in recorded history.

The Khazars agreed to join the fight. Together, the Khazar warriors and Heraclius’s army began to fight their way south into Persian territory, pushing down between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea into land that Khosru II had laid claim to. The Khazars sacked the city of Derbent, while Heraclius continued on towards Nineveh. By 628, the Byzantine army (without the Khazars, who had remained closer to their homes in the north) had reached the walls of Ctesiphon itself.
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The defenders of Ctesiphon did not have a patriarch to unify them in religious fervor. Instead, they turned on Khosru II. He tried to flee, but his own son and his courtiers caught him and crucified him—an end of agony and humiliation for a king who had lost all standing in the eyes of his people.

His son took the throne in 628 as Kavadh II and immediately sent to Heraclius, offering to make peace. The treaty that followed gave back to Heraclius all of the land that Khosru II had conquered; it also returned to Heraclius the fragment of the True Cross the Persians had taken from Jerusalem. Heraclius proceeded from Ctesiphon to Jerusalem in triumph, and on March 21 of 630, he returned the True Cross to the city with his own hands.
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The war was over, and the landscape had changed. Byzantium had regained its old shape again, but the Persian empire had been reduced to a weak and uncertain kingdom under shifting leadership. Kavadh II ruled for a matter of weeks before dying of unknown causes, and for the next four years a whole series of “transient rulers, pretenders and usurpers” passed through the Persian palace, none of them reigning for more than a few months at a time.
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North of the Black Sea, the Khazars had expanded into a political force to be reckoned with. The Avars, weakened by the defeat at Constantinople, lost more land to the Slavic kingdom of Samo, and their threat began to fade. The Bulgars, north of the Azov Sea, had been under the Avar thumb; but now their chief, a young man named Kubrat, sent a message directly to Heraclius, asking to negotiate with the emperor as an independent sovereign. Heraclius agreed to recognize Kubrat’s kingship, and from 632 on the Bulgarian chief reigned as king of the first Bulgarian kingdom: Old Great Bulgaria.

Heraclius, returning to Constantinople in victory, had saved the empire. He had broken the Persian threat, he had almost single-handedly created two new nations, he had restored the Cross: Khosru II had died in shame, but Heraclius was exalted to the skies as almost divine. “In six years the Emperor had overthrown Persia,” writes Theophanes, “and in the seventh he returned to Constantinople with great joy. God, Who had made every created thing in six days, named the seventh day that of rest. And so Heraclius, who had completed many labors in six years, returned with peace and joy in the seventh year and rested.”
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Heraclius had accomplished everything he could have dreamed of. And in doing so, he had destroyed every barrier that lay between his empire and the Arabs to the south.