HERACLIUS WAS HANDSOME and charismatic, described as ‘robust, with a broad chest, beautiful blue eyes, golden hair, fair complexion and wide, thick beard’. As his armada set out across the Mediterranean, he rallied his men by strapping an icon of the Virgin to the prow of his flagship. The fleet reached the shores of the Bosphorus in early October. Impressed and no doubt relieved by the sight of all the ships in the harbour, Phocas’s allies deserted him and Heraclius entered Constantinople without a struggle.
Phocas was arrested, stripped of his imperial robes, and brought before Heraclius, who quipped, ‘So this is how you governed your empire?’
Phocas snarled, ‘Will you govern it any better?’
Heraclius pushed him away with his foot.
Phocas was taken away to be executed; his skinned body and severed head were paraded through the streets of Constantinople. Heraclius was acclaimed by the senate and crowned in the Chapel of St Stephen within the Great Palace.
Heraclius had to find a good answer to Phocas’s provocative question, and find it quickly. The presence of Khusrau’s army across the Bosphorus was alarming, but the Persians, as yet, had no ships and they had no means to penetrate the immense Theodosian Walls. But Heraclius lacked the tools to drive the Persians back: the army was demoralised and depleted, the war had choked off trade, and the imperial treasury was empty. Phocas’s grisly death was symptomatic of the poisonous apocalyptic atmosphere in the city; many thought they could see the hand of God at work, guiding events towards a great climax in the history of the world, the End of Days foretold in the Book of Revelation.
Heraclius had to somehow turn it all around. His challenge was twofold: to bring his badly rattled people together behind his leadership, and gather up what remained of his army to stall Khusrau’s momentum. A victory was desperately needed, a triumph he could present to his people as a sign of God’s favour.
Heraclius tried to get on the front foot: he sent an army to intercept the Persians near Antioch, but it suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Khusrau’s brilliant general, Shahrbaraz. In 613 Shahrbaraz took Damascus, completing the Persian conquest of Syria. Khusrau gloried in these victories, which had carried his men far deeper into Roman territory than he had dared hope.
THEN HERACLIUS SUFFERED an even worse blow: his popular wife Eudoxia suffered an epileptic seizure and died, leaving him without a companion and consort. Her death deepened the pall of gloom on the capital.
Soon afterwards, Heraclius scandalised Constantinople by announcing his intention to marry his young niece, Martina. According to church law, their union was taboo, an act of incest. Sergius the Patriarch tried to talk Heraclius out of it, but the emperor stubbornly insisted. Sergius reluctantly performed the marriage rite, crowning Martina as Augusta. The partnership appears to have made Heraclius very happy; he couldn’t bear to be separated from Martina and brought her on campaign with him. But his subjects were displeased. Martina was widely blamed for having beguiled their emperor into an unholy union, and the Augusta became a reviled figure, the most hated woman in the city.
AND STILL KHUSRAU’S ARMIES kept tearing off pieces of Heraclius’s empire with impunity. In 614, Shahrbaraz arrived at the gates of Jerusalem, where the Christians of the city surrendered to him. Shahrbaraz installed a Persian garrison and placed Jewish leaders in control of the city. But after the general left, the local Christians rose up and slaughtered the Persian garrison, massacred the Jews, and then closed the gates.
Shahrbaraz turned back and recaptured the city in a bloody siege. Shahrbaraz’s revenge was brutal. For three days the Christians of Jerusalem were put to the sword or carried off into slavery. The Persians set fire to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and carried off the True Cross of Christ, the most precious relic in Christendom, as a trophy of war. It was an attack designed to inflict the most terrible psychic agony on the Romans. The war had gone beyond a struggle for territory; the Romans and Persians were now bound by intractable hatreds.
When news of the horror in Jerusalem reached Constantinople, the Roman aristocracy lost its nerve. The senate leaders pressed Heraclius to sue for peace on any terms. Ambassadors were sent to Khusrau with an extraordinary message. In his letter, Heraclius hailed Khusrau the ‘supreme emperor’, he acknowledged the Persian empire as superior to that of the Romans, and he signed off with an act of obeisance, describing himself as Khusrau’s ‘obedient son, one who is eager to perform the services of your serenity in all things’. In six hundred years no reigning Roman emperor had ever written such an abject letter to a foreign king.
Khusrau read the letter and had the ambassadors arrested. There would be no peace – Khusrau was not looking to dominate the Roman empire, but to exterminate it. Revelling in his seemingly limitless power, the Shahanshah responded to Heraclius with all the bombast of a Marvel Comics supervillain:
Khusrau, greatest of Gods, and master of the whole Earth, to Heraclius his vile and insensate slave. Why do you still refuse to submit to our rule, and call yourself a king? . . . I will pardon your faults if you submit to me . . . Do not deceive yourself with vain hope in that Christ, who was not able to save himself from the Jews, who killed him by nailing him to a cross. Even if you take refuge in the depths of the sea, I will stretch out my hand and take you.
THE SHAHANSHAH WAS GIDDY at the turnaround in his fortunes. No longer a weak, embattled figure, he was now tightening his grip around the throat of the Roman empire. From here he could see the endgame: complete control of the remaining eastern Roman lands, followed by the conquest of Constantinople itself.
Ohrmazd and Ahriman
AS THE ROMANS BECAME more singularly Christian in the fifth and sixth centuries, so too did the Persian court shift into a more militant phase of Zoroastrianism, a religion named for Zoroaster, its founding prophet.
Zoroaster taught his followers that the universe was divided into two primal forces: Ohrmazd, the God of Light, Truth and Wisdom, and Ahriman, the God of the Lie.* These two principles, he said, were in constant conflict, and every human being, no matter how lowly their status, had a part to play in the struggle of Ohrmazd to renew the world through fire. The role of the Shahanshah, like that of the Roman emperor, was to act as the divinely appointed protector of the state religion.
Even so, Khusrau remained close to certain Christians in his inner circle, particularly his third and most influential wife, Shirin. He tolerated the presence of Nestorian Christians in his empire and donated money to their shrines. But as the war with the Romans intensified, religious attitudes hardened on both sides.
The ideals of radical Zoroastrianism – renewal of the world through purifying fire – melded well with military conquest. Priests would follow the army into the newly won Roman territories, set up Zoroastrian fire temples and aggressively proselytise among the conquered peoples. The holy men of both empires were waging a war for the soul of humanity, to be redeemed either by the body and blood of Christ, or by the sacred fires of Ohrmazd.
The Roman position continued to deteriorate. In 618, Shahrbaraz’s armies stormed into Egypt. After a year-long siege, the crucial seaport of Alexandria fell to the Persians. Egypt, the empire’s granary, was lost. The next year the plague broke out yet again in Constantinople, further reducing its manpower and revenue. There seemed to be no end to God’s displeasure with the Romans.
FOR TEN YEARS, hemmed in on every side, Heraclius had nothing to offer his people but sacrifice, defeat and more sacrifice. He repaired the imperial finances by halving official salaries and soldiers’ pay: a dangerous move for any emperor. It’s a testament to his remarkable political skills that he was able to persuade his soldiers to swallow their disgruntlement, but elements of the aristocracy defended their privileges and obstructed his reforms. Exasperated beyond belief by their mulishness, Heraclius threatened to abandon Constantinople for Carthage, where he said he could marshal the empire’s forces and take the fight to the Persians from there. His subjects couldn’t bear the thought of being abandoned
by their emperor and all remaining opposition to his emergency measures cracked. A contrite delegation of senators led by Sergius the Patriarch begged him to stay. Heraclius said he would, but only if they were prepared to accept the hardships he required of them, and they meekly assented. The church even agreed to hand over precious gold ornaments and silver plate to refill the imperial treasury. With his enemies outfoxed and his authority enhanced, Heraclius entered the Hagia Sophia and swore an oath, in the presence of the Patriarch, that he would never abandon Constantinople. The fate of the emperor, the city and the church were now intertwined.
Heraclius tried to invoke a mood of Churchillian defiance among his people through a steady drumbeat of propaganda stories of Persian atrocities in Jerusalem. Lurid tales of the destruction of churches and the desecration of icons were circulated in the city. Hatred was also directed at the Jews who, it was said, had opened the gates of the holy city to the invaders and eagerly participated in the mass slaughter of Christians.
In 622, Heraclius personally led a successful counterattack against the Persians in north-west Anatolia, but maddeningly, he couldn’t press his victory. The sudden arrival of the Avars at the Theodosian Walls forced the emperor to drop everything and rush back to the defence of Constantinople.
Heraclius paid off the marauding Avars from his dwindling reserves of gold. Now he could focus his remaining forces on the Persians. He had just one army left: every other Roman army had been destroyed, enslaved or dispersed. Heraclius retrained this last body of men as a guerrilla force, and galvanised their broken morale with Christian zeal.
In the spring of 624, Heraclius was ready to take the fight to the Persians. On 25 March he farewelled his twelve-year-old son and left Constantinople with his men. He would not return to the capital for another four years.
The Tower of Darkness
HERACLIUS MARCHED his army northwards from Trebizond into the mountains of Armenia. He could not hope to defeat Khusrau’s forces in open battle, so he simply bypassed them, leading his men through Armenia’s hard, bony mountain ranges. In the summer they entered the Caucasus, then turned south into the Persian heartlands, laying waste to several cities, taking Khusrau’s thin defences completely by surprise.
Now, deep inside the Persian lands, the emperor made plans to destroy the Shahanshah’s prestige and take revenge for the theft of the True Cross with an act of sacrilege. He sent a detachment of his men to attack the temple of the Fire of the Stallion.
The Persian Zoroastrians revered three sacred flames that were housed within three great fire temples: the Fire of the Stallion, the Fire of the Farr (the holy spirit), and the Fire of Mihr-is-Great, which was housed in the east. The Zoroastrians had come to believe that these three sacred flames had been lit by Ohrmazd himself at the creation of the world, to bring light and order to the universe. A special order of turbaned temple priests was charged with the awesome responsibility of keeping the fires burning. The threat of extinguishment was nothing less than a threat to the integrity of the cosmos.
The temple of the Fire of the Stallion was perched on the summit of a hill in Media, next to a cool mountain lake replenished by underground mineral springs. Every newly crowned shah was expected to make a pilgrimage on foot from Ctesiphon to this temple. Khusrau II had come there to pray for victory against the Romans, and he had lavished royal gifts on the shrine.
The hilltop temple was ringed with two protective walls and thirty-eight towers. Perhaps the hill was poorly defended that day because Heraclius’s men seemed to have little difficulty storming it. The Romans entered the ornate temple complex and killed the horrified priests. The soldiers followed the long corridor into the fire sanctuary, a dramatic domed room girded by a stucco frieze around its walls. In the centre of the room was a three-stepped pedestal leading up to the sacred fire-altar itself. Heraclius’s men gleefully smashed down the altar and stamped out the fire. A final, thin trail of smoke ascended from the ashes up to the dome and dispersed into nothingness.
Now it was Persia’s turn to recoil in horror and revulsion, to suffer the trauma of a spiritually disordered universe.
HERACLIUS’S FORCES RANGED around the lands north of Ctesiphon, striking suddenly, plundering the smaller settlements, and then disappearing. Khusrau sent three armies to locate and destroy them, but Heraclius outmanoeuvred and defeated each of them in turn.
Heraclius was wintering by Lake Van when he heard worrying news: the Persians in Asia Minor had joined forces with the Avars and were converging on Constantinople from east and west. Shahrbaraz was confronting the city from the Asian shores of the Bosphorus, while the Avars had hauled their new siege engines up to the Theodosian Walls. This put Heraclius in a terrible bind, as Khusrau surely knew it would. He stood to lose his capital, but if he were to leave and march his army way back to Constantinople, he would lose the initiative – all his recent gains would have to be surrendered and there would be no hope of recovering the True Cross.
So Heraclius took a deadly gamble. He would stay where he was, and send only a small force, led by his brother Theodore, to harass the invaders. He would leave the Queen of Cities to fend for herself. He chose to place his trust in the hands of God, the Theodosian Walls and the defiant spirit of the people of Constantinople.
DESPITE THEIR VASTLY superior numbers, nothing seemed to go right for the besieging armies. The Avar catapults failed to dent the reinforced land walls. The city’s most precious icon, a portrait of the Virgin, was paraded on the battlements. It was said that the Khagan of the Avars realised his siege was futile when he witnessed a Christian miracle: the ghostly figure of the Mother of God floating above the walls.
At the same time, the Roman navy easily destroyed the rickety Persian transports on the Bosphorus, leaving Shahrbaraz’s troops stranded on the other side. Although the Avars and the Persians had brought massive armies to Constantinople, the siege petered out after a couple of weeks and both the Khagan and Shahrbaraz withdrew.
Heraclius, immensely relieved and heartened by these signs of God’s favour, offered to make peace with Khusrau, but the shah of shahs, incredulous at his sudden reversal of fortune, stubbornly refused. The Romans swept down from the mountains onto the plains of Mesopotamia; Heraclius intended to ruthlessly illustrate to the Persians the powerlessness of their heaven-cursed leader.
On 12 December 627, the Romans crushed a Persian army outside Nineveh. Shamed by the defeat, the local Persian commander killed himself. Khusrau ordered the commander’s body be packed in salt and brought to him, whereupon he ordered the corpse stripped and flailed until it was a bloody, shapeless mess. It was whispered around the palace that the Shahanshah was not altogether sane.
MEANWHILE, HERACLIUS’S MEN, hungry and exhausted, invaded Khusrau’s summer palace and raided his royal zoo. The exotic animals were killed, roasted and fed to the Roman troops. They were mocking Khusrau’s impotence.
Heraclius then marched his men down the banks of the Tigris to raid the outlying suburbs of Ctesiphon, creating terror and anguish within the city. Now it was the Persian capital’s turn to tremble at the sight of enemy fires outside the walls.
And with that, the Persians decided they’d had enough.
A delegation representing Khusrau’s ministers came to the Roman camp in secret. Heraclius was informed that moves were afoot within the palace to depose Khusrau, and to reach an understanding with the Romans. Two days later, Shahrbaraz sent two of his sons to arrest Khusrau, who was suffering from terrible dysentery. Khusrau was locked into a chamber known as the Tower of Darkness for five days with no food. Instead his guards brought in a heap of gold, silver and precious stones, saying: ‘Do enjoy these things which you have loved insanely and amassed’. On the sixth day, the guards returned and slowly shot the befouled and half-starved Khusrau to death with arrows.
News of Khusrau’s demise was sent back to Constantinople with ringing words: ‘Fallen is the arrogant Khusrau, the enemy of God! He is fallen and cast down to
the depths of the Earth, and his memory is utterly exterminated!’
KHUSRAU WAS REPLACED by his son Kavadh-Shiroe, who immediately opened peace negotiations with the Romans. The war was over. In the space of eighteen years, Heraclius had engineered the most stunning comeback in Roman history. The emperor, glad of heart but weary in spirit, left his representatives to conclude a treaty with the Persians, and began the long journey home alongside his wife Martina.
Six months later Kavadh-Shiroe too was dead, killed by the plague, and his infant son Ardashir took his place on the throne. Heraclius’s ambassadors concluded a peace deal with Shahrbaraz, who agreed to restore to the Romans all their former territories in Syria, Palestine and Egypt. The Romans demanded the return of the True Cross, located in the palace at Ctesiphon. It was handed over to them.
And with that, it seems, the Persian leadership simply disintegrated. The child Ardashir was murdered by Shahrbaraz, who replaced him on the throne. Then Shahrbaraz, too, was murdered in a palace coup.
WHEN HERACLIUS AND MARTINA caught sight at last of their palace in Heira, on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, they saw thousands of grateful citizens gathered at the palace gate with olive branches and lit candles. Heraclius was deeply moved, but said he would not re-enter Constantinople until he could bring the True Cross with him. The holy relic duly arrived in Heira in September as preparations were underway for a triumphal homecoming.
On the morning of 14 September 628, a massive crowd gathered at the Golden Gate for the procession. First to pass through the gold-plated doors was the True Cross, accompanied by victorious soldiers. Next to emerge were four Persian elephants, the first ever to be seen in the city.
Then, with a shout of joy, the crowds caught sight of their emperor, who had aged visibly since they had last seen him. Heraclius was cheered along the Mese, all the way to the Hagia Sophia, where a thanksgiving mass was held. Patriarch Sergius grasped the True Cross and lifted it up towards the great dome. It was a golden moment, a perfect triumph.
Ghost Empire Page 15