HERACLIUS AND MOHAMMED
610-641
Distress of the Empire in the early years of Heraclius—The letter of
Chosroes—Treachery of the Avars—Heraclius preaches a Crusade—His six
victorious Campaigns—Great Siege of Constantinople—Persia
vanquished—Triumph of Heraclius—Rise and Character of Mohammed—The
Creed of Islam—Conquests of the Caliphs in Syria and Persia—Troubled
old age of Heraclius.
When the tyrant Phocas had been handed over to the executioner to pay
the penalty for his innumerable misdeeds, the Senate and army joined in
offering the crown to the young Heraclius, the saviour whose advent had
delivered them from such a depth of misery. He was duly crowned by the
patriarch, and acclaimed by the people in the Hippodrome. But when the
first rejoicings were over, and he turned to contemplate the state of
the empire which he had just won, the prospect was not a very reassuring
one. The Slavs were spreading all over the Balkan peninsula, as far as
the gates of Thessalonica and the pass of Thermopylae. The Persian,
securely established in northern Syria and Mesopotamia, was advancing to
permanently reduce the lands of Asia Minor, which he had ravaged so
fiercely in the two preceding years. The treasury was empty, and the
army scattered and disorganised; for some years it had not dared to meet
the Persian in the open field, and the officers whom Phocas had kept in
command had never won its confidence.
The first ten years of the reign of Heraclius seemed little better than
a continuation of the miseries of the time of Phocas. The empire had
gained, indeed, a good man instead of a bad as its ruler, but a change
of fortune had not come with the change of sovereigns. It seemed that
Heraclius would not be able to cope with the legacy of accumulated ills
that had been left him. His predecessor’s dying taunt, ‘Will you rule
the empire any better than I have done?’ must often have rung in his
ears, when the never-ending tidings of battles lost, towns stormed,
revenues decreasing, and starving provinces kept coming in to him. The
imperial etiquette which had prevailed for the last two hundred years
prescribed that the Augustus should never take the field in person, and
this rule seems to have prevented Heraclius from heading his own
armies.[34] The generals to whom he delegated his power were uniformly
unfortunate, and occasionally disloyal. He was obliged to depose
Priscus, the officer who had betrayed Phocas, for arrogant disobedience
to his orders. The absence of the emperor from the field was a grave
misfortune; for he was much less of an administrator than of a fighting
man. His form and face betrayed the warrior. ‘He was of middle stature,
strongly built, and broad-chested, with a fair complexion, grey eyes,
and yellow hair. He wore a bushy beard till he ascended the throne, when
he shaved it, and did not let it grow again till he went to the wars ten
years later.’
Footnote 34:
Since Theodosius I., who died in 395, no reigning emperor had ever led
an army in the field.
[Sidenote: Persian successes, 613-17.] The military disasters of the
first eight years of Heraclius’ reign were terrible. In 613 the armies
of Chosroes began to attack central Syria: Damascus fell, and then the
general Shahrbarz pushed southward into Palestine. In 614 the whole
Christian world was seized with horror at learning that Jerusalem had
been captured. Not only were 90,000 Christians slain in the Holy City,
but—what was reckoned far worse—all the treasures of the church of the
Holy Sepulchre fell into the hands of the fire-worshippers. Chief of
them was the ‘Sacred Wood,’ the ‘True Cross,’ which the empress Helena,
the mother of the great Constantine, had discovered in 327, and placed
in her magnificent church. It was now carried into Persia, to be mocked
by the blasphemous king Chosroes. This was not the end of the disasters
of the empire. In 616 Shahrbarz forced his way across the sands of the
isthmus of Suez, and attacked Egypt, the one Roman province which had
not seen the horrors of war for three centuries. The unwarlike Egyptians
submitted with hardly a blow; many of the heretical sects that swarmed
in the Nile valley even welcomed the Persians as friends and deliverers.
The loss of Egypt seemed a deathblow to the empire. It had been of late
the chief source of revenue to the dwindling treasury of Heraclius, and
on its corn the multitude of Constantinople had been wont to depend for
their free dole of bread. This had now to be cut off, for the State
finances did not permit of the provision being purchased elsewhere. In
617 the invasion of Asia Minor was resumed, and a Persian force seized
Chalcedon, in very sight of the walls of Constantinople.
The darkest hour had arrived. It is a great testimonial to the
popularity of Heraclius that the series of misfortunes which we have
related did not cost him his throne. Any sovereign less
well-intentioned, and less esteemed, would have lost life and crown.
[Sidenote: The Letter of Chosroes.] The direst moment of his humiliation
arrived when, after the loss of Egypt, the overweening Chosroes sent him
a formal letter, inviting him to lay down the sceptre which he could not
wield. In language of arrogant condescension, which almost seems to have
been borrowed from the letter of king Sennacherib in the Book of Kings,
the Persian wrote:—
‘Chosroes, 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? Have I not destroyed the
Greeks? You say that you trust in your God. Why has he not delivered out
of my hand Caesarea, Jerusalem, and Alexandria? And shall I not also
destroy Constantinople? But I will pardon your faults if you will submit
to me, and come hither with your wife and children; and I will give you
lands, vineyards, and olive groves, and look upon you with a kindly
aspect. Do not deceive yourself with vain hope in that Christ, who was
not able even 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 seas, I
shall stretch out my hand and take you, so that you shall see me,
whether you will or no.’
For a moment it is said that Heraclius contemplated abandoning
Constantinople, and taking refuge in his father’s old stronghold of
Carthage. But the very desperateness of the state of affairs brought its
own remedy. [Sidenote: Crusade of Heraclius.] Incensed at the arrogance
of Chosroes, smarting under the loss of the Holy Cross, and pinched for
every necessary of life, the East-Romans were ready to strike one wild
blow for existence. The Church took the lead, and declared the war to be
a holy duty for all Christian men, the first of the Crusades. The
patriarch Sergius bound the emperor by an oath not to abandon his
people, and the clergy offered, as a war-loan, all the gold and silver
plate of the churches of Constantinople. Heraclius took heart, and,
casting aside the trammels of imperial etiquette, swore that he would
himself lead his army in the field. Thousands of volunteers were
collected, and the treasures of the Church lavished on their equipment.
By the end of 618 this effort of despair had given the empire once more
a general, an army, and a military chest.
But an attack on the Persian host in Asia Minor did not turn out to be
at once feasible. A sudden danger at home obliged Heraclius to delay his
crusade. The Avars concentrated their ravages on Thrace, and their
hordes rode up almost to the gates of Constantinople. It was necessary
at all costs to free the city from the danger of attack in the rear
before the army crossed over into Asia. [Sidenote: Treachery of the
Avars.] Accordingly the emperor sent to offer a subsidy to the Chagan of
the Avars if he would withdraw beyond the Danube. The Chagan proposed a
conference at Heraclea, forty miles west of Constantinople, the point to
which he had advanced his army. Heraclius consented to the meeting, and
rode out in royal state, with all his court. But the faithless Avar was
meditating treachery. He concealed troops of his horsemen in the hills,
with the object of waylaying Heraclius on his way to Heraclea, and of
holding him to ransom. The emperor was warned just in time to escape
from the ambush. Throwing off his long purple robe, and tucking his
diadem under his arm, he rode hard for Constantinople, with the Avars
close at his heels. Many of his court, and thousands of the Thracian
peasantry, who had turned out to witness the meeting, fell into the
hands of the enemy. Heraclius had just time to order the gates to be
closed before the pursuers swept through the suburbs, and up to the
walls.
In spite of this piece of abominable treachery, the emperor was still
fain to conclude a peace with the Avars, as an absolutely necessary
preliminary before attacking the Persian. In 620 a peace of some sort
was patched up, in return for a payment of money, but even then
Heraclius was not able to start on his projected campaign. Some
desultory Persian attacks on Constantinople, and notably an attempt to
build a fleet at Chalcedon, and cross the strait, had first to be
frustrated.
It was not till 622 that the emperor was finally enabled to take the
offensive. But all preparations being complete, after solemnly keeping
the Lenten Fast, and receiving the benediction of the Church for himself
and his army, he set sail for Asia on Easter Day. He left his young son,
Heraclius Constantinus, regent in his stead, under the charge of the
patriarch Sergius and the patrician Bonus, the commander of the garrison
of Constantinople.
In the six campaigns which followed, Heraclius displayed an energy and
an ability which no one, judging from his quiescence during the last ten
years, would have expected him to possess. Historians only doubt whether
to praise the more his strategical talents or his personal bravery. From
the very first he showed his ascendency over the enemy, taking the
offensive, and turning the course of the war wherever he chose to direct
it. At his first departure from Constantinople he did not attack the
Persian in the front, but boldly sailed round the southern capes of Asia
Minor, and landed his army in Cilicia, on the gulf of Issus, a position
from which he threatened both Asia Minor and northern Syria. Marching up
into Cappadocia, he cut the communications between the Persian army in
Asia Minor and the Euphrates valley. This movement had the result that
he expected. Hastily evacuating Bithynia and Galatia, the Persian
general Shahrbarz drew back eastward, in order to regain touch with his
country. Ere a blow was struck Heraclius had cleared western Asia Minor
of the enemy; but he finished the campaign by inflicting a crushing
defeat on Shahrbarz in Cappadocia, and thus recovered eastern Asia Minor
also (622).
After in vain offering terms of peace to Chosroes, Heraclius took
effective means in the next year to bring the Persian to reason. Syria,
Egypt, and Mesopotamia were still in the hands of the enemy: he resolved
to deliver them in the same manner that he had saved Asia Minor, by
striking so hard at the enemy’s base of operations that he should be
compelled to call in all his outlying troops in order to defend Persia
proper. [Sidenote: Victorious campaigns of Heraclius, 622-27.] In 623
Heraclius, abandoning his communication with the sea, plunged boldly
inland, and fell on Media. For two whole years he is lost to sight in
the regions of the extreme East, subduing lands where no Roman army had
ever been seen before, where, indeed, no European conqueror had ever
penetrated since Alexander the Great. We hear of his winning three
pitched battles, and of his storming two great Median towns, Gandzaca
and Thebarmes, the latter the reputed birthplace of Zoroaster, the
prophet of the Persians. It was some satisfaction to the army to destroy
their magnificent temples in revenge for the sack of Jerusalem. To
defend Media, Chosroes had to draw back his outlying armies from the
West, and so far the purpose of Heraclius was served; but the emperor
was still too weak to attack Persia proper, or besiege Chosroes’ capital
of Ctesiphon.
After wintering at Van, in the Armenian highlands, Heraclius dropped
southward, in 625, and came into regions more within the ken of Western
historians. He recovered the long-lost fortresses of Amida and
Martyropolis, the ancient bulwarks of the empire on the upper Tigris,
which had been for nearly twenty years in Persian hands, and once more
picked up his communication with Constantinople, which had almost lost
sight of him during the two last campaigns. The year ended with a fourth
crushing defeat of Shahrbarz, who had endeavoured to throw himself
between the emperor and his homeward path by defending the passage of
the Sarus, near Germanicia.
But 626 was destined to be the decisive year of the war. Before
acknowledging himself beaten, the obstinate Chosroes was determined to
make one final effort. Drawing every man that he could together, for the
Persian empire was now growing exhausted, the old king made two armies
of them. While the larger was left in Mesopotamia and Armenia, to
endeavour to keep Heraclius employed, a great body under Shahrbarz
slipped southward, round the emperor’s flank, and marched for the
Bosphorus. [Sidenote: Great Siege of Constantinople, 626.] Chosroes had
concerted measures with the treacherous Chagan of the Avars for a
combined attack on Constantinople, from both the European and the
Asiatic side of the strait. When Shahrbarz appeared at Chalcedon, he
found the Avars already masters of Thrace, and preparing to beleaguer
Byzantium. The two armies could see each other across the water, but
they were wholly unable to communicate with each other; for the Roman
fleet kept such excellent guard in the straits that no boat could cross.
The patrician Bonus made a most gallant defence, the garrison was
adequate, and the population kept a good heart, for they knew that the
Persian was striking his last desperate blow. Heraclius himself was so
well satisfied with the impregnability of his capital that he only sent
a few veteran troops by sea to co-operate in the defence, and kept the
greater part of his army in hand for an attack on the heart of the
dominions of Chosroes. Meanwhile, the host of Shahrbarz had to look on
in helpless impotence, while the Avars, on the other side of the
Bosphorus, made their attempt on Constantinople. On the night of the 3d
of August 626 the Chagan gave the signal for the assault. A body of
Slavs, in small boats, attempted to storm the sea-wall from the side of
the Golden Horn, while the main body of the Avars moved against the
land-wall. But the galleys of Bonus rammed and sunk the light vessels of
the Slavs, and the assault of the Avars miscarried entirely. Thereupon
the Chagan hastily broke up his camp, and retired beyond the Balkans.
The siege was practically raised, though the army of Shahrbarz still
remained encamped at Chalcedon. Thus ended the first of the four great
sieges of Constantinople of which we have to tell.
Meanwhile, Heraclius had been retaliating on Persia in the most
effective way. In return for the invasion of Thrace by the Avars, he
called in from beyond the Caucasus the wild Hunnish tribe of the
Khazars, and turned them loose on Media and Assyria. Forty thousand of
their horsemen laid waste the whole land, as far as the gates of
Ctesiphon, and the emperor took possession of the upper valley of the
Tigris, and prepared to strike at his rival’s capital in the coming
year.
[Sidenote: Battle of Nineveh, 627.] The campaign of 627 ended the
triumphs of Heraclius. The last army of Persia, under a general named
Rhazates, faced him near Nineveh. Charging at the head of the mailed
horsemen of his guard, Heraclius slew the Persian chief with his own
hand, and scattered his forces to the winds. The victorious army pressed
on, and captured Dastagerd, the magnificent country-palace of Chosroes,
near Ctesiphon, where they gained such plunder as no Roman army had won
for many ages. They burnt Dastagerd, and four palaces more, while
Chosroes fled eastward to conceal himself in the mountains of Susiana.
The long-suffering Persians were at last growing tired of their arrogant
lord. [Sidenote: Peace with Persia, 628.] His army rebelled against him,
and proclaimed his son Siroes as king. Chosroes himself was thrown into
a dungeon, where he perished of cold and starvation. The new king at
once sent to ask for terms of peace from Heraclius. The emperor, knowing
the exhaustion of his own realm, and its need for instant repose, made
no hard conditions. Siroes restored all the Roman territory still in his
hands, released all Roman captives, paid a war indemnity, and—greatest
of all triumphs in the eyes of the subjects of Heraclius—gave back the
‘True Cross,’ and other spoils of Jerusalem.
In May 628 the emperor was able to return to Constantinople, bringing
peace and plenty with him. He had restored the boundary of the empire,
and inflicted on Persia a blow from which she never recovered. His arms
had penetrated far beyond the limits of the conquests of Trajan and
Severus, and his six years of unbroken victory were a record which no
Roman, save Julius Caesar, could rival. Not unjustly did the inhabitants
of Constantinople receive him with chants and sacred processions, and
hail him by the name of ‘the new Scipio.’ The crowning moment of his
triumph came when the True Cross was uplifted in St. Sophia, and
publicly exposed for the adoration of the faithful. Well might the
emperor have sung his ‘_Nunc dimittis_’ on that day of solemn rejoicing,
and prayed that the hour of his triumph might be the last of his life.
But already there was another tempest gathering, which was destined to
sweep over the Roman empire, with even greater violence than the Persian
storm which had just been weathered. While in the midst of his last
campaign, Heraclius had received a letter from an obscure Arabian
prophet, bidding him accept a new revelation from Heaven, which its
framer called ‘Islam,’ or ‘Submission to God.’ A similar missive was
delivered at the same moment to Chosroes, then on the eve of his fall.
Chosroes tore up the letter, and swore he would, at his leisure, lay the
insolent prophet in a dungeon. Heraclius sent a polite letter of
acknowledgment and a trifling present to the unknown fanatic, being
averse to making enemies of any sort while the Persian war was still on
his hands. Little as it could have been foreseen at the time, the
followers of the writer of these eccentric missives were fated to tear
up the empire of Chosroes by the roots, and to lop off half of its
fairest provinces from the realm of Heraclius.
The Arabian prophet was no less a person than Mohammed the son of
Abdallah, that strange being, half seer and half impostor, whose
preaching was destined to convulse three continents, and turn the stream
of history into new and unexpected channels.
[Sidenote: Mohammed.] The tribes of Arabia had hitherto been of very
little importance: their local feuds absorbed all their superfluous
energy. They were divided from each other, as well by religious
differences as by ancient clan hatreds. Some worshipped stocks and
stones, some the host of heaven, some had partly adopted Christianity,
others Judaism. They were given over to fetich-worship, human
sacrifices, drunkenness, infanticide, bloodshedding, polygamy, and
highway robbery. Among these godless tribes appeared Mohammed, a poor
man, but born of an ancient and powerful clan, who preached to them a
rigid Unitarian creed, accompanied by a reformation in morality. He had
been called by the One true God, he said, in a vision on Mount Hira, to
proclaim a new revelation to his countrymen, to turn them from idolatry
and hatred of each other, to the worship of Allah and the practice of
brotherly love. Mohammed was a being of a poetic and visionary
temperament, given to high ideals and high enterprises. He was afflicted
with long fits, or trances, in which his soul wandered far into the
fields of thought: these trances he took for divine inspirations, and
his imaginings—which were often noble enough—seemed to him the direct
commands of God, though in them good and grand ideas were freely mixed
with baser elements, tainted by the ignorance, cruelty, and lust of a
seventh century Arab. For long the preaching of Mohammed was of no
effect: his own tribe grew weary of his unending exhortations, and
chased him away from Mecca (622). [Sidenote: The Hijrah, 622.] It is
from this flight to Medina—the famous ‘Hijrah,’ that all Moslem
chronology is dated. But in spite of ill-success and persecution the
prophet never swerved from his mission, and at last proselytes began
flocking in to him, and he became the head of a powerful sect. Then came
the fatal moment which turned his teaching from a blessing to Arabia
into a curse for the world. When he grew powerful enough, he bade his
sectaries to take up the sword, and impose Islam on their neighbours by
the force of arms. His first success in the field, the battle of Bedr
(624), was an encouragement to persevere in this evil path, and for the
last eight years of his life he went forth, conquering and to conquer,
among the tribes of Arabia, till he had built up a little theocratic
empire in the peninsula (624-32).
[Sidenote: Mohammed and his Religion.] Mohammed’s successes were won by
unhallowed means, and the desire to extend them at almost any cost
gradually led him into compromises with the habits and superstitions of
his countrymen which were fatal to the purity of his religion. A strain
of cunning, of revenge, of self-indulgence, appeared in a character
which, in his years of poverty and trouble, had been blameless. He
connived at the ancient fetich-worship of the Arabs, by conceding that
the conical black stone of the Kaabah, which they had always worshipped,
had been hallowed by Abraham, and should be the central shrine of his
new faith. He fostered their vanity by proclaiming them the chosen
people of God. He pandered to their craving for lust and bloodshed, by
promising them the goods of their enemies to plunder in this life, and a
heaven of gross sensual enjoyment in the next. He restricted, but he did
not abolish, the evils of polygamy and slavery. In his day of triumph he
consigned whole tribes and towns to death, sometimes under circumstances
of treachery as well as of cruelty. Worst of all, he foisted into his
revelation special mandates of God permitting himself to do things which
his teaching forbade to his followers, such as to exceed his own limit
of polygamy, and even to take his own foster-son’s bride to wife. It is
hard to believe that he can have failed to see the horrible blasphemy
involved in forging the name of God to special warrants approving his
own lust. But this sin he repeatedly committed.
The personal failings of Mohammed seem to have brought into his creed a
blight of cruelty, bigotry, and self-indulgence, which has rendered
half-useless its higher and nobler features. The religion which
legalises the slaughter and plunder of all unbelievers and consigns
woman to the harem may have been a comparative blessing to the wild
Arabs of Mohammed’s own day, or to the Negro of the modern Soudan: to
the civilised world it was a mere curse—the substitution of an inferior
for a higher creed and life. Even to the Arab of the seventh century it
was but half-beneficial: if it stayed him from drunkenness, human
sacrifices, and infanticide, it merely directed his bloodthirstiness
against foreign instead of domestic foes, and gave a divine sanction to
many of his lower instincts. [Sidenote: Failings of Islam.] Wherever
Mohammedanism has taken root, it has led at first to rapid and
enthusiastic outbursts of vigour, but it seems gradually to sap the
energy of the nations which adopt it, and leads, after a few generations
of greatness, to a stagnation and decay, which the Moslem in his
self-satisfied bigotry is too blind to perceive. The creed only thrives
while militant. When it has won its victory, it sinks into dull apathy.
Islam is a good religion to die by, as its fanatics have shown on a
thousand battle-fields, but not a good religion to live by. Good and
evil elements are too hopelessly mixed in it, just as in Mohammed’s
Koran, that miscellaneous receptacle of all his revelations: high
thoughts about the Godhead or the fate of man are mingled with the mere
opportunist orders of the day, or with licences for the personal
gratification of the Prophet.[35]
Footnote 35:
The Koran consists of all Mohammed’s inspired sayings, taken down at
the time on wooden tablets, palm-leaves, or blade-bones, by his
followers, and consigned in confusion to a chest, from which they were
afterwards drawn out at random, and strung together, not according to
their date or their contents, but simply in order of length.
But whatever were the failings of Mohammed and of Mohammed’s creed, they
had one fearful efficiency, the power to turn their sectaries into wild
fanatics, careless of life or death upon the battle-field. Life meant to
them the duty of smiting down the Infidel, and the privilege of spoiling
him: death, the yet greater joys of a paradise of gross sensual
delights. What the first mad rush of a horde of Moslem fanatics, drunk
with religious frenzy, was like, modern Europe had half forgotten,
though our crusading forefathers knew it well enough. But the generation
which has seen the half-armed Arabs of the Soudan face the steadiest
troops in the world equipped with quick-firing rifles and artillery, and
almost carry the day against them, has had good reason to revise its
view about the power of Mohammedan fanaticism.
Before he died, Mohammed had begun to take measures for the spread of
his religion by the sword beyond the limits of Arabia. In 629, the year
after the end of the Persian war, the troops of Heraclius who garrisoned
the fortresses on the desert frontier of Palestine, had been attacked by
wandering bands of Arab zealots. But it was not till the Prophet himself
was dead that the full storm of invasion fell upon the Roman empire and
its Persian neighbours. It was Abu Bekr, the first ‘caliph’ or
‘successor’ of Mohammed, who sent forth in 633 the two armies which were
bidden respectively to convert Syria and Chaldaea to Islam by the edge
of the sword.
Neither the Roman nor the Persian empire was well fitted for resistance
at the moment. The twenty years of war brought about by the ambition of
Chosroes had reduced each of them to the extreme of exhaustion. Since
the end of the war Persia had been a prey to incessant civil strife and
revolution: nine princes had mounted the throne in little more than four
years. In the Roman empire Heraclius had been doing his best to repair
the calamities of the war: his first care had been to repay, by means of
the war indemnity paid by Siroes and the imposition of new taxes, the
great loan which the Church had made him, in order to equip his troops
for the struggle. [Sidenote: Exhaustion of the Roman Empire.] He had
disbanded much of his victorious army in pursuit of the policy of
retrenchment for which the ruined state of his empire called. But he
could not repair the losses which Syria and Asia Minor had suffered in
spending ten years beneath the Persian yoke. The very foundations of
society seemed to have been sapped in the provinces of the East by the
prolonged Persian occupation. The numerous heretical sects which swarmed
in the valleys of the Nile and the Orontes had raised their heads during
the Persian rule, and bore with ill-concealed reluctance the restoration
of the imperial authority. The Jews, who had often sided with the
Persians, were restless and discontented. It was said that half the
population of Syria and Egypt wished ill to the empire. It would have
required two generations of peace and wise administration to restore to
their old condition those Oriental dioceses which had for the last three
centuries been the stay and support of the East-Roman Empire; but less
than four years after Heraclius had solemnly restored the ‘True Cross’
to the custody of the Patriarch of Jerusalem the Arabs burst into the
land.
While Khaled and one fanatical Saracen horde assaulted the Persian
frontier on the lower Euphrates, another, under Abu Obeida, attacked the
eastern or desert front of Syria. Bostra, the first city on the edge of
the waste, fell by treachery, a small army under the patrician Sergius
was defeated, and the governors of Syria and Palestine sent for aid to
the emperor. Hardly yet realising the danger of the crisis, Heraclius
sent some reinforcements under his brother Theodore to join the local
troops. This army checked the Moslems for some months; and it was
considered necessary by the caliph to strengthen the Arab host in Syria
by sending thither half the force which had invaded the Persian empire,
and Khaled, ‘the Sword of God,’ the most terrible and bloodthirsty of
all his fanatical chiefs. In July 634, Theodore was badly defeated by
the Saracens at Adjnadin near Gabatha, beyond the Jordan. This
ill-success roused the emperor: he poured in further reinforcements, and
the enemy were attacked in the late summer of 634 by an army of 80,000
men. [Sidenote: Battle of the Yermuk, 634.] The fate of Syria was
settled by the battle of the Hieromax (Yermuk), where the troops of the
Empire, after a long and bloody fight, in which they at one time forced
the Arabs back to the very gates of their camp, were broken by the
fanatical rush of an enemy who preferred death to defeat. ‘Paradise is
before you,’ cried Abu Obeida to his wavering host, ‘the devil and
hell-fire behind;’ and with their last charge the Arabs broke the line
of the legions, and rolled the wearied troops in wild disorder back over
a line of precipices and ravines, where thousands perished without
stroke of sword, by being cast down the lofty rocks.
The army of the East was almost exterminated at the Hieromax, and ere
another force could be collected Damascus, the greatest city of eastern
Syria, was captured by the enemy, who in spite of accepting its
surrender massacred a great part of the population (635).
Heraclius now determined to lead the Roman army in person, but he was no
longer the same man who had kept the field with harness on his back for
six long campaigns in the old Persian War. He had now long passed his
fiftieth year, and was prematurely broken by the first symptoms of the
dropsy which afterwards caused his death. In his private life, too, he
had had much trouble of late; he had made an unwise and unhallowed
second marriage with his own sister’s daughter Martina, and was harassed
by disputes between her and the rest of his family, caused by the fact
that the young empress wished to induce her husband to leave her own son
Heracleonas joint heir to the empire with his elder brother Heraclius
Constantinus. But such as he was, Heraclius once more put on his armour,
and spent the years 635-6 in Syria endeavouring to keep back the Arabs
with the new levies that he had assembled. His failure was complete;
city after city, Emesa, Hierapolis, Chalcis, Beroea, fell into the hands
of the Moslems, without the emperor being able even to risk a battle in
their defence. In 636, completely broken by disease, he returned to
Constantinople, having first paid a hasty visit to Jerusalem to take up
and remove the ‘True Cross’ which he had replaced there in triumph only
six years before.
[Sidenote: Fall of Jerusalem, 637.] After the departure of Heraclius
things went from bad to worse; Antioch, the stronghold and capital of
northern Syria, and Jerusalem, the centre of the defence of Palestine,
both fell in 637. To receive the surrender of Jerusalem, which Mohammed
had pronounced only second to Mecca among the holy places of the world,
the caliph Omar crossed the desert in person. When the town had yielded,
the Arab compelled the patriarch Sophronius to lead him all round the
shrines of the city; as they stood in the church of the Holy Sepulchre,
the patriarch, torn by grief, could not refrain from exclaiming that now
indeed was the Abomination of Desolation, spoken of by Daniel the
prophet, in the Holy of Holies. The austere Omar showed more moderation
and compassion than his generals had been wont to display, he left the
Christians all their holy places, and contented himself with building a
great mosque on the site of the temple of Solomon.
While Syria was falling before the Saracens, the lot of Persia had been
even worse; after a great battle lasting for three days at Kadesia, the
Sassanian empire had succumbed before the Moslem sword. Its capital
Ctesiphon was sacked and destroyed, and Yezdigerd, the last of its
kings, fled eastward to raise his last army on the banks of Oxus and
Murghab (636). Arab hordes working up the Euphrates began to assail the
Roman province of Mesopotamia from the south, at the same moment that
the conquerors of Syria attacked it from the west. Heraclius made one
last attempt to save north Syria and Mesopotamia by sending an army
under his son and heir Heraclius Constantinus to endeavour to recover
Antioch. After some slight show of success at first, the young Caesar
suffered a fatal defeat in front of Emesa, and retired from the scene,
leaving Mesopotamia with all its time-honoured strongholds, Daras,
Edessa, and Amida, a prey to the irresistible enemy (638-9). With the
fall of the seaport of Caesarea in 640 the Romans lost their last
foothold south of the Taurus, and Asia Minor itself now became exposed
to invasion.
Before he died of the dropsy, which was the bane of his declining years,
the unfortunate Heraclius was destined to see one more disaster to his
realm. [Sidenote: Saracens conquer Egypt, 640.] In 640 the Saracens, now
headed by Amrou, crossed the desert of Suez and fell upon Egypt. They
beat the Roman army in the field, captured Memphis and Babylon, and then
received the homage of all upper and central Egypt. The population was
very largely composed of heretical sects who received the Moslems as
deliverers from orthodox oppression, and Mokawkas the Coptic governor of
the province surrendered long ere the situation had grown desperate. It
was only about Alexandria, where the Greek orthodox element was
strongest, that any serious resistance was made. But the great seaport
capital of Egypt held out very staunchly, and was still in Christian
hands when Heraclius died on Feb. 10th, 641, in the sixty-sixth year of
his age.
Thus ended in misery and failure the man who would have been hailed as
the greatest of all the warrior emperors of Rome if he had died but ten
years sooner. He had saved the empire at its darkest hour, and won back
all the East by feats of arms such as have seldom been paralleled in all
history. But he won it back only to lose again two-thirds of the rescued
lands to a new enemy, and ungrateful after-ages remembered him rather as
the loser of Jerusalem and Antioch than as the saviour of
Constantinople.
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