Avars fell with unexampled severity. The Goths had afflicted them before,
but they, at least, had been Christian and semi-civilized, while the
new-comers were in the lowest grade of savagery. It is not too much to say
that between 570 and 600 the old population was almost exterminated over
the greater part of the country north of the Balkans—the modern Servia and
Bulgaria—and very sadly cut down even in the more sheltered Macedonian and
Thracian provinces. The Latin-speaking provincials almost disappeared: the
only remnants of them were the Dalmatian islanders and the “Vlachs” or
Wallachians who are found in later times scattered in small bodies among
the Slavs who had swept over the whole country-side. The effect of the
invasion is well described by the contemporary chronicler, John of
Ephesus—
“The year 581 was famous for the invasion of the accursed people called
Slavonians, who overran Greece and the country by Thessalonica, and all
Thrace, and captured the cities and took many forts, and devastated and
burnt, and reduced the people to slavery, and made themselves masters of
the whole country, and settled in it, by main force, and dwelt in it as
though it had been their own. Four years have now elapsed, and still they
live at their ease in the land, and spread themselves far and wide, as far
as God permits them, and ravage and burn and take captive, and still they
encamp and dwell there.”
The open country was swept bare by the Slavs: the towns resisted better,
for neither Slav nor Avar was skilled in siege operations. Relying upon
the fortified towns as his base the great general Priscus, whom Maurice
placed in command, was able to keep his ground along the Danube, and to
perform many gallant exploits. He even crossed the river and attacked the
Slavs and Avars in their own homes beyond it; but it was to no effect that
he burnt their villages and slew off their warriors. He could not protect
the unarmed population in the open country within the Roman boundary, and
the girdle of fortresses along the Danube soon covered nothing but a
wasted region, sparsely inhabited by Slavs. The limit of Roman population
had fallen back to the line of the Balkans, and even to the south of it,
and the Slavs were ever slipping across the Danube in larger and larger
numbers, despite the garrisons along the river which were still kept up
from Singidunum [Belgrade] to Dorostolum [Silistria].
The misfortunes of the Avaric and Slavonic war were the cause of the fall
of the Emperor Maurice. He had won some unpopularity by his manifest
inability to stem the tide of the barbarian invasion, and more by an act
of callousness, of which he was guilty in 599. The Chagan of the Avars had
captured 15,000 prisoners, and offered to release them for a large ransom.
Maurice—whose treasury was empty—refused to comply, and the Chagan
massacred the wretched captives. But the immediate cause of the emperor’s
fall was his way of dealing with the army. He was unpopular with the
soldiery, though an old soldier himself, and did not possess their respect
or confidence. Yet he was an officer of some merit and had written a long
military treatise called the “Strategicon,” which was the official
handbook of the imperial armies for three hundred years.
Maurice sealed his fate when, in 602, he issued orders for the
discontented army of the Danube to winter north of the river, in the waste
marshes of the Slavs. The troops refused to obey the order, and chased
away their generals. Then electing as their captain an obscure centurion,
named Phocas, they marched on Constantinople.
Maurice armed the city factions, the “Blues” and “Greens,” and strove to
defend himself. But when he saw that no one would fight for him, he fled
across the Bosphorus with his wife and children, to seek refuge in the
Asiatic provinces, where he was less unpopular than in Europe. Soon he was
pursued by orders of Phocas, whom the army had now saluted as emperor, and
caught at Chalcedon. The cruel usurper had him executed along with all his
five sons, the youngest a child of only three years of age. Maurice died
with a courage and piety that moved even his enemies, exclaiming with his
last breath, “Thou art just, O Lord, and just are thy judgments!”
X. THE DARKEST HOUR.
For the first time since Constantinople had become the seat of empire the
throne had been won by armed rebellion and the murder of the legitimate
ruler. The break in the peaceful and orderly succession which had hitherto
prevailed was not only an evil precedent, but an immediate disaster. The
new emperor proved a far worse governor than the unfortunate Maurice, who,
in spite of his faults and his ill luck, had always been hard-working,
moderate, pious, and economical. Phocas was a mere brutal soldier—cruel,
ignorant, suspicious, and reckless, and in his incapable hands the empire
began to fall to pieces with alarming rapidity. He opened his reign with a
series of cruel executions of his predecessor’s friends, and from that
moment his deeds of bloodshed never ceased: probably the worst of them was
the execution of Constantina, widow of Maurice and daughter of Tiberius
II., whom he slew together with her three young daughters, lest their
names might be used as the excuse for a conspiracy against him. But even
greater horror seems to have been caused when he burnt alive the able
general Narses,(17) who had won many laurels in the last Persian war.
Narses had come up to the capital under safe conduct to clear himself from
accusations of treason: so the Emperor not only devised a punishment which
had never yet been heard of since the empire became Christian, but broke
his own plighted oath.
The moment that Phocas had mounted the throne, Chosroës of Persia declared
war on him, using the hypocritical pretext that he wished to revenge
Maurice, for whom he professed a warm personal friendship. This war was
far different from the indecisive contests in the reigns of Justinian and
Justin II. In two successive years the Persians burst into North Syria and
ravaged it as far as the sea; but in the third they turned north and swept
over the hitherto untouched provinces of Asia Minor. In 608 their main
army penetrated across Cappadocia and Galatia right up to the gates of
Chalcedon. The inhabitants of Constantinople could see the blazing
villages across the water on the Asiatic shore—a sight as new as it was
terrifying; for although Thrace had several times been harried to within
sight of the city, no enemy had ever been seen in Bithynia.
Plot after plot was formed in the capital against Phocas, but he succeeded
in putting them all down, and slew the conspirators with fearful tortures.
For eight years his reign continued: Constantinople was full of
executions; Asia was ravaged from sea to sea; the Thracian and Illyrian
provinces were overrun more and more by the Slavs, now that the army of
Europe had been transferred across the Bosphorus to make head against the
Persians. Yet Phocas still held on to Constantinople: the creature of a
military revolt himself, it was by a military revolt alone that he was
destined to be overthrown.
Africa was the only portion of the Roman Empire which in the reign of
Phocas was suffering neither from civil strife nor foreign invasion. It
was well governed by the aged exarch Heraclius, who was so well liked in
the province that the emperor had not dared to depose him. Urged by
desperate entreaties from all parties in Constantinople to strike a blow
against the tyrant, and deliver the empire from the yoke of a monster,
Heraclius at last consented. He quietly got ready a fleet, which he placed
under the orders of his son, who bore the same name as himself. This he
despatched against Constantinople, while at the same time his nephew
Nicetas led a large body of horse along the African shore to invade Egypt.
When Heraclius the younger arrived with his fleet at the Dardanelles, all
the prominent citizens of Constantinople fled secretly to take refuge with
him. As he neared the capital the troops of Phocas burst into mutiny: the
tyrant’s fleet was scattered after a slight engagement, and the city threw
open its gates. Phocas was seized in the palace by an official whom he had
cruelly wronged, and brought aboard the galley of the conqueror. “Is it
thus,” said Heraclius, “that you have governed the empire?” “Will you
govern it any better?” sneered the desperate usurper. Heraclius spurned
him away with his foot, and the sailors hewed him to pieces on the deck.
Next day the patriarch and the senate hailed Heraclius as emperor, and he
was duly crowned in St. Sophia on October 5, A.D. 610.
Heraclius took over the empire in such a state of disorder and confusion
that he must soon have felt that there was some truth in the dying sneer
of Phocas. It seemed almost impossible to get things into better order,
for resources were wanting. Save Africa and Egypt and the district
immediately around the capital, all the provinces were overrun by the
Persian, the Avar, and the Slav. The treasury was empty, and the army had
almost disappeared owing to repeated and bloody defeats in Asia Minor.
Heraclius seems at first to have almost despaired of the possibility of
evolving order out of this chaos, though he was in the prime of life and
strength—“a man of middle stature, strongly built, and broad-chested, with
grey eyes and yellow hair, and of a very fair complexion; he wore a bushy
beard when he came to the throne, but afterwards cut it short.” For the
first twelve years of his reign he remained at Constantinople,
endeavouring to reorganize the empire, and to defend at any rate the
frontiers of Thrace and Asia Minor. The more distant provinces he hardly
seems to have hoped to save, and the chronicle of his early years is
filled with the catalogue of the losses of the empire. Mesopotamia and
North Syria had already been lost by Phocas, but in 613, while the
imperial armies were endeavouring to defend Cappadocia, the Persian
general Shahrbarz turned southwards and attacked Central Syria. The great
town of Damascus fell into his hands; but worse was to come. In 614 the
Persian army appeared before the holy city of Jerusalem, took it after a
short resistance, and occupied it with a garrison. But the populace rose
and slaughtered the Persian troops when Shahrbarz had departed with his
main army. This brought him back in wrath: he stormed the city and put
90,000 Christians to the sword, only sparing the Jewish inhabitants.
Zacharias, Patriarch of Jerusalem, was carried into captivity, and with
him went what all Christians then regarded as the most precious thing in
the world—the wood of the “True Cross.” Helena, the mother of Constantine,
had dug the relic up, according to the well-known legend, on Mount Moriah,
and built for it a splendid shrine. Now Shahrbarz desecrated the church
and took off the “True Cross” to Persia.
This loss brought the inhabitants of the East almost to despair; they
thought that the luck of the empire had departed with the Holy Wood, which
had served as its Palladium, and even imagined that the Last Day was at
hand and that Chosroës of Persia was Antichrist. The mad language of pride
and insult which the Persian in the day of his triumph used to Heraclius
might also explain their belief. His blasphemous phrases seem like an echo
of the letter of Sennacherib in the Second Book of Kings. The epistle
ran:—
“Chosroës, greatest of gods, and master of the whole earth, to Heraclius,
his vile and insensate slave. Have I not destroyed the Greeks? You say you
trust in your God: why, then, has he not delivered out of my hand
Caesarea, Jerusalem, and Alexandria? Shall I not also destroy
Constantinople? But I will pardon all your sins if you will come to me
with your wife and children; I will give you lands, vines, and olive
groves, and will look upon you with a kindly aspect. Do not deceive
yourself with the vain hope in that Christ, who was not even able to save
himself from the Jews, who slew him by nailing him to a cross.”
The horror and rage roused by the loss of the “True Cross” and the
blasphemies of King Chosroës brought about the first real outburst of
national feeling that we meet in the history of the Eastern Empire. It was
felt that the fate of Christendom hung in the balance, and that all, from
highest to lowest, were bound to make one great effort to beat back the
fire-worshipping Persians from Palestine, and recover the Holy Places. The
Emperor vowed that he would take the field at the head of the army—a thing
most unprecedented, for since the death of Theodosius I., in 395, no
Caesar had ever gone out in person to war. The Church came forward in the
most noble way—at the instance of the Patriarch Sergius all the churches
of Constantinople sent their treasures and ornaments to the mint to be
coined down, and serve as a great loan to the state, which was to be
repaid when the Persians should have been conquered. The free dole of corn
which the inhabitants of the capital had been receiving ever since the
days of Constantine was abolished, and the populace bore the privation
without demur. It was indeed observed that this measure not only saved the
treasury, but drove into the army—where they were useful—thousands of the
able-bodied loiterers who were the strength of the circus factions and the
pest of the city. If the dole had been continued Heraclius could not have
found a penny for the war. Egypt, the granary of the empire, had been lost
in 616, and the supply of government corn entirely cut off, so that the
dole would have had to be provided by the treasury buying corn, a
ruinously expensive task.
By the aid of the Church loan Heraclius equipped a new army and
strengthened his fleet. He also provided for the garrisoning of
Constantinople by an adequate force, a most necessary precaution, for in
617 the Persians had again forced their way to the Bosphorus, and this
time captured Chalcedon. Heraclius would probably have taken the field
next year but for troubles with the Avars. That wild race had long been
working their wicked will on the almost undefended Thracian provinces, but
now they promised peace. Heraclius went out, at the Chagan’s pressing
invitation, to meet him near Heraclea. But the conference was a snare, for
the treacherous savage had planted ambushes on the way to secure the
person of the Emperor, and Heraclius only escaped by the speed of his
horse. He cast off his imperial mantle to ride the faster, and galloped
into the capital just in time to close its gates as the vanguard of the
Chagan’s army came in sight. The Avars kept the Emperor engaged for some
time, and it was not till 622 that he was able to take the field against
the Persians.
This expedition of Heraclius was in spirit the first of the Crusades. It
was the first war that the Roman Empire had ever undertaken in a spirit of
religious enthusiasm, for it was to no mere political end that the Emperor
and his people looked forward. The army marched out to save Christendom,
to conquer the Holy Places, and to recover the “True Cross.” The men were
wrought up to a high pitch of enthusiasm by warlike sermons, and the
Emperor carried with him, to stimulate his zeal, a holy picture—one of
those _eikons_ in which the Greek Church has always delighted—which was
believed to be the work of no mortal hands.
Heraclius made no less than six campaigns (A.D. 622-27) in his gallant and
successful attempt to save the half-ruined empire. He won great and
well-deserved fame, and his name would be reckoned among the foremost of
the world’s warrior-kings if it had not been for the misfortunes which
afterwards fell on him in his old age.
His first campaign cleared Asia Minor of the Persian hosts, not by a
direct attack, but by skilful strategy. Instead of attacking the army at
Chalcedon, he took ship and landed in Cilicia, in the rear of the enemy,
threatening in this position both Syria and Cappadocia. As he expected,
the Persians broke up from their camp opposite Constantinople, and came
back to fall upon him. But after much manœuvring he completely beat the
general Shahrbarz, and cleared Asia Minor of the enemy.
In his next campaigns Heraclius endeavoured to liberate the rest of the
Roman Empire by a similar plan: he resolved to assail Chosroës at home,
and force him to recall the armies he kept in Syria and Egypt to defend
his own Persian provinces. In 623-4 the Emperor advanced across the
Armenian mountains and threw himself into Media, where his army revenged
the woes of Antioch and Jerusalem by burning the fire-temples of
Ganzaca—the Median capital—and Thebarmes, the birthplace of the Persian
prophet Zoroaster. Chosroës, as might have been expected, recalled his
troops from the west, and fought two desperate battles to cover Ctesiphon.
His generals were defeated in both, but the Roman army suffered severely.
Winter was at hand, and Heraclius fell back on Armenia. In his next
campaign he recovered Roman Mesopotamia, with its fortresses of Amida,
Dara, and Martyropolis, and again defeated the general Shahrbarz.
But 626 was the decisive year of the war. The obstinate Chosroës
determined on one final effort to crush Heraclius, by concerting a joint
plan of operations with the Chagan of the Avars. While the main Persian
army watched the emperor in Armenia, a great body under Shahrbarz slipped
south of him into Asia Minor and marched on the Bosphorus. At the same
moment the Chagan of the Avars, with the whole force of his tribe and of
his Slavonic dependants, burst over the Balkans and beset Constantinople
on the European side. The two barbarian hosts could see each other across
the water, and even contrived to exchange messages, but the Roman fleet
sailing incessantly up and down the strait kept them from joining forces.
In the June, July, and August of 626 the capital was thus beset: the
danger appeared imminent, and the Emperor was far away on the Euphrates.
But the garrison was strong, the patrician Bonus, its commander, was an
able officer, the fleet was efficient, and the same crusading fervour
which had inspired the Constantinopolitans in 622 still buoyed up their
spirits. In the end of July 80,000 Avars and Slavs, with all sorts of
siege implements, delivered simultaneous assaults along the land front of
the city, but they were beaten back with great slaughter. Next the Chagan
built himself rafts and tried to bring the Persians across, but the Roman
galleys sunk the clumsy structures, and slew thousands of the Slavs who
had come off in small boats to attack the fleet. Then the Chagan gave up
the siege in disgust and retired across the Danube.
Heraclius had shown great confidence in the strength of Constantinople and
the courage of its defenders. He sent a few veteran troops to aid the
garrison, but did not slacken from his attack on Persia. While Shahrbarz
and the Chagan were besieging his capital, he himself was wasting Media
and Mesopotamia. He imitated King Chosroës in calling in Tartar allies
from the north, and revenged the ravages of the Avars in Thrace by turning
40,000 Khazar horsemen loose on Northern Persia. The enemy gave way before
him everywhere, and the Persians began to grow desperate.
Next year King Chosroës put into the field the last levy of Persia, under
a general named Rhazates, whom he bid to go out and “conquer or die.” At
the same time he wrote to command Shahrbarz to evacuate Chalcedon and
return home in haste. But Heraclius intercepted the despatch of recall,
and Shahrbarz came not.
Near Nineveh Heraclius fell in with the Persian home army and inflicted on
it a decisive defeat. He himself, charging at the head of his cavalry,
rode down the general of the enemy and slew him with his lance. Chosroës
could put no new army in the field, and by Christmas Heraclius had seized
his palace of Dastagerd, and divided among his troops such a plunder as
had never been seen since Alexander the Great captured Susa.
The Nemesis of Chosroës’ insane vanity had now arrived. Ten years after he
had written his vaunting letter to Heraclius he found himself in far worse
plight than his adversary had ever been. After Dastagerd had fallen he
retired to Ctesiphon, the capital of his empire, but even from thence he
had to flee on the approach of the enemy. Then the end came: his own son
Siroes and his chief nobles seized him and threw him in chains, and a few
days after he died—of rage and despair according to one story, of
starvation if the darker tale is true.
The new king sent the humblest messages to the victorious Roman, hailing
him as his “father,” and apologizing for all the woes that the ambition of
Chosroës had brought upon the world. Heraclius received his ambassadors
with kindness, and granted peace, on the condition that every inch of
Roman territory should be evacuated, all Roman captives freed, a war
indemnity paid, and the spoils of Jerusalem, including the “True Cross,”
faithfully restored. Siroes consented with alacrity, and in March, 628, a
glorious peace ended the twenty-six years of the Persian war.
Heraclius returned to Constantinople in the summer of the same year with
his spoils, his victorious army, and his great trophy, the “Holy Wood.”
His entry was celebrated in the style of an old Roman triumph, and the
Senate conferred on him the title of the “New Scipio.” The whole of the
citizens, bearing myrtle boughs, came out to meet the army, and the
ceremony concluded with the exhibition of the “True Cross” before the high
altar of St. Sophia. Heraclius afterwards took it back in great pomp to
Jerusalem.
This was, perhaps, the greatest triumph that any emperor ever won.
Heraclius had surpassed the eastern achievements of Trajan and Severus,
and led his troops further east than any Roman general had ever
penetrated. His task, too, had been the hardest ever imposed on an
emperor; none of his predecessors had ever started to war with his very
capital beleaguered and with three-fourths of his provinces in the hands
of the enemy. Since Julius Caesar no one had fought so incessantly—for six
years the emperor had not been out of the saddle—nor met with such uniform
success.
Heraclius returned to Constantinople to spend, as he hoped, the rest of
his years in peace. He had now reached the age of fifty-four, and was much
worn by his incessant campaigning. But the quiet for which he yearned was
to be denied him, and the end of his reign was to be almost as disastrous
as the commencement.
The great Saracen invasion was at hand, and it was at the very moment of
Heraclius’ triumph that Mahomet sent out his famous circular letter to the
kings of the earth, inviting them to embrace Islam. If the Emperor could
but have known that his desolated realm, spoiled for ten long years by the
Persian and the Avar, and drained of men and money, was to be invaded by a
new enemy far more terrible than the old, he would have prayed that the
day of his triumph might also be the day of his death.
XI. SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS LIFE. (A.D. 320-620.)