Byzantine Culture

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The Heraclian Dynasty

The Heraclian emperors fought Persia to exhaustion, lost Syria and Egypt to the Arabs, and rebuilt the state that survived. A guide to Byzantium's most dangerous century.

The hundred years between 610 and 711 turned the eastern Roman Empire into something else. At the start of it the empire ruled the whole eastern Mediterranean from the Adriatic to the Nile, conducted its government in Latin, and treated Persia as its only serious rival. At the end it had lost Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa permanently, spoke and governed in Greek, and was fighting for survival against a caliphate that had appeared from nowhere in a single generation.

The dynasty founded by Heraclius supplied five emperors and presided over both the catastrophe and the recovery. Judging it is difficult. Heraclius himself won the most complete victory any Roman emperor ever won over Persia and then lost more territory than any emperor since Valens; his grandson Constans II moved the imperial court to Sicily and was murdered in his bath; his great-grandson Constantine IV saved Constantinople from the Arabs and is barely remembered.

Phocas and the Inheritance

Heraclius came to power by overthrowing Phocas, a centurion who had himself seized the throne in 602 by murdering the emperor Maurice and Maurice’s sons in front of him. The eight years of Phocas’s rule were disastrous. The Persian king Khosrow II, who owed his own throne to Maurice’s help, used the murder as a pretext for invasion and began taking the eastern provinces apart. The Balkans went the same way as Avar and Slav raiding turned into settlement.

In 608 the exarch of Africa, also called Heraclius, rebelled. His son sailed from Carthage with a fleet in 610, entered Constantinople with little resistance, and had Phocas executed. The story that Heraclius asked the dying man whether this was how he had governed the empire, and received the reply “Will you govern it better?”, is recorded by later chroniclers and is too good to be reliable.

The Persian War

The situation Heraclius inherited in 610 got worse for twelve years. Antioch fell in 613, Jerusalem in 614 — the Persians carried off the relic of the True Cross, an event that stunned the Christian world — and Egypt, the empire’s granary, between 618 and 621. In 626 a Persian army stood on the Asian shore in sight of the capital while the Avars besieged it from Thrace.

What Heraclius did between 622 and 628 has no real parallel in Roman military history. He melted down church plate to pay for an army, left Constantinople in the hands of the patriarch Sergius and a regency, campaigned in Armenia and Azerbaijan for six years, and finally destroyed the main Persian field army at Nineveh in December 627. Khosrow was overthrown and killed by his own nobility; the peace restored every lost province and returned the True Cross, which Heraclius carried back into Jerusalem in 630. The campaign is treated in detail in Heraclius and the Last Roman–Persian War, and the Avar siege of 626 has its own article.

The Arab Conquests

Within four years of the triumph in Jerusalem, Arab raiding parties were in Syria. Within ten, everything Heraclius had recovered was gone.

The decisive engagement was fought over several days in August 636 beside the Yarmouk river, a tributary of the Jordan. The Byzantine army was destroyed; the account is given in the Battle of Yarmouk. Damascus, Jerusalem and Antioch followed within five years, Egypt by 642, and Byzantine Africa by the end of the century.

Explaining the speed of the collapse is one of the standing problems of the field. Several factors are generally agreed:

  • Exhaustion. Both empires had just fought a twenty-six-year war to the point of bankruptcy. The Persian state collapsed entirely under the same pressure; the Roman one nearly did.
  • Religious alienation. Syria and Egypt were largely Miaphysite, and imperial attempts to enforce the Chalcedonian settlement had produced a century of resentment. The older view that these provinces welcomed the Arabs as liberators is now thought overstated, but indifference to the change of ruler was real.
  • Fiscal logic. Arab taxation in the first decades was lighter than Roman, and the new rulers left local administration and language in place.
  • Military mismatch. Byzantine field armies were built for set-piece war against Persia and for garrison duty; they were not organised for the mobility of the Arab forces, and after Yarmouk there was no reserve.

Heraclius, ill and broken, is said to have taken his leave of Syria at the frontier with the words: “Farewell, a long farewell, Syria, my fair province. You are the enemy’s now.” He died in 641.

The Monothelite Attempt

The theological experiment of the dynasty was Monothelitism — the proposal, promoted by the patriarch Sergius and endorsed by Heraclius in the Ekthesis of 638, that Christ had two natures but a single will. It was a political formula designed to bring the Miaphysite provinces back into communion, and it arrived at exactly the moment those provinces were passing out of imperial control, which made it pointless as well as contentious.

It was also, to its opponents, heresy. Maximus the Confessor and Pope Martin I resisted it; Constans II had both arrested, tried and mutilated, and both died in exile. The doctrine was finally condemned at the Sixth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 680–681, under Constantine IV, who needed peace with Rome more than he needed Syria, which was by then long gone. The episode is a good illustration of how Byzantine religious policy and foreign policy were the same subject.

Constans II and the Western Turn

Constans II (641–668) ruled through the worst years. He fought the Arabs at sea and lost badly at the Battle of the Masts off the Lycian coast in 655, an engagement that ended the Roman monopoly on the Mediterranean. He campaigned against the Slavs in the Balkans with some success. Then, in 663, he did something no emperor had done for centuries: he went west, visited Rome — the first emperor to enter the city in nearly two hundred years — and settled at Syracuse in Sicily, apparently intending to govern the empire from there.

Whether this was a strategic plan to fall back on the western provinces or a flight from an unpopular reign in the capital is not clear from the sources. He was murdered in his bath at Syracuse in 668, reportedly by a chamberlain wielding a soap dish.

Constantine IV and the First Arab Siege

Constantine IV (668–685) faced the outcome his father had left him: an Arab fleet operating freely in the Aegean and an attempt on Constantinople itself, conducted in stages between about 674 and 678. The city held. The instrument of the defence was the incendiary weapon known as Greek fire, first deployed in these years and kept secret for centuries afterwards.

The failure of the assault mattered far beyond the Aegean. It was the first serious check to Arab expansion, and combined with the second and greater siege of 717–718 it fixed the frontier in the Taurus mountains for two hundred years.

Constantine IV also lost the lower Danube. In 680 a Bulgar confederation under Asparukh crossed the river and defeated him in the Dobrudja; the treaty of 681 recognised a Bulgar state on Roman soil. That state would be the empire’s principal European problem for the next three and a half centuries, as the Byzantine–Bulgarian wars record.

Justinian II and the End of the House

Justinian II came to the throne at sixteen in 685 and was deposed in 695, his nose slit to disqualify him — mutilation being the Byzantine alternative to execution for a deposed emperor. He spent ten years in exile at Cherson in the Crimea and among the Khazars and Bulgars, returned in 705 with a Bulgar army, and ruled for six more years of score-settling before being killed in 711. His second reign gave the empire a byword: he was remembered as Rhinotmetus, “the slit-nosed.”

With him the dynasty ended, and the empire entered two decades of coups that only stopped when Leo III took power in 717, weeks before the great Arab siege.

What Survived

The state that emerged from this century was smaller, poorer and tougher. Its administration had been rebuilt around military provinces, the themes, in which soldiers held land and served locally. Its language was Greek — Heraclius dropped the Latin titles and took the Greek basileus. Its cities, outside the capital, had shrunk to fortified hilltops. Its army no longer sought battle; it shadowed raiders, held the passes, and let the Anatolian plateau do the work.

That is the empire the Isaurian emperors inherited and the one that fought the iconoclast controversy over the following century. It is also the empire that most historians mean when they start using the word “Byzantine” rather than “eastern Roman” — a distinction discussed in Why “Byzantine”?.

The Evidence Problem

The seventh century is the worst-documented stretch of Byzantine history, and the reason is the crisis itself: the collapse of urban life, the contraction of book production and the loss of the eastern provinces broke the historiographical tradition.

There is no seventh-century Procopius. The narrative has to be assembled from:

  • Theophanes the Confessor and the patriarch Nikephoros, writing in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, working from earlier material now lost, and hostile to the iconoclast emperors who came after
  • George of Pisidia, a court poet and deacon of Hagia Sophia, whose verse accounts of Heraclius’s campaigns are contemporary and panegyrical
  • The Chronicon Paschale, compiled in Constantinople around 630, which appears to use official records
  • Syriac and Armenian chronicles — the History attributed to Sebeos is particularly valuable because it is outside the Byzantine tradition and preserves a different set of facts
  • Arabic sources, principally al-Tabari, drawing on earlier compilations
  • Coins, seals and archaeology, which carry a disproportionate share of the argument

The consequence is that basic chronology is disputed. The dates of the Arab sieges of the 670s, the sequence of the Monothelite edicts, and the size of every army mentioned are all contested.

The Transformation Debate

What the seventh century actually was — catastrophe or transformation — is one of the standing arguments in late antique studies.

The catastrophist reading points to the physical evidence: cities reduced to fortified hilltops, the end of monumental building, the disappearance of coin circulation at provincial sites, the collapse of long-distance pottery distribution, and a demographic contraction visible in survey archaeology across Anatolia and the Balkans.

The transformationist reading, associated with the “transformation of the Roman world” scholarship of the 1990s, argues that the change was one of form rather than of substance: settlement moved rather than vanished, exchange continued at a regional scale, and the state remained a functioning tax-raising apparatus throughout — which is demonstrably true, since it kept paying armies.

The honest position is that the eastern Mediterranean in 700 was poorer, smaller, less urban and less connected than in 600, and that the state which survived was recognisably the same institution running on much less. Both halves of that sentence matter.

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