About this ebook
In October 610, a twenty-five-year-old soldier sailed into Constantinople harbour and seized the throne of an empire that was days from total ruin. The Persians had swallowed Asia Minor whole. The Avars pressed on the European frontier. The treasury was bare, the armies broken, and the reigning emperor, Phocas, a homicidal tyrant who had terrorised his subjects for eight savage years.
What Heraclius did next belongs among the most audacious reversals in all of recorded history.
By 622 he had rebuilt Rome's shattered armies from scratch. By 627 he stood on the plains of ancient Nineveh and crushed the Sassanid Empire in a single shattering battle, ending a seven-century rivalry between Rome and Persia. In 630, he rode in triumph into Jerusalem and restored the True Cross to the Holy Sepulchre after its capture by the Sassanids. The Roman world hailed him as a new Moses.
Eleven years later, he was dead, and Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Africa had fallen to Arab armies marching under the banner of a faith that had not existed when he took the throne.
How? How does the man who destroyed an empire greater than Rome itself fail to stop a force that Rome had never heard of? That question has haunted historians for fourteen centuries, and this book answers it with the full weight of every source available, from the Chronicle of Theophanes and the Armenian accounts of Sebeos to the Arabic records of the very conquerors who ended his world.
Author Aurelia Nero draws on decades of scholarship including Walter Kaegi's landmark Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2003), James Howard-Johnston's The Last Great War of Antiquity (2021), and a full range of Byzantine, Armenian, Syriac, and Arab primary sources to reconstruct not just what happened, but why. The religious fault lines that split the Christian church. The Monothelite controversy that cost Heraclius the loyalty of his own provinces. The incestuous marriage that scandalized Constantinople. The catastrophe at the Yarmuk River in 636. The final years of confusion, physical ruin, and despair as a dying emperor watched everything he had built wash away.
This is Roman Imperial history at its most raw and consequential, the story of a man who stood at the exact hinge between the ancient world and the Middle Ages and whose victories and defeats determined which way history would turn. For lovers of Rome, Byzantium, and the clash of civilizations, this book will hold you from the first page to the last.
