Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity

3. Heraclius’ Gift to Islam: The Death of the Persian Empire

3 Heraclius’ Gift to Islam The Death of the Persian Empire The Persian invasions of Palestine and Egypt posed a serious dilemma for the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, who had succeeded the usurper Phocas in 610. He was confronted by hostile Avars in the vicinity of Constantinople, and yet he could not ignore the Persian presence in the near-eastern territories that had formerly been his. His army suffered an ignominious defeat near Der‘a in Syria in 613 that greatly impressed the local population. So Heraclius made a truce with the Avars in 623, which allowed him to carry on with a new military expedition he had launched in the previous year against the Sassanians in Anatolia and Armenia. He proceeded from a base in the Gulf of Iskenderun in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean. The Byzantine historian Theophanes Confessor states that Heraclius deliberately arranged the truce with the Avars in order to prepare for the next phase of war with Persia, and Walter Kaegi, in his study of Heraclius , declared that Theophanes was surely right. 56 | Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity After skirmishing with Persian forces in the Taurus, Heraclius was able to outmaneuver his enemy and move from there into occupied Armenia.1 We shall see that the defeat of 613 and the subsequent campaigns did not pass unnoticed among the tribes of the Arabian peninsula. As Fred Donner has recently observed, the Prophet saw in the struggle of Heraclius against the idolatrous Zoroastrians a mirror of his own struggle against the Qurashi polytheists of Mecca.2 Now, in an unpublished paper, Michael Lecker has emphasized the coincidence of Heraclius’ new campaign in 622 precisely with the year of Muḥammad’s fateful hijra to Medina.3 He interprets this coincidence as the result of Jafnid (Ghassānid) influence exercised on behalf of their Byzantine patrons with the Khazraj of Medina. This suggestion bears important implications for the prophet’s attitude to Byzantium, to which we must later return. Heraclius persevered in Armenia, but by 626 a renewed Persian assault on Constantinople, cunningly launched by Khosroes together with his Avar allies, compelled him to forgo his eastern campaign and to return in haste to the capital.4 Fortunately, at this perilous time, he was able to thwart the Persian–Avar alliance, and then, with lightning speed, to launch an unexpected new initiative against Persia. In 628, by a stroke of astonishing audacity, he personally led his Heraclius’ Gift to Islam | 57 forces into Mesopotamia to gain a brilliant victory over Khosroes, whose reign, together with the empire he had acquired, crumbled before the Byzantine armies.5 Edward Luttwak has perceptively observed, in his new book on the “grand strategy” of the Byzantine Empire, that in his Mesopotamian campaign Heraclius ignored all the conventional wisdom of Byzantine warfare by taking his troops deep into enemy territory, where they might have been isolated and annihilated. This was, in his words, “a high-risk, relational maneuver on a theater-wide scale—a historical rarity in itself.”6 But in this case it paid off.7 The sudden and unexpected elimination of Khosroes sounded the death knell of the Sassanian Empire. His successor Kavad concluded a truce with Heraclius , although it did him little good amid the court intrigues in Persia. He too was succeeded within a year. A little over a decade later, the Sassanian Empire no longer existed at all in Mesopotamia, and ended altogether a decade after that. Of the two great empires that had collided so often across many centuries, from the days of old Rome and the Parthians, down through the foundation of the new Rome at Constantinople and the successive dynasties of the Sassanians, only one now survived intact by 630. In that year Heraclius burnished his reputation as a Christian patriot by bringing back to 58 | Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity Jerusalem the fragments of the True Cross, which the Persians had taken away in 614. But even so astute an emperor as Heraclius cannot conceivably have anticipated the rapid collapse of Byzantium’s traditional enemy or foreseen how to administer a Near East that would no longer be subject to Persian hegemony. The restoration of Byzantine rule west of the Euphrates was relatively straightforward and yet, at the same time, fraught with danger. The inhabitants of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt had not adapted in any significant way to alien...