Brief Notice

Stoyanov, Yuri. Defenders and Enemies of the True Cross: The Sasanian Conquest of Jerusalem in 614 and the Byzantine Ideology of Anti-Persian Warfare. [Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, 819. Band; Veröffentlichungen zur Iranistik, Nr. 61.] (Vienna:Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 2011. Pp. 103. €16,20 paperback. ISBN 978-3-7001-6957-4.)

In this short book, stemming from a research project of the Peace Research Institute (PRIO) in Oslo, the author links two subjects that are currently attracting intense interest: first, the question of whether the Byzantines had a concept of holy war; and second, the contemporary responses to the Persian invasion of the Near East in the early-seventh century and the capture of Jerusalem in AD 614. In three chapters, he surveys the archaeological evidence for the effects of the invasion; the previous development of Christian attitudes to warfare; and the ideological and religious reactions by Byzantines, eastern Christians, and Jews to the war against the Sasanians (AD 603–28). He argues that the strongly expressed eschatological and apocalyptic themes in contemporary writing, including the accounts of the campaigns of the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius (who dramatically defeated the Sasanians in 628 and restored the captured relic of the True Cross to Jerusalem in 630). Although Heraclius did not develop a full doctrine of holy war, he nevertheless played an important part in later Byzantine conceptions and contributed to “the grand narrative of medieval Christian apocalypticism” (p. 75).

Even more important, although Stoyanov does not write about it here, was the extent to which Heraclius’s victory paved the way for the Arab conquests that followed immediately afterward. It is now being argued that the apocalyptic and eschatological themes that are so prominent in the Qur’an may themselves echo the existing Christian and Jewish trends that also found expression in relation to the events that Stoyanov describes. The tumultuous changes in the Near East in the early-seventh century are giving rise to a wave of new publications, including a recent lengthy book by James Howard-Johnston and the Menahem Stern Lectures given in Jerusalem by Glen Bowersock. Stoyanov covers some of the same ground, but from a different perspective, reminding us of the many different ways in which these momentous years shaped the centuries to come.