Heraclius

Byzantine emperor (r. 610-641)

• Born: c. 575
• Birthplace: Cappadocia, Byzantine Empire (now in Turkey)
• Died: February 11, 0641
• Place of death: Constantinople, Byzantine Empire (now in Istanbul, Turkey)

Seizing the East Roman (Byzantine) imperial throne amid seemingly fatal crises, Heraclius turned back the onslaughts of the Persians and Avars, only to see his work largely undone by the Arab conquests. Nevertheless, he and his successors initiated institutional reorganization that would revitalize the empire.

Early Life

Heraclius (heh-rak-LEE-uhs) came from a wealthy and distinguished Cappadocian family in central Asia Minor, possibly (though not incontrovertibly) of Armenian descent. His father, an able general of the same name, was rewarded for his services by his old friend the emperor Maurice (c. 539-602) with the office of exarch, or viceroy, of North Africa. When his father took up residence in its capital, Carthage, about 600, the younger Heraclius was about twenty-five years old. No information survives about the son’s life until then.

In 602, the emperor Maurice was dethroned and cruelly murdered by a crude, half-barbarian usurper named Phocas. His regime became a reign of terror against the nobility in the capital, Constantinople, while the previously strong military efforts against the empire’s enemies were totally neglected. The elder Heraclius was apparently planning some action of his own against the murderer of his old friend and benefactor when he was invited in 608 by exasperated leaders in Constantinople to assist them in removing the tyrant. Too old to lead the action in person, the exarch organized a long-range strategy of rebellion to be led by his kinsmen. Under his nephew, Nicetas, son of the exarch’s brother, and his chief-of-staff, Gregory, a force was able to win control of the strategic province of Egypt by late 609 or early 610.

The second phase of the project was a naval expedition led by the exarch’s son, the younger Heraclius, then about thirty-four or thirty-five years old. He reached Constantinople by the end of September, 610, and his arrival prompted a rising there that brought down Phocas. With the usurper roughly dispatched, there was apparently some uncertainty about the choice of his successor, and his dissident son-in-law, the general Priscus, may have hoped to claim it. However, the senate and the populace declared Heraclius their rescuer. Thus, on October 5, 610, Heraclius was crowned emperor and, at the same time, was married to his first wife, Eudoxia.

Life’s Work

Heraclius assumed rule of a state that soon seemed headed for destruction from paired foreign threats. In the Balkans, the Turkic Avars and their Slavic subject peoples were breaking through the borders and mounting a drive toward Constantinople itself. Meanwhile, Khosrow II (590-628), the Persian king, had invaded the imperial territory supposedly to avenge his former ally Maurice, but his aggression soon became a campaign to restore the great empire of Achaemenid days. Imperial forces were unable to hold back a series of Persian attacks that captured Antioch, Damascus, and Jerusalem, the latter with terrible slaughter and calculated violation of the supreme Christian shrines. Egypt was invaded and overrun by 620, and attacks were launched at Asia Minor, with talk of the new Xerxes crossing soon to Europe.

Against these threats, Heraclius seems to have done little in his first ten years of reign. Although physically strong, brave, and intelligent, Heraclius displayed fluctuations between boldness and indecisiveness; patterns of emotional imbalance in his family suggest that he may have been bipolar (manic-depressive). He also faced acute problems, both personal and political, in his early years in power. Following the death of his father, the old exarch, came the death in 612 of his epileptic wife, Eudoxia, after she had given birth to two children. In his grief, he was persuaded by his mother to marry, about eighteen months later, his own niece, Martina, twenty-three years his junior. This intelligent and devoted, if ambitious, woman made him a good wife, but the marriage provoked Church indignation and popular hostility, while the fact that most of their eventual ten children were born disabled in some way was taken as proof of divine retribution for their incest.

Heraclius also had to assert his right to lead. Priscus, resentful perhaps because he missed his chance at the throne, was openly rude and unreliable; only by a carefully planned ruse was Heraclius able, in late 612, to strip him of command and imprison him. Beyond this, Heraclius had to deal with the veritable collapse of the empire’s once-fine military system and the rapid dwindling of resources and revenue. Heraclius was by no means inactive, but he may well have had his moments of despair. According to one source, around 619 he considered leaving Constantinople to make Carthage his base for a military counter effort. According to this report, panic in the capital prompted the patriarch Sergius I to exact an oath from Heraclius that he would never abandon Constantinople. The story reflects the fact that Sergius made an understanding with the emperor by which vast quantities of the Church’s wealth were made available as its contribution to the vindication of both empire and Christian faith. With these resources, Heraclius seems to have begun building a new military force, one emphasizing cavalry. He is said to have retired to study strategy and military lore intensively, and it is possible that the Strategikon (sixth century; Maurice’s Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy, 1984), traditionally attributed to the emperor Maurice, might have been written, or at least rewritten, by Heraclius during this period of military buildup.

Heraclius also broke a tradition of more than two centuries, that the emperor left military campaigning to his generals, by insisting that he would lead his troops in person. After a solemn departure ceremony on April 4, 622, Heraclius crossed to Asia Minor, outmaneuvered the Persian forces for some months, and then won a handsome victory in February, 623, temporarily relieving the threat to that area. Back in Constantinople, he was obliged to negotiate anew with the restless Avars, from whom he had already purchased a truce at the cost of heavy tribute; at one point, he barely escaped capture by them in a treacherous ambush. With no response to his overtures for peace with the Persians, Heraclius renewed his offensive in early 624, determined to carry the war into the Persians’ land. Invading by way of Armenia and causing the Persian king to flee, Heraclius stormed and desecrated the Zoroastrian shrine city, in retaliation for the profanation of Jerusalem. Heraclius spent the following year cultivating allies among the peoples of the Caucasia and trying to take control of Armenian territories.

In 626, as his operations returned to Asia Minor, Heraclius faced a new crisis. The Persians had menaced Constantinople only passingly before, but now they entered into an agreement with the Avars, encouraging and supporting them in a direct attack on the capital. The Avars seemed genuinely determined to take the city, while the Persians hoped that the attack would force Heraclius to come to its rescue, thereby abandoning his campaign against them. The emperor, however, gambled that the city could hold out without him, relying on its magnificent fortifications, its able commanders, and the leadership of Sergius. His risk proved worth taking: After a ferocious siege, from late June to early August, the Avars admitted failure and withdrew, their power in the Balkans crumbling. Heraclius, who had continued his operations meanwhile in Asia Minor, was able now to redouble his efforts with enhanced prestige.

Much of 627 was spent in further building of his forces and arranging an alliance with the powerful Khazars of the Caucasia. At the end of the year, he resumed his invasion of Persian territory, and on December 12, 627, he confronted the Persian army before the ruins of ancient Nineveh. The outcome was a crushing defeat for the Persians, whose army was broken, but the emperor failed to follow up on his victory immediately, resuming his pursuit of the fleeing Persian king only after some weeks. Taking one royal capital, Dastagird, the vacillating Heraclius decided not to attack another. Yet obstinate to the end, Khosrow was dethroned by a rebellion and murdered in late February, 628, his place taken by his son. The new king sued for peace, and Heraclius gladly negotiated a reestablishment of original boundaries and restoration of holy relics. Making a triumphal procession to Constantinople, Heraclius entered it amid wild rejoicing in September, 628. During the next two years, Heraclius supervised the recovery of the liberated territories and at some point ceremonially restored the Holy Cross to Jerusalem as a symbol of Christian victory.

Aging and worn out, Heraclius devoted the ensuing years to securing the reestablishment of imperial government in the recovered territories, to pursuing religious pacification, and to arranging provisions of succession among members of his growing family. Yet he was not allowed to rest on his laurels: Barely was his heroic war of recovery ended when he was faced with the unexpected onslaught of the Arab conquests. Newly unified under the banner of the Prophet Muḥammad and taking advantage of the mutual exhaustion of Persia and the empire, the Arabs launched initial raids that soon turned into programs of conquest. Imperial forces resisting them were twice defeated in 634 and again the following year, when the Arabs were able to take Damascus. Heraclius attempted to coordinate a defensive program in person and gathered a final, large army. Yet its ambush and destruction on the banks of the Yarmūk River in August, 636, removed all hope of successful resistance. Heraclius abandoned Syria in despair while the cities of the region fell in rapid succession to the conquerors: Jerusalem capitulating in 638, and the imperial capital of Caesarea in 640. By that time, with Syria-Palestine overrun, the Arabs had begun their invasion of Egypt.

Meanwhile, broken and ailing, Heraclius halted his progress to Constantinople at the Bosporos Thracius, refusing for many months to cross into his capital. A congenital hydrophobia, reinforced by a prophecy of his death by water, held him back until, in early 638, under threats of conspiracies and succession problems, a crossing was arranged: A vast pontoon bridge was built across the channel, with trees and shrubbery planted on either side to hide the water from view as he moved across. Back in his capital, Heraclius attempted to resolve the long-standing religious disputes, hoping to mollify the dissident Monophysites, whose unrest in Syria-Palestine and Egypt is thought to have undermined the defense of those areas. Later in 638, he issued his doctrinal decree on this matter, the Ekthesis, and thereafter attempted to negotiate its acceptance among various branches of the Church. Heraclius’s health continued to decline, and he died on February 11, 641.

Significance

Heraclius’s sometimes inconsistent character, together with the disasters of his last years, has compromised the brilliance of his real achievements. It is true that, after saving the empire heroically from one nearly fatal crisis, he died unable to protect it from another. Yet he was fighting external forces beyond his control. Also foredoomed was his effort to resolve the Monophysite dissent: By introducing the compromise doctrine of Monothelitism in his Ekthesis, he only complicated further an already unsolvable situation. Nevertheless, if he left a set of grim legacies behind him, he also left the dynasty he founded, including several emperors of dedication and talent, who were to cope with these legacies through the rest of the sixth century.

He also left at least the beginnings of a governmental transformation that would help make possible the successful struggle of his heirs. Much controversy has surrounded the development of the so-called Theme System, which is dated generally to the sixth century. Under this system, Asia Minor was divided into a set of military districts, garrisoned by native troops supported by the revenues of small agricultural freeholds. This military pattern soon took over the local civil functions and was eventually applied to other parts of the empire’s territories, becoming in time the basis for the surviving empire’s military, administrative, agrarian, and fiscal organization. It has been traditional to credit Heraclius with initiating these organizational reforms whether as a part of his preparations for war with the Persians or after his victory over them (and even in imitation of their institutions) but historians are by no means agreed on how clear or complete such credit should be. To Heraclius’s age is attributed also the final abandonment of older Roman administrative forms and Latin titles and their replacement with a more fully Hellenized chancery.

While controversy about him and his achievements will remain, there is no doubt of Heraclius’s genuine role as a savior of his state and of his age as a turning point in the transformation of the late Roman into the Byzantine Empire. In the later medieval West, he would be remembered as a prototype of the “Crusader” sovereign, triumphant over unbelievers in the cause of the Christian faith.

Byzantine Emperors: Heraclian Line, 610-717

Reign

• Emperor

610-641

• Heraclius

620 s

• Avar and Visigothic incursions

636

• Palestine lost to ՙUmar I

641

• Constantine III and Heracleonas

641

• Egypt, Genoa lost

641-668

• Constans II Pogonatus

668-685

• Constantine IV

674-677

• Mu՚wiyah lays siege to Constantinople

685-695

• Justinian II Rhinotmetus

693

• Armenia lost

695-698

• Leontius (non-Heraclian)

698

• Carthage falls

698-705

• Tiberius III

705-711

• Justinian II (restored)

711-713

• Philippicus Bardanes

713-715

• Anastasius II

716-717

• Theodosius III

Bibliography

Bury, J. B. A History of the Later Roman Empire: From Arcadius to Irene (395 A.D. to 800 A.D.). 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1889. An older set with still useful chapters on the life and age of Heraclius.

Kaegi, Walter E. Heraclius: Emperor of Byzantium. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. A thorough overview of Heraclius’s life and times. Includes an extensive bibliography and an index.

Maurice. Maurice’s Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy. Translated by George T. Dennis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. This important military manual is still ascribed to Heraclius’s most significant predecessor, but its contents reflect the kind of organization with which Heraclius achieved his victories. Has a useful introduction.

Ostrogorsky, George. History of the Byzantine State. Translated by Joan Hussey. Rev. ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1969. A comprehensive one-volume study of the history and institutions of the empire from the early fourth through the mid-fifteenth century. Arguments on the Theme System are no longer fully acceptable, but the treatment of the age of Heraclius and his successors still puts the system in excellent perspective.

Reinink, Gerrit J., and Bernard H. Stolte, eds. The Reign of Heraclius (610-641): Crisis and Confrontation. Dudley, Mass.: Peeters, 2002. A collection of conference papers exploring Heraclius’s reign and influence. Includes an extensive bibliography and index.

Stratos, Andreas N. Byzantium in the Seventh Century. 2 vols. Translated by Marc Ogilvie-Grant and Harry T. Hionides. Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1968, 1972. The opening volumes (of six in the original Greek version, five in the English translation) of a massive work on the entire seventh century. Volumes 1 and 2 discuss in detail the confused and fragmentary sources from this epoch. A comprehensive and exhaustive study.

Theophanes. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, A.D. 284-813. Translated by Cyril Mango and Roger Scott. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Provides an excellent introduction and notes clarifying some of the problems involved with using Theophanes’s work as a source. The Chronicle is still one of the most important surviving texts on the Heraclian age.