Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

By the spring of 622, his preparations were at last finished. It was a testament to Heraclius’s power to inspire that during those long years, despite appalling losses to imperial territory, there were no calls for his removal or pretenders rising to usurp him. There was still a nervous sense of disquiet, but the emperor’s confidence never wavered, and it proved infectious. The army he finally led out of the golden gate was infused with his charisma and proud in their bright armor to march to the defense of their compatriots.

The great advantage the Byzantines had never lost to the Persians was the control of the sea, and Heraclius used it to its full extent. Landing at Issus—where Alexander the Great had destroyed an earlier Persian Empire nearly a thousand years before—he launched a surprise attack. The battle was a desperate gamble. Heraclius knew that if he should fall the empire was doomed, but he was prepared to risk everything—even bringing along his pregnant wife, Martina. The Persians confronting him were commanded by their most famous general, a man who had conquered Egypt, but it was the inexperienced Heraclius who triumphed. Breaking before the Byzantine charge, the Persians were scattered, according to one source, “like a herd of goats.” Morale skyrocketed. The Persians were not invincible after all.

As the army wintered in Cappadocia, Heraclius infused them with his spirit, holding daily training sessions and filling them with confidence. They were honored men, he told them, fighting on the side of truth against the pagans who had burned their crops, killed their sons, and enslaved their wives. That spring they would have their revenge. Marching into modern-day Azerbaijan, the center of Persian Zoroastrian fire worship, the reinvigorated Byzantine army avenged Jerusalem by burning the great fire temple and sacking the birthplace of Zoroaster.

The Persian king Chosroes II was close to panic, but that spring he began to formulate a plan. The Persian Empire was vast, and Heraclius had now penetrated deeper into it than any Roman commander before him. The Byzantines were outnumbered and far from home, unable to maintain a war of attrition, and perhaps the king could use that to his advantage. Gathering an army fifty thousand strong, Chosroes II entrusted it to a general named Shahin, ordering him to destroy Heraclius and warning him that the cost of failure was death. Then, confident that the Byzantines would be tied down, the Persian king contacted the barbarian Avars and offered his support in an attack on Constantinople.

Heraclius was now faced with the most difficult decision of his career. If he rushed back to the defense of the capital, he would lose his best chance of winning the war and undo all the hard work of the past four years. On the other hand, if he stayed, Constantinople might fall for lack of defenders. His solution was to split the army into three parts. The first raced back to defend Constantinople; the second he entrusted to his brother Theodore to deal with Shahin; and the third, and by far the smallest, stayed with him to hold Armenia and the Caucasus Mountains and invade a virtually defenseless Persia.

Heraclius had great faith in the defenses of Constantinople, and in an attempt to bolster its defenders’ morale, he sent an avalanche of letters detailing every aspect of a successful defense. Armed with the emperor’s letters, and the knowledge that he had not left them to their fate, morale soared despite the rather terrifying presence of eighty thousand barbarians outside the walls. Every citizen of the city cheerfully took his turn manning the defenses or carrying supplies to the soldiers on the walls, and each day the patriarch made a circuit of the land walls while holding high an icon of the Virgin Mary, the protector of the city, who, it was whispered, struck terror into the hearts of the barbarians.^*

The city certainly seemed to be under divine protection. Day after day, the siege engines battered uselessly against the walls, and tensions among the attackers began to rise, fraying the alliance between the barbarians and the Persians. When news arrived that the Byzantine army under Heraclius’s brother Theodore had met Shahin in a driving hailstorm and completely crushed the Persian army, the frustrated Avars gave up.† Their mighty siege engines had been futile, their Persian allies were useless, and every attempt at subtlety had been effortlessly repulsed. The city was obviously under divine protection after all, and therefore invincible. Dismantling their equipment, the Avar hordes dragged themselves away from the sight of those accursed walls, burning some churches for good measure as they lumbered off.