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

The hot desert wastes of the Arabian Peninsula seemed neither particularly inviting nor threatening to the Byzantines, and there seemed no reason to suspect that they ever would. Populated by squabbling nomadic tribes, the region hardly seemed likely to pose a serious threat to anyone, much less the huge Byzantine state. In 622, however, the deserts were beginning to stir with a new energy as a man named Muhammad fled from Mecca to Medina and began hammering together the tribes of the interior. Infusing his followers with a burning zeal, Muhammad divided the world between Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (the House of War). Their duty was a holy jihad, to expand the House of Islam at the point of a sword. Within five years, the Muslim armies were unleashed, and they exploded out of the desert with frightening speed. The timing of the invasion could hardly have been better. Hungry for conquest, the Arab armies arrived to find both great empires of the region exhausted and near collapse. The crippled Persians could put up little resistance. Their king Yazdegerd III appealed to both the Byzantines and the Chinese for help, but neither could offer any real assistance, and his fall was swift. Within a year, his tired armies were defeated, and he spent the next decade fleeing from one location to another until a local peasant killed him for his purse.

Muhammad died in 632 of a fever, but nothing seemed able to slake his army’s desire for land. Not even pausing to digest the Persian Empire, by 633 they had crossed the deserted Byzantine frontier, and there they found a land ripe for the picking. Constantinople had never really been able to stamp out the Monophysite heresy, distracted as it was by the war with Persia, and when the Muslims arrived, they found the local populations eager to welcome them in. For the oppressed Monophysites, Islam, with its strict monotheism, was perfectly understandable, and the Arabs were at least Semites like themselves. Better to be ruled by their Arab cousins than the distant heretical emperors in Constantinople, especially since it was always easier to despise a heresy than a different faith. Putting up only token resistance, they watched as the Muslim army poured into Syria, sacked Damascus, and besieged Jerusalem.

In earlier days, the mighty emperor who had broken Persia would have come rushing to Palestine’s defense, but Heraclius was no longer the man he had once been. He was already suffering from the disease that was to kill him, his broad shoulders were prematurely stooped, his golden hair was reduced to a few gray strands, and—like his empire—he was near physical and emotional collapse. Having risen to such heights of glory, he now had to endure the agony of watching as his life’s work unraveled.

Slipping into Jerusalem, the emperor removed the True Cross from where he had placed it in triumph only six years before and headed for Constantinople, leaving the doomed city to its fate. While the patriarch carried out the odious task of surrendering the Holy City, the emperor made a pathetic last entrance into his capital, tormented by the belief that God had abandoned him. The citizens of Constantinople were inclined to agree with this view and were quick to point out why. The cause of all the imperial misery, they whispered, was Heraclius’s incestuous marriage to his niece, Martina. Of the nine children she bore her husband, only three were healthy—the rest either died in infancy or were deformed. Clearly, God had removed his favor, and Martina, never popular, became one of the most hated women in the city. Heraclius, who had delivered the empire in its hour of need, ended his days in misery, deserted by the friends and courtiers who had loudly sung his praises in the years of triumph. A few years after the fall of Jerusalem, he expired, and was interred next to the body of Constantine the Great, in the imperial mausoleum of the Church of the Holy Apostles.

Heraclius’s reign had ended on a sour note, and his subjects certainly didn’t mourn his passing. Under his watch, the empire had lost huge swaths of its territory to a bewildering new enemy, and the dying emperor had hardly bothered to resist them. The shocked Byzantines had looked to Constantinople for help, terrified by the catastrophe, but had found only an agonized defeatism from their broken emperor.