Pride and Fall: Khusro II and his Regime, 626-628

Abstract

Khusro II was at the very apogee of his power in spring 626. The Sasanian empire was on the point of swallowing what remained of its traditional Roman adversary in the west. The just war which Khusro had launched twenty-three years before to avenge the death of his benefactor, the Emperor Maurice, had brought immense territorial gains. By winter 610/11, all Roman territory east of the Euphrates, north and south of the Armenian Taurus, was in Persian hands. Over the next ten years the wealthiest provinces of the Mediterranean world, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, were overrun. Stripped of most of its resources and vulnerable to attack by land and sea, the Anatolian rump of the east Roman empire formed an inviting prey, while, across the Bosphorus, a lethal combination of nomad organisation and Slav numbers was steadily eroding Roman authority in the Balkans. The early 620s then witnessed Roman death-throes. A small, albeit tough and well-trained, fighting force, led by the Emperor Heraclius in person, flailed about, first within Anatolia in a truncated campaign in 622, and then in Transcaucasia where it caused considerable damage in 624 but was hunted down and driven out in 625. Caught between a great Asian and a formidable east European power, the east Roman empire and its heroic but foolhardy emperor seemed doomed to destruction (1) .

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