In the event, his occupation of the throne of Ardashir lasted no more than a year. Khusrow II, with the inevitable backing of the Mihran’s rival Parthian dynasts and the far more unexpected support of the new Caesar, Maurice, defeated the rebel Shahanshah, who promptly fled to the Turks. There, soon afterwards, he was assassinated by Sasanian agents. Order, it appeared, had been restored to heaven and earth. Yet this would prove to be a spectacular delusion. In truth, the presentiment of Bahram Chobin that the framework of things stood upon the brink of dissolution was to prove all too justified. Like the plague, the contagion of violence initiated by his rebellion was destined to spread far and wide. As in Ctesiphon, so in Constantinople—its effects would be cataclysmic.
Maurice, in his decision to override the advice of the Senate, and lend his backing to the House of Sasan, had been influenced by one prime consideration: the urgent need to save money. The gambit had initially appeared a great success: the restoration of a grateful Khusrow II to his throne had indeed resulted in a peace dividend. Fatefully, though, this had encouraged in Maurice a terminal delusion: that he could now afford to stint on the pay of his soldiers. Back in 588, the Army of the East, used as it was to lavish subsidy, had already mutinied over this issue. When the high command had sought to intimidate the fractious soldiery into submission by unveiling before their gaze the self-portrait of Christ from Edessa, “the mob, far from being brought to its senses, had gone so far as to pelt the ineffable object with stones.”76 More than a decade later, in 602, it was the turn of the soldiers in the Balkans to explode into open insurrection. Phocas, their leader, and a man quite as contemptuous of proprieties as Bahram Chobin had been, opted to do what no Roman commander had ever done before: he marched on Constantinople. The proud boast of the Christian empire—that for centuries “no emperor had perished by the hands of either domestic or foreign foes”77—was trampled brutally into the dirt. Maurice, apprehended in Chalcedon as he sought to escape the Balkan rebels, was beheaded, and his corpse exposed to the jeers of the Hippodrome. His replacement as Caesar, inevitably, was Phocas. Eight years later, the usurper too had been overthrown. His genitals were hacked off, his body skinned, and his head paraded through the streets of the capital on a pole. The toxin of something murderous, it appeared, was now well and truly loose in the New Rome.
Yet, if any man was fitted to the finding of an antidote, then it was, ironically enough, the same faction-leader who had toppled Phocas: an Armenian by the name of Heraclius. “Handsome, tall, brave, and a born fighter,”78 the new emperor had already more than demonstrated his capabilities by seizing power in the wake of an almost unfeasibly ambitious operation: a naval assault from Carthage, where his father had been governor-general. Certainly, situated as he now was in the eye of a storm as violent as any in all of Rome’s long history, Heraclius faced the most searing test imaginable of his many talents. The cracking of the ages that Bahram Chobin had sensed in Iranshahr was increasingly being experienced in Constantinople, too. When crosses in the city began to shake and jump about, few doubted that it portended a truly cosmic evil. In the opinion of Theodore—the empire’s most celebrated living saint, and a man of such awesome holiness that he wore a fifty-pound metal corset and subsisted entirely on lettuce—the arrival of the Devil on earth was near: “There will be inroads of many barbarous peoples, and the shedding of much blood, and destruction and captivity throughout the world, and the desolation of holy churches.” Then, stated with a terrifying finality, the most shocking forecast of alclass="underline" “The empire itself will fall.”79
Such an eventuality, of course, could only herald the End Times—and yet astoundingly, within a mere decade of the ascent of Heraclius to the throne, it had become not merely a possibility, but a terrifying likelihood. The descent of Constantinople into factionalism had not gone unnoted in Ctesiphon. There, eager to escape the shadow of the great Parthian dynasts, and to give some colour to his still pallid authority, Khusrow II had recognised in the deposition of Maurice the perfect opportunity to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels. Never before had Iranshahr witnessed such florid mourning for a Caesar. Khusrow—despite describing himself as “the king who hates war”80—posed, with a great show of indignant piety, as his murdered benefactor’s avenger. As was traditional, he launched his campaign by settling down before the walls of Dara. Abandoned to its fate by the distracted authorities in Constantinople, the great fortress duly surrendered, albeit after a three-year siege. Three years after that, in 609, Amida fell, too. Then, in 610, the supposedly Christ-protected city of Edessa opened its gates to the Persians. Suddenly, not only Syria but Anatolia and Palestine lay naked and defenceless before the armies of the Shahanshah. Not since the time of Cyrus had a Persian king been presented with such a deliriously tempting opportunity for westward conquest. Khusrow, scarcely believing his luck, decided to go for broke.
One army, plundering, slaving and killing as it went, struck so deep into Anatolia that in 614 even Ephesus, on the shores of the Aegean, was put to the torch.81 Meanwhile, a second task force, under the command of a Mihranid warlord by the name of Shahrbaraz, swung southwards.82 Its mission: not merely to loot but to annex. Its success was beyond Khusrow’s wildest hopes. By 615, the whole of Syria and Palestine belonged to the Shahanshah, with even hippodromes converted into polo pitches. Four years later, he ruled as the lord of Egypt, too. The dream that had haunted every King of Kings since the time of Ardashir—of an authentically universal, world-spanning monarchy—appeared close to realisation at last. The empire of the Romans, meanwhile, stood on the brink of annihilation.
“As for the fourth beast, there shall be a fourth kingdom on earth, which shall be different from all the kingdoms, and it shall devour the whole earth, and trample it down, and break it to pieces.”83 Such had been the dream of Daniel; and an angel, explaining the vision, had foretold that the time was destined to come when the beast would be destroyed, “and given over to be burned with fire,”84 and that the people of God would then inherit the earth. This, in the time-sanctioned opinion of the Church, had been a prophecy of the fate of Rome’s pagan order; but perhaps it was only to be expected that the Jews, tracking in amazed astonishment the implosion of the New Rome’s Christian empire, should have interpreted it rather differently. Surely now, many of them dared to hope, the coming of the Messiah could not be long delayed? Surely, with Gog and Magog “clashing mightily” and terror filling “the hearts of the nations,” the time had come at last when “Israel will be cleansed of her sins”?85
Focus of all these expectations, only naturally, was Jerusalem. Here, when Shahrbaraz appeared before its walls in the early summer of 614, the patriarch flatly refused to countenance the appalling possibility that the Holy City might actually fall to pagans. Rather than negotiate terms with the invaders—as most other urban authorities, remembering the fate of Antioch, had hurried to do—he insisted on trusting to the protection of Christ.86 Three weeks later, the Persian army stormed the city. The slaughter was something prodigious: some fifty thousand corpses were said to have been left piled up in the streets. A further thirty-five thousand Christians, including the patriarch himself, were hauled off into captivity. With them, exhumed from a vegetable patch where it had been buried upon news of the Persian approach, went the single most precious object in the entire Christian empire: the True Cross. A shudder at the humiliation of this had naturally run deep across the Roman world. No less naturally, it was taken for granted by most Christians that a calamity of such an order could only ever have been the fault of the Jews. Indignant rumour-mongers insisted that it was they who had acted as spies for the Persians, had opened the city’s gates, and had led the slaughter of Jerusalem’s virgins. Most terrible of all, it was claimed that in the aftermath of the siege, Jews had rounded up some 4500 Christian captives, had ordered them at sword-point to change their religion, and then, upon their refusal, had slaughtered every last one. True or not, such allegations were universally believed—and were only fuelled by the naked euphoria of the Jews themselves. No sooner had Jerusalem passed into Persian hands than a mysterious figure, “Nehemiah the son of Hushiel,”d stepped forward to lead the city’s Jews up on to the Temple Mount, where they constructed an altar. Sacrifices, for the first time in five hundred years, were offered on the sacred rock in accordance with the Law of Moses. The opportunity had come at last, it appeared, “to found a temple of holiness.”87