Yet, all these ecstatic expectations were soon cruelly dashed. The Persians, no less tolerant of Jewish pretensions than the Romans had been, did not have the slightest intention of permitting the construction of a new Temple, or allowing some upstart Jew to proclaim himself the Messiah. Only a few months into their occupation of Jerusalem, they arrested Nehemiah, accused him of sedition, and executed him. Whether in fact he had claimed to be the Messiah or not, it was clear that he could not, after all, have been the “son of man” foretold by Daniel, who was destined, after the burning of the fourth beast, to achieve “dominion and glory and kingdom.”88
Meanwhile, far to the north, Heraclius was preparing to hammer a further nail into the coffin of Jewish hopes. Perilous though his circumstances certainly were, yet he had not despaired of them, nor of his empire. The decade that Khusrow had spent in making extravagant conquests, Heraclius had spent in firming up his power base. By 624, he was finally in a position to go on the offensive, confident that he would not be stabbed in the back. This, for his prospects of success, could hardly have been more criticaclass="underline" for the emperor’s campaigning plans were the height of ambition. Just as he had toppled Phocas by striking directly at him from across a prodigious expanse of sea, so now did he aim to repeat the trick by crossing the mountains of Armenia and “cutting out at its roots the very source of the evil—Persia.”89 The gamble was a prodigious one: for Heraclius, straining every financial and logistical muscle to the limit, had mustered a task force that was effectively his empire’s last line of defence. Teetering on the edge of such peril, he too, just as the Jews had done, looked to scripture for reassurance: “And Heraclius, taking the book of Daniel, discovered in it written thus: ‘The goat of the west will come forth, and he will destroy the horns of the ram of the east.’ Then the emperor rejoiced, and was convinced that everything would succeed for him against the Persians.”90
And so it did. Four long years Heraclius would be gone from Constantinople: a period of absence that would culminate in one of the most stunning comebacks ever recorded in military history. Relentless though the fighting was, and doomed though the Roman cause would certainly have been had the emperor and his tiny army ever been wiped out, yet the greatest aspect of this astonishing campaign was the one that pitched faith directly against faith. In Palestine, shortly before the sack of Jerusalem, heavenly armies had been seen clashing in the sky; and now, on the fallen earth, a battle no less celestial in its character was due to be fought. Heraclius, taking a leaf out of the Ghassanid book, did not hesitate to proclaim himself a warrior of Christ. In doing so, he put on the line not merely his own life and his empire’s survival, but the entire authority of the Christian god. As a stake, he wagered the most precious thing he had: Constantinople itself. In 626, when Khusrow ordered Shahrbaraz to advance directly to the shores of the Bosphorus, Heraclius did not waver in his conviction that the Christian people of his capital lay secure beneath the watch of the heavens. Not even the fact that the Avars were simultaneously descending from the north, complete with the very latest fashion in siege-towers and catapults, could persuade him to abandon his plan of campaign, and retreat from Iranshahr. His confidence, in the event, was to be richly rewarded. The Virgin Mary—whose silhouette, “a woman alone in decorous dress,”91 was said to have been glimpsed by the Avar Khan himself upon the battlements—stood directly on guard over the capital. It helped as well that the Byzantine navy, sallying out into the Bosphorus, succeeded in sinking the entire Persian transport fleet. The great siege lasted only a couple of weeks before both Shahrbaraz’s army and the Avars withdrew. The citizens of Constantinople, steeled by such an ultimate test, could know themselves truly the people of God.
Meanwhile, far distant in Iranshahr, Heraclius was busy demonstrating to the fire-worshipping subjects of “the destructive and ruinous Khusrow”92 that their own lord was heaven-cursed. Rather than aim at direct, immediate military conquest—an objective that was well beyond his resources—he made it his goal instead to demolish every conceivable underpinning of the prestige of the House of Sasan. This was why he chose to open his campaigning by sweeping down upon the Fire of the Stallion, storming the summit of the lonely mountain on which it stood, wasting the temple, and stamping out the sacred embers. Then, emboldened by a whole string of victories, he descended from the mountains of Media, and scythed a bloody course across the open mudflats of Mesopotamia, leaving canals, roads and villages polluted with corpses. Finally, in December 627, he began to target Khusrow’s own palaces. Their overseers were taken captive; the animals in the royal parks, from ostriches to tigers, barbecued and fed to his soldiers; the silks, and carpets, and bags of spices in the treasuries put to the torch. “Let us quench the fire before it consumes everything,”93 Heraclius wrote to his great rival—but already, even as he sent the letter, the flames lit by his soldiers were to be seen from the walls of a terrified Ctesiphon.
Meanwhile, Heraclius had more than likely been in secret communication with Shahrbaraz.94 The Parthian general, his troops stationed in ostentatious inactivity in Syria, had been in deep disgrace with Khusrow ever since the failure of the assault on Constantinople. Now, with the Shahanshah in headlong flight before Heraclius’ outriders, the Mihranid warlord prepared to add to his dynasty’s long record of treachery towards the House of Sasan, and stab Khusrow in the back. On 23 February 628, two of Shahrbaraz’s sons arrested the bedraggled monarch, who was suffering from chronic dysentery at the time, and imprisoned him in one of his own palaces. There, they set before him “a great heap of gold, and silver, and precious stones”95—but no food. The wretched Khusrow was left to starve, and literally shit himself, for five days. On the sixth day, his captors shot him to death with arrows. With that, the great war—which had raged for twenty-five years and had spread destruction to the furthest limits of East and West—was over at last.