The Murder of an Emperor

For seven centuries, Rome and Persia — first the Parthians, then the Sasanians — had fought over the borderlands of Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Syria in a rivalry as old as either empire. By the late sixth century a rare peace had been achieved: the Roman emperor Maurice had intervened in a Persian civil war to restore the young king Khosrow II to his throne, and the two rulers became allies, almost father and son.

That peace rested on Maurice's life. In 602, when the emperor tried to economise by wintering his weary Danube army in hostile territory, the soldiers mutinied and marched on Constantinople, proclaiming a brutal centurion named Phocas as emperor. Maurice fled but was captured, and forced to watch his sons butchered one by one before he too was executed — meeting his death, it was said, with pious resignation.

The murder of his benefactor gave Khosrow II both a genuine grievance and a golden opportunity. Declaring that he would avenge the rightful emperor against the usurper Phocas, he unleashed the Sasanian armies across the frontier. The last and greatest of all the Roman–Persian wars had begun — and with the empire convulsed by the misrule of Phocas, it began as an unmitigated Roman disaster.