While Khaled and one fanatical Saracen horde assaulted the Persian frontier on the lower Euphrates, another, under Abu Obeida, attacked the eastern or desert front of Syria. Bostra, the first city on the edge of the waste, fell by treachery, a small army under the patrician Sergius was defeated, and the governors of Syria and Palestine sent for aid to the emperor. Hardly yet realising the danger of the crisis, Heraclius sent some reinforcements under his brother Theodore to join the local troops. This army checked the Moslems for some months; and it was considered necessary by the caliph to strengthen the Arab host in Syria by sending thither half the force which had invaded the Persian empire, and Khaled, ‘the Sword of God,’ the most terrible and bloodthirsty of all his fanatical chiefs. In July 634, Theodore was badly defeated by the Saracens at Adjnadin near Gabatha, beyond the Jordan. This ill-success roused the emperor: he poured in further reinforcements, and the enemy were attacked in the late summer of 634 by an army of 80,000 men. |Battle of the Yermuk, 634.| The fate of Syria was settled by the battle of the Hieromax (Yermuk), where the troops of the Empire, after a long and bloody fight, in which they at one time forced the Arabs back to the very gates of their camp, were broken by the fanatical rush of an enemy who preferred death to defeat. ‘Paradise is before you,’ cried Abu Obeida to his wavering host, ‘the devil and hell-fire behind;’ and with their last charge the Arabs broke the line of the legions, and rolled the wearied troops in wild disorder back over a line of precipices and ravines, where thousands perished without stroke of sword, by being cast down the lofty rocks.
The army of the East was almost exterminated at the Hieromax, and ere another force could be collected Damascus, the greatest city of eastern Syria, was captured by the enemy, who in spite of accepting its surrender massacred a great part of the population (635).
Heraclius now determined to lead the Roman army in person, but he was no longer the same man who had kept the field with harness on his back for six long campaigns in the old Persian War. He had now long passed his fiftieth year, and was prematurely broken by the first symptoms of the dropsy which afterwards caused his death. In his private life, too, he had had much trouble of late; he had made an unwise and unhallowed second marriage with his own sister’s daughter Martina, and was harassed by disputes between her and the rest of his family, caused by the fact that the young empress wished to induce her husband to leave her own son Heracleonas joint heir to the empire with his elder brother Heraclius Constantinus. But such as he was, Heraclius once more put on his armour, and spent the years 635-6 in Syria endeavouring to keep back the Arabs with the new levies that he had assembled. His failure was complete; city after city, Emesa, Hierapolis, Chalcis, Beroea, fell into the hands of the Moslems, without the emperor being able even to risk a battle in their defence. In 636, completely broken by disease, he returned to Constantinople, having first paid a hasty visit to Jerusalem to take up and remove the ‘True Cross’ which he had replaced there in triumph only six years before.
|Fall of Jerusalem, 637.| After the departure of Heraclius things went from bad to worse; Antioch, the stronghold and capital of northern Syria, and Jerusalem, the centre of the defence of Palestine, both fell in 637. To receive the surrender of Jerusalem, which Mohammed had pronounced only second to Mecca among the holy places of the world, the caliph Omar crossed the desert in person. When the town had yielded, the Arab compelled the patriarch Sophronius to lead him all round the shrines of the city; as they stood in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the patriarch, torn by grief, could not refrain from exclaiming that now indeed was the Abomination of Desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, in the Holy of Holies. The austere Omar showed more moderation and compassion than his generals had been wont to display, he left the Christians all their holy places, and contented himself with building a great mosque on the site of the temple of Solomon.
While Syria was falling before the Saracens, the lot of Persia had been even worse; after a great battle lasting for three days at Kadesia, the Sassanian empire had succumbed before the Moslem sword. Its capital Ctesiphon was sacked and destroyed, and Yezdigerd, the last of its kings, fled eastward to raise his last army on the banks of Oxus and Murghab (636). Arab hordes working up the Euphrates began to assail the Roman province of Mesopotamia from the south, at the same moment that the conquerors of Syria attacked it from the west. Heraclius made one last attempt to save north Syria and Mesopotamia by sending an army under his son and heir Heraclius Constantinus to endeavour to recover Antioch. After some slight show of success at first, the young Caesar suffered a fatal defeat in front of Emesa, and retired from the scene, leaving Mesopotamia with all its time-honoured strongholds, Daras, Edessa, and Amida, a prey to the irresistible enemy (638-9). With the fall of the seaport of Caesarea in 640 the Romans lost their last foothold south of the Taurus, and Asia Minor itself now became exposed to invasion.
Before he died of the dropsy, which was the bane of his declining years, the unfortunate Heraclius was destined to see one more disaster to his realm. |Saracens conquer Egypt, 640.| In 640 the Saracens, now headed by Amrou, crossed the desert of Suez and fell upon Egypt. They beat the Roman army in the field, captured Memphis and Babylon, and then received the homage of all upper and central Egypt. The population was very largely composed of heretical sects who received the Moslems as deliverers from orthodox oppression, and Mokawkas the Coptic governor of the province surrendered long ere the situation had grown desperate. It was only about Alexandria, where the Greek orthodox element was strongest, that any serious resistance was made. But the great seaport capital of Egypt held out very staunchly, and was still in Christian hands when Heraclius died on Feb. 10th, 641, in the sixty-sixth year of his age.
Thus ended in misery and failure the man who would have been hailed as the greatest of all the warrior emperors of Rome if he had died but ten years sooner. He had saved the empire at its darkest hour, and won back all the East by feats of arms such as have seldom been paralleled in all history. But he won it back only to lose again two-thirds of the rescued lands to a new enemy, and ungrateful after-ages remembered him rather as the loser of Jerusalem and Antioch than as the saviour of Constantinople.
CHAPTER XIII
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE VISIGOTHS
A.D. 603-711
Obscurity of Visigothic History—Sisibut and Swinthila expel the East-Romans—A series of priest-ridden Kings—Chindaswinth restores the royal power—His legislation—Recceswinth’s long reign—Wamba and his wars—The rebellion of Paulus—Wamba’s weak and obscure successors—Approach of the Saracens—Weakness of Spain—Roderic the Last of the Goths—All Spain subdued by the Saracens.