Heraclius
Heraclius destroyed the Persian empire and then lost half his own to the Arabs within a decade. He came from the Byzantine governing family of Africa and sailed from Carthage in 610 to overthrow Phocas, a centurion who had seized the throne in 602 and whose reign had produced a Persian invasion, a collapsing frontier and a reign of terror in the capital. What he inherited was close to ruin. The Persians under Khosrow II took Syria, Palestine and Egypt, sacked Jerusalem in 614 and carried off the relic of the True Cross, and reached the Bosphorus; the Avars and Slavs took most of the Balkans; and in 626 Constantinople was besieged from both sides at once and held only because the Persians could not cross the water. He reorganised what was left, melted down church plate with the patriarch's agreement to pay the army, and did something no emperor had done for two centuries: took the field himself, year after year, campaigning in Armenia and Azerbaijan rather than defending Syria. The war was framed explicitly in religious terms, with icons carried before the troops. He destroyed the Persian army at Nineveh in 627, Khosrow was overthrown and murdered by his own nobles, and the Cross was restored to Jerusalem in 630. Within four years Arab armies came out of the desert, and both exhausted empires proved unable to stop them. Yarmuk in 636 lost Syria, and Egypt followed. He died in 641, having made Greek the official language of the state.
- Lived: 575 CE – 641 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader
