Maurice
Maurice ruled Byzantium for twenty years, restored the eastern frontier, and was killed by his own army over the price of a winter camp. Born around 539 in Cappadocia, he was a civil servant who transferred to the army and was given the eastern command in 578, where he fought the Persians with enough success to be adopted by the emperor Tiberius II and married to his daughter. He succeeded in 582 to a treasury Tiberius had emptied. His great success was Persian. Khosrow II was overthrown in 590 and fled to Roman territory; Maurice restored him with an army, and took in payment the cession of most of Persian Armenia and Roman Mesopotamia, and an end to the tribute — the best settlement Rome had ever got in the east, and achieved without a war. That freed him to fight the Avars and Slavs on the Danube, and he pushed them back across it for the first time in decades. He is very probably the author of the Strategikon, a manual of tactics, organisation and the characteristics of Rome's enemies that is the best military text to survive from the period. His weakness was money. He cut army rations and pay, refused to ransom 12,000 prisoners from the Avars, who killed them, and in 602 ordered the Danube army to winter beyond the river rather than return to quarters. It mutinied and proclaimed a junior officer, Phocas. Maurice was executed at Chalcedon after watching his five sons killed. Persia used the murder as a pretext for the war that took Syria, Palestine and Egypt, and both empires were exhausted when the Arab conquests began.
- Lived: 539 CE – 602 CE
- Nationality: Byzantine
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader, writer
