This paper evaluates the significance of emperor Heraclius Constantine III, the eldest son of Heraclius, for Byzantium in times of political and military crisis. The first part examines how Heraclius established his family as an imperial dynasty of Byzantium between 613 and 622. The second section analyzes how the young emperor represented his father in Constantinople, while Heraclius waged war against the Persian Sasanids during the 620s. The final segment deals on the one hand with the (...) joint rule of Heraclius and his eldest son after Byzantine victories against the Persians and, on the other hand, with the growing influence of Heraclonas. Finally, the contribution explores Heraclius Constantine’s III role as Augustus senior after his father’s death in 641. The until now often understudied emperor was thereby of essential importance for Byzantium’s stability in the first half of the 7th century. (shrink)

Article traitant du problème des Ajnād omeyyades. Il s'agit des vastes districts militaires constitués dans l'Orient byzantin après la conquête arabe et qui ont persisté jusqu'à l'époque médiévale. Ils sont la source d'un des problèmes majeurs de l'histoire omeyyade comme de celle de l'Orient proto-byzantin.

This paper explores the complex reception of the reign of Maurice (582-602) at the court of Heraclius (610 -641). It explores how the reign of Maurice established two important precedents for Heraclius as he emerged from the Last Great War: first, the re-establishment, after a long hiatus, of the principle of filial succession; and second, the realisation of a profound, co-operative peace with the Persians. It then argues, however, that Heraclian authors - in particular Theophylact Simocatta - resisted (...) the sanctification of the murdered emperor, framing him instead as, ultimately, a failure, suggesting that he had deserved and accepted his death, and insisting that he had surrendered all of his children, including his son and co-emperor Theodosius, to the same fate. Thus the reign of Maurice was presented not as an apex from which his successors had fallen, but as a pale foreshadowing of the early triumphs of Heraclius. (shrink)

The hexagram was first minted during the darkest days of the final Roman-Persian War when Roman fortunes were at their lowest. As a result, commentators have read the coin’s novel inscription, Deus Adiuta Romanis as evidence for the ’stressful and desperate’ state of the empire. This paper presents the case that reading the coin alongside evidence for popular military practices instead paints a picture of the Roman state apparatus deftly manipulating mass propaganda. For the Romans in the 610s, these new (...) coins signalled not defeatism but defiance and the promise of victory. (shrink)

The article tries to contribute to a more concrete embedding of early Islam into the context of late antique, in particular late Roman history. It takes its starting point in a description of the phenomenon of liturgification as an overarching process of religious permeation and internalization that swept across Eastern Roman society since the second half of the sixth century and saved society from collapse. During the early seventh century, when the Romans suffered from immense territorial losses to the Persians, (...) liturgification contributed to the survival of the Empire as well. Liturgification, however, radiated out into the territory of the immediate neighbors of the Romans, and thus also reached Arabia by various ways, not least via trade and military contacts, but probably above all through the mediation of the Ǧafnids, who energetically supported Christianization in their area of influence, which extended deep into the Arabian Peninsula. In this way, liturgification itself created the enabling space in which Islam could come into being. The restitutio crucis by Heraclius in Jerusalem, March 21, 630, then lent these developments concrete reference points and impetus. It should be viewed as the culmination of a process that was driven in turn by liturgification and characterized especially by the grave threats that the Eastern Roman-Byzantine Empire faced in its war against the Persians in the early decades of the seventh century. It led to a reconceptualization of the imperial monarchy, which now attributed a messianic quality to the emperor in a highly eschatologically charged context. The emperor, in turn, first effectively tapped the representational potential of this quality in the act of restoring the relics of the True Cross in Jerusalem in 630. This brought about a situation of messianic rivalry, since the rise of the Prophet Muhammad – which was made possible in turn by the penetration of liturgification into Arabian territory – was based on claims similar to those that Heraclius had claimed for himself. The first attacks on Byzantine outposts in the years 629/30 may have been a direct response to the emperor’s self-representation in Jerusalem. They were the beginning of the Muslim armies’ excursions beyond the Arabian Peninsula and thus the beginning of the great Muslim-Arabian Empire that would come into being in the ensuing century. Against this background, the restitutio crucis proves to be vitally important as a turning point in developments both within the Byzantine Empire and beyond its borders. (shrink)

The impact of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius on western arthistory has been neglected so far. We elaborate here that this figure, besides his historical and liturgical identity as restorer of the holy cross relic to Jerusalem, became also an important catalyst for eschatological models. Heraclius has been personified as the eschatological emperor and was described as the conqueror of Chosroës, the Antichrist. This image-making of the Byzantine emperor in the West was not only adopted by the crusaders, but (...) became also exemplified by important high-medieval dynasties . The franciscans attend the memory of Heraclius to the later Middle Ages by means of their special devotion to the cross and the holy sepulchre . In this context Heraclius became depicted in 14th- and 15th-century franciscan wallpaintings in Tuscanian churches as a part of the so-called legend of the True Cross. (shrink)

The astronomical commentary of Stephanus of Alexandria is an important marker in the history and the transmission of Ptolemy's Handy Tables. Following the example of the Small Commentary of Theon of Alexandria, Stephanus however adjusts the tables and the astronomical data to the geographical coordinates of Byzantium. The treatise presents a problem of attribution because it's anonymous in most manuscripts. The text shows also small additions from the emperor Heraclius Ist. We are preparing a critical edition of the commentary. (...) These study presents several results of our work. (shrink)