Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World by David Keys Page B

Persian king “drew up his elephants like a camp and gave battle, winning a great victory and capturing very many Romans, whom he beheaded.” The Roman general Leontius escaped the Persians but was arrested on Phocas’ orders and brought in chains to Constantinople. The rebel Narses was then finally apprehended, and publicly burned to death in the capital.
    Order was also breaking down in Antioch, Palestine, and Egypt, the sources of at least a third of the empire’s tax revenues. In Antioch people were cut down by troops as they assembled in the city’s major church, and according to the historian John of Nikiu, the slaughter continued until the soldiers “filled every building with blood.” The Antioch unrest was finally suppressed by a Roman general who had the rebels strangled, burned, drowned, or “fed to wild beasts.”
    In Egypt, anti-Phocas rebels attacked the local Roman governor and “put him and his followers to the sword”; five Egyptian cities fell to the rebels. 15 And by late 603 or 604, although Phocas had paid out a fortune in peace payments to the Avars, their vassals, the Slavs, could not resist invading the empire once Roman troops had been withdrawn to fight the Persians. One frequent target for the Slavs appears to have been Thessalonica, which is known to have been unsuccessfully attacked in October 604 by an army of around five thousand Slavs, whose war cries the citizens’ “ears were well accustomed” to hearing. 16 A true dark age had begun to descend on the “Eternal Empire.”
    The following year, 605, was no improvement on its predecessor. More blood flowed in Constantinople, and the Persians overran all of Roman Mesopotamia. The new praetorian prefect, a man by the name of Theodosius, who had succeeded to the job when the previous incumbent was executed, was in turn put to death, as were six other prominent officials. All were beheaded except one, who “had his tongue cut out and was spread-eagled on a stretcher and dragged about [the city] for a show” before being “taken down to the shore where his eyes were removed and he was thrown into a small boat and burnt.” 17
    Whether drink, madness, or merely the intoxicating effect of total power was to blame for Phocas’ conduct is not known. It was probably a mixture of all three. In 606, for instance, at his daughter’s wedding, he became insanely jealous of the bride and bridegroom and started making preparations to have his own supporters executed for praising the newly-weds too enthusiastically. And in 607 and 608, after uncovering evidence of dishonesty, he ordered the killing of dozens of leading political and administrative figures—including the late Emperor Maurice’s wife, Constantina, and their three daughters, whom he had executed outside the city gate in the same ditch in which Maurice had been dispatched.
    The other victims that year were either burned alive after having their hands and feet cut off, strangled, or simply beheaded. Entire families were wiped out, notably any relatives of Maurice and the former general, Comentiolus, whom Phocas had disliked even before the mutiny.
    While Constantinople reeked of fear and of spilled patrician blood, the Persians seized the Roman Empire’s Armenian and eastern Anatolian provinces and began to threaten its very heartland. However, at last, Phocas’ power began to ebb away. Revolt started to erupt all over the empire. There was civil unrest in Constantinople; many citizens were killed or thrown into prison. The Greens, formerly Phocas’ supporters, accused him of drunken lunacy. “You have drunk again from the goblet, you are losing your senses again,” they shouted. 18 But the increasingly paranoid emperor responded by “chopping off the limbs of many of them and hanging them in the middle of the [city’s chariot-racing] stadium.” Others he beheaded or “tied in sacks and threw into the open sea.”
    At this point civil war broke out in earnest. In the