December 12, 627:  While Western Europe was deep into its medieval slumber, a great storm raged in the east, in that part of the old Roman Empire that had been ruled from Constantinople for three centuries.  On this date 1,382 years ago, a war that had lasted decades finally came to an end.  The consequences of that war can still be felt today.

A generation earlier, a usurper murdered the Eastern Roman Emperor, plunging the realm into a ten year period of chaos, civil war, and bloody purges.  Persia, which had maintained a fragile truce with the rightful Roman emperor, saw an opportunity to take advantage of the chaos in Constantinople.  Persian armies swept across the frontier along the upper Euphrates, and soon controlled Syria and most of Asia Minor, territories that had been Roman provinces since the time of Caesar and Augustus.

As so often happens in history, the darkest times are redeemed by the emergence of a great leader, one who can take a nation on the brink and save it from itself, or from foreign adversaries.  In early 7^th century Constantinople, that man was a general named Heraclius, the son of the Roman governor of Africa.  In the year 610, Heraclius gathered his army and sailed from Carthage to Constantinople, easily taking control of the city.  The jubilant crowds quickly proclaimed him emperor, then arrested and executed the cruel pretender.

Once firmly in control, Heraclius initiated a quest to restore Roman rule in the eastern provinces.  Success could not be achieved quickly, though.  First, he had to undo the damage caused by a decade of civil war and misrule.  He reorganized the administrative structure of what was left of the empire.  Anachronistic institutions left over from the time of Constantine, or even Augustus, were abandoned.  Latin, which by now was only understood in the royal court, was replaced by Greek, the closest thing the empire had to a common language.  The East Roman Empire now began to take the appearance of something very different than what had been founded by Constantine 300 years before.  It is at this time that we can correctly refer to the realm controlled by Constantinople as the Byzantine Empire, rather than the Roman Empire. 

Within a few years, Heraclius was ready to begin the campaign to restore his realm.  It was to prove a very long and difficult task.  The Persians took Jerusalem in 615, and Egypt fell the following year.  From Egypt, the Persians swept northward through the Aegean Sea, threatening Constantinople itself.  The extent of Persia’s empire equaled that of Cyrus and Xerxes 1000 years earlier.  Heraclius considered retreating to Carthage, but instead he stirred up a new kind of patriotism, a patriotism infused with Christian zealotry.  With a religious fervor that would be repeated 500 years later during the Crusades, Heraclius struck hard at the Persians, slowly pushing them back in a war that lasted 10 more years.

Finally, on December 12, 627, the Roman army confronted the Persians near the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq.  Overextended and worn out from years of constant fighting, the Persian army was routed and destroyed.  Like Darius following his defeat by Alexander the Great, the Persian king was soon deposed and killed by a member of his own court. 

In one of the great historical ironies, the magnificent Roman victory of December 12, 627, was to prove ephemeral.  Unknown in either Constantinople or Persia, a spark had been lit in nearby Arabia that would soon combust into a world-changing firestorm.  In the same year that Heraclius ascended the throne, the prophet Mohammed began secretly preaching a new religion in Mecca.  While Heraclius was destroying the Persian army at Nineveh, Mohammed’s new religion was claiming more and more adherents whose jihadist passion exceeded the crusading spirit of the Byzantines.

Six years after Nineveh, an Arab army under Mohammed’s successors conquered what was left of the exhausted Persian Empire.  After a generation of constant warfare, Heraclius and the Byzantines were exhausted, too.  Less than 15 years after the Battle of Nineveh, the great Hellenistic cities of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria were in Arab hands.  Just a few years after his crusading army saved those cities from Persian infidels, Heraclius watched as their great churches were converted to mosques.  After decades of war, the Byzantines were powerless to stop the Arab advance.  Heraclius lived until 641.  He died a tired and disillusioned old man, one who had achieved greatness, only to see much of his great work destroyed at the end of his life.

History like this provides a dramatic tale, one obscured by time, but interesting nonetheless.  In the case of Heraclius and the consequences of his wars, there is relevance to our time, as well.  After a generation of endless warfare, the two most powerful empires of the early 7^th century were each too weak to meet the next great challenge to confront them.  Is their situation that much different from our own?  Consider the Soviet Union, which was so exhausted after 45 years of Cold War, and the occasional hot war, that it finally collapsed like Persia after the Battle of Nineveh.  Consider the United States, standing alone as the great world power after the Soviet Union’s demise.  As we continue to wage perpetual war, not against a state or standing army, but against a tactic – terror -- that will never be abolished, do we risk a fate similar to that of the Byzantines?  As we try to police the world, throwing more and more resources into unproductive and bloated military hardware, purchased with money we lack, are we weakening ourselves and paving the way for our successor as the next great world power?