LOST ROMAN HEROES

Saturday, 12 December 627. Mist on the plain of Nineveh, coming up off the Tigris.

For six weeks Heraclius has been running, or appearing to run. Baggage train sent to the front, no lines of communication, everything about him saying this man is going home. Behind him, coming on hard, is the last Persian field army still loyal to Khosrow, under Rahzadh, who has orders from the King of Kings to engage whatever the cost and not to wait for the three thousand elite guardsmen marching north to join him.

In forty eight hours those orders will not matter, because Rahzadh will have the numbers. Heraclius does not have forty eight hours. He has this morning.

And out of that mist, in battle array, come the Romans.

This is the episode where twenty six years of war end. An emperor of Rome rides out in front of his own line and fights three men in single combat, on a plain the ancient world called Gaugamela, where Alexander broke a Persian empire nine hundred and fifty seven years before. A turmarch named Georgius marches a thousand men forty eight miles in a single winter night and takes four bridges without letting one messenger through. A Roman army celebrates Christmas nine hundred kilometres inside Persia, on land belonging to Khosrow's murdered Christian treasurer.

And then the palace at Dastagird, standing open, with three hundred Roman standards stacked inside it. Every eagle Persia had taken since Julian died in the sand in 363.

What follows is stranger than the battle. A king running from a man he once called his vile and insensate slave. A son who was passed over. A vault built to hold treasure, and what it was finally used for. And a letter from Ctesiphon addressed to the emperor of the Romans, and our brother.

The war ends where it began, in the birthplace of the emperor whose murder started it.

And when Heraclius finally comes home to Constantinople, after seven years away, there is no chariot, no red paint, no captive king or slaves dragged through the streets. What Rome needed was not a triumph. It was a THANKSGIVING.

Constantinople held. The City had survived the Great Siege. But the war with Persia was far from over.

The Persians still had the overwhelming advantage in every way that mattered. Military, political, economic. What Rome had was an emperor, one army, and something it had not had in twenty years: hope.

This is the episode where Khosrow starts doing Rome's work for it. A general packed in salt and carried home to be abused in front of the men still holding armies. And a letter. One poisonous letter, written to the wrong man, carried by a courier who rode straight into the hands of the one emperor he should never have underestimated.

Then, in September 627, the Turks go home. And Heraclius, alone, two thousand miles from Constantinople, with no reinforcements coming and winter closing in, looks south at the Zagros mountains.

Every rule of ancient warfare said stop. Armies had campaigned between spring and autumn for four thousand years, for the simple reason that a man cannot eat scenery. Nobody takes an army into snow choked mountain passes in November.

He went anyway. And for six weeks the record goes dark, because the chronicler who had the report cut it out, literally deleting it from history.

Heraclius comes out of those mountains in Assyria, in the ruins of an ancient empire that had died over a thousand years before, and camps in its shadows on the plain of Nineveh on the Tigris, in modern Iraq, waiting for the Persian general Rahzadh, and for what he knew would be the last battle of the war. The one that would determine it all.

In the summer of 626, two empires agreed to end Rome together.

Khosrow sent Shahrbaraz, his finest general, to the Asian shore. The Avar Khagan came down from the Danube with eighty thousand men, Slavs and Bulgars and Gepids among them. Between them they would crush Constantinople, and the list of Rome would finally be extinguished.

Inside the walls: twelve thousand soldiers with no emperor to lead them. Heraclius was two thousand miles east and had made a very cold calculation, that the City could stand without him.

What it had instead was a man almost nobody has heard of. Bonus appears in the sources like a figure stepping out of fog. No great backstory, no famous victories, just a title that meant substitute for the emperor, and forty days in which to earn it.

This is the story of those forty days. A moat, three walls and ninety six towers built by a man who never got the credit. A patriarch carrying an icon around the battlements. Ambassadors in pure silk, and what came back across the water in answer. Slav dugouts in the Golden Horn. A signal fire lit at exactly the wrong hour.

And a page missing from the only manuscript in the world that records it, taking four days of the greatest siege in Roman history with it.

Constantinople had never been breached. In August of 626 it came closer than it ever had, and the man who saved it, Bonus, did it with genius, cold calculation, nerves of steel and subterfuge worthy of his most ancient, and greatest, Roman ancestors.

In 625 the Persians sent three armies to finish him.

Shahrbaraz, Shahin, and Shahraplakan. Three converging forces, hunting one Roman emperor through the mountains of the Caucasus. Between them they had every advantage: numbers, supply, ground, and the certainty that they had him.

And what did Heraclius have? He had the last Roman army, THE GHOST ARMY, a very, very long way from home, and with nowhere to run. Wintering in Azerbaijan, between the Caspian and the Black Sea, as the snow fell, Heraclius shared his men's privations, and planned...

What follows is one of the most exceptional campaigns in Roman history. Unprecedented. Never repeated. Heraclius' army appears, strikes, and is gone before the enemy can form up. A force his enemies came to describe less like an opponent than a rumor. Always somewhere else, always behind them, never where the trap was laid.

And then, after it all, there is a bridge over the River Sarus, where an emperor of Rome does something no emperor has ever done before, and will never do again! It involves a GIANT and sole combat, with the fate of the Empire hanging in the balance...

The campaign that turned Heraclius from a survivor into a hunter.

DEUS ADIUTA ROMANIS. May God help the Romans. Because everything else had already been tried.

The church gold is melted. The coins are struck. The army is waiting in Bithynia. And somewhere in the palace of Constantinople, a man who has lost almost everything has spent a long dark winter reading a dead emperor's manual.

Now it is time to find out if any of it works.

Heraclius is the first emperor in more than two centuries that will lead an army into the field, and not any army, this is the LAST ROMAN ARMY, and it looked like nothing Rome had ever put in the field before. Almost entirely cavalry. Twenty thousand exceptionally well trained men. And they faced four fully staffed, battled hardened Persian field armies led by four extraordinary generals. A hundred and sixty thousand Persians against twenty thousand Romans.

And if the Romans lost one battle, just one, they wouldn't just lose, ROME WOULD DIE.

Join us for episode 104, THE GAMBLE, where the Emperor will ride out from Constantinople, and he will not return, until he wins, or he dies.