LOST ROMAN HEROES

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.

He defeated Phocas. He was crowned emperor. He married the love of his life on the same extraordinary day. And then, for a decade, everything went wrong.

By 612 AD, Heraclius had lost Syria, lost Jerusalem, lost the True Cross, lost the Senate's dignity and his own. And then he lost the one thing that had nothing to do with Persia.

He lost Fabia.

The girl from Carthage. His anchor. His first love. Dead at the Blachernae Palace, leaving behind two infants who would grow up never knowing her. The funeral procession moved up Constantinople's great boulevard, the emperor walking alongside her open coffin, and something happened that day that no one who witnessed it ever forgot.

But grief was a luxury Heraclius could not afford. Because while he mourned, the Persian war machine kept rolling. Egypt fell in 619. The breadbasket of the empire, gone. Constantinople began to starve. And by that year the Roman Empire consisted of little more than Constantinople, scraps of Thrace and Greece, and a rump of Anatolia.

This was not defeat. This was not crisis. This was an extinction level event.

And so in the winter of 621, Heraclius did something the sources record with a kind of wonder. He withdrew from the affairs of state. He did not cower. He did not pray. He studied. Every breath, every day, feeding his mind on strategy, sketching diagrams, anticipating battles before they took place. And then he loaded what remained of the Roman army onto ships, sailed across the Propontis in secret, and began drilling twenty thousand men in the hills of Bithynia.

Then the Avars set a trap. The Emperor of Rome fled on horseback in mean and miserable clothes, his crown under his arm, seventy thousand civilians massacred behind him. The ransom to make it stop — nearly a billion dollars in today's money. His own son sent as a hostage to barbarians.

And still he did not give up.

He went back inside. And he kept planning.

This is Episode 103. This is what rock bottom looks like.

DEUS ADIUTA ROMANIS.

May God help the Romans.

Because everything else had already been tried.

Heraclius arrived on a warship and without shedding a drop of blood, he rid Rome of evil Phocas. Fair-haired. Young. An icon of the Virgin on the prow. That was Heraclius. October 5th, 610 AD. Crowned emperor, married the love of his life, and stepped out into cheering crowds while Persian watchfires burned on the Asian shore less than a mile away.

He obviously knew he faced a terrible fight. But he had no idea, that evening, how close to the end Rome already was.

What followed was a decade of catastrophe so complete it strains the imagination. Syria gone. Jerusalem fallen. Seven hundred years of Roman rule ended in 21 days. The True Cross carried in triumph to Persia. The Patriarch led away in chains. Nearly a hundred thousand dead. And the army of Rome, once half a million strong, pulverized. Reduced to ten thousand men. Little more.

And then the Senate of Rome, that legendary body, over a thousand years old, did something it had never done in all of that time. It wrote a letter to the Persian King of Kings. Begging for mercy. Calling itself his faithful servants. Calling its own emperor Khosrow's obedient son.

Khosrow read it. And sent back a reply for the ages.

"Khosrow, greatest of gods, and master of the whole earth, to Heraclius, his vile and insensate slave."

Not his son. His slave.

Rome was not struggling. Rome was not in decline. Rome was facing annihilation. The actual, literal end of a civilization that had ruled the world for six centuries.

This is Episode 102.

DARKNESS FALLS...