I. Byzantium and Persia

IN 572 the Turks attacked Persia “and laid it waste, and sent an embassy to Justin to urge him to join them in their war against the Persians. They asked him to show his friendship to the Turks by joining them in destroying the common enemy. In this way, with the Turks attacking from one direction and the Romans from another, the Persians would be destroyed. Aroused by these hopes, Justin thought that the power of the Persians would easily be overthrown and brought to nothing.“

Menander the Guardsman is in this passage one of the few ancient authors who explicitly states the aim of one of the many wars fought by Rome and Persia. In another fragment of Menander’ s text we read that Justin “was confident that if be made war he would destroy Khusro and himself give a king to the Persians. With these unrealistic threats be dismissed Sebokhth [the Persian envoy]”.

It is usually assumed that the successful destruction of Persia and the conquest of large parts of the Roman East by the Muslim armies were at least partly made possible by the long and fierce wars in the sixth and seventh centuries which decisively weakened the two empires. Although this is very likely it is necessarily an impressionistic assumption, for we cannot objectively measure the resources, military and material, that were at the disposal of the two powers in the 630s, as compared with other periods, nor can we form an accurate and reliable impression of the political will in both states at the time of the Islamic conquest. Yet this is one of the important subjects that should be discussed in a Workshop on states, resources and armies in the eastern Mediterranean from the late sixth century to the rise of the ‘Abbāsids.

In this paper I shall discuss two questions connected with these problems:

(1) What was the role played by material and military resources in the process of decision-making when Byzantine emperors fought Persia in the sixth and seventh centuries? Were considerations of material gains and losses more important than ideology and glory in defining the aims of policy and warfare? In this connection something will have to be said about the recurring conflicts over payment of Byzantine subsidies to allies and neighbouring peoples.