A CHANGED WORLDThis situation was soon to change. In 602 Maurice was deposed by Phocas,
an army offi cer proclaimed by disaffected and ill-supplied troops in the Bal-
kans. With Phocas outside Constantinople, the emperor called in the aid of
the factions, but the Greens opted for Phocas, and Maurice was put to death
with all his family.^18 For the last two decades the empire had also had to con-
tend with assaults from the Avars and Slavs in the Balkans, and it was in this
context that the soldiers raised Phocas as emperor. Chosroes took the oppor-
tunity to launch a major campaign against Byzantium on the pretext of aveng-
ing his adoptive father, parading Maurice’s alleged surviving son Theodosius.
Dara, only recently recovered by the Romans, was besieged and fell in 604 and
this was followed by the capture of all the cities east of the Euphrates, Edessa,
Harran, Callinicum and Circesium. The Persians were assisted from 609–10
by widespread disturbances in the Roman east involving the factions,^19 and
the position of Phocas became more and more vulnerable. In this situation,
Heraclius, the exarch of Africa, launched an expedition by sea which took
Alexandria, the key port for the dispatch of the grain supply to the capital, and
established itself on Cyprus; his son, also called Heraclius, was able to sail to
Constantinople where he was welcomed, not least by the Green faction. In
October 610 Heraclius became emperor, and Phocas was killed.
The Persian advance continued and Caesarea in Cappadocia was taken
after a long siege; despite a Roman advance into Syria, the Persians moved
south, taking Damascus and then Jerusalem in 614.^20 The patriarch and many
of his people were taken with the True Cross to Ctesiphon, and according to
Christian sources, the Persians sacked the city with great slaughter and de-
ported many of its inhabitants. The fall of Jerusalem was followed by that of
Alexandria (617), and Persian armies also stormed through Asia Minor, sack-
ing Ephesus and Sardis and reaching Chalcedon. Palestine, Syria, Mesopota-
mia, Egypt and much of Asia Minor were under Persian control by 622, and
the situation looked desperate for Constantinople, with attacks by the Avars
and Slavs in the Balkans, an Avar siege of Thessalonica in 618 and the serious
blow caused by the loss of the grain supply from Egypt.
The Persian conquest of JerusalemThe Persian advance and capture of Jerusalem provoked a bitter backlash
against the Jews among Palestinian Christians, who blamed them for aiding
the invaders. Christian sources, including the early-ninth century chronicle
of Theophanes, important for this period, and the contemporary account
attributed to Strategius, a monk of St Sabas, and surviving in Georgian and
Arabic versions of the original Greek, the Life of George of Choziba, one of
the Judaean desert monasteries, written soon after the events, and the nar-
rative of the Armenian ps. Sebeos, are just some of the sources displaying a
strong hostility to Jews.^21 Much of this anti-Jewish expression belongs to a
long rhetorical tradition among Christian writers in late antiquity, but there
is some reason to think that Jews in Palestine were courted at first by the