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Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 46, the last war.

Thank you so much for your patience during the delay to this episode.

I will talk more about that at the end of this story.

Since the overthrow of Maurice in 602, every Roman strategist's nightmare had come true.

Attacked in East and West simultaneously, the empire had been stripped of all its outer provinces.

The Balkans had been surrendered to the chaotic advance of Slavs and Avars.

The East had been systematically occupied by the highly organised Persians.

The new effective borders of Romania were the long walls of Thrace and the Taurus mountains in

Anatolia and neither of those frontiers were entirely secure. Staring out of the palace windows

at this bleak scenario was the emperor Heraclius. What was he thinking? What was he feeling?

Those questions are at the heart of this episode. We can never really know what someone from

the ancient world was like. Obviously time and distance and then the biases and assumptions

of historians colour them in, turning them into caricatures that we just hope are vaguely accurate.

But even with all those understood caveats, I feel like we got a sense of who Justinian was.

Because we have writing by him and about him, we have buildings he put up, we have details of the

wars he started and why, we have writing from people who met him talking about what he was like.

We don't really have a lot to go on when it comes to Heraclius, not personal sources like that.

I've talked about the Christian history, the Pashal Chronicle. We also have a history written by

...