Thomas Allies - Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

Nineveh, at that time, was only a village on the ruins of the old capital. Heraclius marched thence upon Ctesiphon, the capital of Persia, built upon the remains of old Babylon, at a little distance. On his road he passed palaces, seats, and chaces wherein the Persian nobles pursued their hunting. Heraclius suffered his soldiers to sack and burn them all. Chosroes fled from city to city. Heraclius made him new peace-proposals at the beginning of 628. Chosroes refused them all, and became perfectly hated by the Persians. He thought not of the justice of God, which was pursuing him. Thirty-eight years before he had murdered his father Hermisdas to obtain his throne. What he had done to his father was to happen to him from his eldest son. He had been struck by a violent dysentery: and wished to make Medarses, his son by his favourite wife Syra, a Christian, his successor in the throne. His eldest son, Siroes, irritated by this preference, gained the nobles and the army, was proclaimed king, and sent an embassy to Heraclius. Chosroes was captured in his flight, and brought to Ctesiphon, on the 24th February, 628. He was put in chains and imprisoned in the strong tower, Tenebres, which he had built to keep his treasures. The next day Siroes was crowned: the first act of his government was to condemn his father to die of starvation. “Let him eat,” he said, “the gold for which he has desolated the world, and condemned so many to die of hunger.” The Satraps and all his enemies were made to mock the fallen ruler, and spit in his face. Siroes ordered Medarses and all his brethren to be strangled before his father's eyes: and, as the old king was still living on the fifth day, had him shot to death with arrows. So ended Chosroes, king of Persia, murdered by his son as he murdered his father.

These victories the emperor Heraclius reported at Constantinople, and also sent a letter, in which Siroes announced his coronation, and proclaimed his wish for peace. This letter was read from the ambo of Sancta Sophia on the Feast of Pentecost, 15th May, 628.

Siroes, in fact, established a stable peace with the emperor. He restored him all Christian prisoners in Persia, among them, Zacharias, patriarch of Jerusalem. He delivered to him also the true Cross, which Sarbar had taken away fourteen years before at the capture of Jerusalem. This was at first carried to Constantinople: but in the following year, 629, the emperor took ship to bring it back to Jerusalem, and give thanks to God for his victories. Here he replaced the Cross on its old spot. It had remained in its case, as it was taken away. The patriarch, with his clergy, recognised the seal as intact, opened with its key the shrine, worshipped the Cross, and showed it to the people. The Church celebrates, by the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, this event on the same day, the 14th September, on which she had before celebrated the apparition of the Cross to Constantine. Heraclius, in the same year, came to Edessa, and restored to the Catholics the church which Chosroes had given to the Nestorians. And he paid back, in the shape of a yearly income to Sancta Sophia and its clergy, the sums which he had borrowed for the costs of the war.

Let us dwell for a moment on these acts of Heraclius, from 622 to 629.

No Roman emperor, in the course of many hundred years, during the whole time in which Rome and Persia stood as rivals over against each other, obtained such a triumph over the king of kings, as did Heraclius. He surpassed by far Trajan at the culmination of the empire. Heraclius, commending his city and his son to the protection of God, of our Blessed Lady, and of the bishop of his city, God's representative, went forth on what seemed a desperate expedition, borrowing from churches and monasteries the means to equip it. For seven years victory crowned his course. Trajan stopped at the Mesopotamian provinces. Julian perished in them. Mark Antony won no honour of Rome's eastern rival: Crassus and his host never returned. Galerius was stuffed and served as a footstool for the great king to mount on horseback. Into the heart of that eastern realm Heraclius threw himself fearlessly. He made his own army out of divers peoples, and shared their dangers. Host after host he overthrew, as only the son of Philip, the conqueror without his match, had done before him. In the end, on the very spot where a Roman emperor, the special despiser of the Nazarene, and fostering in his heart the destruction of the Church as the crowning work of his reign, to be achieved upon his return as conqueror, perished by a Persian lance, Heraclius, after driving to despair the great king, the persecutor of the Cross, its possessor by conquest, saw him dethroned, famished, and at last shot to death by his son. He received from that son, the successor of the murdered father, abundant satisfaction for the wrongs which the Roman empire had suffered from its great rival of so many hundred years.

But, moreover, during these very seven years in which Heraclius won a perpetual victory in the name of the Cross – the wood of which he brought back as a conqueror to Jerusalem, giving thanks and worship, and replaced it with the seal which guarded it unbroken in its old sanctuary – an Arabian trafficker who had gained his living by carrying goods from city to city, and lived virtuously with one wife much his elder, upon her death, when he was more than fifty years of age, was assuming the name of a prophet and the position of a conqueror. The year in which Heraclius started is the same in which this pretension was set up. His claim to be a prophet is exactly coincident with the years in which he was taking to himself wife after wife, in which, entering suddenly the tent of his adopted son, he was seduced by a casual glance on that wife's beauty to desire her, to obtain her, and to forge a permission from the Most High to take as many wives as he pleased, and the wives of others – a forgery as yet unique in all the history of imposture; for many bad men have taken the wives of others, but no one except Mohammed has pretended to have a divine sanction for an act which treads under foot all human justice, and pulls down for the lust of one man the very foundation of domestic life.

It is of this man that one who has analysed his religion and described its course opens his work with these words: —

“Since the beginning of the world has no other man – mere man – ever exerted so boundless an influence on the human race in the relations of religion, morality, and polity as Mohammed, the Arab. A man, by no means one of those rare spirits whom Providence at times evokes and endues with genius to open a path for a new world – a man rather whose mind was enclosed in narrow limits, poor in ideas for the construction of a new religion: a man such as this has for twelve hundred years cast his net of artless yet impenetrable links of doctrine round a hundred million souls – roots of teaching which have sunk into the marrow of men's minds, have taken up into themselves and mastered the whole of life, and impressed a uniform stamp on the thoughts and deeds of races as well as individuals.”

The seven years of Heraclius form part of the ten years of this Mohammed, in which the trader turns prophet and the reformer of religion endeavours to put a divine sanction on polygamy, in conjunction with a boundless concubinage of which captives were the prey.

As eighteen years of continual defeat by the Persians, from 604 to 622, had reduced the Eastern empire to a state of demoralised weakness, so the seven succeeding years, from 622 to 629, in which Heraclius wrought a full revenge on the Persian king, inflicted no passing collapse upon the empire resuscitated by the Sassanides in the third century. King Siroes did not long enjoy the fruit of his parricide. He reigned six months and then he died – some say of the plague, some of remorse. After his death the throne of Persia seemed to become a seat of murder. His young son, Ardeschir, or Artaxerxes, was killed after reigning seven months by his uncle, the general Sarbar. Sarbar kept the throne two months and was killed. Devanschir took his place. He was followed by Borane, a daughter of Chosroes. She was replaced by a certain Tschaschindeh, who was followed by Borane's sister, Azermidokt. A certain Kesra, or Chosroes, succeeded, and he gave way to a Ferokzad. Finally, Jezdedjerd, a grandson of the last Chosroes, was crowned in the year 632. Thus in the short space of four years about nine persons succeeded to the throne by murder. Jezdedjerd III. began his reign in the year Mohammed died. He is called by Theophanes, Hormisdas. He had the honour to be the last king of Persia and to end his days by the sword of the Arab in 651. His son, Peroxes, became a captain in the life-guards of the emperor of China at Singapore, and left no posterity.