When news of defeat reached him, Heraclius, in dismay, knew not what to do other than quit Antioch—which fell to the Arabs in the following year—and head for Constantinople. During his northwestern march through Anatolia, he ordered all Roman garrisons stripped and fortifications broken so that his pursuers would only find barren country. (Such was the beginning of the creation of that desolate no-man’s-land that for centuries demarcated the frontier between Byzantium and its nemesis, Islam.37)
