Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

maintenance of what was held. The Balkan front was shored up. North Africa was secured, but a small Byzantine presence in Visigothic Spain was abandoned, finally ending Roman interests in old Hispania. And the Persian question was spectacularly settled in the favor of the empire—although the effort came at near-fatal cost to both sides. In other words, after Heraclius’s reign, the empire’s territorial transformation from Rome to Byzantium was complete. It was now a Greek-speaking state, focused on dominating the eastern Mediterranean, with power concentrated in Constantinople and its most important geopolitical rivals lying to the south and east. That was how it would remain, more or less, for eight and a half centuries. But there was one last twist in the story. The defining struggle of Heraclius’s reign was the war with Persia.