Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 107: Heraclius (Part 7 - Mission Impossible) cover art

Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 107: Heraclius (Part 7 - Mission Impossible)

Lost Roman Heroes - Episode 107: Heraclius (Part 7 - Mission Impossible)

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Constantinople held. The City had survived the Great Siege. But the war with Persia was far from over. The Persians still had the overwhelming advantage in every way that mattered. Military, political, economic. What Rome had was an emperor, one army, and something it had not had in twenty years: hope. This is the episode where Khosrow starts doing Rome's work for it. A general packed in salt and carried home to be abused in front of the men still holding armies. And a letter. One poisonous letter, written to the wrong man, carried by a courier who rode straight into the hands of the one emperor he should never have underestimated. Then, in September 627, the Turks go home. And Heraclius, alone, two thousand miles from Constantinople, with no reinforcements coming and winter closing in, looks south at the Zagros mountains. Every rule of ancient warfare said stop. Armies had campaigned between spring and autumn for four thousand years, for the simple reason that a man cannot eat scenery. Nobody takes an army into snow choked mountain passes in November. He went anyway. And for six weeks the record goes dark, because the chronicler who had the report cut it out, literally deleting it from history. Heraclius comes out of those mountains in Assyria, in the ruins of an ancient empire that had died over a thousand years before, and camps in its shadows on the plain of Nineveh on the Tigris, in modern Iraq, waiting for the Persian general Rahzadh, and for what he knew would be the last battle of the war. The one that would determine it all.
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