Heraclio

Kaegi, Walter E. Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 359. $70.00 0-521-81459-6. ISBN: .
Reviewed by:
Geoffrey Greatrex
University of Ottawa
greatrex@uottawa.ca
The publication of a biography of the Emperor Heraclius is undoubtedly timely. Not only has there been no such work devoted to Heraclius since the start of the twentieth century,but, as Kaegi notes (10-16), there has been much discussion of his importance and achievements. Furthermore, new evidence and new ways of analysing the extant sources may now be brought to bear. As those familiar with Kaegi's work have come to expect, this biography takes into account, for the most part, the latest scholarship on Heraclius, including several works yet to be published; to his credit,Kaegi also makes good use of several relevant doctoral theses. Yet surprising lacunae remain, the most notable being the volume edited by G.J. Reinkink and B.H. Stolte, The Reign of Heraclius (610-641): Crisis and Confrontation (Louvain, 2002), the proceedings of a conference held in April 2001. Kaegi equally passes over the relevant volume in the series Histoire du Christianisme des origines anos jours: volume 3, edited by L. Pietri, entitled Les églises d'orient et d'occident (Paris, 1998), covers the period with which the book is concerned. The reviewer may also be permitted to signal the absence of any reference to his own work (with S.N.C. Lieu), The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars, A.D. 363-630 (henceforth REF) (London, 2002) http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~greatrex/ref.html,which contains a large amount of material relevant to Heraclius' war against Persia.[[1]]
This review will go on to discuss in detail aspects Kaegi's work, but initially a few general points may be made. First, there is the question of the aim of the book. It belongs, clearly, to the genre of biography, a genre which continues to prove very popular. Within the late antique period, recent works suchas N. Lenski, Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century A.D (Berkeley, 2002), S. Williams and G. Friell, Theodosius: The Empire at Bay (London, 1994) and J.A.S. Evans (The Age of Justinian: The Circumstances of Imperial Power (London, 1996) testify to this popularity.[[2]] But the titles or subtitles of these works are significant: all seek to offer a more roundedaccount of the period in question, concerning themselves not merely with the emperor but with the whole empire at the time. The emperor may loom too large in this picture sometimes -- such at any rate is the criticism of R. van Dam of Lenski's valuable work[[3]] -- but the approach is broad. Kaegi's work, by contrast, is merely subtitled "Emperor of Byzantium," and this accurately reflects his smallerfocus. Given the very limited number of sources available for this period, a fact of which the author is all too conscious (7-14), this narrowness is puzzling. The reader searches in vain for overviews, for instance of the Roman empire at the opening of the seventh century, of the history of Romano-Persian relations, or of the doctrinal disputes to which Heraclius so unsuccessfully sought to put anend in the 630s.[[4]] To give one example, the first reference to Monothelitism in the work comes at p.209: "Sophronios had sworn an oath never to attack Monothelitism, and in fact he never explicitly attacked it." Neither here nor elsewhere is any attempt made to explain exactly what this doctrine was and why the newly appointed patriarch of Jerusalem was so fervently opposed to it. The work isconsequently difficult to recommend for the lay reader with little or no previous background in Byzantine history. One should note, however, that some background information, at any rate on early Islam and the Byzantine state in the period of Heraclius, is to be found in Kaegi's preceding work, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (Cambridge, 1992). There are surprisingly few references to...