Heraclius, Emperor of the Romans

The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) appointed Diḥyah ibn Khalīfah al-Kalbī to carry his letter to the great emperor of the day, Hiraql — Heraclius, the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire. And the title Eastern Roman Empire is used here, even though most contemporary sources call it the Byzantine Empire. The word Byzantine is not used, because it is not the word they used to refer to themselves, and it is not the title the Muslims used for them. The Muslims used to call them Rūm, and they used to call themselves Romans. So where did this Byzantine thing come from? Apparently it is only a century or two old^*; the name was not used before that. So it is referred to here as the Eastern Roman Empire. In the beginning it was one empire, and then it split into the Western Roman Empire, with its capital at Rome in Italy, and the Eastern Roman Empire, whose capital was Constantinople, present-day Istanbul.

A little background. Heraclius, Hiraql, was a military commander from Carthage — Carthage is in Tunis, present-day Tunisia — and he became emperor and supreme military commander of the Roman Empire in the year 610 AD. He became emperor at a time when the Roman Empire was going through a very difficult time, when the Persian Empire was pounding it and they were losing bit after bit, city after city, to the Persians. The Persians were rolling, and the Romans were suffering defeat after defeat. Heraclius was a strong emperor and a good military commander; however, the empire itself was falling back. In 613 Damascus fell; a year later Jerusalem fell, and the Persians took the True Cross.

What is this True Cross? It is a wooden cross believed by the Christians to be the cross on which ʿĪsā was crucified. Obviously, as Muslims, we do not believe that to be the case; but the Romans believed it to be the most important relic of Christendom. By the way, for the Sīrah of Ibn Kathīr there is a translation by Professor Trevor Le Gassick, which is sometimes useful to check one's own translation of the material in Ibn Kathīr, and it is riddled with mistakes. However, this has not been brought up in the past, on the assumption that Trevor Le Gassick is not a Muslim, so it is to be expected that someone not coming from a Muslim background would make many mistakes. However, it is interesting to find that he even made a mistake in translating the True Cross. Ibn Kathīr mentions it in Arabic as al-ṣalīb al-aʿẓam, the greatest cross, and Le Gassick translates it literally as the great cross. The Christians do not call it the great cross; they call it the True Cross, or the Holy Cross. So it is quite interesting to find that he makes a mistake even in something from his own culture, the culture of Christianity, and mistranslates the term. What is being spoken of here is not just a cross; it is the True Cross. So the Persians took this most important relic of the Christians.

In the year 621, Heraclius himself led the campaign — something that for a very long time Roman emperors would not be involved in; but he led the army himself and started fighting back against the Persians, and he took one city after another, until not only had he regained what had been taken from him, but he invaded Persia on its own land and started taking parts of Persia. Allah speaks about this in the Qur'an — this story was already mentioned in the account of the daʿwah in Makkah. The Qur'an says that the Romans were defeated, but that they would win in a few years (30:2–4), and a few years is between three and nine years. So even though it seemed impossible that the Romans would win, because they were losing one part after another, now the rollback started: Heraclius was defeating the Persians, and he was able to win back Damascus, and Jerusalem too, and he entered Persia itself. So the campaign took him a few years.

In the year 630, Heraclius, reaching the height of his power, fulfilled his vow to march barefoot, as a pious Christian pilgrim, into Jerusalem. He had made a vow that if he were given victory he would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem barefoot. So in the year 630 he fulfilled that vow: he marched barefoot as a pious Christian pilgrim into Jerusalem, and he restored the True Cross to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He was given a grand reception, with people laying out carpets for him to walk on and saluting him with flowers and cheers, and a grand celebration was organised for the return of the True Cross to its place. And this is when he received the letter from the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him). And this would start an interesting series of events — a fall from grace. He would suffer defeat after defeat, until he lost Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon; and eventually the entire Eastern Roman Empire would fall to the Muslims. Centuries later, the closing chapter was the fall of Constantinople to Muḥammad al-Fātiḥ, of the Ottoman Empire.