For his first decade, Heraclius stayed mainly at home, apart from one failed campaign in 613, and let his empire take its punishment. Desperation reached such a point that people said the emperor was thinking of moving his own headquarters, the capital of the remnants of empire, from Constantinople to Carthage. The thought that the Roman empire would find itself led now from the city of its ancient enemy, the city it had razed to the ground 750 years earlier, was too delicious for words. But it is reasonable to believe that Heraclius, raised in Carthage, would have been aware of the tactical possibilities of recruiting his forces from the west. He might have been smart to do so. To regain the advantage in the east, he bought his own peace in the Balkans, buying off the Avars for a time in 619. That was in the long run the real defeat, but these emperors in Constantinople were never able to discover that their long-term interests lay in the Balkans.
Predecessors and concentrated
Heraclius was wiser than most of his predecessors and concentrated his efforts in the 610s on rebuilding his army. Tradition ascribed to him the reorganization of civil government into “themes”—roughly, military recruiting districts—that after centuries would be made standard. The Byzantine empire was a stranger to irony, and none would sense it when the realm was organized into units whose functional purpose was to pro-vide soldiers in order to preserve the existing entity.
Despaired of, pressed hard, and finally becoming venturesome, Heraclius took the field in 621. For the first years of his wars, the issue remained in doubt. In the summer of 626 the Avars were at the gates of Constantinople in what could have been its last gasp, trapping the city while Heraclius and the main forces were away on the northern part of the Persian frontier, in Lazica, but the Persians’ attempts to cross the Bosporus and aid the Avars were repulsed by the Byzantine navy on August 10, and the Avars withdrew. There have been more famous battles in history, but few with greater lasting effect.
Travelling 