Battle of Nineveh (627)

On 12 December 627, near the ruins of ancient Nineveh in northern Mesopotamia, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius defeated a Persian army led by the general Rhahzadh, who was killed in the fighting. The battle decided the long war that had begun in 602 between the Byzantine Empire and the Sasanian Empire. Within months the Persian king Khosrow II had been overthrown, and the peace that followed restored the old Roman frontier in the east.

The war began in 602, when the usurper Phocas seized the Byzantine throne and killed the emperor Maurice. Khosrow II, whom Maurice had helped to his throne, declared war on the pretext of avenging him. For years the Persians had the upper hand, overrunning much of the Levant and Egypt and pushing into Anatolia; Jerusalem fell in 614 and the relic venerated as the True Cross was carried off. Heraclius gradually turned the tide with campaigns deep into Persian territory. In 626 a Persian and Avar attempt to take Constantinople failed.

Heraclius also found allies on the steppe. Byzantine writers call them Khazars under a leader named Ziebel; historians identify them with the Western Turkic Khaganate. Their forces, reportedly 40,000 strong, invaded the Caucasus, and together the allies besieged Tiflis.

In mid-September 627 Heraclius left the siege and struck south into Mesopotamia, an unexpected and risky move so late in the year. His own army is variously estimated at between 25,000 and 50,000 men. His Turkic allies soon went home, put off by the winter conditions. Khosrow gave Rhahzadh command of an army of about 12,000 to shadow him. Heraclius lived off the land as he marched, leaving the Persians to follow through countryside already stripped of food and fodder.

Heraclius crossed the Great Zab river on 1 December and camped near the ruins of Nineveh, the old Assyrian capital. Learning that 3,000 Persian reinforcements were on their way, he chose to fight before they arrived, and picked a plain west of the Great Zab where his lancers could make the most of close combat.

Rhahzadh formed his army in three bodies and attacked. Fog limited the effect of the Persian archers. Heraclius drew the Persians on by appearing to fall back, then turned and struck. The fighting is said to have lasted about eight hours before the Persians withdrew to nearby high ground, leaving some 6,000 dead. The Byzantine chroniclers Nikephoros and Theophanes tell a heroic story in which Rhahzadh challenged Heraclius to single combat and the emperor killed him with one blow, but historians have doubted it. What is certain is that Rhahzadh died in the battle. The Persian reinforcements arrived too late.

The Byzantines could not take the Persian camp, but no Persian army was left in their way. Heraclius plundered Khosrow's palace at Dastagird and, according to the sources, recovered some 300 Roman standards taken in earlier wars. A collapsed bridge on the Nahrawan Canal stopped him from advancing on Ctesiphon. Khosrow fled. The Persian army then rose against him and raised his son Kavad II to the throne; Khosrow was imprisoned and put to death.

Kavad quickly sought peace. Heraclius, aware that his own empire was exhausted, did not demand harsh terms. The Byzantines recovered all their lost lands, their prisoners and the True Cross. It was the last war between Rome and Persia. Both empires were left drained, and Persia slid into civil war, a weakness that contributed to its fall during the early Muslim conquests.

Our 600 map shows the Byzantine and Sasanian empires before the war, with their frontier running through upper Mesopotamia in today's Iraq and Turkey. By the 700 map the Sasanian state has disappeared.