What happened at the Battle of Nineveh?
On 12 December 627 the East Roman emperor Heraclius defeated a Sasanian Persian army under its general Rhahzadh on a plain near the ruins of Nineveh, in modern Iraq. The Persian commander fell and his army withdrew. Within weeks Heraclius was destroying the palaces of King Khosrow II, and by the end of February 628 Khosrow had been overthrown by his own son.5
After a generation in which the Persians had overrun the Roman East, the emperor Heraclius did the unthinkable: he marched deep into the enemy's heartland and forced a battle on a plain near the ancient ruins of Nineveh. It was not a rout, but it broke the Persian war effort.6
Who won the Battle of Nineveh and why?
The East Roman army of Heraclius won. He had chosen the ground, an open plain where his close-order cavalry and infantry could fight at their best, and morning mist hid his turn against the pursuing Persians. Their commander Rhahzadh fell with his senior officers, while Persian reinforcements arrived too late to help.7
An empire on the brink
In 602 the usurper Phocas murdered the emperor Maurice, and Khosrow II, who owed his throne to Maurice, went to war the next year to avenge his protector. In the first phase the Persians took the fortress of Dara and Roman Armenia; by 610 the whole Roman sector of Armenia and northern Mesopotamia was in their hands, and only the Euphrates stood between them and Anatolia and Syria.8
That October the younger Heraclius, son of the governor of Africa, sailed on Constantinople, overthrew Phocas and became emperor, but he could not stop the advance. The Persians took Damascus in 613 and Jerusalem in 614, carrying off the relic of the True Cross, and after Alexandria fell in 619 the whole of Egypt, the empire's richest province, was soon in Persian hands.9
In 622 the Persians opened the final phase, aiming at the heart of the empire in concert with the Avars of the Hungarian plain. In 626 two Persian armies invaded Anatolia while a massive Avar force besieged Constantinople, and the city held. Heraclius was not there. He had cut loose from his own territory in 624 to fight in Transcaucasia, and he stayed in the east.10
Heraclius strikes east
Howard-Johnston calls what followed one of the most astonishing reversals of fortune in the annals of war. Heraclius rebuilt the morale of an army beaten again and again by presenting the war as a holy war, and he worked to bring the Turks of the steppe in on the Roman side. In 627 they invaded Persian Transcaucasia, and Heraclius met their commander outside Tbilisi, which the Turkish army was besieging.11
The fullest account of the final campaign comes from Theophanes the Confessor, whose chronicle runs to 813 and draws on older sources. He says Heraclius invaded Persia with the Turks in September 627, an unexpected move with winter coming, and that the Turks slipped away home as the cold and Persian attacks wore them down. Khosrow gathered his armies under Rhahzadh, a brave and warlike general, who followed the Romans while they burned towns and destroyed crops. On 9 October Heraclius rested his army for a week in the district of Chamaetha; on 1 December he crossed the Great Zab and camped near Nineveh.12
The commanders' choices
Heraclius did not head straight for Khosrow's palaces. Kaegi argues that after crossing the Zab he turned northwest on purpose: the Persians were to think he meant to escape across the Tigris to Roman territory, and so be drawn onto ground of his choosing, while he kept a line of retreat open if things went wrong.13
Rhahzadh, for his part, had his orders. He crossed the Zab at another ford about three miles downstream. Heraclius sent the commander Baanes out with a few picked soldiers, who killed a Persian captain and brought back his head, his gold sword and some two dozen prisoners, among them Rhahzadh's sword-bearer. The prisoner said that Khosrow had ordered Rhahzadh to give battle and was sending him 3,000 more men. Heraclius sent his baggage ahead and looked for a battlefield before they could arrive.14
He found it on a plain west of the Great Zab, some 23 or 24 kilometers from the settlements in the ruins of Nineveh. Kaegi, who visited the area in 1988, places the fighting on the plain of Karamlays, crossed by a creek that could water the Roman horses, below the hills where the Persians later took refuge. Open ground suited the Romans: their military manual, the Strategikon, told them to seek it against the Persians, whose strength was the bow, and to come to close quarters.15
The battle near Nineveh
In Theophanes' telling, Rhahzadh drew up his army in three dense formations and battle was joined on Saturday, 12 December. The emperor rode out ahead of his men, threw down the Persian commander and then two more Persians in turn; the third wounded him in the lip with a spear. When the trumpets sounded and the lines met, his tawny horse Dorkon was speared in the thigh, while its armor of sinew turned the sword blows aimed at its face.16
The Armenian history attributed to Sebeos, written in the seventh century, tells it differently. Heraclius drew the pursuing Persians as far as the plain of Nineveh, then turned and attacked with great force; there was mist on the plain, and the Persians did not realize he had turned until the armies collided. Kaegi thinks the mist suited the Romans perfectly, spoiling the aim of the Persian archers and hiding Heraclius's maneuver from Rhahzadh.17
The fighting went on from morning until the eleventh hour of the day. Rhahzadh fell, and with him, by Theophanes' tally, his three divisional commanders, nearly all their officers and the greater part of their army. The Romans captured 28 standards, not counting those that had been broken, and stripped the dead of their corselets, helmets and weapons.18
How many soldiers fought at Nineveh, and how many died?
Nobody knows the size of either army. Theophanes gives no totals. Kaegi thinks Heraclius's army conceivably numbered between 25,000 and 50,000, a range he suspects is too high; he treats a report crediting the emperor with 70,000 men against 12,000 Persians as suspect, and calls a Christian Oriental figure of 300,000 Romans and 40,000 Turks absurd.19
The losses are as uncertain. Theophanes says the Romans lost 50 killed and a considerable number wounded, of whom only ten more died. For the Persians he gives no number. As Kaegi reports, the Muslim historian al-Tabari has 6,000 of 12,000 Persians killed, and the Armenian historian Thomas Artsruni says 4,000 survived, but Kaegi considers most of al-Tabari's account of the campaign inaccurate. Sebeos says the Romans massacred the Persians to a man, then adds that the surrounded survivors begged for mercy and Heraclius let them go.20
Nor was the Persian army annihilated. Kaegi stresses that there was no rout. The two armies stayed on the field two bowshots apart; the Persian horsemen stood over their dead until the seventh hour of the night, then took up their camp and moved to the foot of a rugged mountain. On 21 December the survivors, joined by the 3,000 reinforcements, were following the Romans again.21
The spoils were rich: gold swords and gold belts set with pearls, Rhahzadh's gold shield of 120 plates and his gold breastplate, his caftan together with his head, his bracelets and his gold saddle. Barsamouses, the prince of the Iberians who served Persia, was taken alive.22
Did Heraclius really fight Rhahzadh in single combat?
Probably not as a formal duel. Kaegi traces the story to a panegyrical official tradition of questionable accuracy, probably going back to Heraclius's own victory bulletins, in which the emperor cuts down three Persian challengers, Rhahzadh first, and is wounded along with his horse. Sebeos, writing outside the Roman court, says only that the Romans slew the Persian general in the battle.23
The versions differ. Theophanes has Heraclius throw down three Persians in turn before the main lines met; the Short History of the patriarch Nikephoros, written in the early ninth century, has Rhahzadh challenge the emperor to single combat, an account the modern translators of Theophanes call imprecise. The court poet George of Pisidia, a contemporary, pictured Heraclius in the battle as a kind of magnet drawing his men around him.24
The fall of Khosrow
Heraclius did not turn for home. Instead of crossing the Tigris, as the Persians expected, he struck south toward the heart of Khosrow's realm, where no Persian army could stop him. After recrossing the Great Zab he sent the turmarch George with 1,000 horsemen to seize the four bridges of the Lesser Zab, crossed them on 23 December and spent Christmas in the mansions of Yazdin, the Christian official who ran Khosrow's land tax.25
Khosrow, learning on 23 December that the Romans had crossed the Torna, fled his favorite palace at Dastagerd for Ctesiphon. The army that entered Dastagerd in early January 628 found, by Theophanes' count, 300 Roman standards taken in earlier wars. Heraclius never attacked Ctesiphon itself: the translators of the Chronicon Paschale explain that Khosrow's destruction of key bridges stopped his advance, and he withdrew across the Zagros to winter quarters at Canzacon in Azerbaijan, the land Sebeos calls Atrpatakan.26
The defeat and the ravaging of Mesopotamia ruined Khosrow's prestige. In late February 628 his eldest son Shiroe, with the support of the army, overthrew him in a virtually bloodless coup and took the throne as Kavad II; Khosrow was put to death in prison within days. Heraclius announced the news in a victory dispatch, preserved in the Chronicon Paschale, that was read out from the ambo of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople at Pentecost, 15 May 628.27
Was the Battle of Nineveh decisive?
In its results, yes; as a battle, less clearly. The Romans could not take the Persian camp, and Kaegi calls Nineveh a marginal victory that turned into a decisive one: with no Persian army left between Heraclius and the farmland of Mesopotamia, panic spread and Khosrow's prestige crumbled. Howard-Johnston also counts it a decisive victory, because it carried Heraclius into the metropolitan region and encouraged opposition to the king at court and in the high command.28
Kavad II sued for peace at once. The negotiations were difficult, but the Persian occupation forces left the Roman Near East in 629, and in March 630 Heraclius entered Jerusalem in ceremony, bringing back the fragments of the True Cross.29
Why Nineveh mattered
Nineveh ended what Howard-Johnston calls the last great war of antiquity, a total war in which each empire committed everything it had. Both were left exhausted. In the two decades after Muhammad's death in 632 the Arabs took Syria, Palestine and Egypt from the Romans and Mesopotamia and Iran from the Persians; Ctesiphon fell in the late 630s, and the last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd III, was defeated and died as a fugitive in the far northeast. Meet the emperor who won it, Heraclius.30
Heraclius lived to see much of it. In 636 the Arabs destroyed the Roman field army at the Yarmouk, and when he died in 641, after a reign of 30 years and 10 months, Syria and Palestine were lost and the Arabs were overrunning Egypt.31
How is the Battle of Nineveh remembered?
Less as a battle than as a chapter in the story of the True Cross. Heraclius's own dispatch, read in Hagia Sophia, opened with the Psalm verse “Let all the earth raise a cry to God” and presented the victory as God's work, and Kaegi thinks the battle account in Theophanes goes back, in the end, to such an official communiqué.32
The place itself was half forgotten. Kaegi notes that the Greek accounts of the campaign never mention the ruins of Assyrian Nineveh, with their two mounds of Nebi Yunus and Kuyunjik, or Alexander's victory at nearby Gaugamela; to Heraclius's contemporaries Nineveh was known mainly as the Syriac name of a Christian community. For the wider story, see our guides to the greatest battles of the Byzantine Empire and the greatest battles of the Persian Empire.33
