rius also used this period to send reinforcements to Italy under the command of Baduarius with orders to stem the Lombard invasion. He saved Rome from the Lombards and allied the Empire with Childebert II, the King of the Franks, in order to defeat them. Unfortunately, Baduarius was defeated and killed in 576, allowing even more imperial territory in Italy to slip away.
Tiberius was unable to respond as the Persian Sassanid Emperor Khosrau I struck at the Empire’s Armenian provinces in 576, sacking Melitene and Sebastea. Shifting his attention eastward, Tiberius sent his general Justinian with the eastern armies to push the Persians back across the Euphrates. The Byzantines followed, and pushed deep into Persian territory, culminating in a raid on Atropatene.
In 577, however, Justinian was defeated in Persian Armenia, forcing a Byzantine withdrawal. In response to this defeat, Tiberius replaced Justinian with the future Emperor Maurice. During the truce which Tiberius concluded with Khosrau, he busily enhanced the army of the east, not only with transfers from his western armies but also through barbarian recruits, which he formed into a new Foederati unit, amounting to some 15,000 troops by the end of his reign.
|Roman – Persian War of 572–591|
The Roman armies faced a major war with the Persian Empire in the east. At the same time they face invasion in the Balkans by the Avars, the invasion of Italy by the Lombards and a North African war against the Berbers.
|Solidus of Emperor Tiberius II Constantine wearing consular robes.|
Throughout 577 and into 578, Tiberius avoided all other entanglements which would have distracted him from the approaching Persian conflict. He appeased, quite successfully, both Chalcedonian and Monophysite Christians by the use of strategic appointments and the easing of persecutions. He paid the Lombard tribal chieftains some 200,000 nomismata in an attempt to keep them divided and prevent the election of a king.
When the Slavs invaded Illyricum, he transported Avar armies to attack them and force their retreat. Consequently, when Khosrau invaded Roman Mesopotamia in 578, his general Maurice was able to invade Persian Arzanene and Mesopotamia, sacking a number of key towns and forcing the Persians to abandon their advance and defend their own territory. It was during this period that the ailing Emperor Justin finally died in early October 578.
The ongoing success against the Persians in the east once again allowed Tiberius to turn his gaze westward. In 579 he again extended his military activities into the remnants of the Western Roman Empire – he sent money and troops to Italy to reinforce Ravenna and to retake the port of Classis. He formed an alliance with one of the Visigothic princes in Spain who was fomenting rebellion, and his generals defeated the Berbers in North Africa.
The reality, however, was that the Empire was seriously overextended. In 579, with Tiberius occupied elsewhere, the Avars decided to take advantage of the lack of troops in the Balkans by besieging Sirmium.
At the same time, the Slavs began to migrate into Thrace, Macedonia and Greece, which Tiberius was unable to halt as the Persians refused to agree to a peace in the east, which remained the Emperor’s main priority. To top it all off, the Army of the East was beginning to become restless, as they hadn’t been paid, to the point where they threatened to mutiny.
In 580, the general Maurice launched a new offensive, raiding well beyond the Tigris. The following year (581), he again invaded Persian Armenia, and succeeded in almost reaching the Persian capital at Ctesiphon before a Persian counter-invasion of Byzantine Mesopotamia forced him to retreat back to deal with this threat.
By 582, with no apparent end to the Persian war in sight, Tiberius was forced to come to terms with the Avars, to whom he agreed to pay an indemnity and to hand over the vital city of Sirmium, which the Avars then destroyed. Unfortunately, the migration of the Slavs continued, with their incursions reaching as far south as Athens.
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