Maurice

Maurice, known in Latin as Flavius Mauricius Tiberius and in Greek as Maurikios, was Eastern Roman emperor from 582 until 602. He was born in 539 in Arabissus, a town in Cappadocia in the interior of Asia Minor. His family was of local Cappadocian standing, possibly with Armenian connections; his father Paul later held high civil office, including the praetorian prefecture. Maurice entered imperial military service under Tiberius II Constantine and rose quickly. He commanded federate troops and then served as magister militum per Orientem, conducting campaigns against the Sassanid Persians in the 570s that helped restore Roman positions on the eastern frontier after earlier reverses.

In August 582 the dying Tiberius II raised Maurice to the rank of Caesar, married him to his daughter Constantina, and named him heir. Maurice became emperor on 13 August 582. He inherited wars on two fronts. In the East he continued the Persian war until a dynastic crisis allowed him to intervene on behalf of the exiled Khosrow II. Roman forces restored Khosrow, and the treaty of 591 returned substantial territories in Armenia and eastern Mesopotamia to Roman control and opened nearly a decade of peace. Contemporaries regarded the settlement as a major success. Maurice also campaigned in the Balkans against Avar and Slavic raids and tried to re-establish the Danube as a working frontier, with mixed results.

Maurice was a conscientious and austere administrator who sought to repair imperial finances after the heavy spending of Justinian I and Tiberius II. His economies, together with demanding strategic orders, alienated the army. In the autumn of 602 he instructed the Balkan army to winter north of the Danube. The troops mutinied, proclaimed the junior officer Phocas emperor, and marched on the capital. Abandoned in Constantinople, Maurice fled with his family across the Bosporus and was captured near Chalcedon. On 27 November 602 he was forced to watch the execution of his sons and was then beheaded. Constantina and the surviving daughters were killed later. The murder of Maurice gave Khosrow II a pretext for a long war that brought the empire close to collapse.

Maurice and Constantina had a large family, including Theodosius, who had been crowned co-emperor, and several other sons and daughters. A devout Chalcedonian Christian, Maurice corresponded with Pope Gregory I and was drawn into the dispute over the title ecumenical patriarch used in Constantinople. The military handbook known as the Strategikon, describing late Roman tactics and organization, is associated with his reign and is sometimes linked to him or his court. Later Byzantine writers remembered him as a capable and pious ruler whose fall was a catastrophe, but he was not formally canonized in the major churches and is distinct from the earlier martyr Saint Maurice of the Theban Legion. His reign was both a high point of late antique recovery in the East and the prelude to the seventh-century crisis that transformed the empire.