Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

4 INTRODUCTION
Belgrade: in 584), and laid siege to Thessalonika in 584 and 586. And
to the East there was Persia—the Sasanid Empire—with which
Justinian had bought peace by paying tribute. Justinian’s successors
refused this tribute and and embarked on war that lasted for twenty
years. The struggle with Persia was to lead to invasion and counterinvasion
in the early decades of the seventh century that impinged
directly—in more ways than one—on the course of Maximus’ life, and
left the two great empires vulnerable to attack from the Arab tribes.
In twenty years—between 630 and 650—the Persian Empire fell to
the Arabs and the Byzantine Empire lost its Eastern Provinces, and in
661 the first of the Umayyad caliphs, Mu’awiya, made the Byzantine
provincial capital, Damascus, the capital of a huge empire that
stretched from Egypt and Libya in the West to the valley of the Oxus
in the East. By the time Maximus died in 662 the Roman dream had
faded, and the Empire shrunk to part of Italy, the cities of the
Adriatic and Aegean coast-line and around the Sea of Marmara
(including Constantinople), and a much-ravaged Asia Minor (and
Cherson). The then Emperor, Constans II, so despaired of the
situation in the East Mediterranean that in 662, the year of Maximus’
death, he moved to the West and established his court in Sicily until his
murder in 668.
EARLY YEARS1 Maximus was born in 580. 2 According to the Greek Life of St
Maximns, 3 composed in the tenth century by the Studite monk,
Michael Exaboulites, he was born of noble parents in Constantinople,
received a good education, 4 and in his early thirties became first
secretary at the court of the Emperor Heraclius. It has been shown,
however, that Michael pieced this Life together from diverse
materials, and that, for Maximus’ early years, he simply paraphrased
the beginning of the Life of the eighth-century reformer of the
Stoudios monastery, St Theodore the Studite, omitting the proper
names: from which we can infer that he had no direct evidence at all. 5
The evidence about his service under the Emperor Heraclius is,
however, more secure, since it appears to be dependent on earlier
material and has some independent attestation. 6 It looks as
if Maximus became head of the Imperial Chancellery (the
protoasecretis) in the comprehensive overhaul of the upper echelons of
the civil service that would have followed Heraclius’ deposition of the
usurper, Phocas, in 610. After a few years, however, Maximus
renounced this post and became a monk, initially at Chrysopolis
(modern Scutari) across the Bosphorus from Constantinople. The
Greek Life gives two reasons for this decision: first, his unhappiness