Maurice ended the Persian war by restoring Khosrow II to his throne, fought the Avars on the Danube for a decade, and was murdered with five of his sons by a mutiny in 602 — the act that started a century of catastrophe.
Maurice came from Cappadocia and rose through the imperial bureaucracy rather than the army, which makes his career as a general improbable and his success at it more so.
Tiberius II gave him the eastern command, he beat the Persians at Solachon in 586, and as emperor from 582 he ended the war in 591 by an extraordinary intervention: restoring the exiled Sasanian prince Khosrow II to his throne with Roman troops, in exchange for territory in Armenia and Mesopotamia.
He then spent a decade recovering the Danube frontier, and was murdered in 602 by the army he had spent that decade driving.
He was born about 539 at Arabissus in Cappadocia and came to Constantinople as a notary, entering the imperial secretariat under Tiberius when the latter was still Caesar.
Promotion to the eastern command in 578 was on Tiberius's judgement rather than any obvious qualification, and it was vindicated: he reorganised a demoralised army and won at Solachon.
In 582 he married Tiberius's daughter Constantina and was designated heir the day before his father-in-law died.
The consistent portrait is of an austere, disciplined, financially rigorous man who was respected and not liked, and the qualities that made him effective are precisely the ones that killed him.
He cut army pay and rations, refused to ransom prisoners the Avars held — who were then killed — and ordered the Danube army to winter beyond the river to save money. Each decision was defensible in isolation and the accumulation was fatal.
He was also genuinely pious and personally decent by the standards of the office: he spared rebels, was faithful to his wife, and the sources record him accepting his death as a judgement, reportedly saying "Just art thou, O Lord, and righteous are thy judgements" as his sons were killed. Whether or not he said it, the tradition wanted him to have.
In 590 Khosrow II was driven from the Persian throne by the usurper Bahram Chobin and fled to Roman territory. Maurice restored him with Roman troops the following year.
The terms were the best any Roman emperor had obtained from Persia: most of Armenia and eastern Mesopotamia ceded, and an end to the subsidies Constantinople had been paying. Two centuries of intermittent war closed on Roman advantage.
The relationship was personal as well as diplomatic. Khosrow called Maurice his father, and when Maurice was murdered in 602 the Persian king treated it as an outrage to be avenged — which is the pretext, and possibly the motive, for the war that ran until 628.
With the east settled, Maurice turned to the Balkans, and for a decade Roman armies campaigned across the Danube against the Avars and the Slavs with real success — the first sustained offensive there in a century.
The Strategikon, a military manual usually attributed to him or to his circle, belongs to this period and is the best surviving guide to how a late Roman army actually operated, down to drill, camp layout and the tactics of specific enemies.
In 602 he ordered the army to winter north of the Danube rather than return to quarters, saving the cost of supply. The army mutinied, proclaimed a junior officer named Phocas, and marched on Constantinople. Maurice fled, was captured at Chalcedon, and was executed after watching five of his sons killed in front of him.
His murder is the hinge of the seventh century, and this archive treats it as such. Khosrow II invaded to avenge him; the war ran twenty-six years and exhausted both empires; and the Arab conquests took Syria, Egypt and the whole Sasanian state within a generation of its end.
The Strategikon outlived the state it was written for and shaped Byzantine military thinking for centuries.
He is the last emperor of the Justinianic house and the last to govern a Roman empire that still looked like the one Justinian had assembled. Everything after him is a smaller and harder thing.