The war with the Romans continued to make successful progress, after Phocas had been overthrown, by his able successor Heraclius (October, 610). The latter, seeing himself hard pressed on all sides, sued in vain for peace. Damascus was taken in 613. The surrounding country, which had never been trodden by Persian feet since the founding of the empire, was laid so utterly waste that to this day countless ruins bear witness to these ravages. In the June of 614 Jerusalem was taken. The whole of Christendom was horrified by the tidings that, together with the patriarch, the Persians had carried off the “Holy life-giving Cross” of Christ. Egypt was next conquered, and Asia Minor again overrun as far as to Chalcedon. Not till 622 was Heraclius able to take the field against the Persians. He took ship for the Bay of Issus, thence pressed forward to Armenia and the regions about the Pontus, and for the first time in the campaign inspired the enemy with respect for the Roman arms. The loss of church treasures must be reckoned as a heavy item in the cost of the war. On the 15th of March, 623, Heraclius at length started upon the great military expedition which led him again and again into the heart of Persian territory. The almost extravagant daring of his cross-marches and transverse marches, in which he was generally deprived of all communication with his base and must have had great difficulty in feeding his troops, prove him a great commander and a great statesman. In the first year of the campaign he destroyed one of the most sacred sanctuaries of the Persians, the Fire temple of Ganjak, not far from the Lake of Urumiyeh; it was his reply to the destruction of Jerusalem. We find him now in the vicinity of the Caucasus, now in the east of Asia Minor, now, again, in Mesopotamia, never vanquished, often victorious, more often still, it may be, weakening or deluding superior forces by skilful movements. Chosroes, who felt the emperor disquietingly near at Ganjak, sent Shahrbaraz, the most famous of his generals, with a great army direct to Chalcedon to draw him off (626). It was an anxious time for Constantinople, with the Persians on this side and the Avars on that (in the summer of 626), and the emperor almost beyond knowledge in the remote parts of Asia. But the Avars soon withdrew, seeing that the Persians, having no fleet, could not undertake concerted operations with them on the far side of the Bosporus. In retaliation Heraclius brought the savage Khazars, from the north of the Caucasus, into Persian territory. At length, in 627, he ventured into the chief province of the monarchy. He kept the “feast of lights” (January 6th, 628) at Dastagerd, only about three days’ journey from Ctesiphon, where Chosroes had held his court regularly for the last twenty years. [Sidenote: [628-629 A.D.]]