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609-619] this authorised number desired residence in Constantinople, they were to buy the privilege from the State (612). Three years later the coins in which the imperial largess was paid were reduced to half their value. But in June 617 (?) yet another disaster overtook Heraclius. The Khagan of the Avars made overtures for peace, and Athanasius the patrician and Kosmas the quaestor arranged a meeting between the Emperor and the barbarian chief at Heraclea. Splendid religious rites and a magnificent circus display were to mark the importance of the occasion, and huge crowds had poured forth from the city gates to be present at the festivities. But it was no longer increased money payments that the Khagan sought: he aimed at nothing less than the capture of Constantinople. At a sign from his whip the ambushed troops burst forth from their hiding-places about the Long Walls. Heraclius saw his peril: throwing off his purple, with his crown under his arm, he fled at a gallop to the city and warned its inhabitants. Over the plain of the Hebdomon and up to the Golden Gate surged the Avar host: they raided the suburbs, they pillaged the church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in the Hebdomon, they crossed the Golden Horn and broke in pieces the holy table in the church of the Archangel. Fugitives who escaped reported that 270,000 prisoners, men and women, had been swept away to be settled beyond the Danube, and there was none to stay the Khagan's march. In 618 those who were entitled at the expense of the State to share in the public distribution of loaves of bread were forced to make a contribution at the rate of three nomismata to the loaf, and a few months later (Aug. 618) the public distribution was entirely suspended. Even such a deprivation as this was felt to be inevitable: the chronicle of events in the capital does not record any popular outbreak.

It was probably in the spring of 619 that the next step was taken in the Persian plan of conquest, when Sahrbarâz invaded Egypt. He advanced by the coast road, capturing Pelusium and spreading havoc amongst its numerous churches and monasteries. Babylon, near Memphis, fell, and thence the Persians, supported by a strong flotilla, followed the main western branch of the Nile past Nikiou to Alexandria and began the siege of the Egyptian capital. All the Emperor's measures were indeed of little avail when Armenia, Rome's recruiting ground, was occupied by Persia, and when Sahrbarâz, encamped round Alexandria, had cut off the supply of Egyptian grain so that the capital suffered alike from pestilence and scarcity of food. The sole province which appeared to offer any hope to the exhausted treasury was Africa, and here only, it seemed, could an effective army be raised. It was with African troops that Nicetas had won Egypt in 609: even now, with Carthage as a base of operations, the Persians might surely be repelled and Egypt regained. Thus reasoning, Heraclius prepared to set sail from Europe (619?). When his determination became known,