Maurice (emperor)

Maurice (Latin: Mauricius; Ancient Greek: Μαυρίκιος, romanized: Maurikios; 539 – 27 November 602) was Eastern Roman emperor from 582 to 602 and the last member of the Justinian dynasty. A successful general, Maurice was chosen as heir and son-in-law by his predecessor Tiberius II.

Maurice's reign was troubled by almost constant warfare. After he became emperor, he brought the war with Sasanian Persia to a victorious conclusion. The empire's eastern border in the South Caucasus was vastly expanded and, for the first time in nearly two centuries, the Romans were no longer obliged to pay the Persians thousands of pounds of gold annually for peace.

Afterward, Maurice campaigned extensively in the Balkans against the Avars—pushing them back across the Danube by 599. He also conducted campaigns across the Danube, the first Roman emperor to do so in over two centuries. In the west, he established two large semi-autonomous provinces called exarchates, ruled by exarchs, or viceroys of the emperor. In Italy Maurice established the Exarchate of Italy in 584, the first real effort by the empire to halt the advance of the Lombards. With the creation of the Exarchate of Africa in 591 he further solidified the power of Constantinople in the western Mediterranean.

Maurice's successes on battlefields and in foreign policy were counterbalanced by mounting financial difficulties of the empire. Maurice responded with several unpopular measures which alienated both the army and the general populace. In 602, dissatisfied soldiers elected an officer named Phocas, who usurped the throne and ordered the execution of Maurice and his six sons. This event would prove a disaster for the empire, sparking a twenty-six-year war with a resurgent Sassanid Persia which would leave both empires devastated prior to the Arab conquests.

Maurice's reign is a relatively well-documented era of late antiquity, in particular by the historian Theophylact Simocatta. The Strategikon, a manual of war which influenced European and Middle Eastern military traditions for well over a millennium, is traditionally attributed to Maurice.

Maurice was born in Arabissus in Cappadocia in 539. His father was Paul. He had one brother, Peter, and two sisters, Theoctista and Gordia, the latter of whom was later the wife of the general Philippicus. He is recorded to have been a native Greek speaker, unlike the previous emperors since Anastasius I Dicorus. Contemporary Eastern Roman sources call him a local Cappadocian. Paul the Deacon, a late 8th-century Lombard writer, calls him the first emperor "from the race of the Greeks". Evagrius, writing under Maurice's reign, declared he traced his lines to Old Rome, which could be either truth or a flattery. Legends from much later times call him Armenian (in reference to the territories of later Cilician Armenia), but the historicity of this claim is opposed by the historian Anthony Kaldellis.

Maurice first came to Constantinople as a notarius to serve as secretary to Tiberius, the comes excubitorum (commander of the Excubitors, the imperial bodyguard). When Tiberius was named Caesar in 574, Maurice was appointed to succeed him as comes excubitorum.

In late 577, despite a complete lack of military experience, Maurice was named as magister militum per Orientem, effectively commander-in-chief of the Roman army in the east. He succeeded General Justinian in the ongoing war against Sassanid Persia. At about the same time he was raised to the rank of patrikios, the empire's senior honorific title, which was limited to a small number of holders.