The Capture of Jerusalem by the Persians in 614 CE by Strategius of Mar Saba

In 614 CE, the armies of Sasanid Persia shocked the Eastern Roman Empire when they besieged and captured Jerusalem, taking a large swath of its population into captivity along with the city's patriarch and the famed relic of the True Cross. This astounding Persian victory over Christian Jerusalem was a key episode in the last war between Rome and Persia in 602-628 CE and occurred at the high tide of Persian advances into the Roman territories in Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt. Among those taken captive was a certain Strategius, a monk of Mar Saba, who subsequently took it upon himself to compose a homily recounting the events leading up to the Persian siege of the Holy City and its aftermath. Strategius presents his pious and harrowing account as that of an eyewitness to many of the events he recounts. For events he did not himself witness, he purports to rely on contemporary informants who did, making his treatise a source with few parallels in late antiquity. Although Strategius's original account in Greek is lost, it survives via later translations into Georgian and Christian Arabic, two languages that attained prominence in the monasteries of Palestine during the Islamic period. This volume provides, for the first time, a complete side-by-side English translation of both the Georgian and the Arabic recensions.