Haemimontus (Roman province)
Substate | Defunct
293 CE to 645 CE
Haemimontus is a late Roman and early Byzantine province, situated in northeastern Thrace.
It is subordinate to the Diocese of Thrace and to the praetorian prefecture of the East.
Its capital is Adrianople, and it was headed by a praeses.
The province is superseded by the Theme of Thrace during the seventh century, but will survive as an ecclesiastical metropolis until late Byzantine times.
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The Great Crossroads
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Slav tribes appear in a great migration to the Balkan borders of the Eastern Roman Empire, settling in different parts of the Balkan peninsula and absorbing the existing Romano-Celtic-Illyrian cultures.
The Empire builds a wall from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara to protect the capital against the raiding Kutrigur Bulgars and Slavs.
Slavs begin to raid and settle south of the Danube in the region of present Bulgaria.
These raids assume massive proportions beginning in the 520s.
Maurice builds more fortifications along the Danube frontier, separating the Empire from the realm of the Avars and Slavs.
Nothing is known of the early life of the imperial general Comentiolus, except that he hailed from Thrace.
He first appeared in 583, as an officer (scribon) in the Excubitores, the imperial bodyguard, when he accompanied an imperial embassy to Bayan I, the khagan of the Avars.
According to the historian Theophylact Simocatta, he enraged the khagan with an outspoken statement, and was briefly imprisoned.
It is likely that the close trust he shares with Maurice dates from the latter's time as commander of the Excubitores, before his ascension to the throne.
Throughout his career, Comentiolus will be loyal to Maurice, and the Emperor will watch over his protégé's career.
The next year, after a truce with the Avars had been arranged, he had been appointed in charge of a brigade (taxiarchia) operating against the Slavic tribes that raided Thrace and had penetrated as far as the Long Walls of Anastasius, Constantinople's outer defensive system.
Comentiolus had defeated them at the river Erginia, near the Long Walls.
As a reward for this success, he had been appointed magister militum praesentalis in 585.
On this occasion, or perhaps a bit later (possibly in 589), Comentiolus had been raised to the supreme title of patricius.
In the summer of 585, he had again defeated a large force of Slavs, and in 586 he had been placed in charge of the war against the Avars, after they broke the treaty.
In 587, Comentiolus assembles a ten thousand-strong army at Anchialus and prepares an ambush for the Avar khagan in the Haemus mountains, but it fails.