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| 648 |
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| The Arabs, having assembled a fleet, took Cyprus. | 1 |
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| 653 |
| |
| The Arab advance continued. Armenia was conquered (653) and Rhodes plundered (654). In 655 the Arab fleet defeated an imperial armada under the emperor's own command off the Lycian coast. But in 659 a truce was concluded with the Arab commander in Syria. | 2 |
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| 663–68 |
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| Transfer of the court to Italy. Constans was intent on blocking the Arab conquest of Sicily and Italy and had dreams of restoring Rome as the basis of the imperial power. But he failed to make any conquests in Italy at the expense of the Lombards, and in his absence the Arabs annually invaded and devastated Anatolia. | 3 |
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| 668 |
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| Constans was murdered in the course of a mutiny at Syracuse. | 4 |
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| 668–85 |
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| Constantine IV (Pogonatus), the son of Constans, a harsh character, but an able soldier. He had been in charge of affairs and had come to Sicily to put down the revolt that had resulted in his father's death. On his return to Constantinople, the troops obliged him to accept his brothers Heraclius and Tiberius as corulers, but after 680 Constantine was sole emperor. His reign witnessed the high point of the Arab attack, accompanied, as usual, by repeated incursions of the Slavs in the Balkans. | 5 |
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| 673–78 |
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| The Arab attacks on Constantinople. After a siege by land and sea (Apr.–Sept. 673), the assailants blockaded the city and attacked it every year for five years. The city was saved by the strength of its walls and by the newly invented Greek fire, which raised havoc with the Arab fleet. The exact composition and means of propulsion of Greek fire, invented by the architect and mathematician Kallinikos, are still uncertain. According to most scholars, it apparently consisted of crude oil mixed with resin and sulfur, which was propelled by a pump through a bronze tube and was ignited either as it left the tube or by firing flaming projectiles after it. | 6 |
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| 675–81 |
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| Repeated assaults of the Slavs on Salonika. The city held out, but the settlement of Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece by Slavic tribes continued. | 7 |
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| 677 |
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| The Byzantines destroyed the Arab fleet at Syllaeum and secured a favorable 30-year peace (678). | 8 |
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| 680–81 |
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| Appearance of the Bulgarian menace. The Bulgars, a people of mixed Ural-Altaic and Indo-European origin, had pressed westward through the lands of today's southern Russia and Ukraine. Threatened by another Altaic people, the Khazars, the Bulgars eventually crossed the Danube. The emperor failed to defeat them and had to cede all the lands to the north of the Balkan Mountains, with the exception of some Black Sea ports. The Bulgars submitted the Slavs to systematic deportation to the north of the Danube. Some Slavic tribes fled as far to the south as the Peloponnesus. | 9 |
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| 680–81 |
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| The sixth ecumenical council at Constantinople condemned the monothelite heresy and returned to orthodoxy. Since the loss of Syria and Egypt, there was no longer any need for favoring the monophysite view. The return to orthodoxy was a victory for the papal stand and was probably intended to strengthen the Byzantine hold on Italy. In actual fact the patriarch of Constantinople (now that the patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria were under Muslim power) became more influential in the east, and the primacy of the Roman pope was hardly more than nominal. | 10 |
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| 685–95 |
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| Justinian II, the son of Constantine and the last of the Heraclian dynasty. He ascended the throne when only 16 and soon showed himself to be harsh and cruel, though energetic and ambitious like most members of his family. | 11 |
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| 689 |
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| The emperor defeated the Slavs in Thrace and transferred a considerable number of them to Anatolia. | 12 |
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