This paper challenges the commonplace notion that Khusrau II (591–628) favoured ‘the miaphysites’ within territories which he conquered from the Romans during the Last Great War of Antiquity. Starting from a union of the Severan patriarchs in Alexandria in 617, it explores the pressures then put upon the Severan patriarch of Antioch, Athanasius, from two fronts: first, the advance of Persian Severan bishops in former Roman Mesopotamia, displacing known Roman rivals to the same sees; and second, the realisation at Dvin in c. 616 of an anti-Severan union of miaphysite bishops in northern Iraq, northern Iran, and Armenia. It then traces the activities of these Persian Severans and aphthartists to the rivalry of two emergent miaphysites sees in Iraq, Mar Mattai and Tikrit; and sees in their subsequent subordination to Athanasius, at the end of the war, a retaliatory assertion of Antiochene authority over Persian miaphysitism. The picture that emerges therefore complicates any notion that Khusrau sponsored ‘the miaphysites’ within the expanded empire, and points towards a much more complex, fragmented, and contentious reality.
