Defenders and enemies of the True Cross examines two events in the Roman-Persian war of the early seventh century and their use in propaganda. These events, the Persian sack of Jerusalem in 614 and the restoration of the True Cross in c. 628, have produced a wealth of different reports and sit at the heart of the anti-Persian and anti-Jewish stereotypes maintained by the Christian Roman Empire in this period. Stoyanov begins by rejecting any notion that reports of a massacre of Christians by Persians and Jews in 614 represent the unadorned truth. Invoking recent archaeology, he points out how frequently the sources speak of the destruction of buildings that is untraceable on the ground (pp. 15–23). Instead, these sources must be read in terms of Heraclius' deliberate escalation of the religious aspects of the war with Persia. Chapter ii sets this escalation into the context of older Christian millenarianism and ‘just war theory’. Chapter iii is the heart of the book, and charts the representation of Heraclius as a ‘new Constantine’, who appeals to God to provide his soldiers with ‘crowns of martyrdom’ to avenge the damage done by the demonic Persians and their Jewish allies (pp. 62–9). Stoyanov usefully points to the Near Eastern dimensions of this ‘propaganda’. It may have been aimed at Heraclius' Caucasian allies, as much as at the citizens of Constantinople (p. 64), and it would fuel later apocalyptic writing in the Levant, such as the work of pseudo-Methodius (p. 73). The author eschews any attempt to force the ideas of seventh-century ‘Byzantium’ into a paradigm of Western ‘crusading’, and he is careful to treat his sources on their own terms. This slim monograph represents a useful introduction to the role of religious stereotype in the last war of Rome and Persia.