The Persians tried to educate the Armenians at their court, but the Christianity of the Armenians was a strong obstacle to such attempts. When the Armenians inclined to Monophysitism, they appeased the Persian government. The Persians began to understand that, due to religious differences, the Armenians did not have a particularly ardent love for Byzantium. On the other hand, the Byzantines also tried to bind the Armenians to themselves by the bonds of religion. Mauritius really wanted to be a firm foot here. But the mutual relations of the Armenian authorities promised so little loyalty to the power that Maurice gave Chosroes the following advice: the Armenian nobles should go further east, and I will settle them in Thrace; If an Armenian is killed, the enemy will be killed, and if an Armenian kills someone there, he will kill the enemy. How it would have ended is unknown. But Chosroes began to regret the concessions made; taking advantage of the fact that Maurice began to deport the Armenian nobles to Thrace, he, on the contrary, began to patronize the Armenians and assure them that Maurice was oppressing them. But the Persian sovereign had to pay for his troubles with disorders in Armenia. Mauritius was also not calm, but he strictly suppressed all attempts at rebellion. An Armenian nobleman. Smbat Bagratuni, of an extremely warlike character, aroused the particular indignation of Maurice, and he was summoned to Byzantium. Smbat was distinguished by an athletic build and strength truly Herculesian. It was said that once, when he was riding with a detachment of troops through a forest, he picked up a branch, grabbed it and, wrapping his legs around the horse, rose with it. In Byzantium they decided to release him to fight wild animals; Smbat showed miracles of bravery. Armenian historians say that Smbat killed a bear in the kinigia, broke the horns of a bull and put it to flight, chasing it, he knocked down its hooves, strangled a lion, squeezing its throat; Tired, he lay down to rest on a dead lion. The people begged him for pardon, but he was nevertheless exiled.

Now Mauritius tried to play on a different string. In order to bind the Armenians to Byzantium, he planned to give them a special church structure. All Armenians had a spiritual head in the person of the Catholicos, who lived in Persian Armenia [in Dvin]. Maurice decided that his Armenians should not be dependent on this Catholicos, and a special Catholicos was chosen for the Greek Armenians, one John [in Theodosiopolis]. Obviously, such a division of power was made in the form of separating the Byzantine Armenians from their Persian brethren. In fact, the Byzantine Catholicos must have been interested in this matter of division, for in the event of the unification of the Armenians, the Byzantine Catholicos would be completely unnecessary. The question of the division of Armenia, therefore, for him was also a question of his own existence.

The emperor's union attempt was favored by another circumstance. The Armenians quite accidentally joined the Monophysites, and received neither honor nor glory among the Monophysites; and in all subsequent times their position among the Monophysites was extremely miserable. The Monophysites – Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians – felt themselves to be members of the same church, but the Armenians, with their incomprehensible language, with their liturgical rite, represented something mysterious and incomprehensible to the other Monophysites. The Syrian Monophysites tried to exert their influence on the Armenians, sending them their bishops; This contributed to a rapprochement between them, but still the Armenians did not enjoy the confidence of the Syrians. Syrian Monophysite writers considered the Armenian people stupid, backward, and their rituals stupid. The Armenian, in a word, broke away from his foundation, lived as a proletarian. The Armenians who adopted Monophysitism found themselves in the same position as the Slavs and Uniate Greeks, who betrayed Orthodoxy and did not accept full Catholicism. Thus, the Armenians did not have firm grounds for persisting in monophysitism. This inconvenient position could serve as an indication that the ties with Monophysitism could be broken here more quickly than in Syria and Egypt, and that is why an attempt was made here to unite. Maurice gave an order to the troops that everyone should commune with Orthodox priests; some did not want to pay with external benefits and joined Chalcedonian Orthodoxy. Maurice decided to act by persuasion, to convene a council and resolve all issues at it, but met resistance in the person of Catholicos Moses of Dvina, who declared that he would not cross the border separating the two empires, and the matter ended in nothing.

Thus, from Maurice, the Emperor Heraclius inherited some special matters in the union sense. It was necessary to try to bring the Armenians to Orthodoxy; The union was intended for them [105].

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Heraclius hoped to settle the matter with the Persians very simply: he had sufficiently avenged the death of Maurice by putting Phocas to death, and the Persian war had lost its raison detre since his accession to the throne. But the Persians did not think of ending the war and continued it with remarkable success. They, having taken Syria and Egypt, reached Chalcedon. The emperor had to create an army, and Cappadocia was the place where he trained recruits. Having finally won a victory over the Persians, the emperor expanded the borders of the Byzantine Empire at the expense of Armenia, which had previously depended on the Persians (alias: he restored the Byzantine possessions to the borders to which they had reached under Maurice). In order to keep the new subjects under their rule, it was necessary to maintain good relations with the Armenians. Hence the appearance of Armenians in high positions in Byzantium. On the other hand, the experience from the time of Mauritius gave Heraclius reason to think that with the Armenians he would succeed what he had failed with other Monophysites.

a) The Byzantine emperors had a powerful means of influencing the Armenian ecclesiastical spheres: in the event of the refusal of the Catholicos of Dvin (in Persian Armenia) from the union on the basis of the recognition of the Council of Chalcedon, the emperor had the opportunity to install a special Catholicos in Armenia subject to him. This was already the case under Mauritius (c. 591). Moses and then Abraham were Catholicos in Dvina, and John was Catholicos in the Greek possessions.

b) The last decade of the sixth century was marked by a movement to the north of Armenia, which apparently proved that the devotion of the Armenians to Monophysitism was not so deep that, under favorable conditions, they could not be persuaded to union. The Armenian Catholicoses managed to make Iviria dependent on them: they installed "Catholicoses of Ivir" (residence in Mtskheta). Moses appointed as "Catholicos of Ivir" a certain Kiron or Kirion (Κύρων, Κυρίων), a man who had received his education in Nicopolis and Colonia (in the ancient Byzantine possessions). Soon Moses doubted his Orthodoxy. Under his successor Abraham, Kirion maneuvered for some time, but then (for petty reasons, according to the assurances of Armenian writers) he declared himself a like-minded person of the patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem, who accepted the Fourth Ecumenical Council. By 606 this fall away from the Iviri was already a fait accompli. It is quite possible that Cyrus, Metropolitan of Phasis (now Poti), was well aware of the history of the "retreat" of Iberia, neighboring Lazica, and therefore did not consider the plan of Emperor Heraclius hopeless. But he doubted the possibility of reconciling the teaching ό μία ενέργεια after the union, which Heraclius considered to be the basis of his union project, with the decree of the Council of Chalcedon and the tomos of Leo V. Then the emperor suggested that Cyrus turn to the Patriarch of Constantinople Sergius for clarification; Sergius' answer was not in favor of δύο ένέργειαι.

There are two versions regarding the conditions for the emergence of the Monothelite movement: official and unofficial. The official version is given to us in the narration of Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople. If this source is to be believed, the Monothelite movement arose quite by accident, without any desire of the great Church of Constantinople. The reason for this is that the Emperor Heraclius had to wage war against the Persians, a desperate war, costing as many victims as in our country, for example, the invasion of the Poles or Napoleon. War was inevitable. The Persian king decided to take revenge not on Phocas, but on Heraclius for the death of Maurice, the chosen father of the Persian king. The war was fought on the borders of Armenia. On the occasion of this war, the emperor was in Armenia in 622, and here, in the city of Theodosiopolis or Karina (Erzurum), meeting with the head of the Sevirians, Paul One-Eyed, had a conversation with him about the faith. As a theologically educated man, the emperor, in refutation of the usual Monophysite assurances that two natures necessarily lead to the recognition of two hypostases in Christ, pointed out to Paul that with the two natures in Christ there is only one energy, μία ενέργεια. Thus, the first word that gave rise to controversy was pronounced by the emperor himself. From this report, borrowed from the epistle of Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople, to Honorius of Rome, it follows that the word μία ενέργεια was proposed by the emperor himself, that the initiative in this matter belonged not to the church, but to the state, or even only to the emperor personally. Everything happened somehow by chance. A chance conversation took place between the emperor and Paul, and this gave rise to the Monothelite movement.

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Another version, unofficial, is presented by the debate of St. Maximus the Confessor with Pyrrhus, Patriarch of Constantinople. From this source it is clear that the Monothelite movement was prepared and discussed in advance by Sergius.

The expression of the polemicist "to depose him" is not clear: whom did John the Merciful want to depose, whether it was George Arsa or Sergius? But judging by the fact that George Arsa did not belong to Orthodoxy, it is most likely that John intended to raise the question of Sergius' Orthodoxy and to conduct the matter in such a way as to depose Sergius. From a Syrian source attributed to the presbyter Thomas, it is clear that in July 619 Alexandria was taken, and on November 12 Pope John of Alexandria died.

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Thus, even before 622, in an epistle to Theodore, bishop of Pharan, Patriarch Sergius asked him what he thought of the expression μία ενέργεια, and in doing so referred in favor of this expression to the epistle of Menas of Constantinople to Pope Vigilius, in which it is said that in Christ there is one will and one action. This epistle, together with the epistle of Menas and the answer of Theodore of Pharan, Sergius sent to Paul One-Eye, with whom the emperor himself later negotiated. But Paul opposed unity and demanded patristic testimony in favor of what is in Christ with two φύσεις εν θέλημα. Perhaps before all this, Sergius wrote to the Monophysite George Arsa [Άρσάς] and asked him to collect patristic proofs in favor of μία ενέργεια, since on the basis of this formula he, Sergius, hopes to arrange the reunion of the Sevirians with the Church. But, says Maximus the Confessor, the Patriarch of Alexandria, John the Merciful, who became aware of Sergius' letter to George, took it away and wanted to initiate proceedings for the deposition of Sergius. The attack of the Persians on Egypt, when Alexandria was taken, and the death of John prevented this. Since the invasion took place in the summer of 619, and John died on November 12 of the same year, it is evident that the testimony of Maximus provides us with solid chronological data. It is clear that the meeting of the emperor with Paul One-Eyed took place after the preliminary steps of Sergius.