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many a wasting foray into the heart of Gaul. The most famous of these plundering expeditions, under the great Emir Abdalrahman,1 was vanquished, as all the world knows, by Charles Martel upon the field of Tours. Let me not for a moment depreciate the fame of so glorious an exploit. The first total defeat of the Saracen by the Christian in a great pitched battle was indeed an illustrious event; and it may be that Charles Martel saved Gaul from the fate of Spain. But let honour be given where honour is due; and honour is not fairly assigned when Charles is magnified as the one saviour of Christendom, while Leo the Isaurian is forgotten. In that day even the conquest of Gaul would have been a light matter compared with the conquest of Constantinople. The Isaurian Emperor rescued the head of Christendom; the Mayor of the Palace rescued only one of its extremities. One bore the onslaught of the whole force of the Caliphate; the other only overthrew the power of its most distant and recent province.

The fight of Tours took place in 732; the Saracens however retained possession of their Gallic province for twenty-three years longer. In 755, when Spain was torn to pieces by the dissensions consequent on the fall of the Ommiad dynasty in the east, Pepin, the son of Charles Martel and the first of the Carolingian Kings, expelled the Arabs from Narbonne and drove them beyond the peninsula.

The remaining Saracenic conquests in the west were made by sea. Nothing could be more alien than a maritime life to the habits of the primitive Arabs; but the same revolution which converted

1 Not to be confounded with any of the Ommiad princes of the same

name.

M

them into natural philosophers converted them also into sailors. So early as the days of Othman and Moawiyah they had entered upon their career of naval victory. They conquered Rhodes and made descents upon Crete; they besieged Constantinople by sea as well as by land, and in later days they sacked Thessalonica by a naval attack. But in the east the Byzantine navy generally maintained its superiority ; the maritime conquests of the Arabs, with one remarkable exception, were confined to the western portion of the Mediterranean. Thus commenced that system of robbery by sea which, under the form of the Barbary corsairs, has lasted down almost to our own times. In the ninth and tenth centuries it was at its height. As long as the Abbasside Caliphs retained any power in the west, the Western Empire, as a friendly territory, was spared by the African Saracens, but, as the Abbasside dominion broke to pieces, the revolted Emirs were restrained by no such considerations. Every port of Spain and Africa sent forth ships, for what, on a small scale, is called piracy, and on a greater, conquest. These sea-rovers were probably the scum of the Saracenic people, and they certainly exhibited the Saracenic character in its most odious colours. They were mere plunderers and destroyers. The islands of Sardinia and Corsica were constantly plundered, and were sometimes more permanently occupied. They ravaged all the western shores of Italy, they attacked Rome itself, and were driven back by the energy of the illustrious Pontiff Leo IV. They occupied Bari on the other side of the peninsula, and required the combined energies of the Eastern and Western Empires to expel them. The army of the Carolingian Lewis and the navy of

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the Macedonian Basil triumphed over the intruders, and the result was a great extension of the Byzantine province in southern Italy. Another band landed at Fraxinetum, near Nice. Here they again took to a terrestrial life; they established themselves as freebooters in Alpine fortresses, and for eighty years they devastated all the adjoining portions of the kingdoms of Italy and Burgundy. But all these Saracen posts were mere nests of robbers; possibly the needs of warfare may have required the aid of medical science, but we may be sure that the astronomers and logicians of Cordova and Bagdad did not often turn out of their way to seek disciples at Bari or Fraxinetum.

Crete and Sicily were more important and permanent possessions, but even of these Crete was merely a pirates' nest on a greater scale. I alluded in an earlier part of this lecture to the character of the first Alhakem of Cordova as an exception to the generally mild and beneficent rule of the Spanish Ommiads. In 823 some of his subjects, dissatisfied with his tyranny, determined to better their condition by becoming themselves tyrants elsewhere. They first sailed to Alexandria. That city was then a dependency, in name at least, of the eastern Caliphate; they were therefore enabled to burn and plunder at discretion among Moslems who recognized not the authority of the master from whom they fled. From Alexandria they sailed to Crete; they occupied the island, and founded a city called Chandax or Chandak, signifying in Arabic a trench. This name, under the corrupt form of Candia, has become, in western languages, the designation of the whole island; but no man therein, whether Ottoman or

Hellenic, knows his country by any name but that which it has retained since the days of Homer. For nearly a hundred and forty years these Cretan Saracens were the terror of the Ægæan. At last, in 960, Nikephoros Phokas, the future Emperor, performed one of his greatest and most beneficial exploits in their overthrow. The Roman leader, a saint as well as a hero, remembered the words of Epimenides and St. Paul, and promised the Christian host a speedy triumph over "liars, evil beasts, and slow bellies.1" The promise was amply redeemed by the annexation of Crete to the Eastern Empire for nearly two centuries and a half; but Nikephoros might have remembered that both the diviner and the Apostle spoke of Cretan Greeks, and not of Cretan Saracens. Possibly however his enemies numbered many who by blood belonged to the nobler race. Certainly the Greek population had to a great extent become Mahometan during the Arab occupation. They have not belied their character in more recent times; since the Turkish conquest large numbers of them have again apostatized, forming a strange contrast to the ordinary constancy of the Hellenic race to its nationality and religion. But those who did remain constant went through the sternest martyrdom of all; never were Arabs or Ottomans so truly "evil beasts" as the Hellenic Moslem of Crete has always been to his Christian brother.

In Sicily alone, of their maritime conquests, did the Saracens display any of their better qualities. There, as I have already observed, the old warfare of East

1 Οὐκ ἠνέσχετο πάντως ἡ πρόνοια μέχρι καὶ τοῦ παντὸς, τοὺς ψεύστας, τὰ θήρια τὰ κάκιστα, τὰς ἀργὰς γαστέρας, καταθοινεῖσθαι λαὸν τὸν Χριστ Távνμov.-Leo Diac. i. 6.

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and West was fought again between the Greek and the Arab, as of old between the Greek and the Carthaginian. In 827 the African Saracens were invited into that noble island to gratify the revenge of a certain Euphemios. The stern justice of Michael the Stammerer had sentenced him to lose either his tongue or his nose for the abduction of a nun, a proceeding which the Emperor, whose own queen had once taken the veil, thought an unbecoming liberty in a subject. Other Arabs from Spain joined the original invaders, but it was nearly fifty years before the conquest of the whole island was completed by the capture of Syracuse. That city made a long and gallant defence, and it might have been easily saved, had Basil the First been as eager to retain Syracuse as to obtain possession of Bari. A hundred and fifty years after, his descendant and namesake, the Slayer of the Bulgarians and the Saracens, undertook its recovery at the age of sixty-eight, but death prevented his winning fresh laurels in the western seas. Ten years later, the Byzantine general Maniakes commenced the reconquest of Sicily in a manner worthy of Basil himself, but the women and eunuchs who ruled at Constantinople procured his recall; affairs fell into confusion, and the prize was eventually snatched from both parties by the Normans of Apulia. They founded a countship which grew into a kingdom, and they avenged the wrongs of their predecessors by conquests on the African coast. The Norman Kings ruled over a people partly Greek, partly Arabian, both of whom retained their manners, laws, and religion. By some strange and unexplained process, both Greek and Arabic have given way, not to the French tongue of the conquerors, but to the