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Prophet. In 673 the Saracens for the first time landed in Europe, and besieged the imperial city. But the ramparts of Constantinople were too strong for their attacks either by sea or land; the Greek fire swept away their warriors; may we not even deem that Christian faith and Roman valour had some share in the destruction of the invading host? In vain had the Caliph sent on the holy errand his own son Yezid, and Abu-Ayub, the last of the Ansars; in vain did the Imam Hossein forget his wrongs, and hasten to join in the warfare with the Infidel. Abu-Ayub left behind him a grave, to be discovered and reverenced eight centuries after; Yezid returned to receive the crown of the Caliphate, and Hossein to win the crown of martyrdom. But their comrades were cut off in the passes of Taurus or dashed against the shores of Pamphylia; and the Commander of the Faithful was fain once more to purchase peace by an annual tribute of 3,000 pieces of gold, fifty slaves, and fifty Arab horses.

At a later period a still larger tribute was paid by Abdalmelik to Justinian II.; but the mal-administration of that insane tyrant, and the revolutions which led to and succeeded his downfall, brought the Roman monarchy to such a pitch of decay and confusion that the time at last seemed really to have arrived for its utter destruction. In 711 the Heraclian dynasty was extinguished at Constantinople, and the Caliphate of Damascus attained its widest extent. Six years later Constantinople was again besieged by a Saracen army. But the last revolution of all had called to the throne a man worthy of the crisis. Leo the Isaurian again beat back the invader with utter defeat, and no Moslem army ever again appeared under the walls of

the New Rome till the Caliphate had passed away, and a sterner race of conquerors had assumed its mission.

But Leo the Isaurian did even more. As Mr. Finlay has shown in so masterly a manner, he renovated the Empire on a better basis within and without. The loss of Syria, Egypt, and Africa, the approaching loss of Latin Italy, rendered the Roman Empire, as it was still called, conterminous, or nearly so, with the Greek language and the Greek form of Christianity. It therefore began to acquire something like a national character. The Emperors of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries ruled over a dominion far smaller, but far more compact, united, and really powerful, than the unwieldy realm of Justinian and Heraclius. Leo the Isaurian, by preserving Byzantium and the Byzantine Empire, preserved Christianity and civilization. Never were they in such awful peril as when Moslemah landed before Constantinople. As far as we can see, had the Caliph once been acknowledged in St. Sophia, all that Constantinople then represented, law and literature and theology, all that distinguishes the Christian West from the Mahometan East, must have perished from the earth. Yet this peril and this rescue are unfamiliar to most European ears; the name of the great Leo is known only to the few who dive into Byzantine annals, while Charles Martel has won everlasting fame by driving back a plundering expedition, and the world rings with the name of a bloodthirsty savage like Richard Coeur-de-Lion.

The condition of the subject races within the Saracenic monarchy doubtless differed much in different parts of the empire; certainly it differed much

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under individual Caliphs. The payment of tribute secured the vanquished in possession of his life, his property, and the public exercise of his religion. His condition did not necessarily involve personal oppression, but it opened every avenue to it, and it always involved civil degradation. Such was the theory, one strictly carried out in practice by the unswerving righteousness of the first Caliphs; in after times, sometimes we find policy relax, but more frequently we find fanaticism aggravate, the state of bondage to which the vanquished were reduced. Moawiyah did not scruple to rebuild Christian churches, and Casim carried on his eastern warfare in partnership with Hindoo allies. But ordinarily the condition of the subject races grew worse and worse, and when Abdalmelik gave the tribute of the Christians the odious. form of a capitation-tax, another fetter was added. Yet it seems probable that nowhere, under the Saracenic rule, did the condition of the subject people at all approach the horrors of Ottoman oppression in the worst governed provinces of that empire. We read of no Saracen province resembling the condition of Crete before the War of Independence; we read of no Saracen emir who ever perpetrated enormities like the massacre of Chios. If any parallels occur, we must look for them in the atrocities which Hejaj and Mokhtar inflicted upon brother Moslems, not in the nobler warfare of Khaled and Zobeir, of Tarik and Casim and Catibah.

The vast extent to which the victories of the three last conquerors carried the dominions of the undivided Caliphate lasted only about forty years. The house of Ommiah reigned less than a century, and their fall entailed the dismemberment of the empire. In 750

the Caliphate of Damascus was transferred, by the result of a ferocious civil war, from the descendants of Moawiyah to those of Abbas, the uncle of Mahomet. But not only was the loss of Sind, as we have seen, contemporaneous with the change, but a prince of the Ommiad race established himself in Western Europe, and made Cordova the seat of a rival Moslem empire. When once the spell of union was broken, other provinces followed the example; and in our next lecture we shall have to trace the process by which the vast empire of the Saracens was torn in pieces by rebellious lieutenants and rival successors of the Prophet.

LECTURE IV.

THE SARACENS IN THE EAST.

THE first half of the eighth century is, as we have seen, the period of the greatest extent of the Caliphate. In the middle of that century it lost its most eastern and its most western possession. In Sind a national revolt expelled the Arabian intruders. In Spain a rival prince gave himself out as the true Commander of the Faithful. The claims of the house of Abbas were successfully preached in the east; the contending parties met on the true scene of Moslem disputation, the field of battle. Victory decided for the cousin of the Prophet; the descendants of Ommiah were hunted down through all Asia, and Abul Abbas was established as Caliph on the throne of Damascus. But a single youth of the doomed race escaped from destruction. After a long series of romantic adven

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tures, he found his way into Spain; he there found partizans, by whose aid he was enabled to establish himself as sovereign of the country, and to resist all the attempts of the Abbassides to regain, or rather to obtain, possession of the distant province. From this Abderrahman the Ommiad proceeded the line of Emirs and Caliphs of Cordova, who reigned in splendour in the West for three centuries after their house had been exterminated in their original possessions.

From this moment Mahometan history loses its unity. Hitherto we have more than once seen riva Caliphs arise, but, as the division was merely temporary, the weaker parties were conveniently stigmatized as rebels. From this time the empire was permanently divided; never again did all the disciples of Islam unite in allegiance to a single representative of the Prophet. We shall henceforth find two, sometimes three, rival Caliphs, each asserting his own exclusive rights, each imprecating maledictions on his antagonist and his supporters. Around the rival thrones of the East and the West, of Bagdad and of Cordova, the subjects of the present and the next succeeding lecture will naturally group themselves. The Abbassides of Bagdad form the natural centre for the history of Mahometanism in Asia, the Ommiads of Cordova for its history in western Europe. Africa we shall find connected with both in turn, but its western portions, as well as Sicily, Sardinia, and even Crete, will properly attach themselves to the Spanish division of the subject.

This division of the Caliphate, it should be observed, was very nearly contemporaneous with a similar division in Christendom. The seeds of this separation