XII. The Coming Of The Saracens.
After the peace of 628 the Roman and the Persian Empires, drained of men and money, and ravaged from end to end by each other's marauding armies, sank down in exhaustion to heal them of their deadly wounds. Never before had either power dealt its neighbour such fearful blows as in this last struggle: in previous wars the contest had been waged around border fortresses, and the prize had been the conquest of some small slice of marchland. But Chosroës and Heraclius had struck deadly blows at the heart of each other's empire, and harried the inmost provinces up to the gates of each other's capitals. The Persian had turned the wild hordes of the Avars loose on Thrace, and the Roman had guided the yet wilder Chazars up to the walls of Ctesiphon. Hence it came to pass that at the end of the war the two powers were each weaker than they had ever been before. They were bleeding at every pore, utterly wearied and exhausted, and desirous of nothing but a long interval of peace to recover their lost strength.
Precisely at this moment a new and terrible enemy [pg 159] fell upon the two war-worn combatants, and delivered an attack so vehement that it was destined to destroy the ancient kingdom of Persia and to shear away half the provinces of the Roman Empire.
The politics of Arabia had up to this time been of little moment either to Roman or Persian. Each of them had allies among the Arab tribes, and had sometimes sent an expedition or an embassy southward, into the land beyond the Syrian desert. But neither of them dreamed that the scattered and disunited tribes of Arabia would ever combine or become a serious danger.
But while Heraclius and Chosroës were harrying each other's realms events of world-wide importance had been taking place in the Arabian peninsula. For the first and last time in history there had arisen among the Arabs one of those world-compelling minds that are destined to turn aside the current of events into new channels, and change the face of whole continents.
Mahomet, that strangest of moral enigmas, prophet and seer, fanatic and impostor, was developing his career all through the years of the Persian war. By an extraordinary mixture of genuine enthusiasm and vulgar cunning, of self-deception and deliberate imposture, of benevolence and cruelty, of austerity and licence, he had worked himself and his creed to the front. The turbulent polytheists of Arabia had by him been converted into a compact band of fanatics, burning to carry all over the world by the force of their swords their new war-cry, that “God was God, and Mahomet His prophet.”
In 628, the last year of the great war, the Arab sent his summons to Heraclius and Chosroës, bidding them embrace Islam. The Persian replied with the threat that he would put the Prophet in chains when he had leisure. The Roman made no direct reply, but sent Mahomet some small presents, neglecting the theological bent of his message, and only thinking of enlisting a possible political ally. Both answers were regarded as equally unsatisfactory by the Prophet, and he doomed the two empires to a similar destruction. Next year [629] the first collision between the East-Romans and the Arabs took place, a band of Moslems having pushed a raid up to Muta, near the Dead Sea. But it was not till three years later, when Mahomet himself was already dead, that the storm fell on the Roman Empire. In obedience to the injunctions of his deceased master, the Caliph Abu Bekr prepared two armies, and launched the one against Palestine and the other against Persia.
Till the last seven or eight years English writers have been inclined to underrate the force and fury of an army of Mahometan fanatics in the first flush of their enthusiasm. Now that we have witnessed in our own day the scenes of Tamaai and Abu Klea we do so no longer. The rush that can break into a British square bristling with Martini-Henry rifles is not a thing to be despised. For the future we shall not treat lightly the armies of the early Caliphs, nor scoff with Gibbon at the feebleness of the troops who were routed by them. If the soldiers of Queen Victoria, armed with modern rifles and artillery, found the fanatical Arab a formidable foe, let us not blame [pg 161] the soldiers of Heraclius who faced the same enemy with pike and sword alone. In the early engagements between the East-Romans and the Saracens the superior discipline and more regular arms of the one were not a sufficient counterpoise to put against the mad recklessness of the other. The Moslem wanted to get killed, that he might reap the fruits of martyrdom in the other world, and cared not how he died, if he had first slain an enemy. The Roman fought well enough; but he did not, like his adversary, yearn to become a martyr, and the odds were on the man who held his life the cheapest.
The moment of the Saracen invasion was chosen most unhappily for Heraclius. He had just paid off the enormous debt that he had contracted to the Church, and to do so had not only drained the treasury but imposed some new and unwise taxes on the harassed provincials, and disbanded many of his veterans for the sake of economy. Syria and Egypt, after spending twelve and ten years respectively under the Persian yoke, had not yet got back into their old organization. Both countries were much distracted with religious troubles; the heretical sects of the Monophysites and Jacobites who swarmed within their boundaries had lifted up their heads under the Persian rule, being relieved from the governmental repression that had hitherto been their lot. They seem to have constituted an actual majority of the population, and bitterly resented the endeavours of Heraclius to enforce orthodoxy in the reconquered provinces. Their discontent was so bitter that during the Saracen invasion they stood aside and refused to [pg 162] help the imperial armies, or even on occasion aided the alien enemy.
The details of the Arab conquest of Syria have not been preserved by the East-Roman historians, who seem to have hated the idea of recording the disasters of Christendom. The Moslems, on the other hand, had not yet commenced to write, and ere historians arose among them, the tale of the invasion had been intertwined with a whole cycle of romantic legends, fitter for the “Arabian Nights” than the sober pages of a chronicle.