[47] The Nestorians and Jacobites bestowed on the self-styled Catholics of the Greek and Roman church, the name of Melchites, or Royalists, to mark that their faith, instead of resting on the basis of Scripture, reason, or tradition, had been established solely by the power of a temporal monarch.
[48] “Six months,” the Worthy Jacobite says, “the 4000 baths of the city were heated with the volumes of paper and parchment.” These volumes must have been bulky indeed, and must have contained a surprising amount of latent heat, considering that, even admitting the library to have existed at the time, and conceding to it the largest number of volumes claimed by the most extravagant writers, viz., 720,000, one single volume per day must have sufficed to heat a public bath! Verily, verily, history is made the most inexact of all sciences. The flames which Cæsar was compelled to kindle in his defence, in the Bruchion (the Belgravia or Tyburnia of the city of Alexander); the havoc and depredation committed by the Alexandrian mob during the troubles of the shoes (so called from the circumstance that these terrible troubles, which are said to have lasted above twelve years [from 261 to 273 A.D.], were first occasioned by a dispute between a soldier and a townsman about a pair of shoes); and the destruction inflicted on the Bruchion by Aurelian, in 273, cannot have left much behind of that portion of the splendid library of the Ptolemies which was kept in the museum. And the other portion of it, which was kept in the Temple of Serapis, to which latter place it is most probable the celebrated Pergamese library, presented by Marcus Antonius to Cleopatra, had also been sent, was totally destroyed in 389, in the reign of Theodosius I., by a bigoted Christian mob, under the leadership of the Archbishop Theophilus, a much more ignorant and brutal zealot than either Omar or Amru.
[49] Othman’s foster-brother, the same whom Mohammed had so reluctantly pardoned after the taking of Mecca. He was renowned as the boldest and most dexterous horseman of Arabia.
[50] Callinicus was either a native of Heliopolis, in Syria, or of Egypt. This clever chemist had been for a while in the service of the Khalif; but, offended at the slight estimation in which his science was held by the ignorant sons of the desert, he went over to the emperor, and placed in the hands of the Christians that marvellous and mysterious agent, the Greek fire, which afterwards repeatedly saved Constantinople from falling into the hands of its barbarian besiegers. It is certainly a curious coincidence, that, at a later period of history, Sultan Mohammed II. was most materially assisted in the reduction of the city of the Cæsars, by another man of science, the Hungarian Urban, who, having been almost starved in the Greek service, had deserted to the Moslems, for whom he cast cannons of enormous size and weight of metal.
[51] The victory of Bassora is therefore usually called the Day of the Camel; seventy men who successively held the bridle of the camel which carried Ayesha’s litter, were all either killed or more or less severely wounded.
[52] That is, “God is great,” or “God is victorious.”
[53] Abder-Rahman.
[54] January; according to some historians, Midsummer, 660; others place the event in August, 661.
[55] But many of the tribes revered the name and memory of Ali. His refusal to be bound by the tradition, or Sonna, became a kind of religious creed, and a wide and deep gulf was opened between two rival sects, the Sonnites, or believers in the tradition, and the Schiites, or sectaries, who reject the tradition, regard Ali as the Vicar of God, and his three predecessors as execrable usurpers. The religious discord of the friends and enemies of Ali may be said to be actually maintained still to the present day in the immortal hatred of the Schiite Persians, and the Sonnite Turks. The twelve Imams, or pontiffs, of the Persian church are Ali, Hassan, Hosein, and the lineal descendants of Hosein to the ninth generation. The curse against Ali and his adherents was abolished by Omar II., in 719.
[56] The ruins of the ancient city of Carthage are about ten miles east of Tunis.