[329] St. John’s Gospel, chap. i. 1.
[330] Thus Sykes. But Skrine and Ross say only that seventy members of the Omayyad family were invited to a feast under promise of amnesty, and then massacred by the attendants. Gibbon gives eighty victims, and tells his story thus: “Four score of the Omayyads, who had yielded to the faith or clemency of their foes, were invited to a banquet at Damascus. The laws of hospitality were violated by a promiscuous massacre; the board was spread over their fallen bodies; and the festivity of their guests were enlivened by the music of their dying groans.” History is not yet an exact science.
[331] Harun-ar-Rashid = Aaron the Just.—H. H. J.
[332] The Caliph’s Last Heritage.
[333] A General History of Europe.
[334] Alcohol as “spirits of wine” was known to Pliny (100 A.D.) The studentof the history of science should consult Campbell Brown’s History of Chemistry and check these statements in the text.
[335] Encyclopædia Britannica, article “Feudalism,” by Professor G. B. Adams.
[336] The Franks differed from the Swabians and South Germans, and came much nearer the Anglo-Saxons in that they spoke a “Low German” and not a “High German” dialect. Their language resembled plattdeutsch and Anglo-Saxon, and was the direct parent of Dutch and Flemish. In fact, the Franks where they were not Latinized became Flemings and “Dutchmen” of South Holland (North Holland is still Friesisch—i.e. Anglo-Saxon). The “French” which the Latinized Franks and Burgundians spoke in the seventh to the tenth centuries was remarkably like the Rumansch language of Switzerland, judging from the vestiges that remain in old documents.—H. H. J.
[337] A General History of Europe, Thatcher and Schwill.
[338] N. B.—Vik-ings, not Vi-kings. Vik = a fiord or inlet.