Omar, who saw already the world at his feet, journeyed by slow stages on a wretched camel, carrying his provisions hanging from his saddle-bow, and slept at night under the shelter of some tree, or on the margin of some well. He had but one suit, and that of worsted material, and yet his word was law to all those breathless listeners, and wherever he placed his foot from that moment became holy ground. Jerusalem and Aleppo yielded; Antioch, the chief seat of Grecian government, fell into his hands; Tyre and Tripoli submitted to his power; and the Saracenic hosts only paused when they reached the border of the sea, which they knew washed the fairest shores of Africa and Europe. It did not much matter who was in nominal command. Khaled died; Amru took his place; and yet the tide went on. The great city of Alexandria, which disputed with Constantinople the title of Capital of the World, with its almost fabulous wealth, its four thousand palaces, and five thousand baths, and four hundred theatres, was twice taken, and brought on the submission and conversion of the whole of Egypt. Amru in his hours of leisure was devoted to the cultivation of taste and genius. In John the Grammarian, a Christian student, he found a congenial spirit. Poetry, philosophy, and rhetoric were treated of in the conversations of the Arabic conqueror and the monkish scholar. At last, in reliance on his literary taste, the priest confided to the Moslem that in a certain building in the town there was a library so vast that it had no equal on earth either for number or value of the manuscripts it contained. This was too important a treasure to be dealt with without the express sanction of the Caliph. So the Christian legend is, that Omar replied to the announcement of his general, “Either what those books contain is in the Koran, or it is not. If it is, these volumes are useless; if it is not, they are wicked. Burn them.” The skins and parchments heated the baths of Alexandria for many months, irrecoverable monuments of the past, and an everlasting disgrace to the Saracen name. Yet the story has been doubted; at least, the extent of the destruction. Rather, it has been supposed, the ignorant fanaticism of the illiterate monks, in covering with the legends of saints the obliterated lines of the classic authors, has been more destructive to the literary treasures of those ancient times than the furious zeal of Amru or the bigotry of Omar.

If this great overflow from the desert of Arabia had consisted of nothing but armed warriors or destructive fanatics, its course would have been as transient as it was terrible. The Gothic invaders who had desolated Europe fortunately possessed the flexibility and adaptiveness of mind which fitted them for the reception of the purer faith and more refined manners of the vanquished races. They mixed with the people who submitted to their power, and in a short time adopted their habits and religion. Whatever faith they professed in their original seats, seems to have worn out in the long course of their immigration. The powers they had worshipped in their native wilds were local, and dependent on clime and soil. An easy opening, therefore, was left for Christianity into hearts where no hostile deity guarded the portal of approach. But with the Saracens the case was reversed. Incapable of assimilation with any rival belief—jealously exclusive of the commonest intercourse with the nations they subdued—unbending, contemptuous to others, and carried on by burning enthusiasm in their own cause, and confidence in the Prophet they served, there was no possibility of softening or elevating them from without. The pomps of religious worship, which so awed the wondering tribes of Franks and Lombards, were lost on a people who considered all pomp offensive both to God and man. They saw the sublimity of simple plainness both in word and life. Their caliph lived on rice, and saddled his camel with his own hands. He ordered a palace to be burned, which Seyd, who had conquered for him the capital of Persia, had built for his occupation. Unsocial, bigoted, austere, drinking no wine, accumulating no personal wealth, how was the mind of this warrior of the wilderness to be trained to the habits of civilized society, or turned aside from the rude instincts of destructiveness and domination? But the Arab intellect was subtle and active. Mohammedanism, indeed, armed the multitude in an exciting cause, and sent them forth like a destroying fire; but there was wisdom, policy, refinement, among the chiefs. While they devastated the worn-out territories of the Persian, and laid waste his ostentatious cities, which had been purposely built in useless places to show the power of the king, they founded great towns on sites so adapted for the purposes of trade and protection that they continue to the present time the emporiums and fortresses of their lands. Balsorah, at the top of the Persian Gulf, at the junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates, was as wisely selected for the commercial wants of that period as Constantinople itself. Bagdad was encouraged, Cufa built and peopled in exchange for the gorgeous but unwholesome Madayn, from which Yezdegird was driven. Many other towns rose under the protection of the Crescent; and by the same impulse which made the Saracens anxious to raise new centres of wealth and enterprise in the East, they were excited to the most amazing efforts to make themselves masters of the greatest city in the world, the seat of arts, of literature, and religion; and they pushed forward from river to river, from plain to plain, till, in the year 672, they raised their victorious standard in front of the walls of Constantinople. Here, however, a new enemy came to the encounter, and for the first time scattered dismay among the Moslem ranks. From the towers and turrets came down a shower of fire, burning, scorching, destroying, wherever it touched. Projected to great distances, and wrapping in a moment ship after ship in unextinguishable flames, these discharges appeared to the warriors of the Crescent a supernatural interference against them. This was the famous Greek fire, of which the components are not now known, but it was destructive beyond gunpowder itself. Water could not quench it, nor length of time weaken its power. For five successive years the assault was renewed by fresh battalions of the Saracens, but always with the same result. So, giving up at last their attempts against a place guarded by lightning and by the unmoved courage of the Greek population, they poured their thousands along the northern shores of Africa. Cyrene, the once glorious capital of the Pentapolis, in which Carthage saw her rival and Athens her superior, yielded to their power. Everywhere high-peaked mosques, rising where a short time before the shore had been unoccupied or in cities where the Basilicas of Christian worship had been thrown down, marked the course of conquest. Carthage received its new lords. Hippo, the bishopric of the best of ancient saints, the holy Augustine, saw its church supplanted by the temples of the Arabian impostor. A check was sustained at Tchuda, where their course was interrupted by a combined assault of Christian Greeks and the indigenous Berbers. Internal troubles also arrested their career, for there were disputes for the succession, and court intrigues and open murders, and all the usual accompaniments of a contest for an elective throne. One after another, the Caliphs had been murdered, or had died of broken hearts. The old race—the “Companions,” as they were called, because they had been the contemporaries and friends of Mohammed—had died out. Ali, after three disappointments, had at last been chosen. His sons Hassan and Hossein had been put to death; and it was only in the time of the eighth successor, when Abdelmalek had overcome all competition, that the unity of the Moslem Empire was restored, and the word given for conquest as before. This was in the 77th year of the Hegira, (698 of our era,) and an army was let loose upon the great city of Carthage, at the same time that movements were again ordered across the limits of the Grecian Empire, in Asia, and advances made towards Constantinople. Carthage fell—Tripoli was occupied—and now, with their territories stretching in unbroken line from Syria along the two thousand miles of the southern shore of the great Mediterranean Sea, the conquerors rested from their labours for a while, and prepared themselves for a dash across the narrow channel, from which the hills of Atlas and the summits of Gibraltar are seen at the same time. What has Europe, with its divided peoples, its worn-out kings, its indolent Church, and exhausted fields, to oppose to this compact phalanx of united blood, burning with fanatical faith, submissive to one rule, and supported by all the wealth of Asia and Africa; whose fleets sweep the sea, and whose myriads are every day increased by the accession of fresh nations of Berbers, Mauritanians, and the nameless children of the desert?

This is the hopeless century. Manhood, patriotism, Christianity itself, are all at the lowest ebb. But let us turn to the next, and see how good is worked out of evil, and acknowledge, as in so many instances the historian is obliged to do, that man can form no estimate of the future from the plainest present appearances, but that all things are in the hands of a higher intelligence than ours.

[EIGHTH CENTURY.]

Kings of the Franks.
A.D.
Childebert III.—(cont.)
711.
716.
720.		Dagobert III.
Childeric.
Thierry.		}Charles Martel Mayor.
742.Childeric III.
Carlovingian Line.
751.Pepin the Short.
768.Charlemagne.
Emperors of the East.
A.D.
Tiberius.—(cont.)
711.Philippicus Bardanes.
713.Anastasius II.
714.Theodosius III.
716.Leo the Isaurian.
741.Constantine Copronymus.
775.Leo IV.
781.Constantine Porphyrogenitus.
802.Nicephorus.

Authors.

Alcuin, (735-804,) Bede, (674-735,) Egbert, Clemens, Dungal, Acca, John Damascanus.